Perhaps Google can tap into the folks who have helped them translate their site into more languages than I knew existed to bridge the gap on whatever information comes out of Iraq, or out of those who know Iraq intimately, if this all begins, which I guess we're all afraid by now that it might.
Some time ago, I wrote a few emails back and forth with Hoder (Hossein Derakhshan), an Iranian blogger now living, if I remember right, in Canada. He is a good writer--and writes in English, so I can tell you that first hand. He has an interesting post about top officials now actually leaving comments in popular Persian weblogs:
"I'm not exactly sure if this has happend anywhere else. But some top officials are not only reading and following Persian weblogs, but also are responding to and commenting about some posts in popular weblogs. After Fazel Larijani called me when I wrote a pieace on his newly started mission in Ottawa as a cultural embassador, 2 of top reformist officials -one of them is a an MP from Tehran- put comments on Sina Motallebi's post about Iranian journalists' association's lack of support to the recently-arrested journliast, Alireza Eshraghi. There were other news that many top politicians are closely following these writings, but this is the first time they actually reacted to them."
I imagine progress through comment boxes, including the excluders in the discussion without requiring that they fully participate. That could actually be a very good thing. Google may need to give us a more robust and reliable comment feature, while they're at it.
His blogroll list a bunch of Iranian bloggers, if you're interested in reading more.
Khorishid Khanoom is another Iranian blogger I emailed a couple of times, but how to get by the language barrier. She's on my blogroll and every now and then I go there and look at the characters--it's more like art than language to me. You can still get a tinsy bit of English--more like punctuation than English--like at the very very end of this post.
I don't know how, but Google has to find a way to let us read and understand one another regardless of our native language. And to make it simple for non-bloggers to participate in cross conversations through more robust commenting functionality than we now have.
We need a bridge somehow across languages through language.
Michael O'Connor Clarke on Google/Blogger as the New CNN...
Here and here. Among other good points, Michael makes this one:
"The critical dimension in which bloggers absolutely have old media – both print and broadcast – smacked down cold is time. It’s about blogspeed. Or more fundamentally: netspeed. The rate of info flow from the news scene via the blogvines is currently exponentially faster than the rate of news dispersal via ‘traditional’ media."
This is one of the reason's Michael thinks it crucial to have bloggers posting from Iraq--to give us the unfiltered human story, the story we won't get from CNN this time.
"Given what we know, we just can’t depend on old media to deliver the truth/whole truth/nothing but the truth. Mini-army of ‘embedded’ frontline media or not. The embedded journalists will get to see and report on only what the Pentagon chooses."
One thing we can do is search out and find more bloggers writing from inside Iraq. And we can hope to perhaps have a team of human blog translators engaged since I doubt if Google can boost its language capabilities to translate Arabic in time.
I wonder what it would take to send "bloggerists" there. Should we begin a blog sponsorship campaign to sponsor some willing bloggers to go to Iraq? What would it take, and what would they need to take with them? How long might they be there? How would we keep them funded? How would we get them access to the front line? Or should we? How would we get their stories back? I wonder if at a different time in my life I would have said, "Send me." Probably not. There was a time when I longed to be a front-line journalist, though, but that's another story, a lifetime ago.
If they go--one or more--they will make journalistic history. Because we'll be sure of it. And Google will help. Beyond that, they'll be transmitting unfiltered human voice, which is as close to truth as we ever get.
Dave Weighs In with a Thoughtful Essay on the Google Blogger Deal
"In other ways, the Blogger-Google deal may signal a change possibly as deep as the personal computer revolution, where huge glass palaces controlled by technologists were routed around, by software and hardware that did the same thing, for a fraction of the cost. "
I was thinking about the Google + Blogger deal as I drove Jenna to school today, and although I'm too sleepy to do it justice, I began thinking that this would be an interesting time to know more languages than just English, and the useless bit of Latin I know from three years of study. Why? As coversations among regular people get bumped up a notch or two or three in frequency and access with Google's likely incorporation of weblogs in their offerings, I want to be able to communicate--albiet not perfectly--with folks whose language I don't speak or read. I started thinking, which language class would I take, if I decided to really take this on.... French? German? