"I don't want the computer to be part of the performance. It's just a pencil."

The same goes for what I do with my colleagues. One of the reasons I think Zoe Keating is so interesting.

Beyond Bizlex: Ceasefire Liberia

I'm back in the office - and it seems quite a lot has happened since I placed the blog on auto-pilot. Hopefully I'll have some time to get to all of it.

While I was away my latest column in Business Lexington ran - it's a feature on Ceasefire Liberia, an innovative new project led by a journalist named Ruthie Ackerman and supported by my friends at Global Voices Online.

It turns out there's a rather interesting link between Liberia and Kentucky. The Bluegrass Region is actually the birthplace of two Liberian Presidents. I think this is the kind of column my editors had in mind when they brought me aboard - find a local link to a global issue.

I had the chance to do a quick email Q&A with Ruthie Ackerman - as always, here's the complete back-and-forth.

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What is Ceasefire Liberia and its mission?

Ceasefire Liberia is a blog bridge between the Liberian community in Liberia and the rest of the Diaspora. Its mission is to create a dialogue between Liberians who remained in the country during and after the war and those who fled. You can see the blog at www.ceasefireliberia.com

How did you learn about this project and get involved?

I started the project with the help of a grant from Global Voices, a non-profit organization of bloggers. I am a journalist who is writing a book about Liberian youth in Staten Island. As the project developed over the last few years it became more multi-media focused. I decided that instead of just documenting the experience of Liberian youth living in this one community in America after they fled their country's 14-year civil war, I wanted to give the youth the chance to document their own experiences. Thus, Ceasefire Liberia was born. Now instead of just a book, there are several short films, and a blog, which includes video and photography.

What's your impression of how the project participants have benefited?

The project is just getting off the ground now, but already I can see the impact it has made. Young people who never would have interacted previously are now planning and making short video pieces together. Liberian youth who were dealing drugs and told me they felt they had no way out of their situation are now saying that they feel they can really make a difference in their community through blogging and video. Young Liberians in Staten Island are communicating with young Liberians in Liberia telling each other about their lives. This is the power of technology to bring people together and bring about social change.

Why should people in Kentucky (or anywhere else for that matter) care about this project?

I love this question. People in Kentucky or anywhere else should care about this project because the world is not just about what's happening my my backyard anymore -- it's about a global backyard. With globalization the entire world is interconnected. This means that what I do impacts people in Africa and vice versa. Liberia is a perfect example of this. Liberia was created by the American Colonization Society to send freed black slaves back to Africa where they were meant to live in racial harmony. That one action led to over a century and a half of tension and turmoil in Liberia between the Liberians who originally lived on the land and the new settlers. Eventually when tensions bubbled over a gruesome civil war broke out, which led Liberians to flee back to America, coming full circle. Now these Liberian refugees are literally in our backyard. We didn't intervene in their civil war in the 1990's and now the fallout is a large number of Liberian refugees that are falling through the cracks here in our very own cities and suburbs.

What's your understanding of the perspective Liberians have of the way they're treated in the US and the other countries they've relocated?

My understanding is that Liberians have always looked to America as their big brother. The Liberian flag is similar to our flag and Liberia's capital of Monrovia was named after our president James Monroe. But from what I understand Liberians are bitterly disappointed about the way they've been treated by America. They feel let down by America's handling of their civil war when America could have stepped in and ended it quickly, saving thousands of lives. They are hurt that Pres. Reagan continued to support former Pres. Samuel Doe financially despite his record of human rights abuses. Then when Liberians arrive in the U.S. they are left to struggle and many fall through the cracks. Liberians expected more from the U.S.

Is there anything you've gleaned from the struggle between acclimating to a new home and maintaining your cultural identity and customs?

There is always a struggle between the old and the new. It is important for Liberians, like any immigrant or refugee community, to hold onto their cultural identities and not forget where they came from. But it is also important if they want to integrate into American society to assimilate and acclimate and integrate. Thus the tensions between both worlds. The more the communities around Liberians reach out to them and provide much-needed services the better off they'll be and the more integrated they'll feel.

