When I tell people about my job at Global Voices they tend to get confused, sometimes even after they’ve seen the site. Admittedly it’s a pretty complex piece of journalism, research and community all mixed up together. For those people I recommend this podcast from Open Source Radio, where the host Chris Lydon interviews two of my bosses, Ethan Zuckerman and Solana Larsen about how and why Global Voices does what it does. They make a great argument for Global Voices as an idea and as a reality, and it’s great to hear the voices of people I’m so used to dealing with through text only (There is no Global Voices office, except maybe our irc channel).

It’s kind of long so you might want to actually put it on your “pod” of choice.

Link to episode page. Direct MP3 link (71 min, 33MB).

As part of my ongoing work for GlobalVoices, I recently designed and coded a GV-like site with the specific goal of covering foreign blog reactions to the 2008 U.S. presidential election, called Voices without Votes. The VwV site is a mix of original posts by GV authors about what people in other countries are saying about the elections and links to foreign posts about the elections along with the first ~50 words as a preview.

Despite what seems like a clearly good motivation and practice, some people have big issues with this, likening it to a pathetic practice called ‘splogging‘ (spam blogging, wikipedia link). In the Wordpress IRC channel (a chatroom, #wordpress on irc.freenode.net) some guys got pretty upset about the idea and I had a debate with them about copyright and aggregation of blogs (aggregation means getting content from varied sources and showing them toghether). This resulted in ‘markr’ posting a lengthy critique of VwV’s aggregation practices on his blog, HERE.

Most of his arguments stem from misconceptions about VwV or about copyright law, but some are sincerely just expressions of his dictatorial attitude towards content. I left the response below as a comment on the post, but am reprinting it here for posterity and for those who read my blog and not his (note: his full response is viewable on his page, only the parts I wanted to respond to are below. Skipped parts are mostly him telling the story i told above).

WARNING: This isn’t for my casual readers. It’s long, detailed, political and there are absolutely no lolcats anywhere to be found.

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I haven’t mentioned it here before but I’ve been working for the past six months or so on a website/project called Global Voices, doing a redesign and hacking the shit out of WordPress. It’s comprised of a group of international blog-fiends who each read just about everything that happens in their local blogospheres (like, all popular blogs in india) then file summaries and links to Global Voices. It’s a kind of filter that can give westerners a sense of what’s happening in the blogospheres they have no real access to, as well as giving links to the best in english blogs coming out other countries (it only covers “developing” areas under the assumption that technologically advanced areas have their perspectives covered adequately already). I’m working under Boris (also a web developer/designer), who hired me because I updated my flickr and was able to talk shit about semiotics with him.

All that to say that the maniacs who run Global Voices are having a conference in India (Delhi) and were nice enough to invite me as deputy-g33k, so I will be pretty damn gone from Montreal and probably the web for a month (I’m bumming around after the conference and stretching the free ride as much as I can). I’ll be checking my email and probably updating this site when I can, as well as putting up any good images my camera happens to find (Monkey Temple of Jaipur anyone?).

I hope everyone has a downplayed and non-commercial holiday season but don’t have faith in it actually happening, so just try to enjoy it despite the mall /shudder

(India photo cc Mosseby)