Some Global Voices geekery

Two bits of GlobalVoices news:

We’re trying an interesting experiment with our colleagues at Reuters today. Reuters is hosting a panel on journalistic coverage of the ongoing war in Iraq, asking some prominent US journalists to talk about what they see as biases in coverage of the conflict. We’ve asked five bloggers who either work with Global Voices, or who we’ve pointed to, to participate in the conversation remotely. They’ll be watching a streamcast of the event and commenting in the #globalvoices IRC channel on freenode or on their blogs. Rebecca will be monitoring the IRC channel while in the room in New York and will give voice to questions from the channel.

This is a model we’ve used quite effectively at Global Voices events in the past – it’s a good way to give voice to folks who can’t physically be at the event. Whether or not it will work at an event where most people aren’t used to having an IRC backchannel will be interesting to see.

It’s given me (and Boris… and Daniel Beck… and several other geeks I’ve been able to beg favors from) a chance to play with WFIC, a flash-based IRC client that we’ve installed to let folks who don’t usually use IRC participate in the discussion. It’s not a perfect solution – it lacks many features standalone IRC clients have – and it’s been a challenge to debug, as it’s written in flash, PHP and French, three languages I don’t speak. But it works – mostly – and I soon will have the mother of all bug reports to send to the authors describing the tweaks we’ve made to the software. Check it out, if you like… though if you’re going to join the chat, fire up a real IRC client and join us that way…

I wrote a little piece of logfile analysis code the other day to try to figure out how many sites had adopted our Free Hao Wu badges. (Roughly 430, if you’re curious…) I realized that it could be pretty trivially modified to parse the (fricking huge) Global Voices logfiles for references to the pretty GVO badges we provide for users. What results is an interesting picture of the GVO ecosystem – the blogs of people who support our project by pointing folks to our content. Roughly 900 people have graced their blogs with the big GVO badge (like the one I’ve got flying in my sidebar) – about 1,400 run either the big or small badge. A quick glance through folks showing the badges is a fascinating tour through the world of bridgeblogs, including some of our regular contributors and regional editors… as well as some fans who haven’t contributed towards the site, but drive traffic to us. (If the links don’t work for you, try adding “www.” at the beginning of the link – I’ve stripped off www’s to help combine domains…) If anyone’s looking for an interesting data visualization project, I think I’ve got one for you – mapping the interlinkages between the multinational, multilingual blogs in this set would be pretty fascinating, I think.