What do Americans gain by supporting projects like this?

Americans gain an understanding -- a glimpse -- of what the world beyond their four walls looks like. I believe that all boats rise with the tide so when one family or individual in a community is doing better than everyone benefits.

You and others can find out more by going to the ceasefire website and reading what the youth -- and I-- have written. You can also look at some of my earlier work on this project at : http://pulitzercenter.typepad.com/liberia/

That link is for the blog but you can also see more information about the project here: http://www.pulitzercenter.org/showproject.cfm?id=40

This Is A Blog About Issues, After All

Enjoy your weekend. I'll be back soon.

More Smart People on Video

Blog vs. Print

On Video.

Smart People On Video

Blogmonday

I don't know if Mark is even still doing this, but it's his idea, so blame him. I'm not even here right now. Some blogs:

Jackfruity - cool stuff about technology, social media, journalism, and Uganda. Now there's something you don't write every day.

Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog - OK, so the title isn't all that original and he doesn't update very frequently but this dude is SMART.

Burning Bridge - from another outstanding global citizen, Ivan Sigal.

and a "green pick of the week" for the ecomonday crowd: Ecopolitology.

I'm sick of coldplay a capella, so here's something actually smart and useful:

2010 Alltech FEI Games

The World According To Mom - apparently still going...

You may recall a while back I participated in a project with Catherine "Her Bad Mother" Connors and some of the the editors at Global Voices Online we called "The World According To Mom." It really took off - to the point where I was having a lot of trouble keeping track of every post.

I'm completely sure I don't have all the posts, but I figured I should at least mention the ones I did see since I said I would... I count 312 posts from bloggers representing 44 countries and 8 languages. The additions I found since the last update:

South Africa: Expensive Mistakes and Cheap Thrills, Angel's Mind
USA: Keep Your Day Job - But You Ought To Write Too, Life at Willow Manor, Sands Random Ramblings, Turning Stones, Mama Mutterings, The Child, A Lawyer Mom's Musings, Suburb Sanity, Pajama Mom, Mistress Stash Enhancer
India: What's On My Mind, YOnEarthNot, HappyFeet N Me, A Journey Called Life, Apya and Bubbu
France: The Ancient Sword
Ireland: K8 the GR8
Philippines: Calculated Spontaneity, iMom
United Arab Emirates: A Baby Story

I also saw an impressive post from the Shutter Sisters, where the members of that community from several countries added comments with links to pictures that fit the meme. And Catherine wrote a second "five things" post in celebration of her son's birthday, and published it on her Belief.net blog.

As I wrote in my previous update I'm hoping others pick this up, track and catalogue the posts. I know the Global Voices team has some great ideas to highlight their coverage of this. We're all juggling busy schedules so it's not always top of mind, but if you're a mom and you're looking for some inspiration, I think you'll find your fellow moms have plenty to share.

The Perils Of Nomenclature

My wife is a social science researcher, and a damn good one. As I've listened to her talk about her work from time to time, I've learned a little bit about quantitative versus qualitative research. She is a stickler for rigorous methodology - she takes the time to learn things like "structural equation modeling" and "growth curve modeling" and she pays close attention to the methodology sections of the gazillions of journal articles that cross her desk, and she makes it a priority in her own work. However, it's unfair to describe my wife as a "number cruncher." I've learned from her that qualitative research - the kind of research that can't always be summed up in a formula output - is also incredibly valuable.

So it's interesting to watch social scientists build the research base for the "nascent" field of online social media, and to watch companies develop tools and systems that try to peg a value to online communication. It's really a relentless and sometimes reckless exercise in nomenclature, and it almost completely ignores qualitative research.

The smart folks at Forrester wrote a book called Groundswell (and there's a blog with the same name) that had a lot of interesting and valuable information about social media, especially as it pertains to marketing. The one thing that most people repeat about it, however, is the authors' attempts to classify people in to six categories of "audience engagement," with category names such as "spectators" and "critics." I'm pretty sure the authors stress that a person can be in one category for one topic (or product) and another category for something else, but that's a level of nuance that seems to be lost on too many of my flackitudinous brethren and sistren. (Yes, I know I'm making words up here. Just roll with it.)

