I spend a good chunk of my waking hours grousing about how little attention most people pay to Africa. And then everyone pays attention for a few days and I grouse again. This is yet another reason why I don’t get invited to cocktail parties.

20 years after Live Aid, Bob Geldof tells us that Live 8 is not Live Aid 2. (For one thing, it’s six bigger.) Live Aid, you see, was about charity. Live 8 is part of “the long walk to justice”. Which means, if I’m reading the website correctly, that it’s about charity, debt relief and fair trade. All of which leaders of the G-8 will spontaneously grant to African nations when thousands of people don white arm bands, attend rock concerts and “make our voices heard in unison”.

(Evidently, what we really, really want is for Coldplay to sing “Yellow” rather than anything off of “X&Y”.)

Look, debt relief is a halfway decent idea, if it’s done in a way that doesn’t ruin a nation’s credit rating and prevent them from borrowing in the future. (Rich nations borrow money, too. Lots and lots of money, in our case.)

A doubling of international aid would likely be a good thing, if said aid weren’t tied to purchasing goods from the donor nation, and if someone can figure out how to give aid to the people of Zimbabwe, say, without giving said money to Mugabe. (Or maybe not. Economist Helen Hughes offers the very reasonable argument that aid and economic growth are inversely correlated…)

And I certainly agree that economic change in Africa is going to require a massive overhaul of global trading rules, where the US and Europe give up farm subsidies as developing nations drop import barriers. (And given that the US can’t seem to give up the sugar subsidies and tariffs that benefit roughly 6,000 farmers at the expense of all the sugar exporters in Latin America, I’m not holding my breath…)

I just wonder whether the whole process really needs to involve Robbie Williams. Or whether it wouldn’t benefit from the involvement of a few more Africans.

Peter Gabriel – who’s done a genuinely excellent job of bringing African musical talent to the attention of Northern audiences through his WOMAD festival and Real World label – was so pissed off by the absence of African artists on the original Live 8 lineup that he guilted Geldolf into adding a parallel event, “Africa Calling”, which has an all-African lineup. It’s unclear whether anyone’s going to schlep from London to Cornwall to catch the second show, or whether TV networks will interupt Snoop Dogg’s duet with Elton John to cut over to Angelique Kidjo.

Gabriel gave some insight into what Sir Bob must have been thinking when he put together a concert to benefit Africa with only one African (Youssou N’Dour) on the bill:

“Bob’s sole criteria is that he has to keep millions of eyes around the world glued to the television and he felt if it was some remote part of China or Latin America, if it was an unknown artist … people might switch off,” he told Sky TV. “So if they didn’t sell 10 million records they weren’t going to be invited. I don’t agree that’s the right thing to do, but I fully understand.”

In other words, the sorts of people Geldof is hoping to reach are so attuned to African issues, concerns and culture that they can be expected to turn the channel if Daara J were opening for Velvet Revolver.

No matter how dumb you think the leaders of the G-8 nations are, they’re not dumb enough to conclude that people are flocking to a rock concert because of their passion for reforming trade policy. Perhaps if thousands of people were marching in the streets to demand an end to EU dairy subsidies rather than to see U2…

When well-meaning rich guys do something to “benefit Africa”, it’s become traditional for the news media to interview “average” Africans about the event. And Reuters and the BBC both rose to the challenge, the BBC with “Do Ghanaians care about Live 8?” and Reuters with Bob who? Live 8 bemuses Africans, some want more. They’re not bad articles in the grand scheme of things – BBC finds a researcher with an Accra-based think tank who’s enthusiastic about Live 8, as well as the predictable plantain seller who thinks Bob Geldof is Bob Marley.

But in the age of citizen journalism, it’s pretty easy to hear what smart, opinionated Africans think about Live 8 directly from their blogs. I just did a roundup of African bloggers writing about Live 8 over at Global Voices. You may be unsurprised to discover that, generally speaking, there’s less enthusiasm for Live 8 on the continent than there is in the US or UK.

While it’s admirable that thousands of bloggers have added Technorati badges to their pages to promote Live 8, to support African debt relief or to try to revive Bob Geldof’s career. But it would be a damn sight more useful and transformative if bloggers would go a step further and start reading some African bloggers… perhaps starting with some of the folks who are justifiably skeptical about the value of yet another rock concert. Allow me to recommend Thinker’s Room’s “Live Aid? Please!”, Sokari Ekine’s “Live 8419″ or Gerald Caplan’s brilliant piece in Pambazuka.

Or you could brush off your old Bob Geldof recordings:

“And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmastime
The greatest gift they’ll get this year is life (Oooh)
Where nothing ever grows
No rain or rivers flow
Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?”

