Mohammed Sameer's Online Aggregator

As 2008 rolled in, friends around the world were watching the events in Kenya with increasing panic as a disputed election turned into increasingly violent protests, eventually killing over a thousand and displacing hundreds of thousands.

This year, we’re watching elections in Ghana unfold, but there’s surprisingly little panic desite an absurdly close election. In the first round of presidential elections, Nana Akufo-Addo of the ruling NPP held a narrow lead over John Atta Mills of the opposition NDC. (It’s hard for me to call NDC the “opposition”, since I remember almost twenty years of NDC political dominance resulting from a coup.) Neither party gained a majority, so there was a runoff election on the 28th. That election proved even closer, and after 229 of 230 had their votes tallied, the margin was 50.13 - 49.87% in favor of Mills and the NDC.

The constituency that wasn’t counted is Tain, in the Brong-Ahafo region, a largely rural area which had a misvote during the runoff. Insufficient ballot papers were available - some argue that papers were stolen - and the electoral commission decided to hold a revote tomorrow. Because the margin is so small, it’s possible that Tain could swing the election, though it’s unlikely - Tain went for Mills in the first round, and unless there’s a major swing in political will, it looks like Mills and the NDC will win the election and there will be another transfer of power (the legendary “double alternation” of a mature democracy). In the meantime, both parties are relentlessly campaigning in Tain… to the shegrin of Peace Corps volunteer Grant Dobbe who’s twittering from the region and notes “i don’t know what’s worse: an endless string of xmas tunes or an endless string of NPP/NDC campaign tunes…”

It would be wrong to characterize Ghana as calm during this period - people tell me that the situation is quite tense. I’ve been getting texts and phonecalls from friends in Accra telling me that the problems are largely “big men saying stupid things” - i.e., politicians on both sides making accusations of voter fraud. (NPP believes there was fraud in the Volta region, the traditional stronghold of the NDC; NDC argues that there was fraud in the Ashanti region, the stronghold of the NPP.) But this isn’t a story about stolen elections or widespread fraud - it’s about a closely contested election that all observers see as free and fair, while admitting that there have been irregularities. The current dispute is more analagous to vote recounts in Florida or Minnesota than electoral fraud in Zimbabwe or Nigeria.

My favorite bit of evidence that Ghana’s continuing to show the continent and the world how to hold a democratic election: protesters from the ruling NPP were chased off from the Electoral Commission with water cannon. Obviously we’d all be happier if folks weren’t marching with machetes, but the government turning water cannons on its own supporters to quell a possibly violent protest strikes me as a positive sign.

Tain votes tomorrow, and we’ll likely see NDC take power. My guess is that we’ll see court challenges and ongoing dispute, but that the situation will be resolved peacefully. Or as a friend emailing me this morning put it, “Ghana has won”.

• Long Tail theory contradicted as study reveals 10m digital music tracks unsold - Times Online Set of data on digital music sales appears to point more to the old 80/20 rule than towards Chris Anderson's long tail. Especially surprising is a very large set of titles that never sell in a digital space. (tags: economics internet music culture business books longtail ecommerce theory ideas data)
• Here Comes 2008%u2019s Most Influential Writing About Media John Bracken John Bracken's picks for influential writing about the media in 2008. Some great stuff in here, lots of links worth following. (tags: media internet journalism digital ideas blogging)

I love airline route maps. I’ve fallen asleep staring at the tangle of possible journeys so often that I sometimes confuse the capilaries I see with my eyes closed with the red paths of Northwest flights hubbed out of Detroit and Minneapolis. I love the questions the maps raise: why is there a direct flight on Air Canada from Halifax to Fort McMurray in Northern Alberta? (Lots of Nova workers in the oil sands, I suspect, but I never would have asked the question without the map.) Why is Chengdu such an important Chinese air hub? Why does MIAT (Mongolia’s airline, affectionately known as “maybe I’ll arrive tomorrow” by regular customers) fly to Berlin, and no other western European cities? Does a direct Air Madagascar flight to Milan imply a strong Italian-Malagasy connection, or was Malpensa just one of the few airports where they could buy a landing slot?

These maps are deceptive in a way. They let you know what’s possible, but not what actually happens. The Northwest map will show you flights from Detroit to both Albany and Bozeman. While it’s good to know that it’s possible to get between those cities by flying Northwest, it doesn’t tell you how easy or difficult it might be to make that trip, how often those flights run, or how many people choose to make that trip. That’s okay - the job of maps is to tell a traveler where she can go, not where other travelers choose to go. But trying to extrapolate too much from a map of infrastructure may be a mistake - is the Ulaanbataar/Berlin link the sign of close governmental and trade ties between Mongolia and Berlin? Or an accident of history, airport capacity or other factors?

This lovely video gives a different picture from the route maps. It’s a simulation of global air traffic from the fine folks at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. The map uses data from Flightstats.com, and overlays their position on a Miller cylindrical projection. Compared to some of the other flight data porn the folks at ZHAW have churned out - like their amazing Radar mashup of flights over Zurich, using live transponder data from aircraft - this was a pretty simple hack.

I’ve watched the video half a dozen times today, getting different insights each time. Popular routes become apparent - the arc of travel from the Northeastern US to London, Paris and Amsterdam runs west to east as night falls, and reverses as morning breaks. The popularity of that ocean crossing vastly outpaces traffic across the Pacific, connecting Tokyo, Manila and Beijing to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. There’s more traffic from Brazil to western Europe than I would have guessed, and virtually no traffic across the southern Atlantic or Pacific. Domestic traffic in the US, India and China, and intra-EU travel is vastly more common than trans-oceanic travel. As the US is covered with yellow dots representing airplanes, international travel looks like a rounding error in comparison to domestic flights.

It’s not a map you’d want to use in planning your vacation, perhaps, but it would be a useful one to turn to if you were tracking the spread of an epidemic, for instance. If you’re studying SARS, it’s useful to know that you can, theoretically, get from Guangdong to Johannesburg - it’s lots more useful to know that most of those travellers are heading to Hong Kong, Toronto and New York City.

It’s a map of flow, not of infrastructure. It reveals infrastructure - the location of airports, the preferred air routes followed - because they appear as bright spots, places where lots of flow originates. A map of infrastructure - a map of potentials - shows every airport as co-equal; a map of flow shows you which airports are heavily used, which are pivotal nodes in a network. If you’re an executive at a fast food company, an infrastructure map of highways is moderately helpful - it’s obviously wise to place your stores in places where drivers could theoretically reach them, rather than in the middle of a desert. (No one told Pacific Bell this, obviously, before they erected the legendary Mojave Phone Booth.) But a map of flow is what you really need, showing where drivers are likely to go, and where they’re likely to come purchase your grease-laden wares.

It’s hard to map flow. Infrastructure tends to stay put. But people, cars, and shipping containers move all the time. To build accurate maps, you can’t simply plot the location of an airport once - you’ve got to map each plane that flies during some period of time. Things that don’t stay put aren’t always happy about being mapped. In simplest terms, maps of flow are a form of surveillance. Mapping your personal “flow” - in the way that the BBC is tracking a shipping container around the world - would likely be a gross violation of your privacy, as it would probably reveal more about you than you’re strictly comfortable sharing.

My friends Sandy Pentland and Nathan Eagle have been experimenting with something Pentland is calling “reality mining“, using surveillance of individuals via their mobile phones to extrapolate information about social networks, individual health and events in the news. Eagle tells me that the system was so effective, it could determine which of the anonymous participants were dating, and was able to correlate behavior to events like the Red Sox World Series victory, during which cellphone users clustered in bars and crossed the river to celebrate near Fenway. Unsurprisingly, a lot of sponsors are interested in this research, including mobile phone companies and advertisers - it’s not unrealistic to believe that mobile phone companies might, at some point, offer you free basic phone service in exchange for your behavioral data (collected by tracking your phone) and the opportunity to target ads to you based on your location. (See Blyk, a free mobile phone service in the UK, targetted to young people and ad sponsored…)

The maps Pentland and others are making tend to make us the most nervous when we place ourselves in them as individuals. We wonder what a map of our actions will tell others. We’re generally more comfortable with them in aggregate. Leaving the Berkman Center, I look at Google Maps to see whether the traffic heading west on Route 2 or I-90 is lighter. This is a useful thing and I’m very glad that someone is monitoring road conditions and letting me make intelligent decisions about which way to drive. On some level, I realize that my beat-up black truck is part of the overall picture represented as a green, yellow or red line. But that map generally doesn’t make me uneasy in the way that a map that allowed you to click on it and see “1999 Toyota Tacoma, 27 mph, heading west on Massachusetts Ave, MA license plate 345 GDF”. The former reads to me as mapping of flow, the latter as surveillance, but it’s not entirely clear to me where the line should be drawn between the two ideas.

