Democracy Now! broadcast Wednesday from the TechSoup NetSquared Conference at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Ca. The conference's theme is “Remixing the web for social change.” The show talked to people active in creating citizen's media.

Here's the guests:

  • Hong Eun-taek, editor-in-chief of the International edition of OhmyNews.com, one of the largest participatory journalism news sites on the internet. The Korean site has about 40,000 citizen reporters that contribute their own stories. The International edition publishes articles submitted by 600 own citizen reporters scattered across 60 countries.
  • Ethan Zuckerman, blogger and activist. Zuckerman is a Research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He is co-founder of Global Voices, a project designed to feature citizen-created media from around the world. He writes about Africa, international development and the media at his website, www.EthanZuckerman.com.
  • Saori Fotenos, a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University. She is founder and director of Vamos Blogar (“Let”s Blog”). Vamos Blogar is a literacy program that teaches children in urban areas of Brazil about weblogging and other forms of media.

    • Some excerpts:

    HONG EUN-TAEK: We launched our site six years ago with four full-time staff members and 727 citizen reporters, and it has grown into a big operation with actually 43,000 citizen reporters.

    AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean “citizen reporters”?

    HONG EUN-TAEK: Our statement is that everyone can be a reporter, so news stories can be written by citizens who are expert on their lives, so they can write about their lives and what they believe and what they want to see in the society.

    AMY GOODMAN: And then, what happens? They submit it to OhmyNews, and what happens to it from there?

    HONG EUN-TAEK: So, then our copy editors take a close look at the stories, and we decide whether it is published or not, and once it is decided to be published, then we can place those articles on the main page and the section pages.

    AMY GOODMAN: How popular is this website on the net?

    HONG EUN-TAEK: Every day we have 400,000 visitors a day.

    AMY GOODMAN: How many?

    HONG EUN-TAEK: I'm sorry, 500,000 visitors a day. ...

    AMY GOODMAN: Ethan Zuckerman, you have been looking at the internet blog landscape for a long time. Can you talk about the significance of the level of participation we're seeing and how it relates to social activism?

    ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: What's really incredible is that over the last two or three years, we've seen blogging take off to just an unprecedented degree. At this point, we believe that there's something like 40 to 50 million blogs worldwide. We no longer believe that English is the dominant language of the blogosphere. We actually think that there are probably more Japanese and Chinese language blogs, but what really excites me about this is that you can find people putting together text blogs, audio blogs, video blogs from literally every corner of the globe.

    We started Global Voices Online about 18 months ago to try to feature content from these blogs from all over the world, and early on in the process we discovered that there were people in the Democratic Republic of Congo who were discussing the upcoming elections. There were people throughout the Middle East who were engaged in dialogue between Israel and Palestine or between different Arab nations. We find activists in Cambodia. We find people even in Belarus, taking videos with cell phones of the protests going on around the elections. People are finding ways to use these very, very simple tools to put information online and to share it with a global audience.

    Part of what's so amazing about it is that people are very aware the extent to which it is a global audience. You will often see people writing very explicitly with the notion that the world is looking and the world is watching, and our job over at Global Voices is to try to actually bring the world to these blogs, to put them in context, in some cases to translate them. We use a team of editors from around the world who find some of the most interesting voices, help explain what's going on in those stories and then put them together on a website.

    AMY GOODMAN: And the website itself is?

    ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: Globalvoicesonline.org.

    AMY GOODMAN: What about bloggers who are found and imprisoned? This is a cause that you have taken on.

    ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: This is a cause that we have been forced to take on for the simple reason that two of our key staff members right now are in detention, unfortunately. Our North Asia editor, Hao Wu, was detained by police in Beijing in late February. He is a blogger, a journalist -- well, he's a blogger and independent filmmaker would be the way to say it. He wouldn't identify as a journalist, but he had done some work for us editing the North Asia section. He has a weblog. He was making a film about underground churches in China, and he has been detained.

    He is being held without a lawyer. His family hasn't been able to speak to him, and we got very active in setting up a campaign for his release. If you go to freehaowu.org, you'll find some information about it. What's honestly been most interesting in his case is that the most passionate advocate for his release, unsurprisingly, is his sister, Nina Wu, who has a blog in Chinese, and we've been translating that on a daily basis and putting that up on the FreeHaoWu site.

    More recently, our friend Alaa Abd El-Fatah, who often reports on the Egyptian blogosphere for us -- he's a democracy activist, an open source activist and blogger from Egypt -- was detained as part of the protests for an Egyptian independent judiciary. What's incredible is that Alaa is actually blogging from prison. He's writing notes in English and in Arabic on scraps of paper. He's passing them to his lawyers and to friends who come to visit with them. They bring them to his wife Manal, who is posting them on their joint blog.

    SAORI FOTENOS: We're teaching children in the favelas, or slums of Brazil, how to blog, and it's an educational program, and we teach them not to just blog with text. With the advent now of very cheaply available multimedia blogs, video, audio, as Ethan mentioned, we can teach children who are not necessarily functionally literate to start contributing their voices without being able to type and actually write words. They have shots of -- they use a webcam to stand in front and sing a song. They do actual video productions, and we, you know, have taught them how to do that, and interestingly, one of the things that they like to do a lot is to take drawings and paintings that they've done, paper and pencil, not electronically, and scan them in and actually put them on the blog, and then what that entices them to do is to -- once they have this knowledge that this information is on the web, they go back -- they are willing and eager to go back to the blog and read the comments that people leave about their artwork and then write back, and so it engages them into actually doing reading and writing, which otherwise they are not confident in doing, they don't do enough of.