Here’s an article by Danish journalist and editor of blogs at daily newspaper www.politiken.dk, Kim Elmose. The article focuses on the admirable Rising Voices project, especially Cristina Quisberts blog Bolivia Indigena. The Rising Voices project gives money and support to various blogging and web-community projects in the developing world, and some of them were presented with great succes at the summit meeting. “Feel good” (in a good sense) trailer here.
The Rising Voices projects have shown impressive results at a very low cost, but lets not forget that there’s more to social and economic development than giving “a voice to the voiceless”. Communication is important, but so is better property rights, non-discriminatory rule of law and entrepreneurish funding schemes like mirco-credit.
Another impressive link: During the election crises and the following “media blackout” in Kenya this spring, a group of Citizen Journalists and bloggers put together the site Ushahidi, which used mash-ups of Google Maps to report live on violence and other important events. One of the organisers, Juliana Rotich, gave a great presentation and talked about the possibility of making a downloadable tool, which could be used by bloggers in any crisis situation. I think this project shows great promise, as it gives us a new way of seeing the hundreds of fragments posted online by bloggers and photographers. This could be an aggregator for seeing “the whole picture” – or whatever the editors decide should be the whole picture.