the drop » Media & Information

MoLive Returns?

Spotty service for Chinese citizen photo journalism site

Last month I linked to Dante Chinni’s article on molive.cn and the possibilities of online citizen journalism in China. The site had mysteriously gone down due to server maintenance for several weeks. Molive is up and running again.

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The Shock Effect and Public Awareness

Parody of an AIDS campaign

Finding new ways to keep media attention on pressing yet unchanging topics is not an easy task. As more public awareness campaigns seek to be controversial, more critique is dished out. In recent news, critics have decried the tastelessness in the blackface cover of The Independent and the I am an African ads.

The controversy used to elbow for the public’s attention can obscure the original intent. One LA Times journalist confused a Doctors Without Borders campaign in Paris, which distributed tents to homeless people, with tourists camping out.

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Continuing the Dialogue Online: Blog Carnivals

Blog carnivals: Furthering community online

With so many disparate voices in the blogosphere, it can seem like dialogue is often relegated to the background. That’s where blog carnivals come in, bringing people together online to discuss specific topics, from sexual violence to the decline of democracy.
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Death of a Journalist: Anna Politkovskaya

Time Europe 2003 Hero: Anna Politkovskaya © Time Magazine

Since the death of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, bloggers have been positing possible theories of her murder. At Global Voices, there’s a translation of one of the most popular posts in the Russian blogosphere, which discusses the journalist’s murder and her investigative work in Chechnya. The Diplomatic Times Review provides a good number of related links on the news of her death.
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Rewriting Africa: Journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault

Hunter-Gault pushes for diverse reporting on Africa, supports local journalism

AllAfrica recently interviewed journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who talks about her experiences as a correspondent for an entire continent. The 5-page article digs into her opinions on media coverage, biased journalism, the changes in local journalism, and her personal experience fighting to get certain stories covered.

“Reporting is dominated by the four ‘d’s… - death, disease, disaster and despair.”

Hunter-Gault has a lot to say regarding the state of reporting from the African continent.

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Upgrading International Development, Part II

A Talk with Ethan Zuckerman, Global Voices Online Co-founder, Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law

In part two of the interview, Ethan shares his views on conquering digital divides, activism and technology, and how improvements in technology might affect us in the future. You can read the first part of the interview here.
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How can we use technology to turn apathy into action?

I think the only force that combats apathy is empathy. Until you care about a situation in another part of the world, it’s very hard to decide to pay attention to that situation and even harder to decide to act.

To get people to care across cultural, language and geographic barriers requires some sort of exposure. I knew very little about Africa and cared very little until I lived in Ghana as a student in 1993. Coming back to the US, I was suddenly interested in African politics because there were a lot of people in Ghana I cared deeply for. This discovery is what led me to form Geekcorps - I wanted to give other geeks the chance to get exposed to different parts of the world, build interpersonal ties and work on solutions to tough technical problems.

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Power Players in Net Neutrality

Proposed US legislation on Internet neutrality is being hotly debated.

At Salon, there’s an interesting read about the grassroots organizations taking on large telecom companies in the fight for Net neutrality. The Telecom Slayers provides a clear overview of the main concerns with the proposed Internet legislation, as well as a rundown on the organizations and lobbyists working for and against the issue.

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Upgrading International Development

A Talk with Ethan Zuckerman, Global Voices Online Co-founder, Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law

I had the opportunity to correspond with Ethan Zuckerman, just back from a trip to Zimbabwe and the Digital Citizen Indaba conference on blogging. In part one of the interview, Ethan talks about his involvement in international development, blogging, the lack of media coverage on foreign investment in Africa, and the prospects of an African blogging conference.

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I came across your blog and Global Voices through being an avid reader of Sokari Ekine’s blog Black Looks. Now it seems that whenever there’s a topic I find interesting either you or Sokari is involved! How did you first get involved in international development and technology issues?

Sokari is one of my favorite reads as well, and one of the bloggers who’s helped convince me of the power of this medium to build friendships across barriers of nationality, race, gender and other obstacles. I’m very grateful to her for the work she did as the founding Africa editor for Global Voices.
I’ve been interested in international development since I lived in Ghana as a student in 1993. But I didn’t think about getting involved in development issues until my work on Tripod.com. Coming out of the experience of helping to run a successful dot.com, I wondered whether any of the lessons I learned could be applicable in building technology businesses in Africa. I was lucky enough to have the mentorship of Professor Dick Sabot, who was a brilliant development economist as well as an entrepreneur, and who helped encourage me to channel my interests into Geekcorps, the NGO I founded in 1999 to work on technology transfer in the developing world.

What has been the response to projects like BlogAfrica and Global Voices Online?

