Joi Ito's Web

Rising Voices is one of the coolest new projects at Global Voices.

Rising Voices, an outreach initiative of Global Voices, aims to help bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the global conversation by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities.

[...]

Launched in May 2007 thanks to the support of a Knight News Challenge Award, Rising Voices seeks to empower under-represented communities to make their voices heard online by 1.) providing financial support to outreach projects, 2.) developing a series of participatory media tutorials, and 3.) cultivating a network of passionate citizen media activists to help encourage and support the replication of outreach trainings.

This is a dotSUB video recapping some of the projects from last year. Please take a look and register and help finish translating it to to your native language if the translation is incomplete.

Congratulations to the whole team.

David Sasaki

Rezwan
Photo by Neha Viswanathan - Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic License

We just wrapped up the Global Voices Summit in Budapest. I unfortunately missed the first public half of the Summit, but participated in the meeting afterwords for the authors, editors and the staff. It was amazing to see so many countries and regions discussing issues face to face in combinations that only the UN would come close to. It was a really great meeting everyone and the last session was tear-jerking, listening to everyone's stories.

Since the first Global Voices meeting in 2004, I've been peripherally involved, most recently as a board member. I'd seen the site growing and growing, but the scale, quality and commitment of the community involved in running this multi-national, multi-lingual blogging effort really hit me after attending this conference and I'm even prouder than ever to be able to part of this movement.

Global Voices is a super-important part in fixing what I call the "caring problem". There is a systemic bias against reporting international news in most developed nations. When pressed, many editors will say that people just don't want to read articles about other parts of the world. This is because most people don't care. They don't care because they don't hear the voices or know people in other countries. I think that by providing voices to all over the world, we have the ability to connect people and get people to care more.

I also believe that voice is probably more important than votes or guns. I believe that combating extremism is most effectively done by winning the argument in public, not by censorship, elections or destruction. I believe that providing everyone with a voice to participate in the global dialog is key. The ability to communication and connect without permission or fear of retribution is a pillar of open society in the 21st Century. Global Voices is the best example of this that I know of.

UPDATE: My photos and everyone's photos of the meeting are on Flickr.

This cartoon was featured on the gapingvoid cartoon widget today. What a blast from the past - a legacy from when my blog was actually widely read. ;-)

Thanks Hugh!

Photoshopped version of my photo by unknown artist - I do not own the copyright to this derivative work

The original image

It was awhile ago, but someone sent me a photoshopped version of my photo of George Lucas and JJ Abrams. I can't seem to find the email. I'd like to contact the artist to ask for permission to use it and ask them to license it under a CC license. I'd also like to provide attribution. If you sent me the photo and are reading this, can you leave a comment or send me an email? If you know who did this, let me know too.

Thanks!

Ms. Suspicious has nothing to hide. Well, she has a little to
hide, but her love of Online Billing isn't one of them. She and the other
Online Liberation Movement(sm) members have all made online billing work for
them, whether they need simplicity, convenience, flexibility, or just peace
of mind.

In a recent marketing ad, AT&T makes a really bad joke poking fun at people upset about their warrantless wiretapping. Bad taste. I think I'm going to cancel my AT&T phone number.

Via Reading (for Dummies).

Dopplr recently released public profiles. Here's mine. There lots of nifty info on the page with code to link to or embed the various thingies.

Done in typical groovy Dopplr style. Good job guys.

Disclosure: I'm a Dopplr investor.

Yvette Alberdingkthijm

WITNESS Appoints New Executive Director

June 25, 2008

PETER GABRIEL'S HUMAN RIGHTS NGO APPOINTS
DIGITAL MEDIA CORPORATE EXECUTIVE AS DIRECTOR

New York, NY (June 25, 2008) - Today, the Board of Directors of WITNESS the international human rights organization co-founded by musician and activist Peter Gabriel, announced the appointment of Yvette J. Alberdingk Thijm as Executive Director.

Alberdingk Thijm has nearly two decades of experience in media and new technology. Most recently, she served as Executive Vice President of Content Strategy & Acquisition at Joost, the global online video platform formed by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype and Kazaa. Prior to joining Joost, Alberdingk Thijm was Executive Vice President of Business Affairs for MTV Networks International (MTVNI), where she oversaw business affairs for all of its branded businesses and channels worldwide (outside the U.S.A.), including digital media initiatives, audiovisual co-productions, new business development, strategic partnerships and joint ventures.

Yvette is one of the coolest people I've met recently. I met her as a fellow board member on the WITNESS board and have been learning about the international broadcast scene from her.

Gillian Caldwell

After Gillian Caldwell, the super-ED who got me involved in WITNESS moved on to run 1Sky, WITNESS has been looking for an ED to fill her shoes. (Very hard shoes to fill).

Jenni Wolfson

During that time, the staff, lead by Jenni Wolfson has done an amazing job keeping everything running and improving and we're eternally grateful and impressed.

I think that recruiting Yvette from the board was a very clever move on the part of the committee in charge of these things and I'm so excited that Yvette was willing to take the role. (Board members becoming staff seems to be in fashion these days. *cough*)

Anyway, yay us!

A Flowgram about it...

My Seesmic video about it. I like Flowgrams better when I haven't had any sleep and look like crap, I just realized. ;-)

UPDATE: Here's the Seesmic plugin for MT.

Went to Aronia De Takazawa with Joshua, Roger and Oki last night. Here's a flowgram about it.

Here's my first Flowgram. It's in closed beta right now and I'm an adviser and an investor. It's lets you put audio narration over a bunch of links or photos. It's sort of like a podcast with bookmarks.

One thing I learned when using it was how crappy my microphones are. This is actually a good way to get people to upgrade their mics since most people don't really get to hear how awful they sound when they're talking on Skype. So apologizes about the sound quality on my first Flowgram. I'll work on getting a better mic.

This is Abhay, the founder of Flowgram. I met him through Reid. I took this with my new Canon which has auto-focus. The good thing about auto-focus is that it's easy. The bad thing is that it often focuses on the tip of the nose instead of the eyes, where I want my focus. I guess I need to learn to use my camera as well. :-P

UPDATE: Oh, and the pages are "live". So you can hit "pause" on the Flowgram and click a YouTube video in a page to watch the video, and then "play" again on the Flowgram after watching the video to go back to my awesome narrative.