Robert McHenry, former Editor in Chief of Encyclopedia Britannica recently posted an insightful critique of Wikipedia. Titled “The Faith Based Encyclopedia”, McHenry offers a general critique of the model behind Wikipedia, and a case study of a flawed Wikipedia entry, the entry on Alexander Hamilton. McHenry accurately points out that the Wikipedia entry on Hamilton is written in murky, unclear prose, gives Hamilton’s birthdate unambiguously (while there is, historically, existing uncertainty about his actual birthdate), lists two contradictory dates for Hamilton’s resignation as Secretary of the Treasury, and is riddled with typos and grammatical errors. (Subsequent to McHenry’s article, which received widespread attention, the Hamilton article has been extensively edited…)

McHenry uses this specific case to support his general thesis that Wikipedia suffers from being a work by committee, rather than the work of individual scholars, and is the product of a questionable model that invites anyone, regardless of experience, to participate in the creation, modification and editing of an encyclopedia. He is deeply skeptical that this process yields useful, accurate results:

Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step:
3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy.

One can argue that this “faith-based step” is actually a well-tested and established model. Open Source software comes into being by allowing open creation and modification, and most software appears to improve over time, as bugs are corrected and features added. Why shouldn’t Wikipedia be able to evolve the same way?

McHenry’s case study seems to suggest that evolution has devalued the article, rather than improving it. The 150 edits to the piece have introduced contradictions and muddied the writing, asserts McHenry: “In fact, the earlier versions of the article are better written overall, with fewer murky passages and sophomoric summaries. Contrary to the faith, the article has, in fact, been edited into mediocrity.”

Before concluding that Wikipedia as a whole gets worse as more people work on it, I think it’s worth positing the existence of two Wikipedias. One wikipedia is a mediocre, incomplete, often inaccurate group-written reference work with an encyclopedia inferiority complex. The other is the most useful and interesting specialist reference work available, allowing people to explore selected technical, entertainment and political topics in depths not available in any other reference work, on- or off-line.

I’ve started thinking of this as the “GSM versus Ghana” problem. When I use Wikipedia to research technical topics, I generally have a positive experience, frequently finding information I would be unlikely to find in any other context, generally resolving my technical questions – “How does the GSM cellphone standard work?” with a single search. When I use Wikipedia to obtain information that I could find in a conventional encyclopedia, I often have a terrible experience, encountering articles that are unsatisfying at best and useless at worst. Generally, these experiences result from a search where I already know a little about a topic and am looking for additional, specific information, usually when I’m researching a city or a nation to provide context for a blog entry. My current operating hypothesis? Wikipedia is a fantastic reference work for stuff that doesn’t exist in other reference works, and a lousy knock-off of existing works when they do exist.

I would love to move from the realm of case study and anecdote into the world of quantitative analysis and try to test this hypothesis. A possible experiment: take the table of contents of an established reference work, like Britannica. Compare it to the TOC for Wikipedia. My guess is that you’ll find a venn diagram where there is a small number of topics covered by EB not covered by Wikipedia, a reasonably large section where EB and Wikipedia both have coverage… and an enormous area where Wikipedia has coverage and EB does not. Focus in on that area where both Wikipedia and EB have coverage and I suspect you will find that EB articles have a larger median byte count than Wikipedia articles. (I realize that “longer” doesn’t necessarily mean “better”, and I’m open to other single-factor quality metrics, if anyone has one to propose. Or we could do a source-blind sampling experiment, where people were asked to read two versions of an article, with no information revealing the article source, and tell us which they thought was of higher quality.) Anyone know where I could get XML versions of the TOCs of EB (or even Encarta and Wikipedia so I could try this out?

My (partial) explanation for why Wikipedia is better when you’re searching for GSM than when you’re searching for Ghana has been to suggest that systemic biases are a neccesary result of peer production. When the contributors to a system have a great deal of interest in and knowledge about technical topics, you’ll get great articles on technical topics and few articles on non-technical topics. I’ve suggested that the only way Wikipedia will be able to cover certain topics – political events in Africa, for instance – will be to radically expand its base of contributors.

McHenry’s article offers another partial explanation: Wikipedia’s bad on non-technical topics because it’s easy for any individual – regardless of knowledge of or passion for the subject at hand – to pitch in. Open a paper encyclopedia, paraphrase the entry on Alexander Hamilton and you’ve done a “service” to the Wikipedia community. And it is a service, of a sort – the existence of an open, copyright-free encyclopedia is a useful thing for people who don’t have access to existing electronic or paper encyclopedias.

But Wikipedia, at its best, can be much more than an open-licensed rip-off of Encarta. Many of the technical articles I’ve encountered on Wikipedia appear to be written by practicioners in their fields, and the changes made to the articles don’t appear to have dumbed down the general high quality of the text. Not only are these articles useful, they’re generally more useful than any other existing references. Perhaps the difficulty of finding information on these topics in conventional reference materials prevents too many contributors from spoiling the soup.

I was talking with my friend Samuel Klein, a passionate Wikipedia supporter and contributor, about how Wikipedia can get over its encyclopedia complex. (Sam and I had a useful near-argument about Wikipedia and Africa a couple of weeks back – my response to Sam’s post and his to mine are in his comments…) Sam believes that the key is to allow anyone knowledgeable about a topic to add a small piece of information to an existing piece with a minimum of effort, allowing Wikipedia participation to be something someone does on a whim, with a free ten minutes, rather than a major investment in learning a new system. Thinking about the ten minute contributions African friends could make to Wikipedia’s consistently terrible articles (most clear rip-offs of CIA world factbook articles) on African nations, cities and politics, I found myself wondering whether some of the research I’ve been doing on Overture could be useful to the Wikipedians.

The OverCluster tool I wrote recently lets you throw a set of search terms at Overture and see what words people search for in conjunction with those terms. Starting with a set of nations as search terms (Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Angola, etc…), the resulting clusters look like the rough outline for what a Wikipedia article on a nation could look like. The top twenty associated search terms for my set of 187 nations are: “news”, “hotel”, “flag”, “travel”, “map (of)”, “culture”, “capital of”, “picture (of)”, “weather”, “food”, “history (of)”, “tourism”, “government”, “newspaper”, “photo”, “embassy”, “visa”, “music”, “holidays”, “tour”.

In other words, Internet users are interested in some of what a conventional encyclopedia tells you about a nation – its history, its flag, the structure of its government. But they’re also interested time sensitive information that’s hard for a traditional encyclopedia to offer (news, weather), travel information rarely found in encyclopedias (hotel, travel, visa, tourism, tour) and the details of daily life (music, food, photo, newspaper, holidays) that encyclopedias generally don’t cover.

If Wikipedia were willing to back away from the encyclopedia paradigm and explore the idea of what an Internet reference material could look like, a Wikipedia article on Ghana might feature headlines from Ghanaian newspapers, the current weather in Accra, photos, music and video samples, descriptions of cuisine and travel tips. These cultural and daily life pieces are the sorts of information people familiar with a nation are able to quickly and easily add… while the precise details of a nation’s governmental functioning generally isn’t. The hypertextual nature of the medium means that a “rich” wikipedia article like the one I’m proposing could be turned into a “conventional” article with a single click for those who prefer the old encyclopedia paradigm. It would be more inviting for contributors and more useful for Internet searchers.