The two projects have had very different responses, probably because they’ve had very different purposes. BlogAfrica was designed to be a tool useful to a small group of people - folks who follow Africa closely and want to keep up with a large number of voices for the continent. For those folks, it’s a little rough around the edges, but functional and basically useful. But it’s not a site I spend a lot of time promoting and celebrating - the folks who would find it useful generally already know about it.

Global Voices, on the other hand, is a site that I’d love everyone to read. It’s designed to pull people into stories they’d otherwise miss, broaden their worldview and introduce them to people they otherwise would never get to know. It’s been amazingly successful - we were just honored with the Knight Batten award for innovation in journalism. Technorati ranks us as the 175th most popular blog in the blogosphere… which is pretty good for a blog that doesn’t focus on technology, popular culture or US politics.
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Fighting Corruption: Bribe Payers Index 2006

Switzerland received the best ranking on the BPI 2006

Transparency International released the Bribe Payers Index yesterday, an analysis of the custom of bribing by companies from the top exporting countries. The index sheds light on a problem that is often characterized as rooted solely in the developing world. Switzerland ranked the highest on the list. Germany came in at number seven; The United States was ranked number nine.

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Sour Apples

Greenpeace is calling all Apple fans to join the campaign for demanding the company to create greener products. Apple fans love the sleek design and the meticulous attention to detail. But why do the products still contain hazardous substances that other companies have already abandoned? Greenpeace argues that a cutting edge company shouldn’t be cutting lives short by exposing children in China and India to dangerous chemicals, but should rather be setting a green standard in the market.
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MoLive: A Step Towards Citzen Journalism in China?

Documenting the everyday with cellphone cameras

After reading an article about a new photo website launched in China, I was curious to find out what type of images were allowed. Molive.cn, an offshoot of the China Daily online news site, displays a collection of photos taken with cellphones by everyday people. Journalist Dante Chinni sees the site as having great potential to change the meticulously controlled media in China.
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Ban on Underweight Models

30 percent of models participated last year were disqualified (Getty Images)

Madrid shocked the fashion world last week, not because of the clothes seen on the catwalks during Fashion Week, but because organizers put world’s first ban on overly thin models. The ban has caused outrage among modelling agencies and raised the prospect of restrictions at other venues. Madrid’s regional government imposed weight restrictions in line with World Health Organization guidelines for healthy height-to-weight ratios used to calculate a person’s body mass index (BMI), which estimates the portion of fat in the body. “This is a great call to global action,” says Lynn Grefe, chief executive officer of the Seattle-based National Eating Disorders Association.
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Social Entrepreneurship in Brazil

Brazil’s Catalytic Communities (CatComm) is a database of noteworthy social innovation initiatives. It was recently selected as a Tech Museum of Innovation 2006 Tech Laureate in the Equality category. CatComm’s online Community Solutions Database (CSD) offers public, freely available information (in three languages) on community-initiated solutions to local challenges, which may include everything from sanitation to unemployment to HIV.
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Foreign Policy Index: Commitment to Development

The Netherlands tops the 2006 FP Index

Foreign Policy and the Center for Global Development released their annual ranking of the 21 richest countries, as posted on Idealist.org. The Commitment to Development Index analyzes at seven government policy categories to determine which countries are living up to promises to end world poverty.
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Visualize This: Internet reading experience reinvented

The future of online newspapers

Reading a newspaper online simply can’t replace reading the printed version. It’s just not the same. Holding a newspaper feels very different from sitting in front of a computer screen, of course. But more importantly, the way one reads a printed newspaper is more engaged and intuitive. When holding a newspaper your eyes take in a much broader stream of information, and often times you end up reading something that you wouldn’t be looking for on your search engine. Well, this just may change very soon.
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“How can the Internet…serve to enhance our own communities?”

Women use the Internet cafe during a Refugees Emancipation computer course

“In order to turn that technology into something that enhances our communities, we need to direct the technology towards a specific end. We need to organize, and then technology alone won’t enable us to do that. It’s just a tool in – among many tools that have to be used to fight for that kind of vision.” - Anthony Arnove, activist, author and Table of Free Voices participant.
Fighting for that kind of vision, Eben Chu organized Refugees Emanicipation (RE), an NGO begun by asylum seekers in Germany.
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Reach Out and Finance Someone

Courtesy Grameen Foundation

A few weeks ago I interviewed Peter Bladin, vice president of Grameen Foundation, the US-based wing of Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank – the Bangladesh institution often referred to as the first large-scale microfinance project in the world. Although the interview (published today) focuses on the connection between technology and microfinance, we also talked a bit about Village Phone, the program where locals sell mobile phone air time in their communities, and make a profit doing so.
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“Are brands more powerful than governments?”

A post on the ‘Think Progress’ website shows a segment from a recent BBC report that revealed a “direct link between the tobacco companies and the claim that climate change isn’t happening.” In 1993 Philip Morris set up a grass roots coalition to “cast doubt on studies showing that second-hand tobacco smoke is dangerous for health.” In order not to raise suspicion that the company was involved, Philip Morris decided to “‘link the tobacco issue with other more politically correct products’ and campaign on issues like global warming.” The result was The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), which was the first and most important of the corporate-funded organisations denying that climate change is taking place. It has done more damage to the campaign to halt it than any other body.