The map above is called “In Transit” and is part of the Cabspotting program run by the Exploratorium, using data from Yellow Cab and visualisations by the folks at Stamen Design. All yellow cabs in San Francisco are equipped with GPS and report their location to dispatchers, automatically, once a minute - they’re being surveilled so that dispatchers can respond to requests for cabs or deploy cabs to another part of town. In this visualization, those minute-by-minute accretion of data points are blurred into lines, showing the paths that cabs take. And these paths can reveal some interesting things about how people flow through the city of San Francisco.

Those who know San Francisco will immediately pick out the major highways - 101, 280 and 80 - and the paths across the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate. It’s not hard to intuit where downtown is, to get a sense for the comparative popularity of various routes in and out of the city. The blank spots, on the other hand, are a little confusing. The area near #5 on the map is the Presidio, a former military base that’s now a park… which helps explain why there’s not much cab traffic through it. The areas just south of #4 and #7 aren’t parks - they’re Potrero Hill and Dogpatch, neighborhoods that are better known for industry and low-income housing than for tourist attractions or dot.com startups. To their southeast is a large blank patch on the map: Bayview and Hunter’s Point, a predominantly African-American neighborhood that surrounds a former naval shipyard. In other words, some areas are blank because there’s no good way to drive a taxi there. In other cases, they’re the neighborhoods where few people call for a taxi… or where the taxi drivers aren’t willing to go. The street map helps you figure out how to get from 3rd Street and Evans Avenue to Union Square, while the flow map makes it clear that you probably shouldn’t count on hailing a taxi to make the trip.

Maps of infrastructure visualize what it’s possible for people to do. Maps of flow show what they actually do. The two may diverge sharply.

A few years ago, if you wanted to send an email to a friend across the street in Accra, there’s a good chance the message would travel through the US or the UK on the way. Ghana had several competing internet service providers, and each provider bought internet connectivity from a different vendor. The vendors’ networks connected, just not in Ghana. So sending email across town meant sending a message on one ISP, to the US, transferring over to the other ISP, and back to Ghana, a journey that involved two satellite hops to cross the Atlantic. This is called “trombone routing”, and it’s generally something to be avoided.

If you mapped the network traffic of Ghanaian internet users - the flow - it sure looked like they were sending a lot of bits to and from the US. This might have been a result of trombone routing of emails between Ghanaians. Or it might have been because many websites are hosted in the US, and Ghanaian users wanted to read cnn.com, espn.com, etc. Knowing which it was mattered - if lots of traffic was local, it would make sense to construct an Internet Exchange Point (IXP), a crossing point for local ISPs to exchange traffic. If it was mostly requests to US webservers, the IXP wouldn’t save much money and probably shouldn’t be built. An infrastructure map would be no help - almost all traffic needed to go through the US, even if the intent was to communicate locally. To build a map of flow, Ghanaian ISPs would need to monitor their traffic, distinguish between domestic and foreign requests, share this information with fellow ISPs and make a decision regarding the utility of an IXP.

Ghanaian ISPs made the decision to build the Ghana Internet Exchange not based on understanding their own flow, but by looking at the behavior of other African exchange points. When ISPs in Johannesburg started exchanging traffic directly, they discovered that roughly 50% of their traffic was local to South Africa. The administrators who set up an exchange point in Nairobi saw roughly 25-30% local traffic. The disparity? There’s a lot more web servers hosted in South Africa than in Kenya, and hence more local traffic. To make the decision to build an IXP on a rational basis, you need to know not just the flow of internet traffic, but the flow the traffic would take if it were routed via an IXP. You need to know not just what users are doing, but what their intention is. This is a tough enough mapping challenge that you end up guessing, not analyzing.

The distinction between maps of infrastructure and maps of flow matters to me because I think it can help explain certain misconceptions and misunderstandings about our connected world. My contention - with very little to support it, frankly - is that we tend to assume more connections than actually exist. We see a map of infrastructure that shows it’s possible to fly from Antananarivo to Albania and assume, on an unconcious level, that the connection is routine, frequent, common. We look at maps of the internet - a near-worldwide tangle of undersea cables - and assume that data flows everywhere, connecting every one of us.

A map of flow would help us understand a more complicated reality. You can fly from Antananarivo to Albania, but you might be the only person this year to make the trip. Traffic flows between Ghana and the US via the Internet. We can see a cable - SAT-3 - that connects West Africa to the global internet through Europe and India. A map of flow could tell us whether that connection is symmetric, whether Americans are looking for information from Ghanaweb as often as Ghanaians are looking at ESPN or CNN. If we could see flow, we might detect the dark spots, the places reached by infrastructure but disconnected - through language, economics, or force of habit - from global flows.

My friend and colleague Hal Roberts is taking on one of the hardest research questions in the space of internet and society - the surveillance of the internet. If surveillance is done in certain ways, it should be invisible to users - a government might be able to read all email by tapping into internet service providers, and this behavior could be entirely invisible. (We’d know about it only through a whistleblower - see Mark Klein and the information he shared about US government wiretaps at AT&T.)

In absence of the sort of information we might obtain from whistleblowers, studying surveillance means studying what it’s possible for someone to watch, not what watching actually takes place. Colleagues of ours have looked closely at internet architectures to determine what’s possible in terms of surveilling the internet. Where are the points where a government or corporation could monitor large amounts of data? How much data can we monitor using current technology? Is it technically feasible to monitor every packet of data coming into a country like China?

For Hal’s talk at Berkman yesterday, the focus was on less speculative surveillance, and more on a more familiar entity: Google. Hal points out that Google owns two advertising systems - Adwords and DoubleClick - which each account for roughly 35% of the online ad market. In visiting 70% of the websites with ads on them - possibly as much as 50% of all web traffic - the vast majority of users are in situations where Google is able to watch their behavior. The question behind Hal’s talk: “Should you care about this?”

When we consider surveillance, Hal tells us we’re usually thinking about Orwellian Big Brother scenarios, shadowy entities like the NSA, the boss reading our work email, or our insurance companies watching how we drive or whether we’re clandestine smokers. These are entites that have power over you, which can control aspects of your life, ranging from your physical liberty to your employment or finances. Google can’t shoot you, fire you or take away your health insurance - why should we care that they’re watching us?

Hal offers two straightforward reasons, and one much more subtle, complicated one:

- Google could lose our data. Credit card companies, government bureaus and other organizations that should know better have lost large amounts of personal data - what if Google’s data protection policies aren’t up to snuff, or someone simply makes a mistake and releases data that should have been kept under lock and key?

- Governments could access the data Google is storing via subpoenas, national security letters or other mechanisms. Hal points out that Viacom was able to access data from Google regarding YouTube videos -

But Hal’s interests focus on a more complex way of considering Google, surveillance and watching. He points out that, in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother’s Ministry of Love watched you while you watched it, through screens located in every home and office. This, Hal suggests, is an especially sinister vision of a network public sphere, a space where you and your neighbors are all watching each other. This form of surveillance helps explain how slavery persisted in the US - neighbors watched each other to make sure that no one was assisting escaped slaves and receiving rewards for returning stolen “property”.

An even more sophisticated model is the panopticon, as concieved by Jeremy Bentham and memorably analyzed by Michel Fouault. Bentham proposed building a prison where prisoners could be watched at all times by guards. Foucault observed that when you place individuals in a position where they can constantly be watched, people will enforce their own behavior, acting as if they’re under observation at all times. This means that surveillance can exert a force over society without direct violence or physical impact. Hal wonders what surveillance via CCTV is doing to social in Great Britain, where CCTV cameras in public spaces are very common. And he wonders what it means that Google watches what we do online.

