RConversation

Join the Open Source Translation Blogging project

Guangzhou-based blogger and Global Voices language editor John Kennedy is leading an exciting new initiative which Roland Soong has dubbed the Open Source Translation Blogging project.. and which "Letters from China" calls the Great Hall of the Bloggers.

John's idea, which started in a comments thread on LfC's blog, is similar to a dream Roland has had for a couple of years: To build a cooperative of bilingual bloggers who coordinate translation of important conversations taking place on the Chinese Internet - particularly stuff that we think will help the English-speaking world to understand China better.

Roland has become one of the most famous Chinese-English "bridge bloggers," bringing articles, blog posts, conversations, and debates from the Chinese-language Internet to the attention of the English-speaking world.  But there are many other people doing this on their own blogs. They include John, LfC, the good folks at Danwei, Interlocals, the China Media Project, the team at China Digital Times and many many more bilingual bloggers scattered around Greater China and across the globe.

The problem, as John points out, is that so far there has been little co-ordination about who is working on what, and people are often worried about duplication (i.e., whether Roland will beat them to the punch after they spend hours working on something).

While informal coordination has been happening all along, a lot more material could be translated a lot faster and more efficiently if the coordination were made more systematic.

Anybody can sign up to join the project on this wiki - but please only do so if you read both Chinese and English and are serious about being involved.  You can participate in a couple of ways:

1. Sign up as a translator blogger
2. Suggest articles for translation

Roland is already using the wiki actively to list what he's working on. I've posted something in the suggestion list. Etc. The ball is rolling.

I am thinking maybe we may also want to designate a special OSTB tag in Technorati, del.icio.us, and for people to use as a category on their blogs, etc. so that anybody who translates anything as part of the OSTB project, and publishes it on their blog, can then automatically feed their OSTB blog posts into a special OSTB web feed. 

Hong Kong bloggers, the SCMP, and influence on the Web

There is an interesting discussion taking place in the blogosphere about who first broke the news to the English-reading world of the protest letter against Sina.com written by several prominent Chinese lawyer-bloggers, who brought attention to it, how and why.  Here is a full chronology of my actions during the time period in question, to clear up any misunderstandings about what I did or didn't do, when, or why:

• Letters From China blogged an excerpt on Friday. (Regrettably I did not see it.)
• Meanwhile over the weekend I received links to the Chinese original from several list-servs I am on.
• I see the story on Sunday morning in the South China Morning Post as I'm going out the door for a hike. I make a mental note to find a translation of the full letter - or translate it myself if necessary - later that evening.
• Unfortunately I couldn't blog the original SCMP story because it's password-protected for paying subscribers only, and if I copy and paste the whole thing they could go after me for copyright violation. So when I get home that evening I go online to see if I can find an online version of the SCMP story or whether the news agencies have picked it up. The  wires had not picked it up. Then I checked the Asia Media site because they often re-run SCMP stories on a site that is freely accessible and can be blogged. However, it was still Sunday morning on the U.S. West Coast where that website is based and while eventually they did post the article, they hadn't at the time I was looking for it. And anyway, it didn't include the full translation.
• I look on my Skype buddy list and see Roland online. I figure I might as well ask him whether he is planning to translate the lawyers' letter so that I won't be duplicating his (faster and better) efforts. So I drop him a line. (Roland has since reproduced our exchange on his blog so you can read it there if you are interested in the detail.)
• I do some other things then check back a couple hours later. Lo and behold, Roland has indeed posted a translation.
• At 12:45am  Monday morning, I publish a post about the letter on my blog.
• The next day I exchange e-mails with BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin, with whom I communicate from time to time on free speech issues. I had originally e-mailed her about Isaac's letter to Google and she says she's going to write a post about it. I thank her and give her the link to my post about the lawyer letter as well, since it's a related issue.
• Xeni does a big post about the lawyer letter and Isaac's letter. I am thrilled that she has helped bring attention to the views of the lawyers and of Isaac, and that I have managed to play a useful role thanks to the help of many others.

A discussion then ensues in the comments section of Letters from China about who had brought the story to the attention of the English-speaking world, and the role that Roland may or may not have played. Daai Tou Laam wrote a post titled SCMP Gets It Before ESWN to set the public record straight. Then Roland published our Skype chat transcript to clear the air on his side.

Hopefully this post serves to clear the air even further, as I am certainly not taking credit for anything in particular, other than being a conduit. I don't pay attention to my blog's traffic numbers. I just felt it was important to bring more attention to that letter by the lawyers (and to Isaac's open letter to Google). I had the ability to do so, thus I did.

This entire sequence of events highlights why it is such a bad strategy for a newspaper like the SCMP to put its content behind a paid firewall.

As LfC pointed out in his comments thread, the SCMP has made itself irrelevant in the global blogosphere:

... SCMP is a gross failure on the web. It requires subscription; its articles cannot be linked to; nor can they be googled! How many subscribers does SCMP have?

ESWN is open to all and linkable. Rebecca MacKinnon apparently picked up the protest from Mr Soong. So did the Time Blog. Boing Boing then stepped in. They invariably point to ESWN’s translation and comment.

It's true that the SCMP played a significant role in the story getting out. But they get little credit and no traffic to their website as a result of their role - which if I was them I would consider unfortunate.

We do know, however, thanks to an e-mail received by one of my students, (and a phone conversation conducted by another) that the SCMP is planning a big redesign.

I hope the SCMP's revamp includes opening up their site so that their hard-working journalists will be able to gain the same global relevance and impact that some Hong Kong bloggers have achieved singlehandedly with no marketing departments.

Joining the worldwide online conversation - from which they have so far excluded themselves - is good for the SCMP's business and brand in the long run, I believe. Especially since, as I understand, their online paid subscriptions have hit a plateau and are not expected to grow substantially.

Another lesson learned from this whole episode: Obviously I need to re-arrange my feed reader and move LfC's blog up to a more obvious position :) 

Chinese lawyers protest blog censorship by Sina.com

Roland Soong has translated the full text of an open letter to Sina.com (a Chinese portal and blog-hosting service) written by four Chinese lawyers. They are protesting the un-transparent, arbitrary, and unaccountable way in which Sina.com has been censoring blog posts by bloggers on its system.

They write: "Unfortunately, while Sina.com's business has been growing, it lacks business ethics.  While providing the space for our blogs, it has also seriously violated our freedom of speech." Full text in both English (Roland's translation) and the original Chinese below.

It's worth noting that the open letter has been posted in many places around the Chinese-language internet, including here on a Sohu blog. Note that Sohu has censored the letter. Solidarity among censoring blog hosts?

