Stories from May, 2005
Serdal: Arabic Pioneer Blogger from UAE
For the next few weeks, we'll be offering profiles of bloggers nominated for the Reporters Sans Frontières weblog awards. This profile is part of the series. Please visit the RSF voting page and vote for your favorite blogs. – Your friendly editors Abdullah Al-Muhairi is one of the pioneer Arab...
Monday World Blog Roundup
Africa: Timbuktu Chronicles has a review of George Ayittey's Africa Unchained Brian of Black Star Journal has a history lesson on the role of Liberia in Guinea's civil strife, and the hard time the country is having in getting aid to war ravaged areas. Chippla thinks it's absurd that an...
Al Jinane: Championing free speech in Morocco
Tarik Essaadi is the blogger behind Al Jinane. His motto: "Bloguer pour comprendre la complexité du monde,"Blogging to understand the complexity of the world"...
Global Voices on Radio Open Source
Radio Open Source, a new public radio show hosted from Cambridge, Massachusetts by Chris Lydon, devoted its second pilot show on Friday entirely to Global Voices. The show featured conversations on the phone with bloggers Hossein Derakhshan (Hoder), Ndesanjo Macha, Dina Mehta, Steve McDermott, and Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman,...
Friday World Blog Roundup
Central Asia: Kudos to Lyndon at Scraps of Moscow and Nathan at Registan.net for their excellent collection of posts and links, aggregating and translation (by Lyndon) of information about the Uzbekistan uprising. Baltics: This picture appeared around Latvia during President Bush's visit. All About Latvia explains what “Peace Duke” means....
Uzbekistan breaking news
Thanks to Registan.net for pointing out that the “Scraps of Moscow” blog is translating news and analysis from the Russian press on the Uzbekistan protest and crackdown story… in which troops are reported to have fired on protestors. Click here and here. If you have links to any more blog-coverage...
Thursday World Blog Roundup
Africa: Picture via Sotho, drawn by 13-year old McGlen of Johannesburg, South Africa. He wants to be a veterinarian. Courtesy Creative Connections. Thinkers Room says it shouldn't be this hard. Afromusing thinks Kenya needs a “hygrid.” Special Blog Coverage: Iranian Presidential elections: Mr. Behi thinks U.S. pressure on Iran over...
Wednesday World Blog Roundup
Africa: Congrats to Jewels in the Jungle on the first anniversary of this excellent African issues blog. Jewels is running a great series of photos of Ugandan schoolchildren by photographer Susanne Behnke taken in 2003. See them here, here and here. Black Looks has started a bimonthly roundup of Nigerian...
Tuesday World Blog Roundup
Iran: Iranian presidential candidate Dr. Mostafa Moeen recently met with bloggers. (Moeen also has his own blog in Persian.) Adventures of Mr. Behi has a detailed account – in English! – of the meeting. If you click through nothing else on this post today, click through to that. Omid of...
Flags as graphs of social issues
Icaro Doria, a 25-year old Brazilian reporter for Lisbon-based Grande Reportagem magazine, has produced a beautiful set of eight images, part of a series called “Meet the World”. The images distort national flags to turn them into graphs of statistics about social and political issues. Brazil's flag becomes a map...
Monday World Blog Roundup
Middle East: Woodstock in the sand dunes? Chan'ad Bahraini has a long report and many photos on a large and peaceful protest in Bahrain demanding constitutional reform. (No sign of this story in the mainstream Western media that I have found.) He says the protest had a “Woodstock feel” to...
Voices From Kiswahili Blogosphere
There are fifteen active and two inactive Kiswahili bloggers. Sixteen bloggers are Tanzanians and one is Kenyan. Several new Kiswahili bloggers are currently working on their blogs but not yet ready to go public. The main conversation in the Tanzanian blogosphere is the nomination of the Minister for Foreign Affairs,...
Brainstorming for a more global conversation
I thought this morning's Global Voices session went pretty well. Most of the people in the room were, of course, American. I started by talking about how – according to initial findings by Ethan Zuckerman – the American blogosphere actually talks about less of the world than the mainstream media...
Blog for Human Rights!
Human Rights Watch is encouraging bloggers to use their RSS feeds and blog for human rights. HRW would like to help bloggers get the information they need to blog more frequently about human rights issues around the world. Show you care, put their feeds in your aggregator, and join the...
Friday World Blog Roundup
Asia AngryChineseBlogger discusses the continuing issue of seven Christian priests detained last month in northern China. SimonWorld discusses and links to several articles about how Google deals with the Great Firewall. Isaac Mao points to signs that Chinese bloggers are being blocked for not registering after recent rules changes. Blogdai...
Thursday World Blog Roundup
Middle East: The UK isn't the only place where elections were held today… Bethlehem bloggers are closely following “the first local elections in 30 years.” (Photo: Beit Sahour polling station, Bethlehem, courtesy Bethlehem Bloggers.) Rafahpundits is all over the latest news from local elections in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip....
South East Asian Blog Roundup
Singapore Steven McDermott of Singabloodypore highlights a gathering for Shanmugam Murugesu, a Singaporean whose appeal for clemency from capital punishment has been rejected by Singaporean President. The blog entry has so far garnered 50 comments. He also writes about the Singaporean student who was forced to shut down his blog,...
Wednesday World Blog Roundup
Middle East: Chan'ad Bahraini has a series of good photos and a long blog post about Tuesday's demonstration in front of Bahrain's Ministry of Information. He says 40-50 people gathered to oppose the ministry's decision to press charges against three moderators of the online forum BahrainOnline.org, one of whom is...
Kenyan blogs roundup
Lucy Kibaki, Kenya's First Lady, has been dominating the Kenyan blogosphere and Kenyan online community over the last few days, particularly after the slap that was heard around the world. A sample of reactions: - Thinker provides the tongue-in-cheek version of events. - Martin Kimani of Bullets and Honey thinks...
Tuesday World Blog Roundup
Middle East: Firas Georges of Iraq&Iraqis reflects on Iraq's future from Dubai while on his first-ever vacation outside of Iraq. (Photo of Emirates Towers, Dubai, by Saudi) Iraq the Model gives an English summary of a firsthand blog account in Arabic about a freshly discovered mass grave. Riverbend of Baghdad...