Catching up with my aggregator and some of the stories it snagged last week while I was MIA:

We’ve all got to have a purpose in life… :-)

Okay, I’m just back from Italy, and now I’m planning the next trip. Here’s something I just posted to Global Voices, inviting friends in South Africa and Jordan to dinner. If you’re going to be in Johannesburg, Cape Town or Amman, please let me know either on comments on this post or via email… would love to meet you in person.

While it’s been great fun to virtually meet people around the world through their blogs, it’s always more fun to meet people in person.

Especially when food is involved.

So we’re starting a series of “Global Voices Blogger Dinners”, to be held whenever those of us working on Global Voices are lucky enough to travelling around the world.

Our selfish goal with the dinners is to learn a little bit more about the local blogging scene, associate faces with blogs, make some friends and, possibly, do some interviews and podcasts. What’s in it for you? Well, we buy dinner…

I’ll be hosting the first three dinners in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Amman in late July. The Jo’burg dinner is tentatively July 20th; the Cape Town dinner is tentatively July 21st – in both those cases, I could really use help picking a venue and identifying great bridgebloggers to invite.

The Amman dinner is on July 28th at 7:30pm at Wild Jordan in Jabal Amman – my friend Isam Bayazidi (the man behind Jordan Planet) is helping me organize the gathering, and we’ll be enjoying great food and quite possibly the best view in the Middle East.

In all three cases, if you’re interested in attending or helping me organize, please drop me a line at ethan AT ethanzuckerman DOT com. Keep your eyes open for pictures, stories and interviews from the dinners in the next few weeks.

Hi folks – I’m disappearing for about ten days and am going to be largely offline during that period, which means no blogging. Enjoy the silence. I’ll be back online on June 27th.

(There are half a dozen people I owe phonecalls to who read this blog regularly. Please accept my apologies, and I’ll be easier to reach once I get back from this trip. June has been a bit crazy thus far.)

In the meantime, please check out Rebecca’s great experiment with Microsoft Spaces in China – it’s an interesting commentary on the sorts of constraints companies are working under when they work in China.

Six months after the Boxing Day tsunami, all is far from well in Sri Lanka, which was massively impacted by the disaster. The JVP, a Sri Lankan nationalist party (sometimes characterised as a Marxist party), has pulled out of Chandrika Kumaratunga’s government, leaving her with a minority government. JVP withdrew to protest an aid deal where some tsunami aid went to Tamil groups associated with the Tamil Tiger rebels.

JVP is not the only party upset about aid being directed to Tamil groups – monks affiliated with the JHU party marched in Columbo last week, before being tear-gassed by Sri Lankan security forces.

In the meantime, Sri Lankan blogger Nittewa has a sad and frustrating story about homes to shelter refugees, corrupt contractors and beach sand:

They took the keys at a big ceremony that was organised to distribute the houses, inspected the houses after the event, and went back to their tents in the camps. No, they have not fallen in love with life in the tent. Nor have they become so attached to spending so much of their time in a tiny confined space shared with about a dozen others.

They thought the permanent houses which had been built for them were structurally unsound and not at all safe for living in. A reporter who was there are the event and went around to few of the houses later, said that you could poke holes in the cement walls with a pen. The sand that had been used in the construction had been sand from the beach. We asked a engineer why sand from the sea cannot be used in constructions and he told us that since they contain a lot of minerals and salts, it hampers the bonding process in the cement. So basically, when you use sea sand in a cement mixture to build a wall, the cement is not as half as strong as it would have been if you had used river sand, which is what is generally used. But river sand is more expensive that sea sand. And their using sea sand in the construction means they knew nothing about building houses, and decided to cut a few corners. Not good.

Anyone who goes to conferences half as often as I do knows the phenomenon of conference friends. They’re folks you like, who you enjoy spending time with, and who, as conference friend Doc Searls puts it, “you only see when there’s industrial carpeting under your feet.” I got to see some of my favorite conference friends – Jerry Michalski, Greg Elin, Helen Grenier – at PUSH. But I also got to hang out with one of my favorite real-world friends – Peggy MacEachern – who lives in Minneapolis and was happy to accept the guest ticket the conference organizers offered me as a speaker.

It’s a little odd having someone from my “real” life witness the sort of things I do in my professional life. While I don’t generally try to embarrass myself while in my conference persona, I do have a reputation for – ahem – enthusiastic presentations. I think I’m glad Peggy didn’t have a camera. (Unfortunately, Greg did…)

Peggy’s a linguist – specifically, a phonologist – and made what I thought was one of the most interesting observations at the conference. As more or less everyone who’s worked with wikis knows, Ward Cunningham named his software “WikiWikiWeb” after the Hawaiian term, “wiki wiki”, which means “quick”. Peggy speculates that the word is probably not an original Hawaiian word, but an English loan word.