Referencing Canadian sociologist David Lyon, Hal talks about social sorting, the ways in which dataspheres change to present different people with different opporunities. If someone managing a datasphere is aware that you have good credit, you might be presented with more opportunities to obtain a credit card or a mortgage. Lyon refers to the profiles that exist in dataspheres as “data doubles” - data dopplegangers which may or may not accurately resemble you, and which govern what opportunities are made available to you. Google, Hal argues, is in an especially powerful position to construct data doubles, and shouldn’t be sharing this data with banks or other entities.

A particular worry with these data doubles is the possibility of the loss of context. For social relationships to flourish, we need context for individual relationships so that one fact doesn’t dominate our understanding of a person. Hal references an email sent by Larry Lessig to an executive at Netscape which Microsoft used to try to demonstrate that he was unfairly biased against the company and could not serve as a special master in the DOJ’s case against Microsoft. It’s not under dispute that Lessig sent the email, but it’s unfair to build a picture of Lessig’s opinions regarding Microsoft from than single fact. Our concerns about privacy and bureacracy center, at least in part, on the idea that facts about our actions end up separated from context by systems that analyze individual points of data, not the picture of a whole, complete, complicated human being.

In Foucault’s understanding of the panopticon, a situation where everyone is surveilling themselves presents an interesting challenge to the prison warden - there’s the ability to control more people, but a loss of control over the mechanism of surveillance. With Google, we face a complicated system where three entities - content publishers, advertisers, search engine users and Google itself, are watching each other, all attempting certain degrees of control and all involved in a complex dance of watching, controlling and reacting. It’s a mistake to conclude that Google is fully in control of the situation - in fact, Google works so well because control has devolved to such a large group of people. These relationships might be surveillance, might be other forms of watching, but bear consideration as we try to understand how these systems work.

Hal talks about the Google Brain - a close integration of Google with everyday activities which enables real-time feedback loops. Searching on Google is fundamentally different from searching in a card catalog, he contends. The rapid iteration and shaping of our search behavior based on feedback from Google turns online search into a difffent activity. At the same time, Google is watching a user search and giving results back based in part on the links the user follows or ignores. Google changes how we search, and we change how Google indexes and presents information through what Hal calls, “the mysterious mechanization of meaning in the google brain.”

We shape how Google organizes information not just by following and not following links Google presents as search results. We also shape information as content providers. The basic logic of Page Rank - the algorithm Sergey Brin and Larry Page pioneered as graduate students at Stanford - is that a search engine should extrapolate from links on webpages to construct a model of user behavior. If lots of users link to the Sumotalk website with links named “sumo”, the search engine should extrapolate that users looking for sumo want to find this page. Google works (in part) by watching how we structure the content of the internet.

But we watch how Google works as well, and sometimes we’re able to take advantage of this behavior in interesting ways. For roughly two years, a search for “miserable failure” would return George W. Bush’s biography. This was the result of a “google bomb”, a coordinated attempt to associate a page with a particular phrase. Knowing that Google looks for phrases linked to a specific page, bloggers made a point of linking “miserable failure” to the destination page. Google was aware of the technique and could have tweaked their results to eliminate the result - instead, they allowed the results to stand for many months, until a change in their “model” meant that other pages ranked higher for a search for the phrase.

(Here’s something I suggested in conversation with Hal afterwards: To the extent that Google’s model is transparent, it gives us some confidence that we understand - at least in general terms - why we’re given one result and not another. But transparent means that it can be gamed, through something like googlebombing. In their ad server, there’s a great incentive to game - anyone who purchases an ad on Google would really like that ad to be the first one a user sees. Google has an incentive to be transparent, as it makes people more likely to use their system; at the same time, a truly transparent system is so easily gamed, it’s not useful. Google has a tough balancing act to play here…)

There’s another complex feedback loop involved with Google’s ad engine. Ads are placed via multiple criteria. Advertisers participate in a community auction for terms - if you’re willing to pay $2 for a click on your ad for the term “sumo”, your ad will get priority over mine. But better ads - as determined by what users click on - rise to the top. Google watches user behavior and re-ranks ads based on their success or failure, so money alone isn’t enough to dominate the ad sweepstakes, a simple feedback system. Hal points out that there’s a third criteria - compliance with Google’s guidelines. These guidelines are so strict, requiring advertisers to be short, simple and, more or less, honest, that Hal contends they’re changing the way advertising works. A perfume ad would generally try to associate perfume with beauty or sex. That doesn’t work on Google - perfume ads focus on facts, offering perfumes at 60% discount from retail, for instance. The marketing function moves from the ad to the content. He’s particularly fascinated that Google tries hard to convince people to follow these guidelines voluntarily, arguing that ad results will be better if the users play by the rules.

Hal’s analysis, as presented yesterday, focuses on watching and control. He’s fascinated by Google in part because so many parties share control. Even in a system like Ad Words, where Google has very strict control over content standards, advertisers have more control than they do in traditional print advertising. They’re invited to watch Google’s performance via a constant stream of data, which lets them evaluate the performance of their ads and the utility of their spending at a much finer grain of control than with virtually any other form of advertising.

The discussion that followed (interrupted?) the talk focused in no small part on the word “surveillance”. Hal uses the term to explain systems like Google because it allows him access to a set of insights from Foucault and others regarding the alienation individuals feel confronted by systems that watch them, control them and aren’t entirely understandable. I find that the term “surveillance” brings me directly to ideas about direct physical control - the ruling party’s police watching you vote and taking you out for a beating if you vote the wrong way. A term that includes everything from tapping the lines of human rights activists to arrest them for treason through watching whether I click result two or three when searching for “sumo” seems like a badly overloaded term.

Harry Lewis has a helpful response to this complaint - he posits a form of watching that would be surveillance if governments did it. This includes some pretty simple commercial behaviors - grocery stores track what we purchase and offer us coupons and promotions based on our behaviors. But when the FBI gets the clever idea of tracking potential terrorists by looking at the sale of falafel and hummus, we get concerned… shortly after we stop laughing. We might choose to worry about Google watching us because it’s easy to posit situations in which Google would be forced to give that information to the US or other governments. You might respond to this by putting up very high legal walls to prevent this information from leaking, or forbid businesses from keeping this data.

But there’s a cost to the latter strategy - this data is what allows corporations to learn and to provide better information. If I can’t monitor the weblogs on Global Voices, I don’t know what stories are driving people to the website. I’m reluctant to fly blind without this information - which might help me produce a better product - because there’s the possibility I could be subpoenda’d for my records.

The problem with surveillance as an intersection of watching and control in the digital age is that you can argue that Google has control over so many aspects of online life that it’s hard to feel comfortable about situations in which they’re simply watching and responding to feedback. In discussions after the talk, Hal expands his criteria and explains that he sees surveillance as a particular intersection of watching with control, consent and context - I look forward to hearing more about these other two axes.

Hal’s still thinking through his work on the topic - as someone giving a lot of talks about a set of issues I haven’t entirely worked through my thinking on, I have great respect for the willingness to put ideas out there and get the (sometimes fierce) feedback offered from Berkfolk. Looking forward to seeing where Hal’s thinking goes on this interesting and important topic.

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• News - The National Newspaper An analysis of Al Shabab in Somalia suggests that they're toning down their rhetoric and tactics to become more acceptable to local populations, and are leaving qat sellers alone. As a result, they appear to hold Kisamayo (tags: africa somalia)

It’s hard to look forward to something as difficult and sad as Medicine Sans Frontieres top ten list of global humanitarian crises. I noted last year that this appears to be the season for top ten lists, and that these lists range from the positive to the extremely disconcerting. MSF’s list is certainly discomfiting, but it’s also a very helpful reminder of what stories we should be paying attention to.

Two of MSF’s top ten focus on Somalia and the ethnically Somali portion of Ethiopia. MSF reports a massive refugee crisis in Somalia, connected to ongoing instability and violence. Unfortunately, MSF is able to provide little help within Somalia - the situation is simply too dangerous for their staff. Three staff were killed by a roadside bomb in Kisamayo, and MSF pulled its international staff out of the country in early 2008 - their local staff continues to work despite a high degree of risk.

Eastern Ethiopia, a region that’s majority Somali-speaking, is facing a severe food crisis. Many of the people who live in this region are pastoralists. An ongoing conflict between the Ethiopian government and rebels have made much of the region inaccessible, which is preventing herds from reaching water and food. Here MSF is constrained from acting not so much by violence, but by an uncooperative Ethiopian government, which has put major hurdles in front of the organization and which forced an MSF project to close in the region.

