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My friend Paul’s new website, The School of Everything. Check it out. Teach something, make friends, make a scarf.

I can’t help feeling frustrated at the news of Guantánamo’s 6th anniversary on 11 January. Hundreds of innocent people (including one journalist) locked up under inhumane conditions for SIX years, and there’s not a shred of hope something like THAT would ever become a campaign issue in the US presidential elections. Who would want to be seen supporting “terrorists”?

Amnesty International has a new campaign to collect at least 500,000 signatures on this new website that slowly eats away at an image of the prison, one pixel per signature. The audiovisual site, called Tear it Down, also provides grueling facts and dates, such as:

“Up to 86% of detainees held at Guantánamo were arrested by the Afghan Northern Alliance and in Pakistan at a time when rewards of up to US$5,000 were paid for every unidentified terror suspect handed over to US forces.”

In California, the pro bono lawyers of two Guantánamo detainees have a blog where they keep track of news about the detention facility, and also provide updates about their own interactions with their clients. Here’s the depressing news from last week:

Today I received a letter from Mr. Al-Ghizzawi in which he informs me that he has recently seen a doctor and the doctor informed him that he has AIDs. It will take some time for me to confirm this information as the government is reluctant to give out any information to the prisoners or their attorneys but you can bet I will be doing everything I can to find out the truth.

How sad that many of the countries of origin of the majority of detainees themselves have abysmal records on democracy and freedom of expression. Somehow it makes their pleas for justice and criticism of the United States ring hollow. And vice versa. Any policy condoning any degree of torture or illegal detention, perpetuates the practice worldwide. At least that’s what I think.

Who am I to question the science? Technorati, the blog search engine, claims that Global Voices is the 90th top blog in the world based on the number of “blog reactions” to the site in the past 6 months. That’s incredible. And wonderful.

More than enough silliness coming out of Fox these days to keep this site busy: Fox Attacks. Barak Obama refused to go on Fox for months, but this morning (in spite of a petition for him and Edwards to refuse the network) he granted an interview to the show, Fox & Friends about the New Hampshire primary.

CNN just asked their correspondents around the world to report on the US, and they nearly all said people around the world were cheering for Obama (especially in Kenya). The only exception was in Ramallah, where the correspondent said people were not in the least optimistic about any of the candidates.

Global Voices has a couple of reports about Obama from Iranian and Caribbean bloggers, and we’ve got another global round up planned for later today. How depressing, that the fact that a candidate is popular abroad could actually work against him in the United States… When you think back to all the global negativity about Bush in 2004, it’s really startling that he still won.

Right now, in Israel, bloggers are upset that President Bush’s current visit to Israel is costing taxpayers an astonishing $25,000 an hour, among other things.

Fouad al-Farhan is one of the few Saudi bloggers who talks about politics using his real name. He is outspoken in favor of freedom and against political corruption. He was arrested a few weeks ago and is being held for “questioning” without charges. His family cannot speak to him. Saudi Arabia has imprisoned many journalists in the past, but this is the first time a blogger has been arrested. A global movement of bloggers are campaigning to free him. Please sign the petition, it may really help.

I got the video from fantastic blog called Osocio that links to social advertising and non-profit campaigns (via Sivacracy).

I’m in Germany right now, and the only English language news television I’ve been able to watch on the assassination of Benzair Bhutto is CNN International, which people tend to say is “better than the American one”. I saw no evidence of this last night as the hosts of a daily news program clumsily attempted to look like they knew what they were talking about, then cut to a clip of Pervez Musharraf and introduced him as the president of Afghanistan. Bhutto has only been in the media non-stop for the past month, but these pretty faces they hire to deliver the news must not have time to pick up a newspaper or book. Their coverage is so sloppy and superficial. The only people who make any sense are the Pakistanis they interview – at least when they are able to remain on point in spite of the silly questions they ask.

On openDemocracy, Kanish Tharoor, walks us through what they could have asked instead. CNN is so darn black-and-white. They present her as a hero of democracy with little mention of her actual record in office, the numerous corruption charges, back-room dealings with Musharraf, illusions of grandeur, or any number of criticisms that are tactfully outlined in this obituary in the New York Times. If you’re looking for any kind of depth of insight about what people in Pakistan may be thinking after this violent assassination, try Global Voices special coverage page, where we are linking to new posts from South Asian bloggers daily.

As a teenager I once picked up Bhutto’s autobiography at a library in Denmark. It was one of the first non-fiction books I ever read. I had traveled to Pakistan with my father when I was just nine years old, and I was impressed how a woman could become Prime minister of a country where female professors teach male students behind screens and need male escorts to walk around in public. The story was exciting from a female perspective, and I still remember details of her house arrest today. The circumstances of her death are tragic, but I hope her legacy may inspire more women to lead in the future.

The first thing I ever did for openDemocracy was to create this hand-coded time line of copyright history. I was reminded by it today when I saw Andy Carvin’s work-in-progress, time line of blogging. Back then, the world was all excited about Napster file-sharing, and nobody had yet invented the Creative Commons. If someone would like to continue the copyright time line, or spruce it up with some fresh code – it’s there for the taking. I still think it’s neat.

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.