In Hawaiian, she tells me, syllables are either single vowels, or a single consonant followed by a vowel. When loan words come into a language, they’re adapted to fit local syllabic structure. So if Hawaiian speakers started using the word “quick”, they would likely pronounce it “ki-wi-ki” or just “wi-ki”. (If I get any of the linguistics wrong here, it’s me, not Peggy, so apportion blame appropriately…)

Generally speaking, languages adopt loan words when there’s no equivalent word in the language. So English speakers may have brought the word (and the concept?) to Hawaii, encouraged its adoption, and we’re now borrowing it back to name new technologies.

Just goes to show, I should attend more conferences with linguists by my side.

I’m returning from PUSH, which was a great deal of fun. My talk appeared to go over well, and a few folks were nice enough to ask for copies of my slides, which I’m posting here as Powerpoint slides and as a PDF document.

I tried to cover some new ground with this talk, and am pretty happy how it was received. As with most of my talks, I opened with a discussion about media attention and the lack of attention to the parts of the world I think are most interesting. When you lead with the assertion that folks need to pay more attention to Africa, for instance, there’s an implicit question: Why? What’s in it for me?

I’ve tried to answer this question a couple of different ways over the last year… and I’ve noticed that the strategies I’ve gravitated towards are echoed by other folks talking about these questions. My stock responses run something like this:

- It’s important to know about Africa/Eastern Europe/Central Asia and other “dark spots” on the map for reasons of security. Most people didn’t know anything about Central Asia until 9/11 – then there was a brief surge of interest in countries that might be hosting terror training camps. Should we be worried that the next global threat is coming from Somalia? Myanmar? Transdniestra? (Extra points if you can find Transdniestra on a map…)

- We need to watch the media dark spots to help prevent human rights abuses or genocide from occurring on our watch. If we pay attention to Darfur, Eastern Congo, northern Uganda, or thousands of other parts of the globe, we can prevent tragedies from happening.

- We need to pay attention to part of the world we normally ignore because the next billion people who will join the middle class, log onto the internet and generally extend the consumer economy are going to come from all over the world. If we’re not ready to sell these folks cellphones, cars and computers, perhaps the Chinese or the Indians will and we’ll find ourselves a second-rate economic power.

So here’s the thing – I believe all three of these explanations, to one extent or another. (Unfortunately, the fact that we’ve managed to draw attention to Darfur without preventing destruction calls the logic of the second reason into question for me… .) And the PUSH talk largely concerned the economic reason – the most optimistic of the three – because it implies that there’s an economic opportunity associated with correctly navigating the situation.

But none of these three reasons have anything to do with why I spend so much of my time trying to learn more about the world. The reason I work on Global Voices, the reason I work on blogging in Africa, the reason I’m starting to do podcasts with people around the world is not that the world is scary, but that’s it’s fascinating.

Most of the “bridge figures” (bloggers and otherwise) I know seem motivated more by fascination than by fear. Nathan of Registan is passionately in love with Uzbekistan, not afraid of it (though there are excellent reasons to be scared about Karimov’s government and reactions to it.) My favorite globe-hopping internationalist bloggers – people like Dina Mehta or Joi Ito – appear to be in love with the entire world, with friends in every corner of the globe and a passion for explaining their homes to people from other nations.

So I tried out a new term yesterday – “globophilia” – to explain my motivations and the motivations of fellow travellers who are interested in embracing the changes associated with globalization and getting to know this strange and interconnected world we’re living in. Ingo Günther picked up the term and introduced its antonym – “globophobia” – in his talk, about an hour later. I like globophilia even better in relation to globophobia – many of my complaints about professional journalism center around globophobia, a tendency to embrace the scary aspects of international news and ignore the more nuanced and optimistic stories.

Folks seem to like the words. But there’s one little problem I need to work through before I register globophilia.com… Google tells me that there are already 2,250 pages that mention “globophilia”. And while those folks may or may not be enthusiastic about globalization, they’re happy to identify as globophiles: people who have a sexual fetish for latex balloons. (They also appear to call themselves “looners”. My, the internet really is full of things.)

