Gauravonomics Blog

Welcome back to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my feed now and you'll never miss a single post!

Social media has often played an important role in on-ground reporting, coordinating relief efforts and fundraising during crisis situations, especially natural disasters like the South East Asia Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and the China Earthquake.

Social media is playing an important role again in the Haiti earthquake (Wikipedia/ Mahalo), in all three areas.

- Global Voices is tracking on-ground reporting from Carribean bloggers and Twitter users on its Haiti special coverage page.

- Ushahidi has set up a micro-site to invite direct reports from Haiti and also track tweets, photos, videos and news items related to the earthquake.

- The Crisis Commons wiki is curating a great list of resources related to the Haiti earthquake.

- CNN, NYT, BBC, NPR and Global Voices have created Twitter lists to track Haitians and relief organizations who are tweeting about the relief efforts. The #haiti hashtag is a firehose of tweets related to the earthquake.

- NPR, Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times and Reuters used the live blog format to cover the emerging situation in Haiti. CNN iReport is asking viewers to share their experience of the quake and post photos of missing loved ones.  Read More

Background: I’m sure that many of you are familiar with Alltop. It creates destination pages for topics of interest by aggregating them on a dashboard that displays the five latest headlines from each feed. The items can be previewed by doing a rollover on the headlines and read by clicking on the headline. If you haven’t checked out Alltop yet, the Social Media, Social Entrepreneurship, Non-Profit, Good, and Human Rights pages might be a good place to start.

For some advocacy projects, it might be useful to build an Alltop-like dashboard that aggregates relevant content related to the cause on one page. So far, I had thought that it wasn’t really possible, without some serious coding.

Then, I built the Indian Election Dashboard for Vote Report India in two hours, and realized how simple it was.

Tool: The trick was to discover the wonderful OneNews theme for Wordpress, which is especially designed to build Alltop clones.

Using a special template, the theme converts a page into a collection of widgets, which can be arranged to form the dashboard. The widgets support text, photo, video and search feeds, and can also be used for entering PHP or HTML code, to add elements not built into the theme.  Read More

Yesterday I wrote a post on the state of online journalism in India and argued that Indian news organizations may have more time to adjust to the world of online journalism, but may choose to waste this extra time, because of the limited online audience in India and the lack of urgency to change their business models.

While Indian media organizations may not be able to identify with CNN, BBC, NYT or The Gaurdian, they would do well to take inspiration from Al Jazeera’s model of using the internet to build and international audience.

A good place to start will be the Al Jazeera Labs which is responsible for innovations like the Sharek citizen reporting platform, the War-on-Gaza citizen reporting platform built on Ushahidi and the India 2009 Election Dashboard, for which Al Jazeera has tied with two projects I’m associated with — Vote Report India and Global Voices.

The next step will be to watch this interview with Al Jazeera Labs founder Mohamed Nanabhay by my new (and very inspiring) friend Sami Ben Gharbia –

Finally, do have a look at Mohamed Nanabhay’s presentation on Al Jazeera’s web business model —  Read More

The world’s largest democracy, India, goes to election starting April 16, 2009. The month long general elections to the 15th Lok Sabha will be held in five phases on April 16, April 22, April 23, April 30, May 7 and May 13, and the results will be announced on May 16.

This is an important election for India, in the context of a series of terrorist attacks last year that shook up the country, and a worldwide financial crisis that threatens to derail its strong economic growth. However, even as analysts debate about the big issues that will shape the upcoming elections, they will do well to remember that India’s 714 million voters elect their 543 representatives based on small local and regional issues, instead of the big national issues.

