machine-envy

Two reasons to drop in on openDemocracy this week. The first is a pilot podcast, 20 minutes of audio journalism that takes in Sidney Blumenthal’s view on the Democrats’ victory in the states, Alain de Botton’s view on architecture, and prospects for an independent South Ossetia, as well as vox pops from the oD team. If you’ve got time to have a listen, please give some feedback as to whether you think it is a good investment of oD’s time and resources.

The second is this excellent overview of ICT for development from Patricia Daniel, which makes clear that OLPC/XO-1/the $100 dollar laptop will not be operating in a vacuum in the developing world. David, our deputy editor, has been trying to source a piece like this for a long time - it’s a really useful summary of schemes in the Global South. What I took from it is, much ilke Web 2.0 hype in the West, the projects that work are the ones that are user-orientated, and that people want to use.

This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy is on the fate of “professional journalism” in the new media age. Since newspapers generally devote forest-loads of copy to their own fate at the hands of the internet, this is a topic I’ve steered clear of for a number of years. But here’s my tuppence worth.

“”We’re Google. So sue us”. Thus read the headline in The New York Times, atop a story highlighting the number of legal cases brought against the maverick search-engine company in its short history. From pornographers to parenting directories, Google has seen more people in court than most of its rivals.
“When Google’s purchase of YouTube was announced on 10 October, many commentators believed the company was just buying itself more legal woes. YouTube had been hailed as a revolution in citizen webcasting, but it was unclear how many of the staggering 100 million videos downloaded each day featured original content, and how many were simply copyrighted material uploaded illegally by other users.

“The copyright argument against (for example) entire episodes of The Smurfs appearing on YouTube without any compensation to the original creators would seem clear. But Google’s ownership of the successful social-networking site adds a new dimension to the evolving relationship between Google and other information-providers - a relationship leading the company to face an increasing number of legal challenges focused on disputes over the frontiers of intellectual-property law.

“Google’s stated mission is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. It’s unsurprising, then, that as the company moves ever-nearer towards its goal, and starts making considerable income in the process, those previously in the business of information might get a little tetchy…”

Read the rest here.

openDemocracy’s Deputy Editor, David Hayes, points me to this excellent article from The Nation, which predicts that media megacorps will use the new web 2.0 environment to pollute our mental space in ways we cannot yet imagine:

“Advertisers are harnessing technology that targets and follows Internet users on their journeys through cyberspace, collecting data and tracking behavior. Virtual software marketing tools will be deployed across the digital landscape so that wherever we go, whatever we do do–e-mail, instant messaging, mobile communications or searches–we will be immersed in enticing content for the lifelong sell…”

Read the rest here.

This week’s column in the New Statesman reviews the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s recent survey of prominent futurologists:

“Sometimes writing about the internet can seem like a cop-out. Imagining the impact that new technology will have on human life, in all its social, political and linguistic forms, is fun, exciting and much easier than, say, reporting from the Middle East. And yet the futurologist is only a step away from the cocktail-party doom-monger boring on about speed cameras, mobile-phone masts and shopping centres.

”But it is a refreshing experience to view futurologists’ predictions in aggregate. A survey released late last month…”

Read the rest here.

Yesterday was the official launch of a website I helped create earlier this year, ChinaDialogue (Pictures from the launch here). ChinaDialogue is the world’s first truly bilingual interactive publishing platform (I’m not really allowed to call it a blog), as not only do articles appear in English and Chinese, but so do the comments underneath them, thanks to a sophisticated backend which lets trusted volunteers log in to translate comments.

The site was built on a Ruby on Rails platform by Hamza Khan-Cheema, and designed by Fernanda Ferretti. Lots of people offered friendly advice during the build, including Francis Irving and Chris Lightfoot from MySociety, Tom Armitage over at Infovore, and Nart Villeneuve at Toronto’s CitizenLab.

It was a really proud moment for me, when Bill Thompson, who helped build the Guardian’s first website, gave ChinaDialogue his seal of approval in his launch speech. He counselled that, despite what techno-utopians might say, the internet was no longer a place without borders, and that our site was a perfect gateway across one of the most important borders in cyberspace.

This week’s column in the New Statesman is a little dance around the grave of the music industry:

“Speaking as a reformed music journalist, it’s been fun watching the industry gasp its last breaths. First it sent peer-to-peer file-sharing underground with the closure of Napster in 2001. Now, it is suing its own fans. The music industry has struggled to cope with how its main export can now be translated into bits and sent down a series of tubes direct to its (not always paying) customers. And all the while, the music has only got better.

Vivendi Universal is the biggest of the remaining handful of bloated mega-corporations that have been suffocating innovation in the music industry since the late Eighties….”

Read the rest here.

Well, not quite. But this week’s New Statesman column is a response to a post Guido Fawkes wrote criticising openDemocracy after the New Media Awards last week (which we won, by the way). I admit it was a bit mean of me to pull him up on his misspelling of smorgasbord:

“When I was a little girl, I dreamed of having my own column. At 27, I appear to have fulfilled my ambition. Unfortunately for my sense of self-achievement, the whole bloody world is now a columnist. Volunteering an opinion on the issues of the day is as easy as setting up an account with one of the many blogging service providers. More often than not, these new voices ape the worst of those in the national press, generalising from trifles, affecting an air of self-importance that barely conceals the poor levels of research, compromised upon to file on time and…”

Read the rest here.

Guido’s original post is here.

(originally published on openDemocracy)

The pioneering Global Voices initiative hosted bloggers from Algeria to Zambia at a conference in London. An impressed Becky Hogge reflects on the challenges it may soon face.

Christmas came early for Joshua Schachter this year. On Friday 9 December his web-based social bookmarking tool, del.icio.us, which lets users share their favourite links with each other using a tag-based system, “joined the Yahoo! family” for an undisclosed sum.

