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Authors who want feedback on a book or text from online readers have experimented with publication in both wikis and blogs, but both methods seem a little stunted. I did a story for Danish radio recently on the future of the book, where I try to describe a new Wordpress theme by the Instute for the Future of the Book called CommentPress that allows people to write “in the margins” of a book to offer feedback on a specific paragraph or point. (Go ahead, you try to explain that on the radio.)

Ethan Zuckerman featured several different annotation experiments in his blog the other day. Among them, this genius approach from the Free Software Foundation.

Imagine how wonderful it would be if something like this were used in UN Summit context, where delegates pour over sentences and paragraphs for weeks in order to generate “a document” for the meeting. Imagine if it were also live on the internet for the whole world to see at the same time. In a perfect world the delegates would use the tool themselves. In the meantime, who will be the first activist to sit in on the process and do it for them? It’s such a complex bureaucratic process – having a more visual representation of what goes on would be great.

Hello? Is this Desmond Tutu? Of course I don’t mind if Mary Robinson and Graça Machel are on the line. Happy Human Rights Day. Oh, and thanks for everything you’ve done to make the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the UN Declaration for Human Rights such a positive occasion. So how are you?

And that is pretty much how the conference call did not go.

Me and five other Global Voices bloggers were given the opportunity to ask questions of these incredible human rights leaders who have recently joined forces with other great leaders as The Elders. The conference call system was very bad, and we didn’t all get to ask the questions we prepared, but the conversation was fluid, and the Elders on the line were genuine and friendly. I’ve written more about what they said on openDemocracy and Global Voices. Hopefully, next time there is such a call, hundreds more bloggers could listen in.

The Elders want to reach out to bloggers because they’ve launched a campaign to help “reclaim human rights for individuals”. It’s called Every Human Has Rights and it involves getting around a billion people to sign the Declaration of Human Rights (go sign, you’ll be impressed to read the plain text version). They’re also asking people and groups to upload human rights videos to The Hub.

So much gets hidden in the world of NGOs, IGOs, conferences and summits, that reaching out to ordinary citizens (or “extraordinary,” as Tutu says) is key. Technology is enabling people everywhere to document and broadcast their own life situations via websites like Global Voices and The Hub. It’s exactly the ammunition human rights leaders need to help push for change.

It’s remarkable that citizen media has come this far. When global heroes like the ones above are asking bloggers for their help, advice, and attention, it means there’s real power there to be tapped. We need to think hard about what more we can do to amplify the voices of people around the world who really need to be heard.

One way to begin is to listen.

Over on Global Voices, Chinese editor John Kennedy is doing a tremendous job of covering a mass protest of ant farmers (yes, ant farmers) in Shenyang, China which is being systematically silenced by the government.

It’s a huge scandal where a major company selling health supplements (the active ingredient is ants) has filed for bankruptcy taking thousands of workers’ personal investments in ant farming equipment down the drain.

Pictures, videos, and forum comments posted on Chinese websites are quickly being removed by the authorities, but John and other bloggers are copying and translating them on other sites before they disappear forever.

More than 11,000 people in China have visited the post already.

This guy is our new Prime Minister again:

So, the right wing Liberal government led by prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen continues for another term. And the most depressing thing about the election is actually that turn out was excellent (82%) and voting was fair – but the Danish public still voted for the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim Danish People’s Party in huge numbers. It remains the third biggest party of the country.

I didn’t follow the elections closely this time. It was very rushed and the outcome was pretty much predicted from the start. Also, I am no longer allowed to vote, because my genius government believes I am less Danish if I have lived outside the country for more than 2 years. Or maybe it’s just that I am less likely to vote for a bigot?

One of the interesting things about these elections is the way the internet has factored in. In the United States they say 2004 was the first “internet election”. Presidential candidates discovered blogs, online fundraising, and social networking. Danish media and politicians have had a comparable epiphany in 2007 with the supercharged additions of Facebook, YouTube, and Google map APIs. If you read Danish, the regional RSS aggregator Overskrift.dk has some great analysis of which politicians blogged, who blogged about them, and what they all talked about.