(While I’ve complained in the past about how little attention is paid to Somalia, the rising threat of piracy has helped attract some attention to that country’s problems. But news from the Somali region of Ethiopia is almost nonexistent - try a search for “Jijiga”, the regional capital, on Google News, or within the New York Times, where most results are from the second World War. A paper from Dr. Abdi Aden Mohamed - whose views are clearly anti-Ethiopian and pro-independence for the region - gives a sense for how isolated this region is: “… 3. There is no electricity any where in the region and most of the people in the region have never seen a Television or Cinemas. 4. No communications like postal services, and most of the people have not seen or used up to now telephones, faxes etc., because there aren’t any in the region. 5. There are no roads in the region except dirty dusty ones and trails created by the nomads and their herds.”

The difficulty MSF is having in reaching Somalia and the Somali region aren’t just coincidental - the disconnection of these areas helps explain why they are in such dire straits. Political and military strategist Dr. Tom Barnett offers the maxim “disconnection defines danger”. Countries that are tightly integrated into global communication, financial, trade and military systems tend not to fail catastrophically in meeting the needs of their people. The idea is not unrelated to Dr. Amartya Sen’s assertion than functioning democracies don’t experience famines - they’re able to access markets and seek help from other nations to avert this sort of catastrophe. (If you’re as disconnected as North Korea, you’ll find your neighbors using food aid as a carrot to try to coax better behavior from you.) This helps explain why Burma, still recovering from Cyclone Nargis, makes MSF’s list. It’s not a surprise that MSF hasn’t been able to send international staff into Burma - the military government has refused to issue visas, leaving the task of providing critically needed medical care to local staff.

I’d always assumed that MSF’s purpose in publishing this list was to fundraise. Oddly, there’s no link to giving information on their site - if you’re in the US and want to support their important work, you can find a link on the Doctors Without Borders site. The idea of disconnection suggests another reason - MSF can’t work in many of the places on their top ten list without better security for their doctors, or international support in obtaining visas. Without more “connectivity” - in Barnett’s sense - these are largely crises they have to watch from afar and help with only indirectly. Top ten lists, whatever else they’re good for, are a way of directing attention, and attention is a necessary precursor to connection.

Some of the most insightful and moving writing about Africa comes from correspondents just as they’re leaving the continent. Africa correspondents are generally absurdly overworked. Your “beat” is a continent that’s larger than the US, China and Western Europe combined. Travel is difficult and time-consuming, and stories tend to emerge in locations that are hard to get to, uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous. It makes sense that correspondents don’t get a chance to give a larger view, a perspective on what they’ve seen and done, until they’re heading home or onto other assignments.

But it’s frustrating, as I often find myself discovering interesting voices just as they’re shifting their attention from Africa to other assignments. I haven’t read much by Stephanie Nolen during the years she’s covered the continent for the Globe and Mail, but her musings on her time based in Johannesburg make me wish I’d paid more attention.

Her recollections are a mix of the sad and hopeful. She offers a poignant take on the multicultural hope for South Africa, and the sometimes violently xenophobic present. She’s shocked and saddened by the violence in Kenya earlier this year, unshocked and saddened by economic and political stagnation in Swaziland. In what may be a surprise to people who don’t follow African news closely, she’s most hopeful about AIDS, noting that a disease that looked impossible to address in the face of severe poverty has become managable for hundreds of thousands of peope through low-cost anti-retroviral drugs and an approach to the disease that focuses on making it routine, survivable and a chronic condition, not a death sentence. Not everyone has access to these drugs, but the success that some communities have had is inspiring and helps turn what sounded impossible into a reality.

As I read her story about a friend whose ARV treatments and doctors appointments are now “so normal, so calm and well-managed, that it took my breath away,” I found myself thinking of other African health miracles that we fail to discuss. Understandably, we tend to spend a lot of time talking about persistent problems like malaria and TB - it’s worth spending a bit of time recognizing progress we’ve made on other fronts.

A friend at the Carter Center sent me a couple of encouraging links regarding guinea worm. This parasitic disease - dracunculiasis, more commonly called guinea worm disease - is something you tend to hear of only if you’ve lived in sub-Saharan Africa… though once you’ve heard of it, the descriptions tend to stay with you. If you drink contaminated water in a country where dracunculiasis is endemic, it’s possible to swallow a small flea - a copepods. Your stomach acid will digest the adult, but the larvae survive, and they burrow through your body and breed. The male dies after mating, while the female burrows further into the body, usually into an arm or a leg. After growing to full size - as big as a meter long - she attempts to leave the body, creating a blister in the skin, which causes a painful burning sensation. The natural impulse is to put this blister into water to cool it - when the guinea worm senses contact of the blister with water, she releases thousands of larvae, contaminating that water supply.

(I find the life cycle of this parasite so weird and surreal, I had to check several sources to ensure that I wasn’t transcribing the plot of the film Alien by accident. This really is how this critter lives. God, evolution or both have an evil sense of humor sometimes.)

Eliminating guinea worm means providing clean water to these communities - something that allows communities to avoid cholera, schistosomiasis, onchocerciasis and numerous other diseases - and ensuring that people with guinea worm don’t contaminate these new water supplies. Because there’s no vaccine - or even effective medicine - to attack guinea worm, this involves gently pulling the adult worms from the patient’s body, a painful process that can take over a month.

Here’s what’s amazing - in 1986, there were 3.5 million cases of the disease a year in 20 countries. Now there are roughly 5,000 a year, concentrated in the Sahel (Ghana, Mali, Sudan, Ethiopia, Niger and Nigeria.) The Carter Center, which has led the charge in eliminating the disease, believes that the disease may be completely eradicated in the next few years. That’s absolutely amazing, given that eradication efforts require working in communities that are extremely rural and hard to reach.

Sometimes, especially on a dark and snowy day, it’s a good idea to reflect on the battles we’re winning, and on the groups of people fighting them.

More on the Carter Center’s efforts on guinea worm and other diseases here. A slideshow about a young girl fighting guinea worm in northern Ghana. A Time photogallery of community efforts to combat guinea worm in Wantugu, Ghana.

There’s lots of business and economics news to be angry about, if you choose to be angry. But one story in particular has my attention, and my ire: the news that Siemens paid over $1.4b in bribes to foreign officials to win government contracts. Bribery was a regular part of business practice at Siemens - employees brought suitcases to a cash desk, where they could be filled with up to a million euros to bribe officials. Until 1999, Siemens claimed tax deductions for these bribes, listing them as business expenditures. At least 4,283 bribes were paid, according to the SEC.

Siemens has pled guilty to accounting offenses, though not bribery in US and German courts, agreeing to pay $1.6 billion in fines. Had Siemens been found guilty of offering bribes, they’d have been blacklisted by the US government, which would have cost them billions of dollars in business. Now, reassured by Siemens executives that they’ve put the “black period” of corruption behind them, they continue to be eligible for lucrative contracts.

Many of the payments made occurred in developing nations like Bangladesh, where Siemens admits “it spent more than 5.3 million dollars to win a 40.8-million-dollar mobile phone infrastructure development project.” Needless to say, Bangladeshi authorities are now trying to figure out who received these bribes. It would be a good thing to see that government crack some heads - Bangladesh ranks as one of the most corrupt nations in terms of perception by the global business community.

My friend Fernando Rodrigues argues that indexes like the Transparency International corruption perception index, cited above, miss the point and punish nations where corruption is openly discussed and combatted - he’s got a good point, but perceptions matter as well as companies choose where and how to do business. In countries widely perceived to be corrupt, businesses are more likely to offer a bribe when doing business.

But it’s way too easy to let companies off the hook by arguing that this is simply how business is done in developing nations. Yes, officials in some nations ask for bribes in considering contracts. But Siemens’ behavior reveals that some companies approach contracting with the assumption that they will pay bribes and well-established systems for doing so. It takes two to tango.

For the past decade or so, international aid from the US has focused heavily on “governance”, which includes effort to root out government corruption. Nations that show progress in eliminating corruption are eligible for money via pools of funds like the Millenium Challenge Account - those who don’t are not. This is a worthwhile policy. Corruption damages poor people in multiple ways. When contractors are overpaid to build infrastructure or government systems, ultimately taxpayers pay for those systems. Government officials who take bribes from international contractors ask for bribes from citizens as well, including those least able to pay. Local firms, which already have a tough time competing against international firms, can face insurmountable odds when the foreign firm has access to a million-dollar cash desk… and when local firms don’t get contracts, they don’t employ local employees.