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A Look at Art and Gender

The Negro Woman Series, Elizabeth Catlett © Howard Museum Collection

In this week’s Village Voice, Jerry Saltz wrote a critique, Women of Babylon, on the lack of women’s representation in New York’s museums and galleries.

When I went to browse the Living Library for Table of Free Voices questions related to gender for this post, I found it interesting that only two out of 100 questions dealt with women’s issues.

Saltz calls the dilemma a “pernicious double bind,” providing a list of the percentages of women participants at recent MOMA and Guggenheim shows.
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Branding for a Good Cause

Co-branding football and children's rights © UNICEF/HQ06-1220/Markisz

According to mediafamily.org, children are able to recognize brand logos as young as three years old, while brand loyalty influence can start at age two. Branding is effective and ubiquitous, especially at sporting events, where it’s difficult to find a square inch of non-sponsored space. Breaking the spell of sponsoring trends, FC-Barcelona recently decided to donate 1.9 million USD over the next five years to UNICEF, displaying the NGO’s logo on its 2006-7 jersey.
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BILL JOY on our Innovation Acceleration

100 answers from Free Voices like Bill Joy now avaiable

Among the 100 questions that Bill Joy answered at the Table of Free Voices were 13 questions about “Innovation Acceleration: Science, Technology and the Future.” Read what the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Green Technology investor, and the man Fortune magazine calls the “Edison of the Internet” has to say about the social impact of new media, local food, and why companies should insure against genetic catastrophes. Here are some (exclusive) transcribed excerpts of Joy’s answers from the “Innovation Acceleration” question session from the Table of Free Voices. Like all content from the Table, Joy’s answers are Copyleft.
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Writing on the Table

Willem Dafoe and Antoschka (Photo: Christina Voigt)

For my own selfish reasons, I’ve spent most of my time so far on the dropping knowledge platform browsing the answers from writers. I’ve particularly enjoyed the thoughtful and honest answers from Pico Iyer, the UK-born journalist and author who has spent much of his adult life travelling the world and writing what he has observed and felt.
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Brian J. Weller’s MIND-MAPS

The array of extraordinary people, ideas and exchanges all around me is overwhelming. An example: over lunch, I was lucky enough to meet Brian J. Weller and take a look at his extraordinary mind-maps, ingenious resources for fostering a well thought-out response to these challenging questions.
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Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

July 2004 elections in Indonesia © 2004 AP

Global Voices On-line reports an interesting piece of “bridge blogging” about Islam in Indonesia which shows once again how the Western, mainstream media is being monitored closely via the net. Indonesian blogger Rasyad A. Payinduri of Sarapan Ekonomi takes on the Washington Times, and finds them guilty of fudging their statistics.
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ASK YOURSELF: “Is it irresponsible for somebody like me, who isn’t really educated in matters of politics, to vote?”

This question was donated to us on the World Question Tour and is available on our website in video format. Jordan Copeland from London, who is asking the question, regards himself as politically uninformed due to lack of interest. What do you think? Should people be able to answer certain criteria before they go to the polls? what can be done to better educate people about politics? Please leave your thoughts and comments in the field below.

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features

Upgrading International Development, Part II

Upgrading International Development

Fighting Corruption: Bribe Payers Index 2006

Recycle Your Cell-Phone, Save a Gorilla

A Look Behind the Prison Walls

The Homeless World Cup 2006

Reach Out and Finance Someone

Arundhati Roy asks herself: What form of resistance is effective and acceptable?

Iranian Bloggers Joined by President Ahmadinejad

Creating A New Universe

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Media & Information

MoLive Returns?

The Shock Effect and Public Awareness

Continuing the Dialogue Online: Blog Carnivals

Death of a Journalist: Anna Politkovskaya

Rewriting Africa: Journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault

Upgrading International Development, Part II

Power Players in Net Neutrality

Upgrading International Development

Fighting Corruption: Bribe Payers Index 2006

Sour Apples

MoLive: A Step Towards Citzen Journalism in China?

Ban on Underweight Models

Social Entrepreneurship in Brazil

Foreign Policy Index: Commitment to Development

Visualize This: Internet reading experience reinvented

“How can the Internet…serve to enhance our own communities?”

Reach Out and Finance Someone

“Are brands more powerful than governments?”

A Look at Art and Gender

Branding for a Good Cause

BILL JOY on our Innovation Acceleration

Writing on the Table

Brian J. Weller’s MIND-MAPS

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

ASK YOURSELF: “Is it irresponsible for somebody like me, who isn’t really educated in matters of politics, to vote?”