Now, I like balloons as much as the next guy. But I don’t like them that way. And before I put too much intellectual investment into the term, I guess I have to decide whether writing about globophilia is going to generate confusion… or perhaps bring a whole new audience to my blog… :-)

Hossein Derakshan is home for a quick visit. This is trickier for Hoder than it is for most bloggers – he’s been living in Toronto since 2000 and hasn’t been back in Iran in the interim. Given the highly political nature of Hoder’s blogging and the fact that Iranian bloggers Mojtaba and Arash have been imprisoned for things they’ve written on their blogs, this looks like a pretty ballsy move on Hoder’s part. Hoder’s theory is that the Iranian government will be on their best behavior immediately before the June 17th elections. That said, he’s taking precautions, blogging about his time in Iran in English, though not in Persian.

The technical challenges are non-trivial, as Flickr and Hoder’s on site are both blocked within Iran. But he’s posting excellent photos, and providing running commentary on the prospects for the various candidates. His most recent post speculates that the recent bombing might have been planned to benefit the more conservative candidates like Rafsanjani, but seems not to have freaked out voters, which may benefit more progressive candidates like Moin.

My fingers are crossed for Hoder’s safety, and I’m really enjoying his coverage in the meantime.

—

And while we’re on the subject of free speech, Rebecca’s post yesterday about free speech in China is a must read.

Push Singh is interested in the hardest challenge of Artificial Intelligence, common sense. While programming a computer to beat humans at chess or index a million documents are solved problems, it’s still remarkably difficult to teach a computer than rain is wet and that humans don’t like to be wet.

At MIT’s Media Lab, Singh launched a project called OpenMind, which is a collaborative, participatory common sense knowledgebase for artificial intelligence. OpenMind now contains more than 750,000 “items” of knowledge – factual assertions – contributed by roughly 16,000 users. Users register to use the system and are presented with tasks that are comparatively simple for humans – writing a two-line description of a photo, adding five “facts” to explain a statement like “the boy drank the milk”.

The OpenMind system takes these user-contributed facts and uses them to build a set of tools – ConceptNet, LifeNet and StoryNet, each of which is an interconnected set of ideas that can help a computer solve common sense problems. ConceptNet links concepts together to help a computer understand what a natural language term means; StoryNet and LifeNet link situations together to let a program understand what events might lead to other events. Other tools include GlueNet, which help identify phrases that have similar meanings, and ShapeNet, a distributed approach to tuning computer vision.

OpenMind isn’t the only system attempting to solve problems like this using the agglomeration of common sense facts. Doug Lenat’s Cyc database has collected hundreds of thousands of “assertions” since the early 1980s; OpenCyc now is attempting to replicate some of this work in an open source environment. Singh describes OpenMind as being different in that it’s taking a wiki-like approach, noting that it was accepting user contributions before Wikipedia, in 2000.

(Push and I briefly talked about quality problems with user contributed material last night. He’s been pleasantly surprised at how little bogus data has been fed into the system. I’m wondering if this is because, unlike with Wikipedia, it’s very hard for anyone to see grafitti posted on the site. Your input goes into OpenMinds, but it’s hard to see where your input goes and what it does…)

As the database gets richer, it could be useful for building intelligent search engines, cameras that know when they should take a photo, or PDAs that know to cancel appointments when you’re out of town. I wish that Singh had a bit more time to show us some of the applications he and the Lab are using for the OpenMind database – it’s clear that this is a really interesting technique for assembling a body of common sense knowledge and less clear what this knowledge can eventually be used for.

Astrobiologist and space advocate Loretta Hidalgo is speaking today at Push 2005. The President of the Space Generation Foundation., she’s someone who clearly has been in love with the idea of space since she was in kindergarden. She’s interned with NASA, studied Martain plant growth in the Canadian Arctic, and done deep-sea diving (really, really deep sea – almost two miles in one case) to look for life in extreme environments and is featured in the IMAX film, “Aliens of the Deep”.

But most of her work seems to concentrate about getting people psyched about space. She’s one of the founders of Yuri’s Night, a global party to celebrate space exploration. She’s part of the in-flight crew for Zero Gravity Corporation and has done 14 weightless flights. (By the way, tickets for the flight now run $3700 and they fly again in July…)

Her talk moves from the grand ambitions of spaceflight – space tourism, settlement on other planets, point to point suborbital travel – to the immediate ambitions of NASA and private companies exploring space, looking at companies like Transformational Space, Bigelow Aerospace and SpaceX.

She’s an extremely funny and enthusiastic speaker, pointing out that the reason to go to the moon instead of Mars is that, with only a second delay, you can have a phone call from the Moon, whereas from Mars, with a 6 to 20 minute delay, “you have to IM”. Space has never been my dream – actually, the most exciting thing Loretta says, as far as I’m concerned, is that point to point suborbital could allow me to travel anywhere on the planet in 90 minutes – but it’s easy to see how there are developments (most notably the Virgin Galactic/Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne) that suggest that space could become routine and boring within our lifetimes.