My friend Clark Boyd, who did a great deal of innovative work on the BBC/WGBH collaboration “The World”, has an amazing story airing on many PBS stations tonight. He began researching Kiva, a group that works to connect individuals in the developed world with projects in the developing world, allowing individuals to be effective microlenders. Clark got sufficiently interested in the story that he travelled to Uganda to see how these loans worked and what sort of impact they had on recipients – that piece airs tonight on Frontline/World, alongside a story about repression in Burma. I’ll be driving back from Boston, so will catch it on Tivo, but you should tune in your local PBS if you happen to be in the US. (I’ll look for a link to an online version of the story or a YouTube video after the story goes live…)

We’ve got Bahrain on the brain here at Berkman today – with Mahmood’s Den blocked, we’re all interested in precisely how the Bahrani government is going to block websites and whether the set of blocked sites will grow over time. My colleague, Rob Faris, pointed me towards another Bahrani blocking issue that I’m embarrased that I missed: Bahrain’s temporary block of Google Earth.

On August 7th, Mahmood reported that Google Earth had been blocked by the Bahrani “Ministry of DISInformation”. Mahmood offered the explanation that Google Earth was blocked because it was a tool that showed the unfairness of land distribution in Bahrain and the confiscation of public lands by the ruling family:

Possibly because through Google Earth, the whole world, let alone the Bahraini users, can zoom in and have a good look at palaces and islands which a normal Bahraini wouldn’t even dream of one day coming close to, let alone stepping foot in, and the glaring confiscation of virtually all but 3% of beaches of the islands.

The block was apparently lifted within days, though there’s speculation in some quarters – Rob tells me – that the images currently available within Bahrain aren’t as high resolution as they were before the block. (I’m skeptical of this – there have been lots of rumors that Google Earth has blurred features on their maps at the request of various governments – Wikipedia has a useful overview of some of these requests. Some features in Washington DC – the Vice President’s residence, for instance, have evidently been blurred via pixelation in USGS photos. But I’m not sure Manama is powerful enough to exert this influence over Google, if South Korea isn’t…)

On September 21st, Elijah Zarwan filled us in on a possible reason Google Maps was threatening to the Bahrani government. He linked to an amazing 45 page PDF which uses imagery from Google Earth to ask uncomfortable questions about land allocation in Bahrain. Does it make sense for Bahrain to be “reclaiming” land from the ocean, when so many large pieces of land in the island nation have been granted to members of the ruling family?

I can’t speak for the accuracy of any of the claims made in the PDF, but I’m fascinated by how useful a tool this can be for land rights activists. Groups like AAAS are using extensive experience with GIS tools to offer analysis like their study of Porta Farm near Harare, Zimbabwe, which studied satellite imagery to demonstrate the effects of the Mugabe government’s Operation Murambatsvina. But this deck is evidence that a user without special GIS expertise can use these tools and technology to make a powerful political argument.

For any of my readers in Bahrain – was Google Earth blocked again after the early August incident? And has this PDF document gotten any attention in the mainstream Bahrani media?

• Online Dictionary for French English, Spanish English, Italian English, and more.
  Really lovely online dictionary, excellent for people translating from English into Romance languages or vice versa. Creates a version of a webpage where each word is a hyperlink to a translation dictionary entry. Lovely.
  (tags: dictionary language translation globalvoices)
• RConversation: Chinese Blogger Conference Slideshow and Video
  Rebecca’s at the Chinese Blogger Conference, giving us a sense for what’s going on in that dynamic, highly politicized and fascinating blogosphere
  (tags: china bloggers globalvoices)
• Global Voices Online � Blog Archive � Prominent Bahraini Blog, Blocked!
  Mahmoud.tv is blocked, along with a few other Bahraini blogs.
  (tags: bahrain globalvoices censorship freespeech)
• New Era of the Recipe Burglar | Food & Wine
  Excellent article on intellectual property in the kitchen, including a discussion of Homaro Cantu’s absurd edible NDA
  (tags: food intellectualproperty)

Mahmood Al-Yousif, the mastermind behind Mahmood.tv, is one of the bloggers I always point to when I try to explain the concept of “bridge blogging”. In an essay on his “about” page, dated June 1, 2003, he explains his motivations for writing online:

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

I hope that I will be judged that I made a small difference.