Then of course I've seen countless posts from smart people trying to "define" and classify social media from their own commercial perspectives - is it marketing or public relations? Is there a "right" way or a "wrong" way to use certain tools? I've seen heated arguments that really boil down to nothing more than nomenclature - if you don't do a certain thing, you don't fit my definition, and therefore you're not... something. And these are reasonably smart people doing this. Maybe I just don't get it.

I've also seen a blog called shouting loudly from another group of smart people and one particular post caught my eye - "A Few Things Political Scientists Need To Stop Getting Wrong About The Blogosphere." In it, one smart academic type essentially disagrees with another smart academic type about a calculation of authority. Go read it yourself. The post author, David Karpf, has even gone so far as to create a "Blogosphere Authority Index" for political blogs that strikes me as somewhat similar to the Todd Andrlik's "Power 150" algorithm for marketing blogs.

These are some of the tools that PR flacks use to determine what a "top" blog is. But they're using only quantitative tools, and questionable ones at that. I could jack up my blog's "technorati authority" simply by creating a bunch of single-post blogs that link to it. I could get into a flame war with a reader and write 500 comments on one post, but it would only be two people virtually shouting at each other. Just about every measure used in calculations like these can be (and often are) manipulated.

There are people on Karpf's BAI that I'd consider enormously influential in politics, and then there are people on that same list with virtually no real influence at all. It doesn't matter how many posts they write or how many comments or links they get. If you REALLY know the political blogosphere, you know that bloggers get inbound links all the time from other bloggers MOCKING them. The political blogosphere is a nasty place, with plenty of arguments via comments and trackback links - but while these online arguments will inflate a blog's technical measures of "authority," they certainly don't equate to political influence. Verbosity is not a true indicator of political influence, at least in my opinon.

Sometimes I look at the Power 150 - apparently so awesome that AdAge decided to buy it - and I scratch my head. Again, there are some people on that list with enormous credibility and influence, and then there are people high on that list who are almost universally recognized as being unable to strategize their way out of a paper bag. Putting a hashtag at the end of your tweet doesn't make you smart if the tweet says "still stuck in this damn paper bag." And I don't care how often you use the word "Facebook" in public - being a panelist or a keynote speaker at big conferences usually just means your firm ponied up a lot of money.

You want to know influence? Don't just look at the blog, look at the blogger. Does he or she work in the industry they write about? How educated are they? Do they discuss their projects and the concepts they're grappling with? Do they publish in other platforms? Are they raising money for candidates or making more money than their competitors? And is what they're writing actually smart, or is it just a bunch of metaphors describing the trendy new social media platform? Are they appearing at conferences that AREN'T just social media marketing gigs? I'm not convinced you can combine this all into a number, though I'm sure someone will try. I think it's better to write a profile of someone than assign a technorati rank to them.

It's never been that hard to determine who's smart and who's not.

Is This Thing On?

I'm heading out for a couple of weeks, but there are a few posts lined up in a queue that may just show up if I know what I'm doing. Enjoy your weekend.

Meantime, the Digital Metropolis guy asked me to post this for him. It's NOT Coldplay.

Knowing Where To Look - And Who To Know

I've been having a series of discussions with colleagues and others about getting the most accurate and complete assessment of an issues-based online conversation. This isn't the same thing as a keyword search for a product name or a company name, and it isn't the same as categorizing blog posts as "positive," "negative" or "neutral." It's about revealing the layers of nuance in a multi-faceted issue that can't break along the lines of "for" or "against."

Let's say you're a company executive with an interest in what the federal government may change in the regulation of health care. No one opposes "reform," but everyone has a different idea of what "reform" means. For example, there are those who oppose a "public option" in the health care debate but don't use those words. Most of those who support a "public option" don't agree on the details. For doctors, the idea of reform centers around how and what a "payer" (i.e., an insurance company or the government) compensates a doctor for particular services. For consumers, the concept of "reimbursement" is essentially absent from the discussion - it centers on how much you pay an insurance company and what you have to pay for after that.