A number of my Chinese friends have questioned whether such a protest will be of any use. Many have also offered reactions along the lines of: "What did they expect from Sina anyway. They should know there are other blog-hosting options and they can blog independently on their own server to avoid being censored." I'm sure there are plenty of Chinese geeks willing to help them rent server space somewhere set up their own blogs independently so that they won't be subject to blog host censorship. (That won't protect them from the "great firewall" and other problems, but at least they will have somewhat more control over their work.)

Other people point out that these lawyers probably know all of the above, but perhaps have other reasons for protesting in this way. The South China Morning Post (requires paid subscription) has already reported on the open letter.  I imagine we'll see more global media coverage of it over the next 24 hours.

Thus the protest is helping to call attention to the way in which China's blog hosting companies like Sina and Sohu (as well as all the others) are all censoring their users' content. What's more these companies are doing it without any advance warning or negotiation with the blogger about his or her content, without any recourse to appeal, without any explanation, without any notice of what laws are being violated by the content or what laws are being complied with by erasing it, etc.

It is very appropriate that this protest is coming from a group of lawyers. This is after all a fundamental "rule of law" issue. Is China's information industry and Internet sector going to be regulated in a transparent and accountable manner? Or is it going ot be an arbitrary free-for-all where unknown people with power do things to other people for unknown reasons?  Which is better for the Chinese people in the long run? Which is better for China's business environment?

If China's Internet brands want go global eventually (as Baidu is already trying to do), how can they expect to win the trust of users outside of China if they treat Chinese users with such disrespect, lie to them and ignore their concerns?

I repeat that final paragraph in my crude and colloquial Chinese:

如果中国网上的这些大名牌以后想进入到其它国家的市场，如果他们对自己国家的拥护那么不尊重，还骗他们， 不理他们... 国外的拥护有可能会信任他们？

Translation of the full open letter by Roland Soong:

Please State Your Reasons Publicly!  Joint Statement about Sina.com's Censorship of Blogs.

We are registered users of the Sina.com blog service.  For a long time, we were grateful to Sina.com for providing a free space for speech.  But we do not owe Sina.com anything.  When we register to have blogs with Sina.com, we are also satisfying Sina.com's business objectives.  Therefore, there exists an equal obligation for Sina.com as well as us to respect each other.

Unfortunately, while Sina.com's business has been growing, it lacks business ethics.  While providing the space for our blogs, it has also seriously violated our freedom of speech.

Ever since we registered, our blogs have seen large numbers of posts being willfully deleted by the Sina.com administrators.  Since we were understanding, we forgave Sina.com for its violation of our rights over and over again.  But we cannot tolerate this anymore, because Sina.com's censorious activities have become more and more unreasonable.  Recently, the posts related to the names of Zhang Yihe (章诒) and Cui Yingjie (崔英杰) were barbarously deleted.  Many netizens spent a long time to write comments, but they were deleted in a flash without even enough time to retain a copy.

Before Sina.com deletes a blog post, it does not provide any warning.  At most, it will leave a system message coming down from the top, usually of the form:

    Sorry.  Your published essay XXX has been deleted by the system administrator.  We deeply express our apologies for causing you this inconvenience.  If you have questions, please send us an email.  We usually respond to an email within 24 hours.  200x-x-x x:x:x"

When any blogger receives such a notice, he/she must feel that his/her dignity has been offended and that his/her freedom of speech has been violated.  When Sina.com deletes something, it should tell us the reason for the deletion.  It should not be about whether I have a question!  Does your "deep expression" really contain any hint of "apology"?

Sina.com, please tell us: Why did you violate our freedom of speech over and over again?

Sina.com, please tell us: Why did you feel that it is your right to delete blog posts? Or even your power?

Sina.com, please tell us: Why do you feel that you do not need to negotiate with (or even notify) us before you delete a blog post?

Sina.com, please tell us: Why do you even believe that willful deletion corresponds to your commercial interests?

Sina.com, please tell us: On which article of law, or which agreement, or which department's tongue-cutting order are your actions based?

Sina.com, please tell us: How dare you be so barbarous?  Please state publicly your reasons for censoring.

Signers:

    He Weifang (贺卫方) (Peking University School of Law professor)
    Pu Zhiqiang (浦志强) (Huayi Law Office lawyer)
    Xiao Han (萧瀚) (China University of Political Science and Law School of Law associate professor)
    Xu Zhiyong (许志永) (Gongmeng Information Consultation Firm researcher)

------------------------------

ORIGINAL CHINESE:

请公开你们的理由！关于新浪博客删贴的联合声明/贺卫方等（原创）

我们是新浪的博客注册用户，长期以来，我们感谢新浪免费提供言论空间。但是我们并不欠新浪什么，在新浪注册使用博客，符合新浪的商业目的，因此，在新浪和我们之间存在着互相尊重的平等义务。

不幸的是，新浪生意做得很大，但商业精神有亏，在提供博客空间的同时，也在严重侵犯我们的言论自由。

自注册使用以来，我们的博客上有大量帖子被新浪网管肆意删除，本着理解的心态，我们一次又一次地原谅了新浪的侵权行径。但是，现在我们不能继续忍受，因为新浪的删贴行径已经越来越不可理喻，近来连涉及章诒和、崔英杰这些名字的帖子也都被蛮横删除，有些博友辛辛苦苦写了很久的跟帖评论，转眼就被删除，连留底的时间都不给。

新浪在删除博客贴文之前，没有任何预警性提示，最多是删除之后居高临下地给一个系统消息，其格式通常为：

“抱歉，您发表的文章xxx已经被系统管理员删除。给您带来的不便，我们深表歉意。如有疑问请给我们发邮件，我们收到邮件24小时内给您回复。 200x-x-x x:x:x  ”

接到这种通知，任何一个博友都会感到自己的尊严受到了伤害，自己的言论自由受到了侵犯，因为你新浪删贴，应该是你来告诉我删贴的理由，而不是什么我有什么疑问！你们这“深表”，真有半点“歉意”的成分吗？

新浪，请告诉我们，是什么，让你们一次又一次作出侵犯我们言论自由的事来？

新浪，请告诉我们，是什么，让你们觉得删贴就是你们的权利??甚至权力？

新浪，请告诉我们，是什么，让你们觉得删帖之前可以不协商??至少是通知？

新浪，请告诉我们，是什么，让你们居然认为肆意删贴符合你们的商业利益？

新浪，请告诉我们，你们的所作所为，依据了哪一条法律、哪一项协议，或者是哪个部门的割舌命令？

新浪，请告诉我们，你们仗恃着什么才会如此蛮横？请公开你们删贴的理由！

签名人（以姓氏声母排序）：

贺卫方（北京大学法学院教授）

浦志强（华一律师事务所律师）

萧瀚（中国政法大学法学院副教授）

许志永（公盟咨询公司研究员）

                                           2007年2月9日

Technorati Tags: freespeech, gfw, trust, 言论自由

Global journalism, hiring, firing, and the Internet

This post is in reaction primarily to these works:

"Goodbye Gutenberg," Nieman Reports, Winter 2006 Issue 

Jill Caroll, "Foreign News Coverage: The U.S. Media's Undervalued Asset," Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Working Paper Series, Fall 2006, #D-39 (downloadable as PDF here). (NOTE: Jill's paper has been taken down temporarily from the Shorenstein website due to several errors. I am told that they will put it back up when the errors have been corrected.)

