BLOGGING: More than teenage talk.

“Baghdad blogger” Salam Pax

“I try to dispel the image that Muslims and Arabs suffer from - mostly by our own doing I have to say - in the rest of the world. I am no missionary and don’t want to be. I run several internet websites that are geared to do just that, create a better understanding that we’re not all nuts hell-bent on world destruction.”

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70+ million blogs tracked (probably under-counted)

Non-English blogs growing fast!

Source: Technorati “State of the Blogosphere” at: http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000493.html

Blog of Chinese TV Anchor, Rui Chenggang

Blog by Sister of Jailed Chinese Filmmaker

Chinese-to-English “Bridge Blog”

(photo courtesy BBC)

Teen fashion & music blogging today…

“Random acts of journalism” tomorrow.

The New Media Ecosystem

Source: Morgan Stanley October 2004 report: “Update from the Digital World” by Mary Meeker et. al.

Rebecca MacKinnon May 9, 2007 www.RConversation.com

Blog readership higher in Asia than UK and Europe

Source: Edelman, “A Corporate Guide to the Global Blogosphere”

At: http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/edelman/whitepaper010907/index.php

Role of blogs: Differs country by country

Source: Edelman, “A Corporate Guide to the Global Blogosphere”

At: http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/edelman/whitepaper010907/index.php

BLOGGERS VS. JOURNALISTS

OR

BLOGGERS AND JOURNALISTS?

Rebecca MacKinnon May 9, 2007 www.Rconversation.com

(Data from Google News, July 2006)Countries in red have more storiesCountries in blue have fewer(Courtesy Ethan Zuckerman at: http://h2odev.law.harvard.edu/ezuckerman/)

Portrait of Global Media Attention

127 million people2nd largest world economy12582 CNN.com stories

130 million people54th largest world economy937 CNN stories

(Data courtesy Ethan Zuckerman http://ethanzuckerman.com/)

Rich Nation, Poor Nation…

OBSTACLES:

ACCESS: The people whose voices we most need to hear are the ones who are least able to speak out online.

Internet 40x more expensive for Africans than Americans!

CENSORSHIP: Roughly 40 national governments now censor their Internet.

(For more info see OpenNet.net)

Web page accessed outside Tunisia.

Same page accessed inside Tunisia:“Page cannot be found.”

Human Rights Watch websiteInaccessible from inside China

…along with many thousand other websites.

Thank you!!

Rebecca MacKinnon Assistant Professor, Journalism & Media Studies Ctr., University of Hong Kong (RConversation.com, jmsc.hku.hk)

Co-founder:GlobalVoicesOnline.org