Today, Mahmood is speaking with an image worth a thousand words – his smiling face, familiar to all readers of his blog, muzzled with a red gag. His blog, along with five other websites, have been ordered blocked by the Bahrani Ministry of Information. Mahmoud’s site is the only one of the blocked sites that is written in Bahrain by a Bahrani. Haitham Sabbah, writing on Global Voices, reports:

Among the above list, only Mahmood’s blog is a Bahraini. Other web sites vary between news, religious and entertainment web sites.

Usually, no explanation is given to the web sites owners about the reason their web sites are blocked. However, looking at the official memo, it refers the press law no. 47, passed in 2002, which then added further restrictions on freedom of expression including the prohibition of “defamation of the person of the king and royal family members.” On 24 April, 2005, the Information Ministry issued a decree instructing web site and blog moderators of any site that included information on Bahrain to register with the Ministry and to assume responsibility for all materials published online.

Mahmood suggests that all the sites blocked are ones that published information on “the Jamal Dawood scandal”. Dawood is the head of Press and Publication for the Bahrani government and has been involved with part plans to order all Bahrani bloggers to register their online presences. He’s evidently implicated in “Bandargate“, a scandal named after Salah al-Bandar, the Sudanese/British author of a report that documents attempts to rig parliamentary elections in favor of the Sunni minority.

I support a ONE Bahrain!

Mahmood is the leader of the “Just Bahrani” campaign, which has been urging Bahranis to ignore sectarian tensions and unite as one nation: “It doesn’t matter if you are a Bahraini, Indian, Sudanese, Saudi, Kuwaiti or Plutonian. Show your support for us Bahrainis who want to live as a SINGLE nation away from sectarianism.”

Mahmood’s blog is already mirrored at Alyousif.tv and is accessible to Bahrainis via that address – as a petition campaign and banners circulate on the net, it will be interesting to see whether the bad publicity for the nation helps make the block of Mahmood’s blog a brief one.

Update: the Google custom search team has retuned their code and fixed most of the problems I outlined here. Very impressive. Here’s a new post on Google’s tweaking of their engine and my gratitude to them for solving this problem.

Like several thousand other geeks out there, I’ve spent a good chunk of this week playing with the latest toy from Google, Co-op Search. The idea behind this new search tool is an excellent one: let users make their own specialized vertical search engines, showing either results only from a selected subset of sites, or prioritizing the results from those sites while searching the whole catalog. The service has all sorts of geeky bells and whistles – you can upload an OPML file to create a catalog, you can weight sites as being good or bad matches for certain terms, you can wrap the whole thing in AJAX and produce your own pretty, customized results.

My friend Nathan pointed me to the tool in response to a question I’d asked for his advice on: how do I let users of Global Voices search the thousands of blogs we’ve pointed to in our 18 month existence?

Basically, there’s two ways to approach this problem. One is to build your own search engine – decide what sites you want to spider, index them with a tool like KinoSearch and put a CGI interface on your site to let users search. (You can also buy search-in-a-box from companies like Google – the principle is the same: you’re building a custom index of sites you think are important.)

The other approach is to take the output of an existing search engine and filter it, looking only at the sites you’re interested in. Savvy Google users know how to do a search with the “site:” attribute – “ghana site:ethanzuckerman.com” gives you the 309 blog posts on my site that have mentioned Ghana. Yahoo!’s search API lets you restrict a search to one of thirty different domains, a very powerful feature which the folks behind Rollyo – a company that urges you to “roll your own search engine” – have used as the technical backbone of their company.

But these options don’t work well when you want to give your users the ability to search on thousands of blogs.

Enter Google Coop Search. You can design a search engine that searches across up to 5000 different domains, orders of magnitude more than Yahoo! allowed you to search. (Some good reviews of Coop Search, especially if you’re looking for a more positive review than this one…)

Fantastic – I fired one up immediately, dropped in OPML files from about half of the Global Voices regional editors and had, within half an hour, a search engine that searches almost 3000 global weblogs.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t search them very well. More specifically, the precision is high, but the recall sucks. (Information retrieval systems are usually measured in terms of how well they perform on these metrics. “Precision” means “how good were the results you got in regards to relavence to your query?” “Recall” means “how complete were your results out of all available relevant documents.”)