(While I’m obsessed with Wikipedia’s coverage of countries and cities, OverCluster could be a useful tool for Wikipedians working on other issues as well. What should articles on computer languages look like? I don’t know – throw a list of twenty or thirty names of computer lanuages at OverCluster and see what clusters of searches emerge. Those clusters will often function as useful subheadings within an article.)

I’m going to have the chance to meet with Jimbo Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, in a couple of weeks. My main question for him: “What does Wikipedia want to be?” Is Wikipedia about unlocking knowledge and recreating EB or Expedia without copyright? If so, I’m not that intersted. But if it’s about figuring out what it means to be a reference material in the Internet age, it’s not just an interesting project – it’s one of two or three of the most interesting Internet projects.

ITConversations, one of the most interesting sources of podcasts and other fun web audio, just posted the audio from two of my favorite talks at Pop!Tech 2004. Geologist Richard Alley gave a frank and frightening picture of humans ability to affect global climate. He’s an expert at the analysis of mile-long ice cores drilled in Greenland and Antartica. These cores can be dated, much like tree rings, and by doing chemical analyses of these cores, we can see human-initiated change by tracking the massive rise in lead content (and then sudden fallout, as we collectively decided that leaded gasoline was a stupid idea.) I’m reading his book, “The Two Mile Time Machine” on my current trip to Egypt and finding him almost as engaging and fun in print as he is in person.

The ITConversations folks also just posted Ben Saunder’s talk about his solo ski voyage across the frozen Artic ocean. Ben was ultimately thwarted by the forces Alley writes about – roughly 900 miles into his 1240 mile crossing, the ice had melted so completely that Saunders would have been forced to make several multiple mile swims through polar bear-infested waters, dragging a three-hundred pound sledge, to continue his journey. Ben is a lovely guy – humble enough to shrug off the description of himself as an “explorer”, to define himself as an “extreme blogger”. I would read his blog more often if it didn’t make me feel quite so pathetic about my own utter lack of physical activity. (Flying from Albany, NY to Cairo doesn’t count as a “solo adventure”.)

One of the best things about Pop!Tech was having dinner with these two guys. Clearly polar culture is a fraternity of sorts. I had the sad sense listening to Ben and Richard share polar stories that there’s a rapidly closing window to join the fraternity of folks exploring Artic ice. It’s the sort of thing that makes me want to get on the next plane going north.

One of these days, ITConversations will post my talk from Pop!Tech – rest assured my ego will ensure that I blog it immediately.

Robert McHenry, former Editor in Chief of Encyclopedia Britannica recently posted an insightful critique of Wikipedia. Titled “The Faith Based Encyclopedia”, McHenry offers a general critique of the model behind Wikipedia, and a case study of a flawed Wikipedia entry, the entry on Alexander Hamilton. McHenry accurately points out that the Wikipedia entry on Hamilton is written in murky, unclear prose, gives Hamilton’s birthdate unambiguously (while there is, historically, existing uncertainty about his actual birthdate), lists two contradictory dates for Hamilton’s resignation as Secretary of the Treasury, and is riddled with typos and grammatical errors. (Subsequent to McHenry’s article, which received widespread attention, the Hamilton article has been extensively edited…)

McHenry uses this specific case to support his general thesis that Wikipedia suffers from being a work by committee, rather than the work of individual scholars, and is the product of a questionable model that invites anyone, regardless of experience, to participate in the creation, modification and editing of an encyclopedia. He is deeply skeptical that this process yields useful, accurate results:

Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step:

3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy.

One can argue that this “faith-based step” is actually a well-tested and established model. Open Source software comes into being by allowing open creation and modification, and most software appears to improve over time, as bugs are corrected and features added. Why shouldn’t Wikipedia be able to evolve the same way?

McHenry’s case study seems to suggest that evolution has devalued the article, rather than improving it. The 150 edits to the piece have introduced contradictions and muddied the writing, asserts McHenry: “In fact, the earlier versions of the article are better written overall, with fewer murky passages and sophomoric summaries. Contrary to the faith, the article has, in fact, been edited into mediocrity.”

Before concluding that Wikipedia as a whole gets worse as more people work on it, I think it’s worth positing the existence of two Wikipedias. One wikipedia is a mediocre, incomplete, often inaccurate group-written reference work with an encyclopedia inferiority complex. The other is the most useful and interesting specialist reference work available, allowing people to explore selected technical, entertainment and political topics in depths not available in any other reference work, on- or off-line.

I’ve started thinking of this as the “GSM versus Ghana” problem. When I use Wikipedia to research technical topics, I generally have a positive experience, frequently finding information I would be unlikely to find in any other context, generally resolving my technical questions – “How does the GSM cellphone standard work?” with a single search. When I use Wikipedia to obtain information that I could find in a conventional encyclopedia, I often have a terrible experience, encountering articles that are unsatisfying at best and useless at worst. Generally, these experiences result from a search where I already know a little about a topic and am looking for additional, specific information, usually when I’m researching a city or a nation to provide context for a blog entry. My current operating hypothesis? Wikipedia is a fantastic reference work for stuff that doesn’t exist in other reference works, and a lousy knock-off of existing works when they do exist.

I would love to move from the realm of case study and anecdote into the world of quantitative analysis and try to test this hypothesis. A possible experiment: take the table of contents of an established reference work, like Britannica. Compare it to the TOC for Wikipedia. My guess is that you’ll find a venn diagram where there is a small number of topics covered by EB not covered by Wikipedia, a reasonably large section where EB and Wikipedia both have coverage… and an enormous area where Wikipedia has coverage and EB does not. Focus in on that area where both Wikipedia and EB have coverage and I suspect you will find that EB articles have a larger median byte count than Wikipedia articles. (I realize that “longer” doesn’t necessarily mean “better”, and I’m open to other single-factor quality metrics, if anyone has one to propose. Or we could do a source-blind sampling experiment, where people were asked to read two versions of an article, with no information revealing the article source, and tell us which they thought was of higher quality.) Anyone know where I could get XML versions of the TOCs of EB (or even Encarta and Wikipedia so I could try this out?

My (partial) explanation for why Wikipedia is better when you’re searching for GSM than when you’re searching for Ghana has been to suggest that systemic biases are a neccesary result of peer production. When the contributors to a system have a great deal of interest in and knowledge about technical topics, you’ll get great articles on technical topics and few articles on non-technical topics. I’ve suggested that the only way Wikipedia will be able to cover certain topics – political events in Africa, for instance – will be to radically expand its base of contributors.

McHenry’s article offers another partial explanation: Wikipedia’s bad on non-technical topics because it’s easy for any individual – regardless of knowledge of or passion for the subject at hand – to pitch in. Open a paper encyclopedia, paraphrase the entry on Alexander Hamilton and you’ve done a “service” to the Wikipedia community. And it is a service, of a sort – the existence of an open, copyright-free encyclopedia is a useful thing for people who don’t have access to existing electronic or paper encyclopedias.

But Wikipedia, at its best, can be much more than an open-licensed rip-off of Encarta. Many of the technical articles I’ve encountered on Wikipedia appear to be written by practicioners in their fields, and the changes made to the articles don’t appear to have dumbed down the general high quality of the text. Not only are these articles useful, they’re generally more useful than any other existing references. Perhaps the difficulty of finding information on these topics in conventional reference materials prevents too many contributors from spoiling the soup.

I was talking with my friend Samuel Klein, a passionate Wikipedia supporter and contributor, about how Wikipedia can get over its encyclopedia complex. (Sam and I had a useful near-argument about Wikipedia and Africa a couple of weeks back – my response to Sam’s post and his to mine are in his comments…) Sam believes that the key is to allow anyone knowledgeable about a topic to add a small piece of information to an existing piece with a minimum of effort, allowing Wikipedia participation to be something someone does on a whim, with a free ten minutes, rather than a major investment in learning a new system. Thinking about the ten minute contributions African friends could make to Wikipedia’s consistently terrible articles (most clear rip-offs of CIA world factbook articles) on African nations, cities and politics, I found myself wondering whether some of the research I’ve been doing on Overture could be useful to the Wikipedians.

The OverCluster tool I wrote recently lets you throw a set of search terms at Overture and see what words people search for in conjunction with those terms. Starting with a set of nations as search terms (Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Angola, etc…), the resulting clusters look like the rough outline for what a Wikipedia article on a nation could look like. The top twenty associated search terms for my set of 187 nations are: “news”, “hotel”, “flag”, “travel”, “map (of)”, “culture”, “capital of”, “picture (of)”, “weather”, “food”, “history (of)”, “tourism”, “government”, “newspaper”, “photo”, “embassy”, “visa”, “music”, “holidays”, “tour”.

In other words, Internet users are interested in some of what a conventional encyclopedia tells you about a nation – its history, its flag, the structure of its government. But they’re also interested time sensitive information that’s hard for a traditional encyclopedia to offer (news, weather), travel information rarely found in encyclopedias (hotel, travel, visa, tourism, tour) and the details of daily life (music, food, photo, newspaper, holidays) that encyclopedias generally don’t cover.

If Wikipedia were willing to back away from the encyclopedia paradigm and explore the idea of what an Internet reference material could look like, a Wikipedia article on Ghana might feature headlines from Ghanaian newspapers, the current weather in Accra, photos, music and video samples, descriptions of cuisine and travel tips. These cultural and daily life pieces are the sorts of information people familiar with a nation are able to quickly and easily add… while the precise details of a nation’s governmental functioning generally isn’t. The hypertextual nature of the medium means that a “rich” wikipedia article like the one I’m proposing could be turned into a “conventional” article with a single click for those who prefer the old encyclopedia paradigm. It would be more inviting for contributors and more useful for Internet searchers.

(While I’m obsessed with Wikipedia’s coverage of countries and cities, OverCluster could be a useful tool for Wikipedians working on other issues as well. What should articles on computer languages look like? I don’t know – throw a list of twenty or thirty names of computer lanuages at OverCluster and see what clusters of searches emerge. Those clusters will often function as useful subheadings within an article.)

I’m going to have the chance to meet with Jimbo Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, in a couple of weeks. My main question for him: “What does Wikipedia want to be?” Is Wikipedia about unlocking knowledge and recreating EB or Expedia without copyright? If so, I’m not that intersted. But if it’s about figuring out what it means to be a reference material in the Internet age, it’s not just an interesting project – it’s one of two or three of the most interesting Internet projects.

I needed to do a bit of background research for the lecture I’m using to open today’s Digital Democracy class at Harvard. The end result is this (rather long) blog post. (In the unlikely event that you’re a Digital Democracy student and reading my blog, you should skip this unless you really want to be bored later today…)

In 1992, French composers Erik Mouquet and Michel Sanchez layered a female vocal over a techno drumbeat and released a single called “Sweet Lullaby”, the featured track on their debut album, “Deep Forest”. Whether you know it or not, you have likely heard the track dozens of times. Deep Forest’s album sold over a million copies in the US, and “Sweet Lullaby” was featured in the film “Ready to Wear”, in promos for the Discovery Channel and ads for The Body Shop. Using the song to promote other products helped drive album sales:

“Done tastefully, exposure through vehicles like commercials can translate into sales,” [VP of Promotions for 550 records] Schaev says. “We worked out a deal with Sony that featured ‘Sweet Lullaby’ on a Trinitron commercial, with a chyron identifying it. That was on TV every 10 minutes, which certainly didn’t hurt.” (From Billboard, March 18, 1995.)

It also didn’t hurt that Mouquet and Sanchez positioned themselves as defenders of global musical culture. Their bio, on their website hosted by Sony Music France, begins with the humble declaration:

“Eric Mouquet and Michel Sanchez of Deep Forest are sound reporters. A voiceless musical duo, they draw on voices from every corner of the world. Under their patronage, infinitely distant utterances have become familiar to us. Hymns of joy and cries of anger, prayers and aubades, songs of hope and despair have all been brought to shake our certainties, seize our senses and stir our emotions. From Africa or Eastern Europe, from pygmies to nomads,the human visions brought to us by Deep Forest have helped greatly in narrowing the musical gap between the hemispheres.”

Before thanking the voiceless musical duo for their ceaseless reportage, it’s worth taking a look at how “Sweet Lullaby” came about, something that anthropologist Steven Feld does at length in his excellent article “A Sweet Lullaby For World Music”. (Ironically, the best version of the article I’ve found online and unlocked is at a Deep Forest fan site.) Most listeners to “Sweet Lullaby” assumed the vocal was a melody from one of the pygmy tribes of Central Africa. The first track of the Deep Forest album features the vocal: “Somewhere, deep in the jungle, are living some little men and women. They are our past. And, maybe… Maybe they are our future.”

While pygmies may be our future, they’re not the vocalists responsible for “Sweet Lullaby”. The sweet lullaby in question is called “Rorogwela”, and it’s a Baegu lullaby from the Solomon Islands, which are located just east of Papua New Guinea, roughly 8,000 miles east of the Central Africa rainforests where pygmies live. “Rorogwela” is sung by a woman named Afunakwa, who was recorded in 1970 by a Swiss ethnomusicologist, Dr. Hugo Zemp, who was working for the Ethnomusicology Department of the Muse de l’Homme and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. The recording was re-released on CD in 1990 by UNESCO as part of their “Musics and Musicians of the World” series, which was distributed by record company Auvidis.

Coincidentally, Dr. Zemp had made recordings of the Dan people of Cote d’Ivoire, many of which were also released by UNESCO. It’s through these recordings that Dr. Zemp first heard from the Deep Forest boys.

Deep Forest had begun sampling pygymy vocals recorded by Zemp’s colleague Simha Aron, and some of the Dan chants recorded by Zemp. Their record company contacted Noriko Aikawa, UNESCO’s Chief of Cultural Heritage, to ask about licensing samples from several UNESCO recordings for use in a project for Earth Day. Aikawa declared himself in favor of the project if the ethnomusicologists who’d recorded the pieces approved and if the original artists were properly credited.

Aikawa played Zemp a recording from Deep Forest, which layered some of his West African recordings over a techno beat. Zemp refused to license the samples and encouraged Aikawa to focus UNESCO’s efforts on promoting traditional music rather than on fusion projects like Deep Forest.

But “no” is only a minor setback when you’ve got a potential hit on your hands. Deep Forest hired Francis Bebey, a world-renowned Cameroonian musician and composer, as a “producer”. Bebey, then 72 and in ill health, called Zemp to express his support for the project; based on his personal esteem for Bebey (who, tragically, died shortly after his “production” work) gave a verbal okay for the group to use a 40 second sample from his West African recordings for a non-commercial, charitable recording.

Fast forward two years. Zemp hears his recording of Rorogwela, remixed by Deep Forest as “Sweet Lullaby” as the background to a shampoo commercial. Understandably upset, Zemp asked for meetings with UNESCO and Auvidis. Reviewing the correspondence on the matter, Zemp discovered that neither UNESCO or Auvidis had given permission to Celine Music, Deep Forest’s record company, to use the sample.

Zemp wrote an angry letter to Deep Forest, demanding that his name be removed from the project and that the Baegu people share in the profits of the recording. Deep Forest responded two months later, insisting that they’d had permission from Auvidis, and refusing his other demands. Zemp, in true academic fashion, wrote an angry journal article for the Yearbook of Traditional Music, accusing either Auvidis or Deep Forest of lying. The journal editor, fearing legal action from Sony, cut the statement.

Enter Jan Garbarek, a well-respected Norwegian jazz saxophonist. Garbarek heard Deep Forest’s “Sweet Lullaby” and became fascinated by the melody. Since Deep Forest hadn’t credited Afunakwa, Garbarek guessed that the melody came from Central Africa and recorded his world fusion version of the song as “Pygmy Melody”.

By this time, the “Sweet Lullaby” story had become a cause celebre for the ethnomusicological community. Steven Feld, author of the aformentioned article on “Sweet Lullaby” was giving a speech in Norway on his research on “pygmy pop”, the use of pygmy music in rock and jazz compositions. Radio Producer Marit Lie of Norway’s NRK radio was in the audience and sensed a story idea. She contacted Garbarek and confronted him with the information that his “Pygmy Lullaby” was a stolen Melanesian melody. Garbarek defended himself with a comparison to Edward Grieg, explaining that the melody was part of the “oral tradition” and hence fair game for serious composers to use.

NRK radio ran a story on Garbarek’s Solomon Islands/Central Africa confusion, which deeply upset the composer, who complained to Norway’s journalism oversight bodies. Garbarek felt the radio story had accused him of failing to pay royalties on the “pygmy” melody. Garbarek insisted that he’d been legally in the right, as TONO, the Norwegian performing right collection society – essentially, the Norwegian version of the US’s ASCAP or BMI – had determined that Garbarek should get half the royalties from “Pygmy Lullaby”, while the other half should go to a fund to support cultural preservation… Norwegian cultural preservation.

In all my reading about “Sweet Lullaby”, I can’t find any evidence that anyone ever tried contacting Afunakwa in the Solomon Islands to find out what she thought about the success of “Rorogwela”. Nor can I find any evidence that anyone – including Deep Forest – wrote her a royalty check for her contribution to Deep Forest’s success. While I certainly feel that Hugo Zemp was wronged (egregiously so, when Deep Forest claimed his blessing in liner notes albums subsequent to their debut!), I find the idea that the ethnomusicologist controls rights to the recording troublesome.

When Hugh Tracey loaded a pair of pickup trucks with recording gear in the 1950s and drove into Central Africa to record the pygmies of the Mbuti region for the International Library of African Music, it’s possible that assigning copyright to the “producer” was the correct solution to the problem of crediting “field recordings”. (If this article is making you anxious to hear actual pygmy music, allow me to recommend Tracey’s recordings of Mbuti pygmies in 1952, re-released on CD in 1999.)

But “field recordings” have gotten a great deal more troublesome in recent years. My friend Bernard Woma is one of West Africa’s leading balafon players. A member of the Dagara people of northwestern Ghana, Bernard plays with the national theatre of Ghana, leads his own ensemble of musicians and dancers, and teaches music in Ghana and the US.

In the mid-1990s, one of the best ways to hear Bernard play live was to visit him at Nandom House in the Mamobi neighborhood of Accra. After church on Sundays, Bernard and friends would drink pito (a homemade millet beer), eat bean cakes and play traditional Bewaa-style xylophone music. One Sunday in November 1996, Mark Seidenfeld approached Bernard and asked for permission to make a field recording of one of these sessions. Bernard, nice guy that he is, agreed.

On one of his subsequent trips to the US, Bernard’s friends told him how much they’d enjoyed his new CD, “Live at the Pito Bar”. Seidenfeld had gotten in touch with John Zorn’s Avant record label, who, fascinated by the polyrhythms of Bernard’s playing, agreed to release the album. The resulting CD credits Seidenfeld as the producer, Zorn as executive producer, assorted engineers and associate producers… but doesn’t list Bernard or any of the other performers. Oh, and Bernard didn’t get paid, either. Nor did he given permission for the recording to be released commercially.

Perhaps the folks at Avant/Disk Union assumed that, as a “field recording” of “traditional” music, they had no obligations to the performer. But while Afunakwa may be tough to locate, Bernard’s got a website, a hotmail address and a teaching position at SUNY Fredonia. And while Bernard plays in a traditional style, many of the pieces he plays are original compositions. The liner notes for “Pito Bar” don’t include any composer acknowledgements – the copyright on the CD is assigned to Disk Union, the publisher.

Bernard is a realist and understands that “Pito Bar” has probably made very little money for Avant. His objections to the recording are less financial than cultural. The track names on “Pito Bar” aren’t the accurate Dagara names for the songs – they’re words of Twi and Ga, mostly slang terms for food (possibly the only Twi words Seidenfeld learned…). The woman featured on the cover of the album is an Ewe, from southeastern Ghana, rather than a Dagara. And the liner notes imply that the unique sound of Dagara xylophone is the product of pito-fueled drunken frenzy, rather than the product of a sophisticated musical culture.

It’s a moot point whether or not Bernard could bring legal action against Avant – he hasn’t, and probably will not. Avant has not responded to complaints brought on his behalf by sympathetic American ethnomusicologists, and Bernard doesn’t have the resources to sue Avant. Even if he did and a court found in his favor, it’s unlikely that an adequate remedy could be found: Bernard wants the Dagara to be credited, accurately, for their cultural achievement, and resents the confusion the Avant recording has caused. How do you remedy the damage Deep Forest did to the Baegu, assigning their cultural heritage to an unrelated people a third of the way across the globe?

“Traditional” music gets even more interesting when large corporations come into play. When Disney released their straight-to-video Lion King 1 1/2, it featured a recording of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, recorded by Lebo M. (It’s also featured on the cast recording of the Broadway show.) The Disney album lists the song as being composed by “Luigi Creatore/Lebo M./Hugo Peretti/George David Weiss”.

The truth is a bit more complicated. In the 1950s, Pete Seeger began singing his version of “Mbube”, a song written by South African songwriter Solomon Linda in 1939 and recorded by Linda and his band, “Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds”. Seeger had trouble pronouncing the Zulu words, and sang the chorus of the song as “Wimoweh”, which is how the song is commonly known in the US. To his credit, Seeger ackowledged Linda as the composer of the song and send him at least one payment in thanks for the commercial success he had with the song.

Songwriter George David Weiss added the English lyrics to the song, which was later popularized by Brookyln doo-wop band, the Tokens, in 1962. Over 150 bands have recorded the song subsequently, generally attributing authorship of the song either to Weiss, Creatore and Peretti, or to “traditional/unknown”.

Dr. Owen Dean, an attorney with Pretoria’s Spoor and Fisher, and an expert on historical copyright law in South Africa, made an interesting discovery earlier this year. Linda sold the copyright on “Mbube” to a South African company in 1939 for ten shillings. Under the copyright laws in force in South Africa at the time, the ownership of the song should have reverted to the composer’s estate 25 years after his death, revoking any existing deals and forcing any users of the copyrighted material to renegotiate with the composer’s heirs.

Armed with this strategy, Dean sought – and was awarded – authorization to attach Disney’s trademarks in South Africa -including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, et al., until resolution of the case. (Spoor and Fisher, not shy about publicity, issued a news release titled “Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and others ‘kidnapped and held hostage’ in extraordinary legal proceeding” after being awarded the attachement order.)

Disney has responded by arguing that they had a license to use the work from Abeliene Music in New York, and that the party responsible to Linda’s estate is Abeliene (which, conveniently, lacks assets in South Africa.) More recently, they are claiming that Solomon Linda’s widow signed away rights to the song years ago. While Disney is taking some PR hits over the issue, it’s unclear whether Linda’s children and grandchildren – none of them wealthy people – will receive compensation for use of the work.

With a recent decision in the 6th circuit making unauthorized sampling of copyrighted sound recordings unambigiously prohibited, it’s becoming almost impossible for turntablists, hip hop producers or any other collage-based composers to create original works from America’s popular culture.

The rise of mash-up culture seems to be an acknowledgement of this reality. Without an army of sample-clearing lawyers, you’re never going to be able to release your sample-heavy recording. So why fight it? Release it online for free, let the peer to peer folks distribute it, and accept that whatever money you would have made is counterbalanced by the fame and goodwill you’ve gotten from the Internet community. It’s worked well for The Kleptones and for DJ Danger Mouse, whose “Night at the Hip Hopera” and “Grey Album”, respectively, have made them Internet heroes.

But if you’re interested in those fat commercial soundtrack checks from Sony, you’re going to need to steal your source material from someone less likely to sue you. History seems to suggest that you can’t go wrong stealing from obscure field recordings or little-known African musicians. Should they discover your theft, they’re unlikely to have the resources to take you to court. If you get caught by the press, you can always claim that it was your intent to protect and promote indigenous culture.

There’s evidence that people in the developing world are starting to fight back, at least on another front: “bio-piracy”. In 1995, the University of Mississippi Medical Center was issued a US patent for the “novel” use of turmeric for improved wound healing. This was hardly a novel use for the Indians who’d been using turmeric for exactly this purpose for thousands of years. But US patent law does not recognize undocumented foreign “traditional knowledge” as prior art – to challenge the validity of the patent, the New Delhi-based Council for Agriculture Research had to present an ancient Sanskrit manuscript documenting the use of turmeric for wound healing. Council for Agricultural Research prevailed, and the patent was withdrawn in August, 1997.

It’s worth noting that the US government issued the patent despite its obvious lack of novelty, and that an Indian-government supported organization was forced to challenge the patent at their own expense. While India is aggresively fighting “bio-piracy”, other developing nations lack the resources or expertise to fight what can be expensive legal battles. It’s also worth noting that the Indian government chose to challenge the validity of the patent as a whole, rather than attempting to claim ownership of the patent by the Indian people.

What do pygmy lullabies and turmeric have in common? As “traditional knowledge”, they’re both badly protected under US intellectual property law. And, as a result, they’re an easy target for savvy IP “pirates”, those folks smart enough to stay out of the well-patrolled waters of US intellectual property and set sail for the untroubled IP seas of the developing world. It’s the sort of thing that makes you want to say “Arrrrrr!”

The New York Times has an excellent page one story today about the resurgence of the Port of New York. The world’s busiest container port until 1985, New York fell out of favor as the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach and Savannah grew.

For the past twenty years, most shipments to the Northeast from Asia came via the “mini land bridge”, railroads running directly from the Southern California ports to the Northeast. While shipping by sea and rail costs significantly more per container – $300 to $600 more – the “all-sea” route to the Northeast took so long it was worth the additional cost. But shipbuilders are constructing substantially faster container ships – they run at 25 knots, up from 16 knots, making the trip through the Panama canal more logistically feasible for importers.

The trip from major Asian ports to New York now takes 22 days, instead of 35. 65% of all merchandise sent to the US from North Asia comes through West Coast ports… but that’s down from 86% in 1999, reflecting the growth of the New York port.

Draw a 1500km circle around New York – representing, roughly, the destinations that can be served via a 24-hour truck trip from the port of New York. The area you enclose includes 80 million people and is the richest consumer market in the world. Hence, it makes economic sense to build out the Port of New York, even though it requires new rail lines, dredging shipping channels, storage facilities throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and, perhaps, widening of the Panama Canal. (The ships contributing to the New York boom are barely able to fit in the canal – the next generation of ships are too big to fit in the locks.)

The most interesting part of the article for me:

…so far, the mounting Asian trade has been largely a one-way affair. After unloading 1,120 containers from the Glory, the longshoremen reloaded the ship for the return trip. Of 667 containers to be sent back, 419 were empty, being returned to Asia to carry more goods back to the United States. Of the rest, most were stuffed with two of New York’s biggest exports: wastepaper and scrap metal.

The US ran a $600 billion dollar trade deficit last year, in no small part because we’re importing the contents of our WalMarts from China and sending back scrap metal and paper. This has been terrific for Chinese industry, and the Chinese central bank as pegged the yuan to the dollar to keep the yuan cheap. This allows Americans to buy Chinese goods cheaply, which helps expand the trade deficit, as Americans buy foreign, rather than domestic goods.

Helping us sustain our trade deficit, the Chinese and Japanese governments have bought huge quantities of US securities, particularly treasury bills, helping us finance our $412 billion budget deficit. These twin deficits are pushing the value of the dollar down – the dollar is now down 50% against the euro since mid-2000 and at its lowest level in nine years against a basket of foreign currencies. As the dollar slides, foreign investors may be less willing to buy our securities… forcing the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, which makes it harder for capital-intensive industries in the US to expand… which makes it less likely that US factories will produce anything to go in those containers to send stuff to China.