Ethan Zuckerman, "Are foreign correspondents going extinct? Or just changing their stripes?," My Heart's in Accra, Jan 26, 2007.

Michael Hirschorn, "Get Me Rewrite: A modest proposal for reinventing newspapers for the digital age," The Atlantic Monthly, December 2006 issue.

I was making my way through the latest issue of Nieman Reports with its cornucopia of articles about how the Internet is changing journalism - and that the change can be for the good if we make it so - when my friend Ethan Zuckerman wrote a very thoughtful post reacting to Jill Caroll's academic paper defending foreign news coverage.

(Jill as you recall was the freelancer working for the Christian Science Monitor who was held hostage in Iraq - making me pause in a moment of deep respect before venturing to criticize anything she has to say.)

Unfortunately the Boston Globe was not listening to Jill's arguments: that foreign news coverage is highly valued by newspaper readers; it and builds trust, credibility, and uniqueness that can't easily be gained in other ways; and that foreign news is actually good value when you consider these factors. A friend of mine is one of the four remaining Globe correspondents being called home from overseas. It is truly depressing for a person who has spent most of her journalistic career as a foreign correspondent to be faced with a job market in which there are fewer and fewer opportunities.

But are newspapers going to be talked into reversing this epidemic of foreign bureau closures?  Not likely. Unless the entire industry - including individual journalists themselves - start thinking radically outside the box.

Jill offers two suggestions to make foreign correspondence more affordable and justifiable to newspapers:  use more freelancers rather than setting up full-time bureaus with full-time staffs (Jill herself was a freelancer in the Middle East), and do more foreign stories with local angles.

Ethan is surprised that Jill did not address the role of news agencies in any detail. He also points out that she doesn't really deal with the Internet much other than to say that it has hurt circulation and advertising revenues. Ethan's point about the web and foreign news has mainly to do with the potential of citizen media, and how news organizations should be thinking about how to tap the power of thousands of talented and articulate bloggers around the world.

But the challenges and opportunities of the Internet go beyond that - as the many contributors to Goodbye Gutenberg discuss.

Phillip Meyer writes: "It is still possible to save journalism, but maybe not journalism as we know it." One could substitute "foreign correspondence" for "journalism" in that sentence.

As a teacher of journalism in an age where j-schools also need to reinvent themselves to remain relevant, I was particularly struck by the following passage by Roanoke Times editor Michael Riley about how news companies need to rethink themselves:

"No longer are we purely media companies; we must become technology companies, too, and that means we must raise our technology IQ to compete in a digitally transformed world.  A big part of our success will be tied into rethinking what type of people we hire. The premium, moving forward, will rest on attracting more innovators into our midst and finding ways to give them the freedom and the backing they need to experiment and help move us into a new realm in which we can preserve the journalism and make a robust business model work."

If news organizations are going to do a better job at covering international news in original ways and reverse recent trends, people wanting careers covering global stories are going to have to reinvent themselves as much as their employers must.  So must editors who handle international news, if they want to save their own jobs. This is just reality.

Here are a few directions such innovations might take. None of these ideas are mine alone.

- Try harder not to duplicate agency and each other's coverage. In the Internet age when everybody is checking Google and Yahoo for their breaking news anyway (or Reuters and Bloomberg if they work in finance), people are still spending way too much time duplicating stories that the agencies are covering - or that all the other foreign correspondents are covering. Editors have got to allow reporters to break away from the pack and do truly original reporting that readers won't find anywhere else, and which they will come to value and miss if it's absent. Reporters need to push harder to do such stories even when editors are calling up and saying "Reuters [or the NYT, or CNN or whoever] reported xxx can you file something on it?" 

- Focus on global stories that have clear and direct relevance to your core home audience, and make the connection much more clear.  My last three years living back in the U.S. really brought home to me just how unreal the rest of the world seems to most Americans. Sure, there's international news coverage, but even for those who read and watch it, the connection to people's daily lives is not very clear or well understood. This I believe is partially the fault of how news organizations structure their coverage. There is almost no foreign news story that doesn't have a U.S. domestic angle and almost no U.S. domestic story (especially anything economic or business related) that doesn't have international angles to it. Maybe rather than getting rid of foreign news reporters what we really need to eliminate are the separate sections of the newspapers and newscasts that silo foreign news into a category of topics that are distant and strange. The rest of the world is not distant and strange at all. It reaches into your kitchen and your bedroom daily. We need to do a better job of covering the world as the interconnected place it truly is. If we do that properly, I believe having reporters overseas will seem much more indispensable than it does today.

- Create communities of conversation around your reporters. This idea was articulated well by Michael Hirschorn in the December issue of the Atlantic Monthly. He sees one possible future in which star reporters are better off as freelancers:

It will require only a slight shift in the economic model for the Friedmans of the world to realize that they don’t need the newspapers they work for; that they can go off and blog on their own, or form United Artists–like cooperatives to financially support their independent efforts.

The solution he proposes: "Not only do you allow your reporters to blog; you make them the hubs of their own social networks, the maestros of their own wikis, the masters of their own many-to-many realms." 

In this scenario played out, some readers who are serious Friedman fans would get their New York Times content primarily via Times headline feeds running through Friedman's blog - rather than the Times' front page. There on the blog they would discuss his stories with him and each other, and share recommendations for other journalism by other people.

Under this model, I should think, a news organization has real incentives to support such communities of conversation around its star foreign correspondents, whose talents can be better showcased and who can help be a "draw" for the news organization's other content. If the Christian Science Monitor had Jill Carroll doing exactly that, would more people wind up reading the CSM more faithfully? A certain segment of news junkies like me probably would.

- Involve local immigrant communities and diasporas. This is something that Doug McGill - a former foreign correspondent now in Minnesota - has been going on about for some time: the need for more "glocal" reporting that ties local communities to the broader world. One way to do this is for local newspapers to get a better grip on where the ethnic immigrant communities in their city come from and do a better job at covering those countries, with a special emphasis on stories that span between hometown and homeland. How many U.S. cities with large Ethiopian or Vietnamese populations do a decent job at covering those countries? How well do Hong Kong papers cover the global Hong Kong diaspora? This doesn't necessarily mean opening lots of new bureaus. By utilizing a smart combination of freelancers and readers/viewers who may not be professional journalists but who have stories to tell and things to say that are relevant to your audience, one can bring a great deal more global coverage into the mix - coverage of things that your local community wants and needs to know.