The deal closes a good year for the internet. In March, Yahoo! purchased Flickr, a photo-sharing website also based on tags; in September, eBay bought Skype, the internet telephony company. With web giants Google and Amazon also continuing to pour money into research and development, it’s clear that the second dotcom boom is upon us.

There have been ripples in the corporate world on the east side of the pond too. Wanadoo, Europe’s most successful internet service provider, is preparing to align its brand with its sister mobile telephone company Orange in 2006. British Telecom, mindful of the disruption on the horizon represented by internet telephony, has been busily developing its media and tech development arms, hiring whole office-fulls of ex-television executives and hackers at one time. British television company ITV has bought Friends Reunited (no, I don’t know why, either) and the British Broadcasting Corporation continues to prepare for the eventual demise of television with its interactive media player, the IMP.

The listening art

With all this cash slushing about it seems only fitting that the Global Voices conference on 10 December 2005 should have been held in London’s Canary Wharf. A swooping gesture towards corporate aspiration, the twenty-year-old business district contains the UK’s tallest building, 1 Canada Square, whose straight tower and glass pyramid roof has more than a whiff of the Franco about it. Walking through it (or indeed, taking the DLR monorail) is like being transported into a world where global free-market capitalism got to paint on a blank canvas.

The Global Voices project, started a year ago on modest seed capital by Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, couldn’t be more of a contrast. In late 2004, MacKinnon and Zuckerman realised that although American weblogs were talking to one another and gaining lots of exposure in the mainstream press, blogs from the rest of the world needed a bigger audience. Their central mission, beyond supporting the right of people to speak and speak freely, became promoting the importance of listening.

The result is a website which aggregates posts from weblogs around the world. The homepage of the Global Voices site is dominated by a cloud of tags listing countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Clicking on each one brings you the news from the blogosphere, with options to visit other blog summaries in the region. The site, originally maintained by Zuckerman and MacKinnon, now has a team of six regional editors. It is supplemented by a wiki running through the centre of the page, where readers can suggest other regional blogs worth monitoring.

The project has grown at an enormous pace. The site received a total of 800 visits in its first four weeks. Now 300,000 individual people check the site each month. On an average day, Global Voices gets 12,000 readers, many from the mainstream press, which uses the stories as its own personal and international news desk.

The modest origins and bottom-up character of the project make it revealing that the London conference is being hosted in the vast white marble Reuters building on the edge of Canada Square. Many of the bloggers have been flown from their respective parts of the world at Reuters’ expense, thanks to a new partnership between the grassroots blogging tool and the world’s most recognisable newswire. The result is vibrancy tempered by doubt: as bloggers from Kuala Lumpur, Tel Aviv, Amman, Beijing and Kingston sit down to coffee and cakes together, a series of questions pops up – now we’ve got so big, will we screw it up? Do we need to start behaving like journalists? Where do we go next?

On hand to help are professional journalists, not only from Reuters, but also from the BBC, as well as “citizen media” expert Dan Gillmor. Ethan and Rebecca act as conference Oprahs, weaving their way through the audience, mic in hand, picking out contributors and reinforcing contributions with their own thoughts on the way between one speaker and the next.

The information being generated from the conference is immense. An audio stream is beamed out to those who could not make the show in person. They in turn populate an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, monitored by one of the conference attendees, who gives a periodic summary of the remote debate taking place. The meeting is both transcribed and compressed, live on screen, into a set of notes. Meanwhile bloggers weave through the audience taking snapshots, which are immediately uploaded onto a Flickr photo pool to share with the group. On more than one occasion the wireless network cracks under the strain of all the information flowing through it.

The format reflects perfectly why Global Voices has been such a success. These people clearly know how to handle data, and have harnessed the wealth of information generated by weblogs around the world to great effect, much like del.icio.us harnessed the wealth of people bookmarking links on the net, and Flickr captured the trend for sharing photos online.

The personal and the political

But opinions (as expressed in blogs) are not links or photos, and one gets the impression that the friendly, armchair style employed by the hosts has enabled the project to cope with such diversity for this long. One session asks how to nurture the blogospheres of countries that have come late to the web. The answer? Be encouraging; be nice.

What doesn’t get discussed is also revealing. On a weekend when the World Trade Organisation is preparing to meet in Hong Kong, the United Nations is hosting a conference on climate change in Montreal, and the “war on terror” is blowing up in the face of the United States and British administrations, political issues seem to be off-topic. When Robert Scobles, the Microsoft blogger, starts talking, a ripple of what feels like outrage drifts over the audience, but the discussion is quickly brought on to friendlier terms by a few words from MacKinnon.

One question from the floor is still resonating in my head: is Global Voices personal or political? For me, the answer has to be the former. Weblogs are the ultimate personal communication medium, and the decisions of what to feature on a digest of personal weblogs made every day by MacKinnon, Zuckerman and their regional editors are also personal, in the sense that they are made by a person and not a machine. Diversity and transparency are the watchwords of all the Global Voices editors – the more voices they feature, the more likely the site is to offer a full picture of events and aspirations around the world. But as the project begins to be taken seriously as a global news source, will this be enough?

There is a cautionary tale for Global Voices in Wikipedia’s recent travails (Jimmy Wales, founder of the online, open-access encyclopaedia, has announced that contributors are now required to register before they can create articles, after John Seigenthaler, former journalist and founding editorial director of USA Today, accused it of being host to “volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects”.) Once your profile as a source of information grows to a certain level, more than diversity and transparency alone are needed to secure your reputation. It became clear meeting people around the conference that the Global Voices community are well aware of the pitfalls they face. How they chose to steer around them in the coming year will have something to teach us all.