US manufacturers like a cheap dollar – it makes the relatively expensive goods we produce in this country affordable to Europeans, who have a stronger currency. And it makes the US a great tourist destination, if you happen to get paid in euros. (God help you if you’re an American who – like me – gets paid in dollars and does business in Europe.) In turn, it makes BMWs and brie more expensive, penalizing both “Old Europe” and northeastern liberals. (I drive a Toyota and I’m lactose intolerant, so this doesn’t apply to me…)

The worry that some economists are starting to express is about a dramatic devaluation of the dollar, which could happen if lots of people start selling dollars. One possible trigger for this? If China removes the dollar peg on the yuan, lots of Chinese could sell a lot of dollars very quickly. According to the Wall Street Journal, (quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, which doesn’t restrict access to its archives) Chinese citizens were lined up outside the Bank of China in Shanghai, waiting to sell their dollars for euros, yen or yuan. They know that the yuan will rise when the dollar peg is lifted, and they don’t want to get killed with their life savings in dollars.

(Hmm. My life savings appears to be in dollars. Wonder if I should get in line somewhere.)

The fine folks over at Metafilter are having an interesting discussion about current events in Cote d’Ivoire. MeFi user “kablam” posted an extremely graphic piece of video, hosted by the Ivoirian Embassy in the US, with the following accompanying text:

French Soldiers Machine-gunning Civilians… So much for the “moral high ground” of the French, as they slaughter civilians in the Ivory Coast.

I suspect “kablam” was trying to make a point regarding the French government’s unwillingness to support the US invasion of Iraq. But there’s enough controversy regarding the actual events in Abidjan to fill any number of blogposts. It’s deeply unclear to me that the footage incriminates French peacekeepers… and it disturbs me the extent to which the Gbagbo government is blaming the French for the situation in Cote d’Ivoire. My post to the comments thread on MeFi:

Some context for this video:

Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire) has been extremely unstable since 1999, when Robert Guei took power from Henrie Bedie in a coup. Guei alienated many people from northern Cote d’Ivoire – primarily Muslims, many who had immigrated from Burkina Faso – by banning Alassane Ouattara from the 2000 presidential elections, because Ouattara had been born in Burkina Faso.

Guei lost power in an uprising in 2000, to Laurent Gbagbo. Gbagbo continued anti-northern rhetoric and kept Ouattara out of the political process. (Ouattara spent most of 2001 in exile, in France and Gabon.) In September 2002, Northerners in the army rebelled, plunging the country into civil war. These rebels ended up controlling the north of the country, and base themselves in Bouake, the largest northern city. Gbagbo’s government controls the south, including Abidjan, the largest city and Yamousoukro, the capital.

Civil war continues, off and on, into 2004. There are a number of ceasefires, an attempt at a power-sharing government, and, as recently as a few months ago, real hope that the situation could be resolved. As of March 2004, there’s a large contingent of UN peacekeepers – some African (largely Ghanaian), some French – maintaining a buffer zone between rebel and government held areas. (More info available from BBC, a timeline, and a country profile.)

On Saturday, November 6th, 2004, at least one Ivorian bomber attacked a detachment of French peacekeepers, stationed in Bouake. Eight Frenchman and one American aid worker were killed. The Ivorian government claimed that it had not been targeting the French – they’d been targeting rebels and had miscalculated. The French responded by ordering their troops to destroy the Ivoirian airforce – two fighters, two bombers and three helicopters – which they did, on November 7th. (BBC story here.

Gbagbo took to the airwaves and – accurately or not – announced that the French were supporting the northern rebels and attempting to overthrow his government to install a neo-colonial state. Mobs took to the streets in Abidjan, destroying French-owned businesses and burning French schools. The French began evacuating citizens – there were over 20,000 French citizens living in Cote d’Ivoire five months ago; there are estimated to be fewer than 3,000 today. (Article in Christian Science Monitor about Europeans evacuating from Cote d’Ivoire.)

On November 9th, a confusing set of events happened at the Hotel Ivoire. Peacekeepers were protecting a number of French citizens who had taken refuge at the luxury hotel. A large group of anti-French demonstrators had assembled outside. A rumor was spread that the troops protecting the civilians within the hotel planned to march on the presidential palace and overthrow the government. Violence broke out. It is unclear whether peacekeepers, Ivoirian troops or armed protesters fired first. It is also unclear how many people were killed. The Gbagbo government claims that peacekeepers fired into the crowd and that at least sixty civilians were killed. The French claim that Gbagbo loyalists fired first and that Ivoirian security forces returned fire, and that seven were killed. (Reports from the Boston Globe, the New York Times and the BBC.)

It is my best guess that the video we’re seeing here is from the incident on November 9th. It is not at all clear who is firing shots, nor is it clear whether it’s a single party, or a gun battle. Clearly civilians were injured and killed – which is tragic – but the video does not present evidence, to my eyes, that French peacekeepers (rather than Ivoirian security forces or loyalist citizens) fired the shots.

It is worth pointing out that the Gbagbo government has been working hard to portray the recent conflict as a French “invasion” of Cote d’Ivoire. Reporters Sans Frontiere (yes, they’re French, but they’re also one of the most respected journalist rights organizations in the world) argues that the Gbagbo government is using the TV and radio to incite people to riot, quite possibly with this footage, as the footage is hosted by the Ivoirian embassy in the US. Human Rights Watch is calling on Abidjan to rein in militias and ensure that the current anti-French violence doesn’t escalate into anti-Northern violence.

My point is simply this: the situation in Cote d’Ivoire is extremely complicated right now. It’s grossly unfair to accuse French peacekeepers of committing atrocities without clear evidence. It’s quite possible that this tragic footage is the result of shots fired by people other than French peacekeepers. The Gbagbo government very much hopes that people will draw that conclusion – it’s extremely unclear to me that that is the correct conclusion to draw.

I am disappointed, though not entirely surprised, that the discussion of this incident on MeFi should turn into a discussion of Iraq. Kablam invites as much, slamming the French for their alleged “moral high ground”. It would be far more respectful of the people involved in the incident if we discussed it in terms of the history of Cote d’Ivoire, rather than as a deeply imperfect mirror of American involvement in Iraq.

The fine folks behind Calabash Music – one of the best places on the ‘net to legally download world music – have started a “free song a day” weblog, offering a great opportunity to become more knowledgeable about music from all over the planet. Brad Powell, creative director for Calabash is posting a new song every day or two, along with commentary and context. On the day a song is posted, it’s downloadable for free from Calabash. (Yes, you’ve got to set up an account – it’s free, but requires you to have a credit card to set up.)

The last few posts have featured Robert Plant, singing at the “Festival in the Desert” in rural Mali, Zimbabwean songwriter Chiwoniso, Rwandan singer and reconcilliation activist Jean Paul Samputu, and the astoundingly cool Ba Cissoko. Cissoko, born in Guinea-Bissau, moved across the border to Guinea-Conakry in 1989 to study with kora master M’bady Kouyat. He bonded with M’bady’s sons, Kourou and Skou, and the three began performing as a trio, performing on kora, electric kora and bass, later adding Ibrahim Bah on djembe and other percussion.

