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BeyondBorder

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Blogging beyond borders

 

Introduction to speakers

 

Yining:

Rebecca Mackinnon was a journalist with CNN for 10 years and now working with Global Voices Online. Others speakers are schee, huang suan quan, oiwan and andrew lih.

 

Global voices online

 

Rebecca:

 

- after listening to isaac's talk, i think blogging culture will have greater development in china than other countries.

- blogs are direct information sources for the western world to know more about china and how the chinese people think. and this apply to other parts of the world, such as middle eastern and african countries.

- the purpose of global voices online is to gather bloggers from different part of the world to form an information source. we have some volunteers to help us gather information from the blogsphere.

- we need more bridging across borders. ESWN is doing great translation work from chinese internet media to the world; micheal anti has also started an english blog on chinese intellectual thinkings.

- we can use internet tool, such as the tag function in technorati, to faciliate translation effort on certain issue, such as sino-japanese dialogue.

 

Hong Kong in-media

 

Oiwan:

 

- inmediahk.net is an site blocked in china. once you are blocked, it is difficult to talk about blogging beyond borders so censorship is a cruical issue.

- translation is not only related with language, but context. even hk and taiwan do not have language and censorship problem, the two societies do not know much about each other. we need to create context, connection and desire for dialogue and conversation.

- inmediahk has made some border-crossing effort, global voices online is in fact one of our news source. however, it would be difficult to get news source from other non-english speaking countries, such as s.korea and japan, although they are much closer to us.

- translation work is a huge task that cannot be done by individual effort, collective effort is needed. inmediahk is planning to create an english platform for non-english independent media to share information.

 

twblog and twimc

 

Huang Xian Quan:

 

- from pots magazine and a founding member of twblog.net. the twblog.net was rather successful at the beginning.

- face three major difficulties: 1. commercial competition, once you started off something new, the commercial force came in and took over; 2. difficult to manage, too many writers, too much spam; 3. censorship issue, difficult to enter conversation with china because of the great wall.

- global voices online has been introducing others to the western world, however, there is little effort to introduce others part of the world among each others.

- the problem of language: we learned english since we were kids, we knew more about u.s and u.k more than japan, thailand, philippines and korea.

- even the development of soft-ware is english based, such as the interface used by indymedia, which is supposingly a global media network.

- inmediahk is organizing a conference in dec. many speakers are from within asia, hope that we can initiate something to overcome the problem and make connection among non-english speaking world.

 

Language problem and translation

 

Rebecca: chinese will become the most popular language in the internet, can we request westerners to learn chinese?

 

Huang: this is not only a language issue, but related with area politics, we are so much used to learn about other countries through western media.

 

Oiwan: for example, the report about taishi village by the guardian, taiwan and hk learned about taishi from guardian rather than chinese media. partly because the chinese mainstream media in hk has self-censorship problem, but also we are not used to go to china bbs to get information source. in the end, we have to rely on guardian's exaggerating report. it is really a issue of power.

 

Rebecca: the taishi issue is really regretful, but can we force them to learn chinese?

 

Oiwan: but not only chinese speaking world face such problem, but other parts of asia as well. perhaps we can force westerner to learn chinese, but we can't force korean or philippina to learn chinese, otherwise chinese will become another hegemony. the issue at stake is to create a communication mechanism to dialogue with other countries apart from the western world. some time ago, i ran into a website on african issue, the website is in english but it is still invisible in the internet world. so language is not the only issue here.

 

Rebecca: would like to ask schee about the communication between taiwan and china; i think no matter how people's opinions are divided, they want peaceful resolution, however can we enhance communication across the strait.

 

Schee: my experience in blogging really helps me to know more about china, there are real conversation taken place which helps me to know more about their view points in various issue, such as opinion on japan and u.s. the development of new technology, such as mblog will overcome the great wall and the existing political border and there will sure be more communication in the future. am rather optimistic on this.

 

Rebecca: can andrew comment more on the border issue. once people said that there won't be border in the internet, but it seems that the real world borders have been moved to the virtual world.

 

Andrew: my putonghua is not very fluent. actually many small kids in u.s. is now learning chinese because of business opportunity. in this evening, we will have a meeting on wikipedia, we hope that we can unblock this internet encycopedia soon and we certain need your effort in maintaining the chinese wikipedia.

 

Question from the floor about i-government, no direct answer

 

Question from the floor about blog and media

 

Oiwan: will be brief, actually andrew would be a more proper person to answer as he teaches journalism. blog is an internet interface for individual, however, there are many integration, we have collective blogs and integration of bbs and blog, which transforms a personal blog into a media; for example in inmedia, many of our writers have their own personal blog, but they want to get together to write on social issues and engage in agenda setting work. therefore, inmedia categorizes our columns into different issues, such as environment and peace, and bloggers or columnists can group together to write on a specific topic.

 

Question from the floor: how can a person who don't know english can cross the border?

 

Rebecca: translation work is very important, global voices online has been organizing volunteer for such propose. we can set up some mechanism such as tagging your blog to ask for help in translation. or we can have a system similar to wikipedia.

 

Schee: i would suggest that you can use photo or picture to communicate with other. with podcast, we can also use music.

 

ching chiao (late comer from taiwan): translation is very very difficult task, i think the only successful case is disney company. anther case is not translation, but cnn. they were publishing news in different parts of the world under different version. instead of translation, it is better to develop blogging culture first within a language system. the momentum for blogging is from the "self" that you want to present one-self, while translation is different. we can try to understand others, but translation is another matter.

 

Opinion from the floor about open source journalism

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