Go to Google and type in "health care reform" and you get 19,600,000 results, plus a list of sponsored links that provide language that has probably been so focus-grouped that all the meaning has been filtered out of it. Further, the "top results" provide a lot of positional rhetoric but not a lot of analysis or projection.

Go to uber-human-search engine Mahalo and type in "health care reform" and Mahalo asks you a question - "Is 'health care reform' a person, place, thing, event, how to, or other?" Of course, you could argue that "health care reform" is "other," but how helpful is that? And by the way, who likes having their question answered with a question?

Now realize that the people actually making the decisions about America's health care system have never seen about 19,599,800 of the 19,600,000 of the search results you found at Google. Further, references to the most important discussions these people have had about health care - if you can find them on the Internet at all - are very likely buried between search results 15 and 16 million. They're not in the newspaper, they're not on tv or radio.

The most critical discussions are taking place in closed rooms among participants who don't want to be watched. I don't mean that in the conspiracy-theory, crypto-clearance, oh-my-God-they're-plotting-to-take-over-your-body way. I mean that many of the sensitive and complicated discussions about health care (and many other issues) require a quiet and deliberative environment.

There's a difference between "quiet" and "secret," however. These are not secret discussions; in fact, most of the details are available to anyone who wants to know them. It's just that there aren't many people with the education, experience and patience to pay attention to them - or even realize that's what they're looking at. There's an even smaller subset of people in that group who know how to translate health-policy-speak into plain English. And an even smaller subset of those who operate online.

If we apply the measures most commonly used in the social media world, most of these people aren't "influential" at all - if they write a blog or appear online, not many people read it or link to it. They write pieces that aren't optimized for search engines. Many barely show up on the radar. But they wield enormous influence in the areas that truly matter. They walk in the same circles as those who make the decisions that affect everyone. Sometimes they ARE the people who make the decisions.

So to me, this is where social media search must evolve. We need to move from keywords and hashtags to PEOPLE. Google and Technorati and all the shiny "dashboard" tools PR firms build that just look at Google and Technorati only take you so far. I need to do the simple keyword search, sure. But if I want the real picture, I have to find the people who really know, who have really read up on this, who influence the process and the outcome of a given issue. I have to know them ahead of time.

It's very difficult to automate that. It's easier to find people who truly know where to look.

Blogmonday

It's Monday again, so that means this was Mark's idea. Blame him. Which is odd because it seems like I'm doing this more than he does now. OK, some wholesome social media goodness for the week:

The Radiolab blog - this is one of my favorite podcasts, introduced to me by a pal who lives here in Lexington.

Yogabeans - "Your Internet Source for Plastic Action Figures Demonstrating Yoga." I love blogs with self-explanatory subheadings. It isn't updated anymore, but let's face it - this is timeless.

Knowledge Problem - it's a blog written by two economists who focus a lot on the economics of energy. They're smart.

The Mom Slant - I've been calling this "Mothergoosemouse 2.0" but it's gotten to the point where it has its own identity.

As a shout-out to the "ecomonday" crowd, I'll add Inhabitat.

And I promise only to embed a few dozen more of these. After all the Digital Metropolis guy loves them. (Even he says this is getting tired now, though.)

Speech Clouds: President Obama Addresses the Muslim World

From the President's speech in Cairo this morning. Thanks again, Wordle.

I wonder how the speech might look had someone else given it.

Adding My Voice

It's no secret that I've been singing the praises of Global Voices Online and its advocacy arm for some time now. So when I saw this - even though it's a contest run by organization that's working closely with a competitor - I thought it was important to add my voice to a global chorus in support of Global Voices Advocacy.

Zemanta has a new add-on tool for blogs, and they're trying to promote blogging for a cause. The cause that gets the most blog posts will win $3,000.

I vote for Global Voices Advocacy, because they represent the future of activism and communication in a newly-wired developing world.