While Cissoko is clearly a brilliant and inventive kora player, it’s Skou Kouyat who blows me away. His kora is run through a set of effects which add a thick layer of distortion to his solo lines. The resulting sound has caused the French music press (the group is currently based in Marseilles) to refer to him as “le Hendrix de la Kora”. Personally, he makes me think of some of my favorite albums of all time, the two records kora master Foday Musa Suso made after hanging out with Herbie Hancock, under the band name “Mandingo”, which sounded like traditional kora music and Bill Laswell colliding at high speeds.

So thanks, Calabash, for giving me (free!) the number one track on my current playlist. And for those of you who enjoy some world music with your globally-focused media criticism (or whatever it is that I do here), make haste to Brad Powell’s blog.

My current favorite tool on the web is Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool. (Many thanks to Ben Edelman and David Pennock for independently introducing me to it and ruining my productivity for the month.) Designed to help purchasers of ad keywords select appropriately targeted search terms, it returns a set of “associated terms” for any term you offer. Search for “red sox” and you discover more precise searches for “red sox curse”, “red sox ticket” and “red sox nation”… not to mention 10,068 searches last month for “red sox suck”. (Fellow members of Red Sox Nation will be pleased to note that there were 30,527 searches for “yankees suck” in the same month. And while there were 8,031 searches for “yankee hater”, there were only 619 for “red sox hater”.)

So, while Overture may have built the KST to assist their customers, it appears to be custom designed for internet sociologists, so we can see what the web really thinks about a given search term. I think of it as Freudian psychotherapy for the web – we ask the Internet to free associate and attempt to draw make sense of the results.

What do web users think about Brazil? That’s an easy one: we want to visit, and we’d like to see some naked women. (No word on whether that’s why we want to visit.) The top 20 search terms associated with “Brazil” include “travel”, “tour”, “hotel”, “vacation”, “carnival”, “visa” and “beaches”… and also “girl”, “woman”, “sex”, “porn”, as well as “Mike”, who appears to be visiting Brazilian beaches with a camera, meeting lots of naked women.

The Canadians, on the other hand, can keep their clothes on. We want their drugs – “pharmacy” and “drug” both rank in the top five search terms – and we’re thinking about moving there. “canada immigration” is the 12th associated search term, followed closely by “jobs in canada”. (The keyword selector tool offers some help there as well – if you can’t get a job in a Canadian pharmacy, consider Sears or Wal Mart, both of which rank in the top 20 associated search terms. (The Overture data set is updated monthly, so these results reflect October searches – I look forward to seeing how these figures change in November.)

Having fun yet? I was, so I built a little tool to automate querying of the KST. The program, which I christened OverCluster (less because it produces clusters of search terms from Overture and more because it sounds like the sort of company that got VC funding in the late 1990s) accepts a list of search terms, calculates how each subsidiary term compares to the main term (i.e., what percent of people searched for “green bay packers” rather than “green bay”), and creates clusters of subsidiary terms. For instance, when you feed OverCluster a list of search terms representing the 187 nations I routinely monitor media for, you discover that nine of them are often queried with the subsidiary term “safari” – the resulting “safari cluster” is Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Malawi.

Looking to share the fun with y’all, I’ve run three data sets – my usual 187 nations; the 50 US states and 13 Canadian provinces and territories; and the 87 cities in the US and Canada with populations over 250,000. I ran each twice, once looking at the top 40 subsidiary terms, once looking at only the top 20. The results are here:

Nations (depth 20)

Nations (depth 40)

States and Provinces (depth 20)

States and Provinces (depth 40)

Cities (depth 20)

Cities (depth 40)

I’m also releasing the source code for OverCluster under the GNU Public License. It has its own project page on a Berkman Center website, along with the three search term files I’ve used and all sorts of caveats, warnings and apologies. The quick version of those warnings – it’s buggy research code, and you need to be comfortable with customizing Perl and installing Perl modules from CPAN to have a prayer of using it successfully. (For my friends who’ve requested that I release the GAP tools under GPL – they’re coming. This was an experiment in building a tool for release under GPL – OverCluster is an order of magnitude simpler than GAP, so I thought I’d learn by releasing it first.)

For those of you not rushing to download my new toy, allow me to share some of my favorite results thus far:

We’re not especially interested in the what’s currently going on in Madagascar (madagascar news: 408 searches.) But the not-yet-released Ben Stiller/Chris Rock animated film is already gathering interest (madagascar movie: 2520 searches). And Birkenstock’s Madagascar sandals netted 2944 searches – and three of the top five subsidiary term slots. We hear they’re good for stepping on Madagascar’s hissing cockroaches (522 searches, 11th subsidiary term.)

For those who thought Belarus just produced wacky neo-Stalinist dictators – it produces tractors, too! Proudly manufactured by Minsk Tractor Works (MTZ), Belarus tractors come in 30 different models, and are the subject of 1593 web searches, Belarus’s #2 secondary term. Belarus is one of seven nations in the adoption cluster (13, if you search 40 matches deep instead of 20), alongside Kazakhstan, Guatemala, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Azerbaijan and Moldova. Belarus is also part of the bride “near cluster”, along with Moldova, Russia, Ukraine and Latvia (where the search is for “latvia and bride”).

When I visited Rwanda in 2002, government ministers were trying to “rebrand” the country, hoping people would start to associate the nation with mountain gorillas, tea, and pyrethrum, an insecticide produced from crysanthemum flowers. So far, it’s not working. “Genocide” (1st), “genocide in” (2nd), “genocide picture” (5th), “massacre” (7th), “genocide 1994″ (9th), “1994″ (12th), and “picture of civil war” (13th) dominate Rwanda searces, as does PBS’s Ghosts of Rwanda documentary (”ghost of” (6th), “ghost of pbs” (10th)). “Gorilla”, “tea” and “pyrethrum” don’t make the list.

“Genocide” is a small cluster – Rwanda, Sudan, Bosnia, Burundi, Armenia, Somalia and Cambodia. It’s the same size as “civil war” – Sudan, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, El Salvador and Ivory Coast, but smaller than “war – Viet Nam, Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Rwanda, Sudan, Sierra Leone, North Korea, Liberia and Ivory Coast – and “war in” (eight nations, all mentioned under “war”). The war in Ivory Coast wasn’t the subject of a whole lot of interest last month – 39 searches for “Ivory Coast war” and 36 for “Ivory Coast civil war”. Let’s see what bombing some Frenchmen does for search engine traffic, shall me?

On the subject of war – the second most popular secondary term for “Poland”? “you forgot poland”. But it’s not just President Bush who can put a nation on the map. Secondary results #2 and #3 for “Burma” (which I’d been using instead of “Myanmar”, but will now switch to the nation’s official name) – “shave”, and “mission of”. Nice to know that 1019 people a month are searching for my favorite once-defunct, now thriving punk band.