In addition to blogging at blogbyblog.dk (technology) and borgerdemokrati.dk (politics) my father has now also launched a personal weblog at danlarsen.net. Who said blogging wasn’t addictive? Might be more economical to consolidate at some point, but in the meantime delineation is probably helpful.

I blogged about this already in Danish on blogbyblog.dk – but anyone with a good idea for a blogging project in a “marginalized” community, should write it up and submit it to Rising Voices – the new Global Voices outreach project run by my colleague David Sasaki. We are giving out grants of max $5000 to the best projects. Deadline for application is November 30. The application process is styled like a group brainstorm in a wiki (see instructions). So far Rising Voices grantees include a blogging workshop in El Alto, Bolivia, a group blog at a school for women in Bangladesh, and an urban library blogging project in Colombia. Can’t wait to see what this next round of applications will lead to…

My industrious father Dan Larsen has launched a new blog in Danish called Borgerdemokrati.dk. It’s about e-democracy, citizen journalism, and political uses of the internet in Denmark and abroad. With only 13 days left until the national election in Denmark, he’s not letting any politicians off the hook. It’s probably the best blog in Danish. Ever. Check it out.

Like many governments around the world, the US Department of State are dabbling in citizen interaction with a new blog called DIPNOTE. There was a woman from the State Department at the conference I was at last week, who said they “even have young people blogging” for it. But this isn’t something they’ve slapped together with interns. It’s slick and contains carefully edited (and approved) first-person narrative from a range of State Department workers.

As a means of communication and public relations, it’s pretty genius. But as the woman at the conference said, “people can comment all they want, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to change anything”. Okay, so maybe it’s not e-democracy, but they deserve kudos for leaving up the negative comments. While it seems the people whose names are on the posts mostly really are the ones writing them, I think we can expect about as realistic an image of what goes on in the State Department and the countries they operate in as this video shows of America.

Yikes, I’ve just now noticed there’s a link to Global Voices in their sidebar under some very high profile establishment publications (a result of the conference?). How cool that Global Voices has snuck in there right under the Council of Foreign Relations. Talk about influence! Our content belies it, but I hope no one thinks we have anything to do with the US government. Double-kudos to the State Department for reaching out to bloggers of the world and hopefully reading their comments.

Web stats are a really imperfect science. That doesn’t make it any less gratifying to check them. How else would I know who was reading my blog?

My favorite statistical fact relating to this blog, is that the most frequent search term of visitors arriving from search engines is 1) “Dinosaur sex” and 2) “Pet lobster“. If you search for either of these terms in Google my blog appears on the first page of search results. Now that I’ve written this post, it might even appear twice – or higher on the list!

The morale, of course, is that if you want your blog to be famous on the internet, you shouldn’t write about boring things like politics or Al Gore, but stick to what the public really wants to know and isn’t getting information about elsewhere. Like lobster sex. We already know how dinosaurs do it.

Obviously, I myself found both subjects interesting enough to write about in the past (here and here). But if you are one of the curious souls who have searched for information relating to either phenomena and landed on this page, would you please let us know… why?? I await your comments below.

Anti-abortion activists are nearly halfway through a 40 day 24-hour campaign to picket all the Planned Parenthood clinics in the country. They are not actually able to target every single clinic, or even gather that many protesters in all locations. But outside the many clinics where they have, they are successfully terrorizing young women for visiting clinics where they receive medical treatment, sexual health advice, birth control, and abortions.

Planned Parenthood has responded with a quite creative campaign – a blog titled I am Emily X, “the true life diary of a frontline Planned Parenthood worker and activist”. Emily X describes her work day, and interviews colleagues who work with her on video. You can pledge to donate x number of cents per anti-abortion protester she counts on her way to work.

I can’t imagine how awful it must be to be shouted at and harassed for being a doctor at one of these clinics or a patient seeking treatment. I always thought it was bad enough that they make you walk through a metal detectors to even get into the clinics in New York. It’s hard to believe this stuff still goes on the in the United States, and very depressing that even one doctor interviewed for the blog doesn’t feel she can show her face. We need to stand up for everyone’s right to chose when and with whom they have babies.

As I’ve written previously (here and here), women’s rights worldwide are under constant attack from the manipulative and misguided anti-abortion activists in this country. Please support Planned Parenthood if you can.