- Engage with citizen media. The Reuters partnership with Global Voices, the BBC's increasingly active engagement with bloggers, and many other initiatives are showing how professional reporting and citizen media can complement each other well. As the Washington Post has found, displaying the blog posts that are linking to your stories helps spread a web of global conversation to your journalism and builds readership and audience loyalty. Then there is a modified OhMyNews model in which editors can work with volunteer citizen-reporters in places where no professional freelancers are available - or on specialized topics they're not qualified to cover.

The web enables all of these things in ways that simply weren't possible before. As Jon Palferman writes: "Given its transformative capacity, we can regard the Web as a problem or we can see it as a potential solution to a broader problem that we would have had to face anyway."

What does all of this mean for young people planning to enter the profession? I think it means that there still are opportunities for young people to go into international news - and for not so young foreign correspondents to re-invent their careers. But we can't expect that things will ever go back to the way they were, or that people ten years from now can have the same careers that some of us had ten years ago (or in some cases even one or two years ago). But if you're not afraid of the web, have an open mind and are ready to innovate, I believe the opportunities will be there - if you help create them.

China's Starbucks-blogger-gate: Hype and reality.

This morning I was invited to appear on RTHK3's "Backchat" show to comment on the blogger-driven firestorm about whether Starbucks should have been allowed in the Forbidden City and whether it should stay. (The show's audio will eventually be archived here.)

The firestorm was started by Rui Chenggang, a star anchor on Chinese Central Television (CCTV)'s English-language service, who also writes a blog on Sina.com - one of China's largest blogging platforms - as well as on CCTV's blog site. On January 12th he wrote a post arguing that Starbucks should leave the Forbidden City. Roland Soong translated it on ESWN here.

The story - largely framed as grassroots cyber-nationalism and an example of the newfound power of Chinese "netizens" - has been lapped up by newspapers across the globe. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece late last week titled How blogging can galvanize China (thanks to Gen for the link to a freely available version on post-gazette.com).  It quotes Rui as saying: "Blogging is giving ordinary grass-roots Chinese people a chance to express themselves."

Let's keep a few things in perspective. Rui is no "ordinary grass-roots Chinese person." I first met him not in Beijing but in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum. Unlike most "grass-roots" people he gets invited to speak at international meetings where he rubs shoulders with CEO's. As a very smart, sophisticated, and globally minded guy, Rui can talk to powerful people in their own language and they bother to answer his e-mails.

Rui is one of several relatively young and increasingly influential Chinese journalists who write popular blogs - and whose popularity and influence has increased thanks to their blogs. Let's call them "China's A-list Journo-bloggers," shall we? (Suggestions for some other term are welcome..)

His Starbucks blog post got the attention it did because of his position, because it contained original information about a direct conversation with a global CEO, and because the editors of Sina.com chose to highlight that blog post prominently on their front page. My friend Roland Soong says he told a journalist who called him for comment about the story that the power in this situation lies as much with anonymous editors at Sina.com who giveth influence and taketh away. (The journalist did not end up quoting Roland on this point.)

Another influential Chinese A-List Journo-blogger, "Rose" Luqiu Luwei of Phoenix TV, writes a blog in Chinese called Rose Garden. She has just published an article in the latest issue of the journalism journal Nieman Reports titled Blogging News in China that helps to provide  more context to the Chinese Journo-blogger phenomenon.  Her blog is also on Sina.com. She started it after a friend who works at Sina urged her to do so. Rose's blog, with accounts of her foreign travels to major world events as a Phoenix TV reporter and interviews with world leaders, quickly became a hit with the Sina.com readership - precisely because her life is so unlike that of the ordinary "grass roots." Her article explains why in more detail.

Rose also points out that three articles she posted on her blog were taken down because something about them was too sensitive - she declines to specify exactly what. Her piece concludes:

We are left to wonder whether in the near future China will allow citizen-journalism Web enterprises like Korea's OhMyNews to exist. If so, Chinese people would have more access to information about what is happening in their country and in the world. However, the restrictive changes Chinese officials recently instituted for the news media—both domestic and foreign—indicate they fear the power and the influence of the Internet.

Read the original article in full - it is fascinating and  you'll learn a lot - but my point is this: the Starbucks-blogger-gate is not about how anybody in China can go on the Internet and bring about widespread public debate and even provoke a policy change. What is really happening is that certain people who are already relatively successful and famous can use the Internet to galvanize public sentiment to bring about change in ways that weren't possible before.

That in itself is a big step forward, but as Rose's experience shows, her power, or Rui Chenggang's, or any other Chinese journo-blogger's power is limited to issues that the Chinese blog-hosting companies and blog site editors feel: a) will likely be appealing to large numbers of readers and thus generate traffic and discussion on their service; and b) won't get their companies in trouble with the authorities. 

One other thing to keep in mind with this story is that in some quarters Rui Chenggang is being unfairly lumped in with China's head-banging anti-foreign nationalists - mainly because some such people have been commenting enthusiastically on his blog and citing him as a champion. Rui himself has made it clear (see a follow up post "What am I really trying to do?") that he is a globalist and he is not complaining about Starbucks in the Forbidden City because he is anti-foreign. Rather he is complaining about the rampant commercialism by the authorities who run China's national monuments more generally, and thinks that allowing tacky displays of commercial branding at China's World Heritage Sites is unbecoming of a people who ought to be proud of their heritage. His goal, it appears, is actually to provoke a total rethink about the way such sites are managed.

To highlight Rui's globalist perspective, the indefatigable Roland has translated a post that Rui wrote on September 30, 2006 titled An essay about Japan that every Chinese person ought to read. It is a call for Sino-Japanese friendship. It is also an appeal for young Chinese to stop going around with historical chips on their shoulders and rather to "look at Japan, America and the world in a multi-dimensional, diversified, rational and self-confident manner."

Asia leads the world in blog readership

Edelman the P.R. company has come out with a fascinating study of global blog readership titled A Corporate Guide to the Global Blogosphere (published in that annoying new NXT format, unfortunately.) While the report's primary audience is meant to be companies, there is plenty for non-corporate people who study the blogosphere to chew on.