The only possible way to end a post titled “The Freudian Web” is with a close look at “sex”. (”mother” doesn’t appear in any of our clusters.) With 40 nations, it’s one of our larger clusters. “iran sex” ranks highest in percentage terms – for every 100 searches for “iran”, there are roughly 7 for “iran sex”. But Japan is a close second in percentage terms, and first by a landslide, with 21,358 searches last month for “Japan sex”. Japan finishes second to Brazil in percentage terms on searches for “girl”, beating out Ukraine, which places third. Ukraine is ranked first in searches for “woman” – 8.29 searches for “Ukraine woman” for every search for “Ukraine”. But Brazil is first in absolute terms – 6,873 searches for “Brazil woman”. The clusers for “escort”, “miss” and “porn” do little to clear up the confusion. Clearly, we as a web are torn.

If you think of any clever sets of terms you’d like to feed to OverCluster, or if you get any interesting results running the script yourself, please let me know. Stand up and be clustered!

A month ago, it looked like peace might be around the corner for Cote d’Ivoire. Government soldiers and rebels had stopped shooting at one another, and were playing soccer, refereed by a French peacekeeper: government forces won 5-0, but a good time was had by all.

Things can change very quickly in Cote d’Ivoire. The pride of West Africa only a decade ago, the country has gone steadily downhill since the death of founding president (or “colorful dictator”, if you prefer) Flix Houphouet-Boigny in 1993. And a tense peace can disappear over the weekend.

On Saturday, Ivorian government forces bombed French peacekeepers near Bouake, a rebel stronghold in the north of the country. Nine French soldiers and an American aid worker died – dozens more were injured. The government claims that it made a mistake, and had been targeting a rebel encampment, not UN peacekeepers. Chirac responded by deploying soldiers to destroy the four airplanes and three helicopters that comprised the Ivoirian air force.

Ivoirian government officials took to the airwaves in Abidjan, the commercial capital, and urged Ivoirians to chase the French out of the country. Riots ensued, including widespread looting of French-owned businesses. French troops were deployed from peacekeeping positions in the north to retake the international airport in Abidjan and protect French citizens from machete attacks. At least 400 people were injured; at least 2000 French citizens are seeking shelter in UN or French military bases in the country.

France is now pushing a resultion through the UN security council, calling for an arms embargo and travel restrictions on Ivoirian diplomants – China, Africa’s new best friend, is threatening a veto.

How does a north/south ethnic and religious civil war turn into a colony/colonizer conflict overnight? Evidently, the Gbagbo government has concluded that France is not a neutral party in the conflict, but an active supporter of the northern rebels:

“France has declared war on the Ivory Coast, that’s how it looks to us,” says Sery Bahi, a senior adviser to President Laurent Gbagbo, speaking by phone from Abidjan. He says Mr. Gbagbo is willing to have direct talks with French President Jacques Chirac. “We now know the real problem we have is not with the rebels but with France. We want to understand what is it the French government wants from us.” (from Mike Crawley’s article in Christian Science Monitor.)

Why the French government would choose to support the Muslim north against the Christian south – or to support either party in the conflict – is unclear. It’s well established that France supported Houphouet-Boigny from independence in 1960 to his death, allowing him to spend lavishly (and stupidly – his lasting memorial is the world’s largest basilica, Our Lady of Peace, in

Yamousoukro, his home town – which he later declared the capital. Adequately describing the absurdity of the basilica would require a much longer blog post. But one irresistable detail: the hundreds of stained glass windows feature innumerable white faces, and a single black one, which bears a striking resemblance to the late President… Here’s a lovely photo panorama of the basilica. )

When Houphouet-Boigny died in 1993, France’s “special relationship” with Cote d’Ivoire ended. In 1994, the French government devalued – by half – the Communaut franaise d’Afrique (CFA) franc – the intent was to make African products more competitive on world markets, but many in the middle and upper-classes in Cote d’Ivoire saw the move as a conspiracy to make it harder for them to purchase international goods – the shock of 26% inflation in a country previously inflation-free increased this resentment. More than 20,000 French citizens were living in the country at the time of the 1999 coup – French citiziens hold anywhere from 40-50% of the total capital in Ivoirian firms.

So perhaps the French are an easy target for Gbagbo to pick on, much as Amin expelled Indian shopkeepers in Uganda as he consolidated his power. Or perhaps France really is up to no good, as sites like La Neocolinisation Continue and blogger Watch France often speculate. (Watch France felt compelled to make clear: “France Watcher does not support nor condone racial violence of any sort. The targeting of French civilians by mobs is clearly unfortunate.”)

What’s clear is that it’s going to be hard for France to maintain a peacekeeping force in Cote d’Ivoire if they’re seen as neo-colonial invaders. This is a real problem – French peacekeepers make up almost half the troops currently deployed to the country; the rest are from neighboring West African nations (including a large contingent from Ghana, a country that deserves more recognition for its regular and reliable contribution to international peacekeeping efforts.) With UN presences in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and AU peacekeepers in Darfur, African armies are getting stretched pretty thin. It’s admirable that the French have been willing to put troops on the line in their former colony – it’s unlikely that uninvolved nations like the US or the UK will pick up the slack in Cote d’Ivoire if France is forced to pull out to reduce tensions.

Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell have written an excellent article, “Web of Influence”, published in the November/December issue of Foreign Policy. (Geoffrey Kirkman pointed me to the article a week or so ago, but it wasn’t obvious where the article appeared on the FP website. Thanks to Shannon Clark for pointing me in the right direction.) Drezner and Farrell are doing strong scholarly work on the blogosphere – “The Power and Politics of Blogs”, which looks at blogs ability to influence and frame media debate despite comparatively small readership, is very much worth reading. (Or read Farrell’s summary of the paper on Crooked Timber, where he’s a co-editor.)

One of the stars of the FP article is my friend and colleague Rebecca Mackinnon, “recovering television journalist” and fellow fellow (don’t you just love the English language?) at the Berkman Center. I’ve had a great time over the past year watching her become an alpha blogger, building NKZone, a creative new way to report about North Korea, and RConversation, her personal blog.

She’s just posted a remarkable piece about the end of her time with CNN and her thoughts on how the network has changed during her time with it. Rather than being the sort of personal rant all of us want to write when leaving a job we were passionate about, it’s a critique of the very notion of market-based journalism. The final paragraph gives me a great deal to wrestle with:

…it is unrealistic to expect commercially-driven TV news companies to do anything other than to seek profit maximization – while at the same time selling a product that can still be defined as “news” in some way. The search for profit maximization means that these companies will shape their news to fit the tastes and values of the majority of their most lucrative potential audience. Citizens of democracies who want to be well informed must understand this. They cannot expect to be passive consumers to whatever news comes their way from a name-brand news source. They must question, contrast and compare. They must demand better quality information.

I agree with both Rebecca’s formulation of the problem and her proposed solution. But it’s a partial solution at best – while some of us are becoming better critical readers, it takes a tremendous amount of work to read every story properly. I simply don’t have the background Rebecca has to read stories about North Asia critically. So I rely on informed critical readers like her to navigate me through issues in China and North Korea.

And this, to me, points to the larger, more difficult solution to the limitations of commercial media. Critical readers who share their interpretations have the chance to shape what corporate media covers and how they cover it. We’ve got a back door – an ever widening one – into the mainstream media. We’ve got a chance to hack commercial media. Let’s get busy!