But governance issues need to focus on combatting corruption from international contractors as well. Transparency International maintains a well-known corruption perceptions index… and a much less well-known index: the Bribe Payers Index. Germany registers as the 5th least corrupt on this index, suggesting that Indian, Mexican, Chinese and Russian corporations may be throwing around even more cash in seeking contracts. (Again, this is a perceptions index, and there are all sorts of methodological reasons to be cautious about reading too much into these numbers.) The BPI is a good move towards ensuring that countries and their corporations take some responsibility for their role in corruption in developing nations. So are transparency efforts, like this one at the World Bank where bribe payers are named, shamed and banned on a public webpage.

Daniel Kauffman, a scholar of governance at the World Bank and the Brookings Institution, argues that we’ll only see the elimination of corruption when penalties and incentives line up. “What truly raises the cost of bribing will matter, in contrast with PR-friendly measures that are useless in raising the cost of corruption.” He suggests that successful prosecutions of a firm like Siemens are worth many times more than all the codes of ethical corporate behavior multinational firms have signed. I’d suggest that making sure stories like this are well discussed, and don’t fall off the news radar, is key as well.

I realize that, at the end of a year when nearly everyone has faced economic hard times, all sorts of worthy organizations are asking for your help. Well, we are too. Global Voices is launching an online giving campaign today. We’re asking folks to lend their support to all our activities - the grants we give to blogging groups in developing nations through Rising Voices, the work we do on free speech advocacy, the translation and reporting we do everyday, on breaking stories like the Mumbai attacks or less serious issues, like Shoegate.

Like public radio in the US, we’re supported by a combination of support from foundations, corporations and individual donors. We know that 2009 is going to be a very hard year for media organizations and foundations, and we’re hoping our readers can lend a hand. Like independent media organizations around the world, we’re supported by a great deal of volunteer labor, but we do have costs associated with server space, our editorial staff and administration of a project that involves more than 200 people around the world - we’re hoping you can help us support and draw attention to work bloggers around the world are doing and keep the world talking.

Global Voices is a Stichting, a non-profit foundation, under Dutch law. For US donors, we’re accepting donations through the Media Development Loan Fund, a US nonprofit that supports an amazing range of independent media projects - your donation will be to MDLF, who will pass the funds on to our Dutch organization. If you don’t care about tax deductions, you can give to us via PayPal or check through our website.

Did I mention that we’ve got cute badges? We’ve got cute badges.

Thanks for listening. I’ll keep folks posted on the campaign here and on Twitter.

• AIR TRAFFIC Utterly wonderful visualization of air traffic above Zurich using real-time transponder data, overlaid on a Google map. Wow (tags: maps web2.0 mashup airplane airport aviation switzerland)

The last two major projects I’ve worked on - Geekcorps and Global Voices - share an interesting trait. Both ended up becoming research projects for academics studying the changing nature of organizations in a digital age. Dr. Leo Hsu of New York University wrote an excellent dissertation, “Hacking Development” about Geekcorps’s novel approach to skill training. My friend and colleague Lokman Tsui is looking closely at Global Voices and community values, like tolerance, listening and hospitality. As a make-believe academic (i.e., someone who hangs out in academic contexts, writes the occasional paper but tries to avoid all that scholarly rigor stuff), I find that the scrutiny brought to bear by these friends often reveals truths that are difficult for me to see, either because I’m too close to the projects or because I lack the frame for the insights.

So it’s not a surprise that Chris Salzburg, a researcher at the University of Tokyo and Japanese Language Editor for Global Voices, was able to tell me a great deal that I didn’t know about a project I’d helped found. While Chris works on bridging between the Japanese-language blogosphere and our English-speaking readers, his recent research has focused on Lingua, our project which makes Global Voices content available in over a dozen languages. Presenting his research at Berkman this week, Chris has good evidence that Lingua is taking over Global Voices, with more volunteers now focused on translating our content than on creating it.

In a recent paper for the Translation Journal, Chris describes Lingua as one of the world’s largest translation communities. He admits that this may not be true - it’s hard to know what projects should be described as “translation communities”, as translation is usually a solitary activity. Projects like Cucumbis, dotsub and Worldwide Lexicon are trying to take advantage of the distributed, participatory nature of the Internet to help turn translation into a team sport.

Looking closely at Lingua, Chris sees a number of patterns for group translation emerging. Our Chinese translation team uses wikis to break apart translation tasks. Most don’t - most use simple mailing lists and an editor and volunteer system that allows translators to agree to work on pieces and submit their work for review by an editor. A few communities allow seasoned translators to post content to the sites without review. The flexibility of structure appears to be helping Lingua grow - Chris shows a graph of community growth, that shows Lingua growing larger than the GV editorial community in roughly half the lifespan.

This makes good sense, in that the Lingua teams are producing more than a dozen different sites, while the GV team works primarily on one. But it’s also an interesting example of a blind spot Rebecca and I had when founding the project. We believed - perhaps unconsciously - that Global Voices would focus on bridge bloggers, and that these bridge figures would use English to reach wider audiences. The rise of the polyglot internet rapidly proved us wrong, and while Rebecca and I were both surprised at the passion for creating GV sites in local languages, we’ve realized our mistake and encouraged the growth.

The challenges of translation continue to be surprising. As Jillian York - GV’s Morocco author, and a talented Arabic/English translator - explains in her post about Chris’s talk:

Chris points to “lost context” as the biggest challenge of the project, meaning, when original articles are translated into a foreign language, translators are often stumped on how to translate phrases, concepts or terms. For example, in an article on “genital excision” (also known as female genital mutilation), a Malagasy translator had difficulty translating the foreign concept. She finally settled on “circumcision of young girls.” This is a common occurrence; as a Global Voices author, I’ve had translators contact me on a number of occasions to clarify terms I’ve used in articles on Morocco; terms which are clear in English but may not be in, for example, Korean.

Chris’s analysis of Global Voices and group translation is focused, in part, on finding a place within academic discourse to study this new form of translation. He sees the field as related to the study of journalism, the sort of internet and society studies we do at Berkman and to the small, but growing, field of translation studies. This search feels, to me, like a demand for legitimacy for the field. It’s understandable, given how little attention translation receives in the technical community. Discussing Chris’s work, Doc Searls pointed out that translation in an open source context often tends to be treated as “a box to check.” In the same way that projects need specialized talent to ensure that the right device drivers are written, someone needs to translate the interface into Spanish and Swahili, but that’s certainly not considered the central or sexy part of the project.

I continue to wonder whether Americans are especially insensitive to the importance of translation. We translate very little in comparison to our European bretheren (there’s roughly 15% as much German to English translation as English to German, according to this back of the envelope analysis I did some years back on Index Translationum.)

As the internet becomes more multilingual, these asymmetries become more apparent. For those who want to keep up with the Chinese internet, a few sites like Roland Soong’s indispensible EastSouthWestNorth exist. But there’s an explosion of Chinese translations of English content. See Solidot for a Chinese version of Slashdot, for instance, or TEDtoChina, a site that translates and discusses videos from the TED conference. I’m having a hard time imagining a similar site doing peer translation of top Chinese lectures so that they were available to English-speaking audiences… though this is something we badly need. The translations we do at Global Voices are a start, but the wealth of information available in a connected, polyglot world points to the need for much more work.

My friend Persephone Miel came to the Berkman Center more than a year ago to take on a challenging question: What’s the future of journalism in a digital age? This is the sort of question research centers love to take on - thorny, complicated, and very important. With support from the MacArthur Foundation, Persephone and Berkman colleagues have held conferences and conversations, written papers and blogposts and ultimately released a comprehensive report from the Media Re:public project.

The video above gives a quick sense for the questions asked and (sometimes) answered in the report. The report is a set of linked documents, including an overview of Persephone’s research, papers by knowledgeable people in the field, and a set of case studies of experiments in integrating citizen media with professional journalism. My paper, “International News: Bringing about the Golden Age” wonders why the international connections possible in a digital age haven’t led to better, more compelling international news coverage. Dan Gillmor argues that new media demands a new form of literacy, for readers as well as for journalists. And Ernie Wilson raises the stakes of the debate, arguing that democracy is at risk if we don’t overcome some of the limitations and siloing we’re seeing in the early stages of new media. There’s lots of amazing stuff in the report for those interested in a skeptical, scholarly and ultimately optimistic view of news in a digital age - hope you’ll check it out.