Their key finding is not surprising: blogs are much more influential in Japan, South Korea, and China than they are in the West.   Here's the chart (click to enlarge):

One thing to keep in mind about global blog counts is that they are very very inexact and unreliable. The Edelman survey, done in conjunction with Technorati, finds that the English language blogosphere remains the world's largest (with 39%) of blogs, followed by the Japanese blogosphere (33%) and then the Chinese (10%). [SEE UPDATE BELOW THROWING THESE NUMBERS INTO FURTHER QUESTION] However, my former Berkman Center colleague Ethan Zuckerman and I both think that Technorati is seriously undercounting Chinese blogs. There are a number of technical reasons for this, which Ethan discusses here and here. More discussion about the undercounting from China here and here. A major reason, in a nutshell, is that many Chinese blog-hosting platforms (and many other non-English blog hosting platforms for that matter) don't bother to configure themselves in a way that their blogs can be easily found by Technorati. Japanese blog hosts seem to do a much better job, thanks in part to  a lot of hard work done by the Technorati Japan office.

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UPDATE (8 hours after original post): On January 9th, David Wolf of Silicon Hutong reported on ChinaTechNews: Edelman Gives Up Tracking Chinese Blogs. Basically, Edelman as of the end of last year recognized that Technorati is unable to track Asian language blogs sufficiently well. He points us to a blog post by Edelman's Steve Rubel on December 29th in which he says:

Work on the Asian language sites - Korean and Chinese - has ceased. In China there are access issues and Korea data quality is less than desirable because most blog platforms don't ping. That's the nature of the culture.

Therefore, Edelman and Technorati reached a decision to de-emphasize Asia and focus on Europe. The partnership was never set to renew.

 

It's strange that Edelman does not note any reservations about the language blogosphere numbers in their report.
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Another extremely interesting finding was that more Chinese blog-readers are more likely to take action as a result of reading a blog than Japanese or Koreans. Here's the chart (click to enlarge):

Tony Tao of Edelman's Shanghai office writes that "engaging the Chinese blogosphere is something that should be done with complete transparency. Perhaps more than elsewhere, bloggers in China can be extremely hostile if they feel they are being maniuplated."

I recently did a small-scale study of the extent to which the international media is influenced by blogs in their coverage of China. (I posted some of the initial results here and will share a more detailed academic paper I've written based on those and other results once it's ready.) I found that Chinese blogs and English-language "bridge blogs" about China have become a staple part of the China correspondent's media diet. Given the extent to which Chinese Internet users are influenced by blogs according to this Edelman study, journalists covering China are increasingly remiss if they don't keep an eye on the Chinese blogosphere.

Reading through the country-by-country writeups, one is struck by how unique every country's blogosphere really is. This confirms my own conclusions from working on the Global Voices project. People in different countries and language groups use blogs in different ways for different purposes. You really can't take generalizations about how the U.S. blogosphere works and apply them to any other country or region's blogosphere. The relationships between blogs, mainstream media, government, companies, etc. etc. are very different from country to country and region to region. To understand any blogosphere you have to construct a unique equation involving a country's culture, economic level, internet penetration, political system, and many other factors.

Lamma Island hits Placeblogger!

I was meaning to write about Placeblogger earlier but have been a bit busy with moving from one side of the earth to the other...  perhaps I should start a support group for Placelessbloggers...

Launched on January 1st, Placeblogger is a site dedicated to helping you find local blogs from everywhere. (See Jay Rosen's post about it here.) Founder Lisa Williams got the idea from her experience founding and running a placeblog called H20Town in Watertown, Massachusetts. She previewed the site a couple months ago at the Berkman Center. You can watch the video here and listen to the podcast here. Here is how LIsa defines "placeblog:"

A placeblog is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time
It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that’s open to community contribution
It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism
It’s about the lived experience of a place

I'm delighted to see that a local Hong Kong placeblog, Lamma.com.hk, and its founder "Lamma-Gung" is featured on the front page of Placeblogger this week. Amongst his plans, L-G says he hopes to seed more place blogs in other parts of Hong Kong.  Sounds like a great thing, perhaps, for some of my future students to get involved with... or for them to do themselves.

While the site is heralded as a new addition to the "citizen journalism" universe, Lisa makes it clear however that placeblogs should not be confused with "local news:"

Placeblogs, however, are about something broader than news alone. They're about the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn't news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people. However, when news happens in a community, placeblogs often cover those events in unique and nontraditional ways, and provide a community watercooler to discuss those events.

This is why I like to use the term "citizen media" instead of "citizen journalism" when talking about the blogging phenomenon, and about the non-Western blogospheres that my friends and I are trying to aggregate and curate with Global Voices Online. Many blogs do perform journalistic functions but that's not what they do all the time - and it's not all they do.

Lisa makes it clear that she doesn't think blogs should replace newspapers and nor do I, for the same reasons. That said, there are a lot of very good reasons why budding journalists - or seasoned journalists looking to get involved with this new medium - should get involved with placeblogging. As Northeastern journalism professor Dan Kennedy wrote on his blog:

Last semester she spoke to my Journalism of the Web students, and talked about placeblogging as an entrepreneurial opportunity for young journalists. Why not? When I was a recent J-school graduate, friends and I talked about several ideas for launching community papers. We didn't do so mainly because it was too expensive.

By contrast, you can launch a placeblog virtually for free, with the hope that, eventually, you can sell enough advertising to make a living. I would think that an aggressive young journalist who knows how to write, and can post photos, video and sound, could give her chain-owned community weekly fits. And there's no need to settle for just "random acts of journalism," either.

In Hong Kong, there is plenty of low-hanging fruit waiting for assertive young journalists to grab and make a reputation for themselves. The local media fails to cover many things, not because they'll go to jail for the most part but for commercial reasons and because corporate bosses don't want to be too controversial. The news media here self-censors to a certain degree, and tends to operate with what many local journalists here describe to me as a massive "herd mentality:" everybody chasing the same stories in packs and few journalists daring to branch off to do truly original stuff that nobody else is doing - and few editors brave enough to devote the resources to let reporters to split away from covering the same stuff everybody else is covering.

Thus it seems to me that students here in Hong Kong have a great opportunity to pursue truly original reporting that can really make a difference to the community. And thanks to technology, it doesn't have to be expensive. Plus they could even help lead the way with media innovation if journalism programs encourage and facilitate it.

Last November I did a brainstorm at the Berkman Center about some of the opportunities the Internet brings for journalism students, and how journalism education might explore these things more creatively. You can watch the video of the talk here, or listen to the audio here. For some reason I was feeling shy or busy or something and didn't post the links at the time. I haven't gone back and watched or listened to it so I have no idea if it's coherent (it probably isn't), but I welcome feedback, suggestions, and ideas from anybody out there.  Especially people in Hong Kong who might have specific suggestions. I'd love to hear from anybody who might be interested in working with JMSC students on potentially innovative projects - particularly those related to "hyper-local" or "niche" journalism as well as the creation of what I like to call "communities of conversation" around that journalism.

