I did the Dutch translation for this video that introduces Rising Voices, an amazing project spearheaded by my friend David Sasaki that “aims to bring new voices to the global conversation”.

Let me know if you find any errors in my translation. You can also watch the original video in any other language besides Dutch. If you know a language that this video hasn’t been translated in, feel free to contribute (dotsub makes it real easy to translate)!

I am considering writing a paper on the Danish cartoons, and I was curious how many people were talking about it in the blogosphere. Looking at the graph, it isn’t hard to figure out when the incident took place.

I am interested in how incidents over taboos like the Danish cartoons do not just make social and cultural boundaries more rigid (I mean, yes, the Muslims and non-Muslims could barely see eye to eye on this matter), but at the same time, it also offers us an opportunity to renegotiate these very boundaries. Especially with the advent of the internet, it is now possible for citizens to directly talk and engage with each other, adding a much richer picture to the otherwise more simplistic picture the mainstream media provides us with, suggesting we are perhaps on our way to a truly global dialogue. Am I naive? I prefer idealistic.

Starting points for exploration:
Global Voices posts on the Danish cartoons and Bridge the Gap in Blogspace – a blog dedicated to cultivating a cross-cultural (trans-cultural?) dialogue.

The tangled web of logic is written by Brett Banks, someone who, as a friend of mine would say, ‘has the boiling blood of a nomad’, having been to pretty much everywhere in the world, including Canada, Mexico, Australia, many parts of Asia etc. Some of you might also be interested in the Global Citizenship Series at UBC that Brett worked on. It was Brett’s post on Living Like a Refugee that initially caught my attention.

Speaking of refugees, some of you may know I have a long standing interest in issues like the flow of people, and in particular the constraints on this flow, such as immigration laws. I thus wanted to introduce you to a second blog, ImmigrationProf Blog, (the title says it all) run by professor Kevin Johnson, Bill Hing and Jennifer Chacon, all professors at UC Davis. They do people like me a great service in keeping track of the recent developments in immigration law (focusing on the US mostly) and providing thoughtful comments.

An immigrant blog more specific to the situation where I am from is Wij Blijven Hier!. This is a Dutch blog and the title literally means “We Are Here to Stay!” – and although it is within one country, it is a bridgeblog in many aspects of the word – bridging the (mostly Muslim) immigrants to the other Dutch citizens who do not necessarily understand immigrant or Muslim culture. Small sidenote: I somehow wish there was also a non-Muslim Dutch immigrant voice to this otherwise amazing group weblog, which is run by Ashraf, Eighty, Faisal, Khadija, Mehwish, ReFlex, Tasneem and Umar.

For something entirely different, please visit the Hong Kong music review blog 斥測樂壇, (in Chinese) run by Holf Yuen. An independent voice and great resource for getting the skinny on the latest music releases in Hong Kong. Especially now that I am not in Asia myself, I depend on sites like these to find some good music amidst the commercial noise known as the Hong Kong entertainment marketing machineries.

Last but not least, I give you Interlocals, a recent citizen journalist website started by my friend Oiwan Lam and Roland Soong of ESWN fame, as well as Coco, Iam Chong, all from Hong Kong, Chung Kai from Malaysia, Dongwon from South Korea, Chung-pei and Li-bun from Taiwan. The website seeks to stimulate “interlocal” dialogue between the non-English speaking world (using, ironically, English to communicate). Personally, I am most excited about the Letters and Dialogues part where people can send in letters and have them answered by someone from a particular region or culture – it is like a letter to the editor, except for the fact that we are all editors. This blog just started so keep an eye out for it!

I see this kind of initiative as a great way to countering some of the less democratizing aspects of the web: first, the ‘Daily Me’ as suggested by Prof. Cass Sunstein: the idea that we end up only reading those websites that conform to our worldview, because the internet is so customizable, and second, the power law distribution as suggested by Prof. Clay Shirky: the idea that we end up only reading those websites that everybody else keeps linking to, or in terms of blogs, the so-called A-list bloggers.

In short: there are so many interesting blogs out there! Why keep reading the same ones over and over again?

PS: I was listed as one of her five blogs for BlogDay last year, by Qadira.