On Monday, my laptop and I set up shop in my local university library so I could escape the world of digital content and get some writing done. The university in question has internet connectivity, of course, but I have no affiliation and, therefore, no access. In the heart of an institution dedicated to preserving and sharing knowledge, I managed to find a place where I could disconnect from incoming data long enough to get some writing done.

It didn’t work. It turns out I need Google to write these days. I wanted to reference a longshoremen’s strike in Long Beach, and couldn’t remember whether it took place in 2002 or 2005. A better man would have left a question mark in the text - I found myself using my phone to try to Google the answer, then broke down and went to visit the public internet terminals. Realizing how silly this was, I went back to the coffee shop where I usually write, logged on and went back to researching and writing. (And yes, I realize there are likely ways I could have solved this on paper. But I find I’m not consulting the Reader’s Guide to Periodicals nearly as often now that I can search newspaper websites. Are you?)

There’s a problem with this discovery. Much of the good stuff isn’t on the web yet. It’s still in the library. And those of us who’ve gotten out of the library habit are missing information we need. I got a rude awakening to this when I started writing about media attention. Unable to find anyone online writing about media attention, I assumed I was one of the first… missing critical work done by Johan Galtung in 1965, which would have been obvious searching the literature in the library.

Those of us who live and work in a digital world can’t wait for a day when an online search for information looks not only at data stored on millions of webservers, but in the millions of books in the Library of Congress. That vision motivates pioneers like Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, Michael Hart of Progject Gutenberg and Maura Marx of the Open Knowledge Commons.

Marx spoke at the Berkman Center earlier this week, introducing Open Knowledge Commons, a new project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to help coordinate the myriad of projects working towards the goal of a universal digital library. Sloan’s motivation for funding this new organization has to do with fear of duplication of effort - they are supporting a wide range of efforts to digitize content, and realize that there’s a need for a central registry of content that’s been digitized. There’s also a great need to coordinate legal and advocacy efforts to make the larger vision of a global, multilingual open library possible.

Formerly with the Boston Public Library’s digitization project, Marx sees the project of a universal digital library as an extention of the work Josiah Quincy Jr. and others took up when they formed the American public library movement - the availability of knowledge that would be “free to all”. In a digital age, Marx argues that an open knowledge commons needs to be without enclosure, encompassing both all recorded media and the “cognitive processes applied to it” - the uses of that media - and maintained in the public sphere for the use and benefit of everyone. Her vision is broader than just having access to all texts digitally, but being able to do complex, cross-text work like named entity analysis and text extraction on a huge corpus.

Of course, it’s not as simple as putting all the world’s books in a pile and scanning them one at a time. There’s a great deal of complex legal uncertainty around what libraries can and cannot do with scanned books. Public libraries are possible - in intellectual property terms in the US - through the doctrine of “first sale”: if you’ve bought a book, you can lend it to others, if you’d like, rather than forcing them to buy their own copy. It’s not so clear how this applies in a digital age, and there are open questions about copyright, licensing and fair use in a digital age.

As a result, most of the projects working on a digital library are starting with content that’s out of copyright. Project Gutenberg began keying in public domain books in 1970s, avoiding licensing issues by focusing on texts where copyright has expired. The Million Books Project, started early this decade, has used OCR to create a collection of books focused on agriculture, scanning both public domain works and asking permission to scan copyrighted works. The Internet Archive, Marx tells us, was very active in this project, helping invent the high-speed scanning systems used by most libraries today, including the Northeast Regional Scanning Center, funded by 20 libraries in the Boston area. These libraries have scanned half a million books in the past three years, focusing on the Biodiversity Heritage Library project.

The landscape around library digitzation shifted in 2004 when Google announced partnerships with major university libraries to scan a huge set of texts and make them accessible via Google Book Search. Google has the resources to scan a huge number of books, and its ambitions in the field make a wide range of people in the book world nervous. Publishers and some copyright-holders worry that Google Book Search could become a Napster for books, allowing users to download copyrighted material without paying - the American Association of Publishers and the Author’s Guild sued Google in 2005 for “massive copyright infringement”. Many of the other library digitization projects aren’t real happy about Google’s plans either. Google isn’t handing the output from its scans to other digitization projects - it’s making them available through their search service. And because Google is scanning so much content and making much of it available at no cost, it is likely undercutting other projects to digitize texts and make them available in a free, open way. They also worry that Google may not be fighting hard enough for concepts enshrined in US copyright law, like fair use.

Marx is critical of the recent settlement between Google and the publisher and author groups. The 300-page settlement (Google’s summary of it here, EFF’s reader’s guide to the settlement here) allows Google to offer “previews” of works that are in copyright, but out of print, and give access to the full text for a fee. This involves creation of a licensing body that will provide this subscription access, and a book rights registry which should make it easier for authors to register “orphan works” and get paid for their work. Google has already scanned 7 million books and seems likely to scan many more now that a solution is in sight.

But there are real problems with this settlement, Marx tells us. Libraries get limited access to this subscription content - a single terminal with access per library. While Google has rights to the entire corpus to run analyses and experiments, other researchers can gain access only through two research centers. These centers must evaluate research before it takes place, and Google and the publisher and authors groups can block said research. Furthermore, the research can’t be used for commercial purposes without Google’s permission. Finally, there are concerns about privacy - will Google be as committed to the privacy of readers as libraries are?

In other words, Marx and the Open Knowledge Commons group would like a solution that’s a good bit more open. And they’re worried that a pretty good, but closed solution, will remove incentives to build a high quality open solution. Just because Google has the power to achieve a settlement with Google doesn’t mean that other digitization projects will be offered the same terms.

In contrast to this unsatisfying outcome, she points to a recent argument over the use of catalog records in the WorldCat format. OCLC, a non-profit library organization, attempted to force users of its catalog record system to add a field to their records, a license assigning the data to OCLC and demanding it not be used in competing systems. The library community reacted strongly to the policy, and OCLC retreated, recommending but not obligating the record field.

Marx hopes that OKC will be able to monitor and weigh in on battles like these, but will also push the envelope for open content. She argues that open access can increase sales, and wants to see ways for libraries to make affordable printed copies of texts accessible. This requires working with publishers and authors, as well as fighting copyright battles in the courts. She also believes it would benefit from a massive public works project - a giant effort to create a public good of open licensed, freely available digitized books, funded by governments as well as foundations. Having this data available openly would allow experimentation with annotation, as with Library of Congress’s Commons experiment on Flickr, asking Flickr users to help tag and categorize images from the LOC.

I’m a huge admirer of these projects, but I worry that they are - for completely understandable, wise and legally logical reasons - scanning the wrong stuff. In approaching the elephant in the room - America’s broken copyright laws - innovators have worked on two sides of the problem, avoiding the massive middle. Projects like Creative Commons urge creators to release content under less restrictive licenses, allowing reuse and remix. This is starting to have a modest effect on new content. It’s certainly possible to build a good powerpoint presentation using only CC-licensed images on your slides; it can be a bit trickier to find enough CC-licensed music to keep your mp3 player full. The digitization projects work on the other side of the spectrum, focusing on content old enough to have returned to the public domain. The new frontier is orphaned works, books governed by copyright, but where the copyright holder isn’t findable.

It’s exciting to be able to freely download Treasure Island, or remix a Jonathan Coulton song without violating laws. But much of the content we want and need isn’t going to be available anytime soon, via legal means. It is, however, available via illegal means, and the discussion at Berkman revealed how many of us have resorted to pirate media to access books we’ve wanted to read. (I’ll own up. I’ve been known to download the PDF versions of Harry Potter books so I can read them on my laptop while I travel. But I’m a good boy and buy them - in hardcover - when I get home.)

My concern is that if projects like OKC are seen as focusing exclusively on collections of texts primarily interesting to historians, the larger vision of a universal digital library gets positioned as a fight for academics, not a mainstream concern. I hope OKC will consider taking on larger fights as well, perhaps attempting to win access to put texts online by asserting fair use, or testing whether the first sale doctrine can apply to digital, not just analog media. If not, I worry we’re going to end up with two parallel systems - a carefully worked out, legal system for texts 99% of people aren’t looking for, and well-developed black markets for texts people are looking for.