Search for “ghana” on our little search engine – you get three results: one from Koranteng’s Toli, one from Timbuktu Chronicles and one from my blog. The results from Koranteng and Emeka are good matches for the search – the one from my blog is curiously bad. But what’s really weird is how few there are – as we saw above, a “site:ethanzuckerman.com” search for “ghana” gives you 309 results. You’ll get 234 on Koranteng’s site and 212 on Emeka’s TChron site – so why aren’t we getting 800+ results from our engine?

A little poking solves the mystery pretty quickly. Google Coop Search works by searching against the main Google search catalog, retrieving 1000 results and filtering them against the sites you’ve included in your catalog. This makes sense, computationally – these searches are fast, almost as fast as normal Google searches. Rather than conducting 3000 “site:” searches and collating and reranking the results, Google is sacrificing recall, getting 1000 results and discarding those not in your set of chosen sites, which requires one call to the index and a really big regular expression match.

Search for “Ghana” on Google, preferably with the number of results per page set to 100. After 300 or so results, you’ll find the Koranteng post our little search engine calls up; at about result 600, you’ll find the Timbuktu Chronicles post on Wireless Ghana. (The result on my site is around number 900, which Google won’t let me see with an ordinary search.)

In other words, the little engine I’ve built is useful only if the sites I’ve chosen are relatively high ranking and authoritative sites on the topics I’m searching on. If I make a search engine of sumo commentary sites and search for “Asashoryu”, the results will be quite good, as those sites probably have several dozen pages that are top matches for the big man. Try it on our engine and you get four results (three from my site…) Alternatively, pick topics where our bloggers are relatively authoritative, and you’ll get better results – try “blogger block“, for instance, and you’ll get 35 sites, either on the blocking of Blogger.com in some countries, or the dreaded disease that seems to strike some bloggers (though not me, so far…)

This doesn’t mean that Coop Search is broken – just that it’s broken for my purposes. Folks will develop lots of interesting search engines, I suspect, using sets of sites that are consistently good matches for the terms they encourage people to search, like my sumo example. But Coop Search isn’t a good solution for authoritative searches on a large set of relatively unpopular blogs, unless one or more of those blogs happen to be very authoritative on the terms you choose. (I could also solve this problem almost immediately by telling Google not just to search my 3000 blogs, just to prioritize them in the index. But that wasn’t the goal of my experiment.)

I’d originally thought that Google might be using Coop Search as a way to identify collections of URLs they might want to spider more deeply – for instance, if I identify 20 great sumo sites, Google might want to visit them more often, or increase their relevancy for searches on sumo. And perhaps they’ll figure a way to do this without opening themselves up to a huge new vector for spammers to promote their sites. But I suspect the truth is that they saw a way to leap ahead of Yahoo! (destroying Rollyo in the process) and offer a tool that’s going to be great fun for 80% of the people who use it. Unfortunately, for the 20% of us who are trying to use Coop Search so we don’t need to go buy our own Google Search Appliance, we’re probably still out of luck.

• Wikipedia Leader: I Want to Be Deleted | Workbench
  Interesting followup on article about Angela Beesley’s attempts to get her bio deleted from Wikipedia – is this an indictment against the appropriateness of wiki for bios?
  (tags: wikipedia)
• [WikiEN-l] Quitting Wikipedia and wanted you to know why.
  Interesting and sad note from an admin about reasons for leaving wikipedia – admin arrogance
  (tags: wikipedia)
• IAAF International Association of Athletics Federations – IAAF.org�-�Medical & Anti-Doping�-�Medical & Anti-Doping News
  Fascinating article by an endurance cyclist who decides to try a full regimen of “performance enhancing substances” and writes about the physical and mental effects.
  (tags: sports pharma)

Some readers have complained that I don’t pay enough attention to issues surrounding intellectual property. And it’s certainly true that I’m not as focused on these issues as some friends are.

But every so often, IP in Africa makes the news. Alas, this story is not about the compulsory licensing of anti-retroviral drugs or physics textbooks. It’s about coffee.

Starbucks sells a lot of coffee. Some of their premium coffee is Ethiopian, featuring beans from the Sidamo, Harar and Yirgacheffe regions. Purchasing this coffee helps support Ethiopian coffee farmers… and in 2004, Oxfam worked with Starbucks to lessen poverty in coffee farming communities.

