Global Voices Online / Berkman Center

""Corporate consolidation of media, the blurring of the line between media and entertainment and the unspoken bias towards U.S. government interests have combined to create a mass media that pays almost no attention to most of the developing world. My research on media attention and foreign news suggests that Africa, with almost a fifth of the world''s population and more than a third of the world''s active armed conflicts generally represents less than five percent of the foreign news stories reported by major media outlets.[8] Similar patterns are true for Central Asia, Eastern Europe and parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America. U.S. and European media sources systematically over-cover wealthy nations and under-cover poor ones."
Ethan Zuckerman, writing in a March 2004 essay: "Making room for the Third World in the Second Superpower". "

About

UPDATES:
Sept. 18, 2006 -- The Knight Foundation awarded $10,000 to Global Voices for its innovation
Reuters backs Global Voices

Ethan Zuckerman is an Internet entrepreneurial pioneer and expert on international blogging who is a resident scholar at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard law School.

"Our job over at Global Voices is to try to actually bring the world to these blogs, to put them in context, in some cases to translate them," Zuckerman said in a May 31, 2006, interview with DemocracyNow!''s Amy Goodman. "We use a team of editors from around the world who find some of the most interesting voices, help explain what''s going on in those stories and then put them together on a website."

Below excerpted from EthanZuckerman.com:

My main affiliation is with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Berkman is a remarkable institution - it''s sometimes described as a "do-tank", a think tank for folks who effect change as well as study phenomena. A number of my favorite people in the world of technology and international development hang their hats there and, as a result, it''s a great place to explore activist and research ideas. I''m working on a number of projects there at the moment:

-Research on the Global Attention Gap - the tendecy of major media outlets to report more thoroughly on rich nations than on poor ones. My current project - Global Attention Profiles - gives graphical portraits of where different media sources are focusing their attention and demonstrates correlations between these distributions and economic and population statistics. I''m currently trying to determine, statistically, the differences between media attention in new media like blogs and traditional media.

-Blogging in the Developing World - I''m interested in helping people around the world build weblogs and contribute to the global dialogue taking place between webloggers. One project in this area is BlogAfrica, a project to help Africans learn about weblogs and to aggregate content from African weblogs. I''m also looking into anonymous blogservers for use by people in the human rights community, allowing human rights workers to blog about situations in their countries without compromising their security. I recently wrote about these issues in an essay titled "Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower", a reaction to an essay by my good friend Jim Moore called "The Second Superpower Rears Its Beautiful Head".

-Digital Democracy - Last fall, I helped lead a class at Harvard Law School called "Digital Democracy". I''m co-leading it again this fall, under the tutelage of Charlie Nesson. The class will attempt to address the question "What happens to goverment in a digital age?" from a number of perspectives. I plan to focus my teaching on the potentials and pitfals of eGovernment in developing nations and on "semantic democracy" - the ability of various different people to have their stories told in a digital age.

See Ethan Zuckerman''s Blog.