It’s a story too strange to be true: a wealthy Bangladeshi film-maker is building a life-sized replica of the Taj Mahal near Dhaka so that Bangladeshis can see the famous building without making the expensive trip to India. At least, that’s what AFP is reporting:

He hired specialist architects, sending them to India to measure the dimensions of the real Taj Mahal, and brought six Indian technicians to his building site across the border… Moni imported marble and granite from Italy, diamonds from Belgium and used 160 kilogrammes (353 pounds) of bronze for the dome.

As reports have come in about the “$58 million structure”, there’s been speculation on a diplomatic “fracas” between India and Bangladesh and questions about whether a building can be copyrighted.

It would be nice if someone actually went and visited the building site.

Several Bangladeshi bloggers did just that this past weekend. They reported paying unusually high fees for motorized rickshaws to the site, and an admission charge that was high by local standards. The building itself was underwhelming:

Local tiles on a plain and simple brick structure… even the tiling work is that of an amateur… the structure is still incomplete. Even if after all this they want to put Italian marble where will they put it? All the visitors were upset and were feeling cheated. …After 10minutes we realised that there was nothing to see inside. We left. On the way back we spoke to other visitors and there was only one word going around — “what a scam!”
From Bibortonbadi, translated by Aparna Ray for Global Voices

Bloggers noted that the filmmaker in question is notorious for making cheap Bollywood knockoffs, and consider this the architectural equivalent of such chicanery. The fact that the newspaper story ran during Eid has increased the traffic, as families decided to take Eid trips to visit the “attraction”.

Video from the underwhelming replica.

Bloggers are particularly incensed at local media’s role in the scam. Bibortonbadi called one local paper to complain and was told that the paper had simply published an AFP story without any verification:

I was surprised to note that the leading dailies of the country did not do any verification before writing about these false claims such as 400crores BD Taka (58mn USD), 172 diamonds, Italian marble etc. Is 400crores a child’s play? When someone claimed to have spent that kind of money, did they (the MSM) not find the time to verify these tall claims before publishing them as is? At best they would have had to travel for about 1.5hours to do this verification. Is there such dearth of news in this country (that there is no need to verify - anything will do) or can money power get anything published these days? At best only 3/4 crores were spent.

It’s pretty common for professional journalists to complain about poor factchecking in blogs, and the possibility that bloggers will hype stories that professional journalists would have quickly and easily debunked. Here’s a classic counter-example: an international press agency hyped a story which helped rip off Bangladeshis, who used blogs to debunk the story. Here’s hoping the international outlets hyping the story will pick up on the corrections as quickly as they seized on the story.

Thorough coverage of the fake Taj scam on Global Voices.

Understanding Somalia always requires some triangulation. Recent events are more than a little baffling, at least at first glance. At second glance, they make a bit more sense, but seem to indicate even more miserable times again for the people in the south of that unhappy country.

To review:

- Somalia hasn’t had a central government since 1991. The northern part of the country has declared independence as Somaliland; the central and southern sections have been wracked by violence, much of it between clans.
- The country is “run” by a transitional government led by Abullahi Yusuf Ahmed, which has UN backing, but almost no power on the ground. Until very recently, the vast majority of “government” members lived and worked in Kenya
- In 2006, Somalia looked to be heading in a more peaceful direction, under the leadership of a group called The Union of Islamic Courts (UIC). Markets reopened, violence slowed, and a semblance of normalcy returned. But Ethiopia, the US and others worried that the UIC were harboring Al Qaeda, anti-Ethiopian forces, or both.
- With US intelligence backing, Ethiopia invaded Somalia in late 2006, installing and supporting the transitional federal government (TFG).
- UIC forces quickly melted away. But more extreme groups from within the UIC emerged and began battling the TFG. One of the most extreme - al Shabab (”the youth”) - now controls large parts of the country and is engaged in daily attacks with the TFG and Ethiopian forces.

The central irony of the story thus far is that, near as most outside observers can tell, the UIC weren’t bad guys for the most part. While the Ethiopians and Americans were able to chase them out - at least temporarily - what’s now emerged is an Islamist movement that’s more serious, more extreme, more likely to be aligned with Al Qaeda. If we accept the idea that Somalia was the US’s third front in the “war on terror”, it’s been the least succesful of the fronts, achieving even less than efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So here’s the latest confusing and contradictory news:

The Ethiopians are leaving. On the one hand, that’s not a bad thing - they never should have been there in the first place. Somalia and Ethiopia have fought two wars, prior to this one - Christian Ethiopian troops were never going to be seen in Mogadishu as anything but occupiers. Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s dicatorial prime minister, gave his version of a “mission accomplished” speech, but at least acknowledged that “it has been impossible to crush the Islamist extremist al-Shabab forces and establish a stable government in the two years since he dispatched troops to neighboring Somalia. But he said that was not Ethiopia’s objective.”

What was the objective? “to defuse the plan orchestrated by Eritrea, accompanied by al-Shabab, and anti-peace elements in Ethiopia… We have defused it in a way that it cannot come again. That is, if we feel there are signs it is coming back again, we can take action.”

Let’s translate from Zenawi into English for those who aren’t fluent. Ethiopia’s primary military concern is Eritrea, with which its fought a bloody and pointless border war after Eritrea declared independence. Zenawi was worried that Eritrea would back the UIC - which was sweeping across the country in 2006 - in seeking a “greater Somalia“, including majority-Somali areas of Ethiopia like the Ogaden. (Eritrea’s interests - if those were in fact Eritrea’s interests - would have more to do with tweaking Ethiopia than in seeking greater Somalia.) The UIC is no longer in power, and perhaps Zenawi believes that al Shabab’s ambitions don’t extend beyond Somalia’s current borders. Or perhaps Ethiopia’s military is badly stretched and the forces deployed in Ethiopia are needed to maintain order domestically - the New York Times reported a year ago that teachers and civil servants were being forced onto the front lines in the Ogaden to fight rebels there.

As for the clause about taking action: Despite the fact that Ethiopian troops are slated to pull out of Somalia, right now they appear to be pouring in. The TFG claims that the troops are “helping the Somali people and they will get rid of al-Shabab.” That seems unlikely, since TFG controls almost no territory at this point - perhaps this is a last stand, an attempt to keep al-Shabab away from the Ethiopian border? Or a shift in policy, recognizing that leaving al-Shabab unchecked will mean needing to defend the border sooner rather than later? Or a reaction to the fact that TFG forces are deserting at an unprecedented rate, some taking their weapons and joining militias?

Ethiopia has stated a hope that the UN will take over from Ethiopia to keep TFG in power. That’s not going to happen. The UN’s totally overstretched in the region with major peacekeeping efforts in eastern DRC and in Darfur. Indeed, the Ugandans - who’ve been tripping over themselves to be as pro-US as the Ethiopians - are pulling out as well. The Burundians won’t be far behind, whatever the AU says. If the Ethiopians continue their pullout - and who knows if the influx of troops is temporary or long term - TFG will lose all control within weeks and the southern part of the country will be under al-Shabab control.

In other words, two years after ousting a moderate Muslim (admittedly unelected) government that had made great strides in achieving security, we’ve now guaranteed control of Somalia by an extreme, intolerant, Al-Qaeda aligned group that’s responsible for stoning rape victims to death. Oh, and half a million civilians have been forced to flee Mogadishu, leading to a major humanitarian crisis. And piracy has grown so brazen in Puntland that even newspaper readers who don’t dig for African news have heard about it.

I offer this as context for a story on Wired today about the possibility of a “US land invasion” in Somalia to prevent piracy. That strikes me as extremely unlikely. Could US special forces land in Eyl, blow up some speedboats and damage pirate assets. Sure. Will it do anything in the long term? No. Another coastal town will end up as the center of piracy. It’s too profitable, there are too many weapons in the region and too little else for pirates to do, in absence of other economic opportunities. And the US has no interest in invading and controlling Somalia ala Iraq or Afghanistan… and there’s no indication that a concerted effort to control Somalia would be any more successful in the long run than attempting to hold Afghanistan.

So what’s going to happen? My money’s on al-Shabab controlling Mogadishu within weeks, and moving to stabilize the country under Sharia law. This is likely to be less pleasant than the control the UIC imposed, but will likely have the effect of reducing piracy and, perhaps, allowing commerce to resume. In the medium term, it’s likely to threaten Ethiopia and perhaps Kenya in a serious way, and to provide safe haven for Islamic extremists. And in the long term, it’s likely to become a major security issue for the Obama administration, possibly rising to the level where it’s discussed by folks other than Africa policy wonks.

A wild card in all this? Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, the chairman of the Alliance for the Re-liberating of Somalia, one of the more moderate leaders of the UIC, has returned to the country from Djbouti. Sheik Sharif is returning at the invitation of the TFG. This sounds like a somewhat desperate attempt by TFG to find some allies against al-Shabab. I don’t know the situation on the ground well enough to know whether Sheik Sharif is likely to be able to muster forces to support the TFG.

In the meantime, nearly everyone watching the situation can agree on one thing: for the vast majority of people in Somalia, it’s just going to keep getting worse.

Background on the situation in Somalia from previous of my blogposts.

Vijaysree Venkatraman of the Christian Science Monitor has a very generous article about my recent thinking on the challenges of finding sufficiently challenging information online, and how media organizations can architect serendipity in a digital age. I come off somewhat more zen-like than I suspect I am in real life, but perhaps that’s not a bad thing.

I’ve been (very slowly) putting together a book proposal about serendipity, homophily, xenophilia and cultural bridging, and so the ideas in the CSM article will look pretty familiar to my regular readers. For anyone else who’s stumbling onto this line of thought for the first time, let me recommend:

- A talk I gave at MIT Museum’s Soapbox Series, which includes excellent questions and brainstorming from the audience

- A conversation Global Voices editor Solana Larsen and I had with master interviewer Chris Lydon for Radio Open Source

- Blog posts from April, June, September and December of this year on this set of topics. (See? Told you I was writing slowly.)

Okay, that’s roughly as much self-promotion as I can handle this week. Thanks to Vijee for her interest in the story and for CSM for helping to share these ideas with a wider audience.

Yesterday afternoon, I sat in on a discussion at a Berkman Center conference about the role of YouTube in electoral politics. It was never explicitly stated, but the assumption (of course) is that we were discussing US politics. Was YouTube a new platform for disseminating online video? Did videos posted online matter, or was it the amplification effect provided by traditional media that made some videos relevant? Should YouTube be thought of as a medium for political discourse, or as a holding tank for media, which can be called on by bloggers and other online writers to illustrate points of view? Does online video help voters get beyond the sound-bite driven news media? (Evidence in favor of this perspective is the huge number of people who watched Obama’s speech on racism in its 37-minute entirety, or the voters who watched the entirety of Reverend Wright’s speeches and came away with a very different opinion than those who saw soundbites on news networks.)

As we argued about video and political discourse in the US, I was downloading video focused on the election that’s still happening, the Ghanaian election. There’s a remarkable amount of election-focused video available, more than I would have imagined.

This well-made video, narrated by Joseph Appiah-Dolphyne of Africanews.com, offers a view of campaign posters, rallies and street scenes in Accra, as well as interviews with several voters about their preferences and reasons for supporting candidates. (It’s also got a great shot of NDC’s posters advertising the “connection” between Obama and Atta Mills.) These vox pop interviews are quite popular - I’m very fond of this interview with a Twi-speaking NPP supporter. I can’t understand the vast majority of her reasons for supporting Nana Addo - I’m mostly just marvelling at her ability to carry on a political discussion while balancing a 20-liter bucket of water on her head. Much as random American voters move into political pundit mode when people put a camera in their faces, nearly everyone is willing to offer commentary on the prospects for the candidates in the runoff - this video from africatalks offers the analysis of Edem, who’s positioned by the interviewer as “Ghana’s Joe the Plumber“. I’m not sure I buy that - Edem speaks more clearly and coherently than Joe, and he hasn’t announced either a book deal or a country music recording career yet.

Some of my favorite videos are part of efforts to ensure that the voting process is fair and transparent. The video above shows public vote counting in Odododiodio (say THAT five times fast!) with uniformed election workers tallying the total number of ballots. While there are videos that document all aspects of the process, from registration through the actual voting, it’s also clear that the presence of a camera can be a threat to some. Some of the people waiting to register to vote in this video are arguing with police, accusing them of intimidating voters - the police, in turn, are upset that they’re being filmed. As video becomes a more common tool of election monitoring in Ghana, it will be interesting to see whether people grow more or less resistant to being filmed while voting or overseeing voting.

Of course, not all election-related videos are quite so civic-minded. There’s a good dose of slander available as well, including a wonderfully mean video that accuses current president Kufuor of being a puppet of the Bush administration by showing photos of him with the US President over a song by Fela. Not the most persuasive argument, but these musical commentaries are more about image than argument. Reggae artist Sheriff Ghale appears ready to dismiss all politicians who want his vote. “I never trust no politrician.” Guess that’s not much of an endorsement for anyone.

Watching these videos, I have two reactions. One is nostalgia - watching these videos is like getting a chance to wander around Accra, something I miss doing. The second is a much stronger sense for how the election season is actually taking place. I’m following election news quite closely, but actually seeing polling places, election monitors and posters has made the poll much more real to me.

Here’s my question - do videos like this have the same effect for people who don’t know Ghana well? I’ve been watching a lot of the videos we feature on Global Voices, trying to get a sense for when citizen video works well. We’ve got a story today about a Finnish expatriate who lives in Thailand, who joined the People’s Alliance for Democracy in occupying Suvarnabhum Airport near Bangkok. He shot several interesting videos, which I’ve watched a few times. They help give me a sense for what the protests looked like from the inside, but the videos of confrontation between PAD and police are just… confusing. I can’t really tell what’s going on and I wish there were more context on his website.

One of the biggest discoveries we’ve made at Global Voices is the importance of context in helping people understand citizen media. Ask anyone who works on the editorial side of the project and they’ll generally tell you we do three things: filter through large sets of online content and select the stuff likely to be interesting to a broad audience; translate from other languages into English; provide sufficient context to a piece of blogpost, photo or video so that it makes sense to an audience not familiar with local events or culture.

A great example of this is on the Afrigadget blog, where Erik Hersman turns a brief video of a craftsman making paraffin lamps out of used tomato tins into an extended look at the informal recycling industry in Nairobi. The video gives you a sense for the noise, and almost, the closeness and heat, of a metalworking workshop in Gikomba; the rest of the post explains how recycling workers collect scrap, sort out the most valuable pieces and sell cans to metalworkers, so they can build low-cost lamps.

In the same way that blogs exploded, putting the words of tens of millions of people on the web, forcing groups like Global Voices to learn how to curate, video is now growing in the developing world. Who’s curating video well? Who should we emulate and learn from in building collections of videos that help us visit different parts of the world?

Our conversation this morning at the Berkman conference on Internet and Politics has ticked off my colleagues Yochai Benkler and Eszter Hargittai. Eszter reminds us that it’s a mistake to talk about internet users as a single group. There’s a broad range of skill levels and ability to participate online, even in the subset of Americans who’ve got broadband access. There’s a tendency to oversimplify the discussion and assume that everyone in the grassroots can participate in online discussions - building online platforms for particiation may lead to a situation where only a subset of voices are represented.

Yochai’s pushback is more direct - he’s worried that discussions on the internet and politics are simply discussions on the internet and campaigning. He’s interested in the network public sphere - the conversations taking place in political blogospheres, on the left and the right, where participants collectively work to set the agenda. Politics is more than mobilizing people for the next battle - it’s about creating a space to debate the agenda. Joseph Nye summarizes Yochai’s points by asking how we involve participation while transitioning from salesmanship to governing.

While the academics argue the point on stage, the Obama transition team has introduced one of the more interesting tools I’ve seen to enable participation in the governing process. The website has a new feature - Open For Questions - which invites people to suggest questions the Obama transition team should answer. Users vote on these questions, deciding whether they’re worth asking the team or not. (You’ve got a third option to skip the questions, which the system charmingly responds to by registering your “Meh” vote.)

The system runs on Google’s Moderator platform, a very clever tool that allows a group of people to offer suggestions and prioritze them as a group. The platform apparently launched a couple of hours ago, and already 811 people have posted 471 questions and cast over 24,000 votes. The questions are pretty smart thus far, and I’ve been surprised at peop