So it’s a bit of a surprise today to see Oxfam excoriating Starbucks for their relationship to Ethiopian coffee. The issue at hand isn’t pricing or the living conditions of farmers – it’s about trademarks and names.

Last year, the Ethiopian government filed trademark applications to protect the names “Sidamo”, “Harar” and “Yirgacheffe” – the hope was to prevent unscrupulous coffee dealers from buying inexpensive beans from other countries and selling them as “Sidamo”, whether or not they emerged from the region.

Unfortunately, the USPTO (US Patent and Trademark Office) rejected Ethiopia’s claims to these three names. Why?

…Ron Layton, head of Light Years IP, a Washington-based intellectual property rights organisation that is advising the Ethiopian government, said that in 2004 Starbucks had filed a trademark application with the word “Sidamo” to the USPTO. The USPTO then judged that Ethiopia’s application a year later had to be rejected because the word was already the subject of Starbucks’ application.

Right. Obviously Starbucks was using the word “Sidamo” to refer to coffee long before the coffee growers of Sidaro were. And a search for use of the Yirgacheffe name in US markets would obviously never find anyone using that mark previously. (That was sarcasm, for all the sarcasm impaired out there…)

It’s a little too easy to beat up on Starbucks for protecting intellectual property – if anything, people should be beating up US trademark law and the relentlessness of corporate America as a whole in protecting their brands. And just to be very clear – no one is accusing Starbucks of misrepresenting their coffee, calling a Columbian bean a Sidamo.

But Starbucks’s first response seems lame, at best. They suggest that trademarking their beans is a lousy strategy for the Ethiopian government to pursue – which may well be right. And they offer their willingness to work with the government on a coffee certification program… of course, they made this offer yesterday, as it became clear that Oxfam was going to take them to the woodshed. And they claim they didn’t block the trademark application. (They didn’t have to, if the explanation is that their prior application blocked the Ethiopian government’s application.)

Does it really make sense for Starbucks to try to protect these brands? Wouldn’t they get better press from withdrawing their applications and then working with Ethiopian coffee growers to build some sort of regional certification program?

Then again, Starbucks hasn’t shown a great deal of enthusiasm for extending operations into Ethiopia in the past. Ethiopian entrepeneur Tseday Asrat, a devoted Starbucks fan, attempted to open a Starbucks franchise in Addis Ababa – the company turned down her requests for a franchise, and she opened a Starbucks-inspired store called Kaldi’s. According to the New York Times:

Officials at the Starbucks Coffee Company were not thrilled when they learned about Kaldi’s. “Even where it may seem playful, this type of misappropriation of a company’s name (and reputation) is both derivative and dilutive of their trademark rights,” a company spokeswoman, Lara Wyss, said in an e-mail, adding that the company preferred to resolve such conflicts amicably.

To their credit, Starbucks didn’t sue. Perhaps they’ll find a way to resolve this conflict amicably as well.

The absurdity of the situation, as I read it, is the need for a very poor nation to protect “intellectual property” they’ve owned for centuries in an expensive foreign market. The coffee situation makes me think of the notorious “turmeric patent“, where Indian scientists and attorneys had to present ancient Sanskrit manuscripts to overturn a US patent that introduced the “novel” use of turmeric for wound healing, a process used for thousands of years in India. The patent was overturned, but it’s a huge barrier for poor countries to have to litigate bogus patents in US court.

(I’ve written at painful length about turmeric and other “indigenous IP rights issues” in the past on this blog…)

Mo Ibrahim knows a few things about how money works in Africa. He built a hugely succesful mobile phone business – Celtel – in countries most companies would write off as impossibly poor markets: Chad, Niger, Sierra Leone, Malawi. He sold Celtel in 2005 to MTC, a Kuwaiti firm with operations in Iraq, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and huge global ambitions – the company was worth $3.4 billion and had such a strong brand and management team that MTC has been running it as a wholly owned subsidiary, not wrapping it into their Arab operations.

His success gives him the chance to figure out how he’d like to “give back” to the continent – after the CelTel sale, he announced plans for a $100 million personal foundation to fund development projects in Africa, using the model of “investment with a heart”.

But most people probably weren’t expecting one of his first major philanthropic investments to be a large cash prize for African leadership. The prize – $5 million over ten years, plus $200,000 a year for life. Leaders cannot collect the prize until they leave office.