This local nature of India’s national elections is at the core of India’s coalition politics. In the last decade, both Indian National Congress (Congress) and Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) have had to form coalitions consisting of several small regional parties. The BJP led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was in power from 1999 to 2004 under BJP leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has been in power since 2004 under Congress party’s Manmohan Singh. Parties opposed to both the Congress and the BJP are also talking about forming a Third Front, but previous experience has shown that such coalitions tend to be fragile.  Read More

On December 27 2008, Israel launched a series of air strikes, known as Operation Cast Lead, against targets in the Gaza Strip, killing more than 400 Palestinians and injuring more than 2200 over the week (Wikipedia/ NowPublic/ Mahalo/ Global Voices/CrisisWire).

The Israel-friendly Help Us Win blog (Facebook/ Twitter) says that “the war is not only on the ground – but also in the international media” and encourages Israel’s supporters to “tell Israel’s side of the story” and “ensure that the international coverage of the Campaign Against Hamas is balanced”.

In fact, the Israel propaganda machinery is in full flow to ensure that everyone gets to hear Israel’s side of the story. The Israel Defense Force has a blog and a YouTube channel, the Israel consulate in New York held a press conference on Twitter and summarized the discussion on their Israel Politik blog, and the Likud prime ministerial candidate Benjamin Netanyahu is active on both Twitter and YouTube.

CNN quotes Israel consul of media and public affairs Davi Saragna on the Twitter press conference –  Read More

DesiPundit, the Indian linkblogging website that curated the best posts from the Indian blogosphere, has changed its role from curator to aggregator with an increased focus on the new community section –

These are a collection of invited Indian blogs that have agreed to share the best of their posts with DesiPundit. These bloggers were invited based on basis of previous links on DesiPundit and voted on by the DesiPundit board. They tag selected posts on their blogs for DesiPundit for display in the Community section. This gives them the bloggers the freedom and ability to select which of their posts they wish to share with you, the DesiPundit readers who have the convenience of reading their best posts at one place. We’ll accept applications twice a year from bloggers who wish to join the Community.

DesiPundit had previously made significant changes in late 2006 (farewell, take two, redux), and some new linkblogging websites like Blogbharti were started in response to those changes. DesiPundit, however, has remained the best curators of Indian blogging, along with Global Voices and, over time, they have come to occupy separate niches. Global Voices tends to focus on “current affairs blogging”, DesiPundit has tended to focus on “personal diary blogging”.  Read More

I was recently asked to outline the three most important trends in communications technology. Here are my top three –

- The use of digital tools to make real world changes.

Social media and mobile tools are increasingly being used transform media, education, business, development and government. Increasingly, the focus will shift to ‘real meets virtual’ applications like curated international news (GlobalVoicesOnline.org), mobile citizen journalism (Ushahidi.com), crowd-funded journalism (Spot.us), micro-philanthropy (Kiva.org), collaborative product development (DellIdeastorm.com), crowd-sourced campaigning (MyBarackObama.com) and participatory governance (Change.gov). Also, the power of such applications will increase with the ubiquitous, immediate, personal, location-aware and always on nature of mobile access.

- The shift from explicit to implicit community contribution.

So far, most web 2.0 observers have focused on crowd-sourcing, or explicit community contribution (DellIdeastorm.com, MyBarackObama.com). However, the real value of web 2.0 lies under the hood, in systems designed to improve based on implicit community contributions (Google’s pagerank algorithm, Amazon’s recommendation system). Even though it’s more difficult to design a business around implicit community contributions, we’ll see the web 2.0 community trying harder to understand such business models.

- The entire web as a social network.  Read More

I have been reading a lot of work done by Ethan Zuckerman and others at the Media Re:public project at the Berkley Center of Internet and Society at Harvard University.

In a very well written paper on the importance of international news, Ethan Zuckerman talks about the value of adding context to interest Western readers in international news.

I’m a big fan of Global Voices, which curates user generated content from around the world via a network of more than 150 active volunteer authors and translators and more than 20 freelance part-time regional and language editors. I am subscribed to the Global Voices country feeds for Brazil, India, Russia and China and regularly check their special coverage section for their more comprehensive stories.