Blogs and China correspondence - survey results

Last month I put out a survey of foreign correspondents who cover China to try and get a sense of how - and whether - blogs are impacting their coverage of China. Many thanks to the 70-plus journalists who took the time to complete at least part of the survey. Respondents included people from major news organizations headquartered in the U.S., UK, Singapore, Russia, Qatar, Poland, Italy, Hong Kong, Germany, France, Finland, Canada, and Australia. There are roughly 400 foreign correspondents accredited officially to cover China, plus an unknown number who do so more informally. So while the answer pool is not huge, I think it at very least serves as a useful "focus group" for the evolving relationship between China bloggers and foreign correspondents who cover China for the international media.

The data will form the core of an academic paper I'm working on, but first I'd like to share the key findings. I would love your feedback. Please feel free to share your reactions in the comments section of this post, or via email.  Here goes:

90% follow blogs. 61 out of 68 people said "yes" to the question: "For the purposes of work, do you or your staff ever read blogs written from or about China – either in Chinese or another language?"

41% have been following blogs for 1-2 years, and 22% have been doing so for 2 years or more. (Click the pie chart to enlarge it and see the full breakdown.) When I broke it down and asked people: "About how long have you been following blogs as a source of of story ideas or information?" 9 people answered "no" (For some reason 7 people had answered "no" to the previous question.)

Most respondents find blogs useful for story ideas and information - In fact they find blogs significantly more useful than CCTV, CNN, BBC (radio & TV), overseas forums, BBS & chatrooms, or Chinese radio.  I asked the question: "Thinking about the stories you’ve written during the last month, would you say the following sources have been useful to you for story ideas or information in a major way, a minor way, or not at all?" Then provided a range of options. The chart below illustrates the results (click to enlarge):

Most find blogs useful to spot emerging stories and as a general source of story ideas.

 I asked the question: "In what way do you find blogs useful?" and provided a range of options to select. On the right is a chart showing all the selections (click to enlarge). Top choices were: 1. "A way to find out about emerging stories sooner than I would otherwise;" 2. "As a general source of story ideas;" 3. "As a source of information that I can’t find elsewhere" tied with "As a gauge of China's popular culture "pulse".

ESWN and Danwei appear to be substantially more important to correspondents than other English-language China-focused blogs. Of the 48 people who responded to this question, 66% said they read ESWN at least weekly; 61% read Danwei at least weekly.  38% said they read ESWN "daily," with 25% claiming to read Danwei daily. While opinions differ as to whether China Digital Times (run from the University of California at Berkeley) is a blog or simply an aggregator of China news from other sources, it's useful to note for comparison and context that 15% said they read China Digital Times daily while 61% said they read it weekly or more. Click on the thumbnail above right to see the raw data breakdown from my survey software.

As you will see by clicking on the chart and looking at all the other blogs, none is as widely read by journalists answering the survey than ESWN and Danwei.  One respondent wrote: "ESWN is so much more important than other blogs that it almost deserves a category by itself. No other blog comes as close to serving as a bridge between Mandarin and English media." People also cited several story ideas they've gotten from Danwei. One journalist said she finds Danwei particularly useful because it follows Chinese media regulations very closely and links to original regulations.

The list of choices was compiled by consulting a number of China-based journalists and asking them which blogs they follow regularly. Based on responses to an open-ended follow-up question, two additional English-language blogs that probably should have been included were the Chinese Law Prof blog and the blog written by Richard Spencer of the Daily Telegraph.

Blogs are somewhat more useful to foreign correspondents than BBS and chatrooms. 55 people who responded to the question: "Specifically, which do you find more useful in doing your story research: Blogs or internet forums and BBS?" 25 (46%) said blogs are more useful; 10 (18%) said BBS and chatrooms are more useful; 19 (35%) said they are equally useful; and one person said neither is useful. Many commented that they use blogs versus Internet forums and BBS for different purposes. Internet forums/BBS's are used more as a way to gauge the public mood, while blogs are used more for analysis - let's see what so and so has to say on such and such issue. Both are sources of story tips. Said one respondent: "We use blogs more for ideas and insights and internet forums more for getting a sense of how people feel about an issue." Said another: "They serve different purposes. Blogs tend to give you story ideas, angles and leads, as well as links to relevant BBS sites. BBS is more useful to gauge public opinions on major events." One Asian journalist who finds BBS and Internet forums more useful pointed out: "Interesting stories in the Chinese media are more often copied and pasted on to BBS sites. This doesn't happen as often on blogs."

Most follow Chinese-language blogs: Of those who follow blogs: 57% usually ask Chinese staff to help follow Chinese-language blogs; 32% read Chinese language blogs themselves; 11% don't follow Chinese-language blogs but follow English or other non-Chinese blogs.

I did not ask people to select from some choices of Chinese blogs as I did with English because based on my conversations with journalists while drafting the survey I got the impression that foreign correspondents' reading of Chinese blogs is more diffuse and less consistent. However I did ask people to list the Chinese blogs that they tend to read. Some said "prefer not to divulge" or "ask my assistant." Others mentioned the following (in no particular order) as being useful to their work: Academic criticism, Chen Danqing, Li Yinhe, Law Blog, Wang Yi, Cowblog, Tao Sixuan, Ministry of Finance blogs,  Wang Xiaofeng, Family of Chen Guangchen, Keso's tech blog, Lian Yue, Bingfeng Cafe,  Zhang Rui, ShiFeiKe,  Luo Yonghao, Michael Anti, Zeng Jinyan, Nina Wu, Massage Milk, Pro State in Flames, and Hong Huang.    

CREDIBILITY QUESTIONS: Most believe it is impossible to answer question of whether blogs are more or less "reliable" compared to other media.  Much is made by media pundits and scholars about the question of whether blogs are "credible" or "reliable" in comparison with mainstream media.  So I asked two questions in this vein. The answers indicated that the question is essentially irrelevant when it comes to the reasons why journalists find blogs useful.

The first question concerned Chinese blogs: "Compared to official PRC media, do you find the information on Chinese-language blogs to be: always more reliable; often more reliable but depends from case to case; equally reliable; often less reliable but depends from case to case; always less reliable; completely depends, impossible to generalize; don't know. Of the 49 who responded to this question 21 (43%) chose "completely depends, impossible to generalize." Equal numbers of people (11 or 22%) chose "often more reliable but depends from case to case" and "often less reliable but depends from case to case." Two people each chose "always more reliable" and "equally reliable."

When I invited people to elaborate, one respondent said the question misses the point. He wrote: "One doesn't go to blogs for information. One goes to blogs for opinion, insight and color. The information in Chinese blogs, like the information purveyed in much state media, needs to be double-checked for accuracy. The utility of blogs lies in their indictation of popular interest in a subject or interested or informed opinion on a matter."  Another person agreed: ""Reliable" may not be the word best used to describe the differences. Both sources are different and so the information is of different value. Blogs as well as official media can also be unreliable and not trustworthy sources. It really depends." A third person wrote at length: 

Official PRC media are by definition not reliable as theyr are a state source, but good to use as such.  Blogs quality depend on a personal factor, and very often authors are not bound by any  professional journalistic technique or ethics. They are motivated by personal, ego, political or other  motivations, and reflect this goal. Therefore they are to be used as an inspiration for stories or good quote material, not as a reliable news source. Of course, they can be first on news stories when these news are suppressed by official media, but generally cannot be considered as a bona fide news source themselves.

I asked a second question about non-Chinese language blogs: "Compared to China coverage by foreign news organizations, English and other non-Chinese language blogs focused on China are: always more reliable; often more reliable but depends from case to case; equally reliable; often less reliable but depends from case to case; always less reliable; completely depends, impossible to generalize; don't know." Of the 50 who responded to this question 19 (38%) chose "completely depends, impossible to generalize;" 11 chose "often more reliable but depends from case to case; 9 chose "often less reliable but depends from case to case;" 4 chose "equally reliable," 3 chose "always more reliable," and 1 chose "always less reliable." The message here is once again all over the map, but with strong leanings towards "completely depends." And again, the view is that "reliability" is the wrong way to look at blogs. As one respondent wrote:

Blogs are great for watching topical issues emerge and get dissected, and for aggregating news from a variety of other sources, but they don't necessarily verify the information they serve up. But blogs shouldn't be expected to do this -- it is up to the end-user of the information to decide what to do with it, including verifying sources and facts.

Another wrote:

the blogs often aren't reporting spot news, so it's hard to speak of reliability. it's more opinion and commentary, and if you follow a blog over time you get to know who generally knows what they're talking about. where it sometimes is 'spot news' a good example would be danwei linking to new regulations on chinese media, for which i would be thankful for the tip-off, but then hope to look for the original of the regs myself. i wouldn't cite a blog on spot news, for example. they're often more just to stay plugged in in a general way. eg. say i spend a week with my head in nothing but the china-africa forum, a few clicks on danwei and eswn and a couple of others give me a quick idea of what's on people's minds in other areas.

...and another, in the same vein:

Reliability isn't what draws me to some blogs. For instance, I look at Roland Soong to see what's cooking in all sorts of spheres that I would never see otherwise. It's a virtual news tip sheet. Some of it is translation, so reliability may be a big question. But Roland does a huge service by bringing it to our attention.

This is very much the way I have tended to describe the relationship between blogs and journalists: journalists approach blogs as raw sources. Thus asking whether blogs are reliable is just as useless as asking whether people are reliable. Each tipoff or story idea coming from any human source must be judged in a very specific context: Does that person have any real expertise in the subject at hand? Is his/her knowledge first, second, third or fourth hand? Does he/she bear a grudge or conflict of interest? What is his/her agenda in telling you the information? Etc.   

I'll be writing up these results, with some more follow-up and analysis, in a more formal academic paper which may get published sometime later next year - at the earliest - given the speed of academic publishing. Meanwhile I thought it would be useful to post some of this relatively raw data because I know that many of the journalists who took the survey are curious about the results.

Please feel free to post your reactions and any questions in the comments section by clicking the "comments" link below.

Global Voices Delhi Summit: People of the Year

As the Global Voices team held our second annual summit in Delhi this weekend, TIME magazine dedicated its "person of the year" to YOU: people around the world who are taking media creation into their own hands. 

(Photo by Jace. Click to enlarge.)

The TIME article praises the individual "for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game," etc. The article concludes: "This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person."

That, in a nutshell, is exactly what Global Voices is all about.

The problem is that the "new kind of international understanding" that TIME describes, a world of true "citizen to citizen" communication, remains a still-distant dream.  The reality is that Web2.0 - and the potential for empowerment that it represents - remains largely inaccessible to large numbers of people on the planet, and is not being accessed by many more, for many reasons.

(Photo by Georgia. Click to enlarge.)

How do we help more people become creators of their own media? What kind of outreach can Web 2.0-savvy citizens provide to the still-uninitiated? How do we bridge massive and endless barriers of language and culture? Are the technical tools accessible enough to the next billion Internet users, or are we in need of new solutions better suited to the developing world? And how about people who are being prevented from speaking - or being heard - by governments, corporations, and other powerful entities?  These were exactly the questions we tackled during our public meeting on Saturday.

My key takeaways from the day's discussion:

- Global Voices right now is in English (translating what content it can from blogs in Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Spanish, Portugese, French, and Russian) but it needs to be in many other languages. Right now there is a volunteer-driven effort to translate GV into Chinese. Many people in our community feel strongly that much more translation needs to happen, and it appears that at least for some of the languages there is a great deal of enthusiasm. The challenge now is for people to take the lead in building new translation teams to make this happen.

- Outreach can't be one-size-fits-all and must fit local needs. we had much to learn from some of the Indian attendees who described a number of very successful citizen media outreach projects in India. One in particular was Cybermohalla, in which slum dwellers reported on the demolition of their own community in order to make way for a public works project. There was some discussion about who ought to be doing outreach to whom - and much agreement that we are not talking about putting Western bloggers on planes to teach people in the Third World how to blog. Rather, in most cases it's about bloggers and media activists in the developing world reaching out to their less privileged countrymen.  People agreed that outreach techniques and tactics will vary widely from country to country and community to community - and the more local the teachers, the more likely they will understand the needs of the people being taught. There was also a great deal of discussion about children as the focus of technology and citizen media outreach - the idea being that it is young people who will take most naturally to the idea of using technology for self-expression. (There was of course much interest in the One Laptop prototype that SJ Klein brought to the meeting.)

- Teaching people how to blog or create media isn't enough, as Salam Adil explained in the fourth technology session. People need to be able to speak and be heard without fear of reprisal if their thoughts aren't in line with their government's. They need tools to get around censorship - both in terms of expressing themselves and in accessing the works of others. There is also the issue that many people in many countries aren't aware of what their governments are actually doing to limit speech or access to information on the Internet, and thus even in many democracies, there isn't enough public pressure on governments to be as open as possible. Global Voices is about to launch an advocacy arm, thanks to some funding from the Dutch development organization, Hivos, which will enable members of our community to work directly on these issues.

