Global Voices in the top 200 blogs

I've been a fan of Global Voices, since I discovered it. Via Ethan Zuckerman's blogpost I learned that it's now in the top 200 blogs of Technorati, the blog search engine. The slogan of Global Voices is: "The World is talking, are you listening?" and they hope to make information available via blogs all over the world, but particularly in the south more accessible. You can search and subscribe per country or per theme. Via Beth Kanter, and Emmanuel K Bensah, who are both bridgebloggers for Global Voices (Cambodja and Ghana respectively) I learned what a bridgeblogger is. A bridgeblogger is a person who reads blogs from a particular country and reposts information that may have value to a wider audience. For local bloggers, it's a great way not to drown in the ocean of blogs and become more visible. Reuters , the news agency, places a feeds from Global Voices. See above for the example of Global Voices of Ghana on the Ghanaian page. So if you are a new Ghanaian blogger, and you write a good post, you may appear on the Reuters page!

From Ethan:

22.4% of our visitors come from the US, 3.6% from the UK, and the other 74%
are spread around the world, including substantial userbases in China, India,
the Phillipines, Brazil, and Qatar. Compare that to the New York Times, with
over 50% of users in the US, or BBC, with over 30% in the UK, and it’s clear
that we’ve got something of an unusual audience pattern.

The fact that only a minority of visitors are from the north (though Ethan doesn't talk about Europe), shows that you cannot 'push' information to people who aren't interested, in the north. I believe that it's hard to evoke changes in development by websites alone, but it can be a good supportive strategy. And ofcourse, it is a great resource for people in the south, and the people who ARE already interested in what's happening in the south