However, even as I agree with Ethan on the importance of context, I believe that the present linkblog format of Global Voices doesn’t really provide that context. Reading the absolutely brilliant Global Voices India feed, for instance, doesn’t give an outsider an overall sense of the structure of the Indian blogosphere.  Read More

Douglas MacMillan in BusinessWeek highlights the trend of online news websites relying on donations from their users to fund part of their costs –

So, if online advertising can’t save the media any time soon, what will? A growing number of entrepreneurs and journalism advocates around the country are experimenting with a new type of business model for news: community-funded online journalism.

Organized around a group of readers bound by location or an area of interest, these new web sites solicit donations to pay for the work of professional journalists. While the collection plate is small, and in most cases the sites are relying on supplemental funding from advertising, grants, or other institutional donations, their founders say that readers who help underwrite the news become engaged in the process of reporting and storytelling in meaningful ways.

Spot.us (sponsor-a-story), Locally Grown (sponsor-a-reporter) and MinnPost are all interesting models of how a combination of grants from foundations and donations from users can support journalism that is relevant to local communities.

My favorite news website, however, is Global Voices, which curates user generated content from around the world via a network of more than 150 active volunteer authors and translators and more than 20 freelance part-time regional and language editors.  Read More

Here’s a great video from Ethan Zuckerman’s talk at MIT on how to find something that you aren’t looking for –

Apart from his usual talking points on serendipity, homophily, xenophilia and cultural bridging, he talks about the importance of editors by highlighting an important difference between the NYT paper edition and the NYT online edition. The front page of the NYT newspaper has 25 links, whereas the front page of the NYT online edition has 350-400 links. In the paper edition, the editor tells you to look at interesting news. In the online edition, he trusts you to find interesting news. As a result, we are less likely to look at things we aren’t looking for. That’s something to think about.

Also see: Ethan Zuckerman’s interview at The Christian Science Monitor.

Ethan Zuckerman emphasizes the need for context in citizen video –

One of the biggest discoveries we’ve made at Global Voices is the importance of context in helping people understand citizen media. Ask anyone who works on the editorial side of the project and they’ll generally tell you we do three things: filter through large sets of online content and select the stuff likely to be interesting to a broad audience; translate from other languages into English; provide sufficient context to a piece of blogpost, photo or video so that it makes sense to an audience not familiar with local events or culture.

In the same way that blogs exploded, putting the words of tens of millions of people on the web, forcing groups like Global Voices to learn how to curate, video is now growing in the developing world. Who’s curating video well? Who should we emulate and learn from in building collections of videos that help us visit different parts of the world.

Ethan is right: curating user generated video is something of a black box as of now. First, searching for such videos is difficult, because of the dependence of tagging. Second, highlighting relevant parts from such videos is even more difficult, because of limitations related to video editing. In the next 2 years, this will become a skill set with a very steep learning curve.

Quick Summary: Attend the first Mumbai Bloggers Meet-up for 2008, and discuss the state of Latin American blogosphere or the nuances of video-blogging with Global Voices editor Juliana Rincon Parra, over pizza & wine.

Invite designed by Melody

When: Saturday, February 16, 2008 at 8:00pm
Where: A/65, Sea Lord, Opp Taj President, Cuffe Parade, Bombay, India

Peruvian-Colombian blogger Juliana Rincon Parra is the Latin America and Video-Blogging editor on Global Voices. She is also great fun to spend an evening with (based on first hand recent experience).

Here’s an opportunity for you to meet up with her and discuss the state of Latina American blogosphere, the nuances of video-blogging, or just hang out.

You can find out more about Juliana at her Global Voices profile or her Facebook profile.

What’s more, here’s a bonus for the regulars at my parties. Unlike the usual party at my place, where I spend most of the time cooking dishes or mixing drinks, I’ll not enter the kitchen at all. So, not only can you spend time with Juliana, you can also (finally) spend time with me.  Read More