Global Voices

Coming
to you live from the floor of the Internet and Society 2004 conference
at the Harvard Law School.  Today the sessions are being held in
Pound Hall, which miraculously does have functioning wireless access,
so participants in the current session "Global Voices – International
Blogging Track – How to Build a Blogosphere" are madly blogging away
on a variety of technology (although Macs predominate).

Global
Voices is a joint project by a group of concerned
blogging internationists who are trying to act as a clearinghouse, support
forum, contact point and promotor of projects to promote blogging around
the world.  Early projects, and the present presentation, deal with
Iran and Aftrica.

Could we do something similar in Ecuador? So far we
have personally net only two indigenous Ecuadorian bloggers, but certainly
there are more. Do we have anything to contribute to the development
of the Ecuadorian blogosphere?

For a while we have been thinking of ways to breach
one of the barriaers they are discussing right now – language.  As
indigenous blogospheres sprout around the globe like mold on a ten-year-old
sandwich, most of the grass roots blogging is being done in non-English
languages.  At the same time, English is for better or worse, the
lingua franca of the Internet as well as international commerce, communication
and
culture. How to make this language barrier as permeable as possible?  Reliable
machine translation is still years if not decades away.

live from Internet and Society 2004