The Challenge Rambles and riff raff about all this and that

WeMedia Buenos Aires – Part 5

Final part of Today.

Jorge Gobbi, Editor Social Voices.

Social Voices does not cover Europe and the US because they have enough traditional media coverage. Social Voices is a global startup. He's talking about "voices without votes" what the rest of the world thinks about the US election. He's the only Argentine writter. The idea is not to yield their own oppinions but rather to leverage bloggers's points of view.

"Rising Voices" gives grants to develop blogs for those people who don't have access to the internet or blogs. OLPC is huge in Uruguay.

They also try to help bloggers who suffer censorship.

Reuters invests in Social Voices. NYT republished the feed about South Osetia.

Juán Cruz Mones Cazón, idealistas.org

60K daily uique visitors, 500k registered users, 80k organizations.

"Can Internet change the world?" "No, people can, using Internet".

Gives examples of how idealistas.org helps to connect different organizations. "That is what idealistas is all about".

Things are free because people believe that once you start charging for a service another company / guy will come and do it for free.

The free business model is a challenge even for organizations such as Idealistas.

Paulien Osse - Wage indicator foundation.

She's coming to the public asking what people earn. Of course people are reluctant to answer.

"Essentially this is what we do, we ask people how much they make, but on the internet". They are going to display a movie.

This is fun for economists. Just to compare the wages of exactly the same job in different countries. It is essential to know if you know if you're paid propperly.

Knowledge sharing for collective inteligence.

The question on how they validate the date, make sure people are not telling lies when completing their wage information. Paulien says there is only a small percentage are not truthful about their sallary.

Final Keynote

Steve Herrmann, Editor, BBC.

When thre was an earthquake in India the BBC got tons of messages of people trying to tell each other they were ok, if they knew something about missing people and other "social" requirements.

On Zimbawe they asked the population to SMS the BBC to let them know what was going on during polling. BBC was banned from the country at the time. People reported all kinds of abuses and other atrocities.

Burma: BBC's reporter couldn't move freely through the country. They contacted the local population to get updates on what was happening.

The Burma story didn't end up very well. They stopped getting messages and emails. The burmanise government shut down the ISP's, BBC was left out of sources.

China Earthquake. They are mentioning the twitter feed. Also Chinese bloggers. They also monitored what was the Chinese media said about the torch relay protests in Europe and the US.

More examples about blogging from countries that are hard for the BBC to get into (Saudi Arabia, Cuba).

They tried an experiment called "Laptop link-ups". Sent people with Notebooks to remote places so people could tell their stories. (Brilliant!!).

In the UK they have a project for schools where they send a journalist to let kids know what journalism is about. They create news from this schools and then publish it on the BBC. This program has cought up in other countries and regions as well.

BBC uses blogs as a publishing platform for their star journalists (the screenshot is from Peston's Picks, title: "We own the banks").

They use an interactive map about the general mood around the financial crises where people pinned thier economical problems (unapyable mortages, rising food prices, etc).

To exmplain globalization BBC painted a crate and send it all over the world, then they encouraged readers to ry to spot it at ports and boats, take pictures at it and send them back to the BBC. Amazing shots.

And thus the day ends... sort off. Pictures coming soon.