Be sure to read Nathan Hamm's summary of our introductory Session 1, Ethan Zuckerman's account of Session 3 on translation, and Sameer Padania's summary of Session 4 on tools and technology. A summary of Session 2, focusing on outreach, should be coming soon. There is also a conference blog put together by Ange, one of our community members participating remotely from Dubai.

Sunday's meeting was a closed-door session for Global Voices editors and authors only. We rolled up our sleeves and discussed how Global Voices authors and editors can do an even better job at amplifying citizen voices from around the world. We are working on a major re-design of the site to make it more user-friendly (and less overwhelming); we are also developing a new public aggregator of all the blogs that our editors and authors watch in order to compile their daily links and features. As we realized last year, GV is not just a media site but a conversation community. Many of our authors and editors discussed strategies for community building: specifically, how to support communities in their own countries, regions, and language groupings comprised of people who want to communicate with a broader global community of conversation.

People are taking initiative to carry out ideas that we could never have imagined just a year ago.  We've always known that the individuals who work on GV are talented, passionate, creative, and articulate, but spending two days with this diverse collection of characters was humbling.  As co-founders, Ethan and I were excited to see that authors and editors have taken real ownership for the project, enabling the two of us to step aside when it comes to leading Global Voices and representing it to the public. We are very happily receding into backstage supporting roles: fundraising and doing the legal groundwork to transform Global Voices from a project under Harvard's Berkman Center to an independent non-profit organization.

This weekend's meeting also drove home the importance of face-to-face meetings even for a virtual organization like Global Voices. The Web has helped us find one another and has enabled us to work together in ways that would otherwise be completely impossible. But for the people who are devoting many hours every week to curating the global conversation on Global Voices, there is nothing like sitting down over curry and beers for building trust, camaraderie, commitment, and a feeling of shared ownership of the project.

People who are not very familiar with what we do often make snyde remarks about how strange it is that bloggers find it necessary to meet in physical space - as if the need for face-to-face meeting somehow proves the limitations or inadequacies of what we do. These remarks completely miss the point, of course. Global Voices may be a virtual organization with no physical headquarters (and no plans to create one), but what we do is ultimately about building understanding - and ideally dialogue - between real flesh-and-blood human beings and physical human communities.

We are not just generating chatter amongst avatars and usernames and online personas. We are not creating an alternative universe or online cyber-utopia into which our members escape from the realities of our daily lives and the problems within and between our countries. We are using the Internet's virtual space - and the creation of online citizens' media - as a means to a very physical end. The Web connects the physical human beings at the ends of it who are using it as a channel to express themselves and reach out to one another.  When we as individuals can all create our own media, not only do we find each other and organize more easily around common causes. By taking control of our own narratives, our own stories, we gain greater control over how others perceive and define us. This in turn will make it more difficult (we believe) for outsiders to impose unwelcome, unsuitable, unjust or violent policies upon us - all of which are made much easier when mass media is used to stereotype, pigeonhole, and dehumanize us. 

We use the Web not to escape our humanity, but to assert it.

Global Voices Online launches new custom search

My colleagues Ethan Zuckerman and Boris Anthony have put together a new "Global Voices Web" search using the new Google Co-op platform which enables you to create your own search engine.   Check it out.  You can find it in the yellow search bar near the top of the page right under the infamous "tag cloud" (which will likely change in the upcoming redesign).

In addition to being able to search all of the Global Voices site itself or all of Google, now you can also search "the Global Voices Web."  Right now, that includes about 4,800 blogs that our Regional Editors follow each day, and from which they select their "Daily Links".  In other words, when you use this search function, you are searching all the blogs that we regularly link to or which our editors have found worth following.

GV doesn't cover North America and Western Europe because we believe the views of people from those parts of the world get disproportionately more attention on the world wide web and in the global media than people from all other regions. GV is meant to be a small effort towards counter-balancing that imbalance. Thus the search includes few blogs from N.America or W.Europe except for blogs by members of various diasporas currently living in the West. The point is to have a search that covers the same footprint of online citizen media that GV covers.

This new "Global Voices Web" search was constructed by Ethan and Boris using Google's Co-op search, with a bit of help from some people at Google who responded to their requests for changes.  When Ethan and Boris started putting it together, Ethan blogged about the lack of results on some terms in a post titled "What Google Coop Search Doesn't Do Well." The folks at Google eventually read his post and fixed the problem. As Google engineer Vrishali Wagle wrote on the Google Custom Search blog: 

After a week of some serious engineering, we believe we've made searching on Ethan's Custom Search Engine -- and all CSEs, for that matter -- much, much better. In particular, Ethan's search for Ghana, which originally returned only three results, now retrieves a much healthier number. All around, you should see much better performance in the quality of the search results.

The reason is fairly complex. Custom search engines are based on approximation algorithms that aim to search over the entire contents of the sites you specify. As with all approximations, there is always room for improvement. We're constantly working on our algorithms, and your search engines will continue to get better. If you see any anomalies or problems, please let us know. We want to hear from you about what is and is not working.

Ethan is now much happier:

Google Coop Search is now a reasonable solution to my search problems, removing a particularly thorny problem from my “to do” list.

But it’s also good news for Google as a whole, and anyone using their tools. It’s a really good sign when engineers are watching reactions to their products closely, monitoring the blogosphere, and proactively solving problems that users are identifying. What impresses me even more is that I didn’t file a bug report about my experiences with custom search, or attempt to twist the arm of anyone I know who works at Google - this was the team’s response to my observations about the tool.

Thanks for solving my problem, folks. I’m impressed, not just by the re-tuned approximation algorithms, but by the way you guys are doing business.

It's pretty exciting to be working on a project that has enough influence that we can impact Google's products - to the benefit of everybody using them, I hope.

Note that our search is still very very "beta." Because it was constructed by importing the feeds from editors' aggregators, we had to weed out a bunch of non-blog and off-topic feeds (news sites, U.S. tech blogs, and things like that). If you try it out please let us know if there are any non-blog or off-topic sites we've failed to weed out or if there appear to be glaring omissions. I'm sure it is far from perfect at this stage which is why we need as many people as possible to test it out and let us know what's wrong.

As Ethan explains in his blog post about this new search function: "a future version will include all the sites we link to on GV, which should expand the collection quite a bit. And an even further off version will integrate with the giant aggregator we’ll be offering on the site next year, which will let you look at new posts from all the countries we cover, as well as offering suggestions for feeds we should be watching - the blogs covered by that aggregator will be the same blogs tracked by the search engine."

Please help us make it better. There is a lot to tweak, no doubt. In playing with it just now, one thing I want to improve is to return the results in some kind of chronological order so that the most recent blog posts show up at the top. Right now you have to resort to hacks like putting in "2006" along with the rest of your search terms if you're not interested in posts from 2005 and 2004.