Ibrahim explains that the prize is designed to address a problem most of us haven’t thought about: what do African leaders do when they retire?

There is much gossip and speculation about what Tony Blair will do when he leaves office next year. Will he join the lecture circuit? Will he take on a series of directorships? Will he write his memoirs?

In Africa, the choices for heads of state are more sobering. Most leave office with no chance of sustaining a lifestyle equivalent to the one they enjoy while in office. The income of former heads of government may seem a trifling issue compared to the major problems faced by many of the continent’s citizens. In fact it is of fundamental importance in securing its future.

A situation in which leaders face three choices – relative poverty, term extension, or corruption – is not conducive to good governance.

He goes on to explain that the prize offers a fourth option – govern well and be fiscally rewarded, recieving a prize worth more than the Nobel prize.

Clearly a few hundred thousand a year isn’t going to be sufficient for some African rulers. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission of Nigeria calculated that roughly $400 billion was appropriated by Nigeria’s military leaders, much of it ending up in bank accounts outside the nation. (A page from the admittedly partisan AgainstBabangida.com shows amounts found in bank accounts linked to different Nigeria generals – it claims the information is from the 1999 Financial Times, but I haven’t been able to verify the sourcing of the figures. It suggests that General Babangida and General Sani Abacha were each able to expropriate tens of billions of dollars… Then again, Mobutu Sese Seko, who many believed plundered $5 billion from Zaire over the decades of his rule, may well have stolen only in the hundreds of millions, given that he died leaving only a few million in his Swiss accounts…)

But the prize isn’t designed to convince the Mobutus of the world that good governance beats dictatorial plunder – it’s designed to reward leaders like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, John Kufuor or Amadou Touré, who will likely leave office after fulfilling their terms and will need to figure out what you do after leading your nation. The hope attached to the Ibrahim prize is that retired African leaders might be able to be constructive civil society figures, perhaps in the way former American presidents like Carter and Clinton have been since leaving office.

(I don’t know José María Figueres, the former president of Costa Rica, well, but I’ve had some excellent conversations with him over the years at meetings we’ve both attended. When he was leaving his position with the World Economic Forum, I asked him what it was like to be a former president looking for work. He smiled and gave an answer I’m sure he’s given a few thousand times: “You know, it’s a new direction for people in my situation. Historically, being a Latin American president wasn’t a job you survived.”)

I think Ibrahim may have an interesting solution to a real problem, but it’s easy to see why others might find the prize silly, depressing or embarrasing. I’m expecting to see more posts like Gathara’s, titled “Bribing Africa’s Leaders to Stop Corruption“, which reads in part:

Of course [Ibrahim] would never call it what it really is: a bribe. While heads of government on other continents are expected to deliver peace and prosperity with only their people’s gratitude and a pension as compensation, in Africa’s case this is considered a tall order. This prize reaffirms the view that African leaders (and by implication, the African societies that produce them) are irredeemably corrupt. It is a view widely held not just outside, but within the continent.

I’d like to think that there’s a middleground between idealism and reality that gives space for an idea like Ibrahim’s to succeed – find the folks who are leading their countries out of idealism, but give them a real reward for fulfilling our expectations. But I find Gathara’s objections compelling as well – there’s a need to expect good governance in Africa, not to reward it as something extraordinary.

• Global Voices Online � Blog Archive � Kenyan Blogosphere: Debate over social responsibility, freedom of speech, and censorship
  Ndesanjo's overview of the controversy in the Kenyan Blog Ring about the removal of a blog from the aggregator
  (tags: kenya weblogs africa globalvoices)
• JET LAG – Review – Theater – New York Times
  NYT review of Jetlag, a play about a woman who flies her grandson to Amsterdam 167 times to avoid having the boy live with his father, and about Donald Crowhurst's doomed sea voyage
  (tags: poptech theatre blogs)
• Reporters sans fronti�res – Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index – 2006
  Press freedom index for 2006 – some good news in Africa, lousy news in America and the Middle East… and Russia’s really shown in a bad light
  (tags: press freedomofspeech journalism)

I got invited to participate in a post-WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) poll organized by UNESCO to determine just what sort of online collaboration system the 40,000 who attended WSIS whould use to collaborate online. I know that online collaboration can bring people together, but I had no idea it had already moved my native land to Europe. Does this mean my taxes just went up?