There are dozens of great causes participating in this contest, and each deserves support. For at least part of my career I spent time focusing on the developing world and trying to find solutions through trade and intellectual property rules to the enormous public health challenges in the poorest countries. I quickly learned that there are far more urgent priorities than a rulebook and a tariff schedule updated regularly in Geneva, and the top priority can be summed up in a single word: infrastructure.

When most people hear the word "infrastructure" they think roads and bridges and ports. When they hear "communications infrastructure" they usually think about fiber-optic cables or cellphone towers. And they're right. But infrastructure is also about people. It's about people with the right training, in the right place, at the right time. Bridges don't get built without engineers and construction workers. Communications networks don't get utilized without people who know how to use them.

You could make medicines for HIV, tuberculosis and malaria available for free, but they're useless if there isn't a system in place to distribute and administer those medicines. That means you need working ports to unload the vaccines and the medical supplies, but you also need everyone from the person who knows how to drive a truck on rough terrain without tipping over to the person who knows how to give a vaccine to the person who knows how to convince others to come back regularly for care. In too many places that's all the same person, and if anything happens to her or him, the entire infrastructure is gone.

History has shown that the key to preventing disease - as well as addressing any number of injustices - is the free flow of information.

Global Voices Advocacy is providing that channel for information to flow both ways - they're quite literally building and training a network of advocates and communicators where they're needed most, and they're helping those whose voices haven't been heard before share their stories and solutions. They're building the links between those "in the field" and those in the boardrooms and the broadcast booth. Global Voices Advocacy is the human global communications infrastructure of the 21st century. It is the foundation upon which large-scale grassroots campaigns will be built.

On top of that, they're redefining the "business of journalism." The global news network of the future is going to look a lot more like Global Voices than it will BBC or CNN - a loose coalition of smart people leveraging low-cost technology for high-concept results with sound production values. They'll circumvent censorship and oppression with flip-phones and portable solar chargers. They'll download data and conduct research from internet cafes in Ghana. They'll produce compelling, high-definition content with laptops and $200 cameras. Language barriers will be virtually meaningless. Most importantly, they'll be constantly growing their ranks as people understand the value of telling their own stories and learning from others.

How can you raise awareness about a specific disease, or recruit people to address a tragedy, or offer a solution to a problem, if there's no way to tell your story to the world in your own words?

This blog post is part of Zemanta's “Blogging For a Cause” (http://www.zemanta.com/bloggingforacause/) campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

Blogmonday

OK, I'm back. Last week was crazy busy. But it's Monday, which means this whole thing was Mark's idea and you should blame him. I've also noticed that the green tweeters are using Mondays to promote their own through "ecomonday," so I'll try to add a green blog to each monday post - sort of my "green picks of the week" mini-me. (yes, I know I've neglected that as well. BAD blogger. BAD.)

OK, here goes:

White African: I don't know this guy but he writes about how new technologies can improve the quality of life in Africa and the rest of the developing world, so he has to be cool.

On Social Marketing and Social Change: I've followed this blog for some time now and it keeps getting better. Strong focus on using social marketing (the theoretical constructs that guide the design of social media tools) to have a positive impact on global health.

Get Better Health: Dr. Val Jones is a medical blogging rockstar, and she's built quite the network. I also notice that one of my colleagues contributes to her blog.

Blood and Milk: A colleague turned me on to this blog recently. It's about international development, and the author has specific expertise in global health.

And my special bonus green blog add-on: Maria Energia. She knows environmental policy & technology very well; she knows communications very well, and from what I understand is about to be very busy. Congrats & kudos to her.

I've also decided, in honor of the guy who writes Digital Metropolis, that for the forseeable future I will post an acoustic or a cappella version of his absolute favorite song every Monday. He's told me how Coldplay's "Viva la Vida" represents the single greatest cultural achievement of the decade. I'm not sure I'd go that far - in fact, I don't particularly care for it - but it sticks in your head and this guy knows music better than I do so he must be on to something. Here goes: