- Jeff Jarvis: “Hoder is
attending in IRC because he couldn’t get a visa. Hoder is Hossein
Derakhshan. whose work with Iranian bloggers is a roadmap for how we
can change the world. There are 100,000 Iranian bloggers. Iranian (aka
Persian aka Farsi) is the third-most used language on the Web. The Vice
President of Iran has a blog. And this is the work of Hossein
Derakshan. Hoder has that roadmap. What was done in Iran can be done in Iraq.” - Hoder [IRC, Toronto]:
” Iranian experience can be used almost anywhere. We should promote
Unicode standard among English speaking programmers. Many tools do not
work well with Unicode and this sucks. We need tools that index
popular posts based on languages. And then initiatives to get them
translated. We can get English teaching institutes to promote blogs
among their students. - Hoder [IRC, Toronto]: “We also need
blog-to-email services such as Bloglet. Email is very crucial in
developing countries and it beats censorship. Bloglet-like services
should be expanded. They send out emails including favorite weblog
posts everyday using their RSS feeds.” - Hoder [IRC, Toronto]:
“Local celebrities should be dragged to weblogs! The Iranian
vice-president is blogging. He loves blogs and posts everyday himself.
His mobile photos
are amazing. Photoblogs can be very helpful, especially for those who
can’t write in English very well but are wealthy enough to get a
digital camera and a big hosting space. We should promote them.” - Ethan Zuckerman:
“Big media neglects poor nations. You can graph coverage versus a
nation’s GEP. But the US blogosphere talks about the developing world
even less than the mainstream media does. [For maps and analysis that
back this up, see Ethan’s April 16 blogpost.] - Rebecca MacKinnon (discussion leader) “I don’t think we can assume that because
blogs exist, that enables truth. You also enable extremism and closed
goups agreeing about some minority group they hate. To what extent are
bloggers breaking down barriers if people stick to reading blogs that
validate their own world view?” (Jim Moore
says, “That’s a problem of
the world, and not just the blogosophere.” Fons Tuinstra [IRC,
Shanghai] replies, “But every problem of the world is a problem of the
blogosphere.”) - Fons Tuinstra [IRC, Shanghai]: “In China being anti-Japanese is
very popular on the internet. It can become a very nationalistic
sentiment, but not necessarily in the good direction (or what we think
is good).” - Ejovi Nuwere: “If I go to Nigeria and get a couple of
hundred people to start blogs, nothing will happen until a US blogger
starts to point to one of them.” - Ethan Zuckerman: ” I’m dragging Joi Ito to Ghana. The other
bridge I’d like to build is between blogs and talk radio. The
discussion we hear in blogs, in this country, is going on in talk radio
in Ghana.” - David Weinberger: “Is it good for the blogs?” – 21st century question…
Rebecca MacKinnon, who led the International blogging session, gives an organized summary, as do Jim Moore, Jeff Jarvis, Michael Feldman, and Hoder himself. Other good links: Rebecca MacKinnon’s public blogroll of international blogs, Hoder’s aggregation of Iranians blogging in English, and the IRC transcript.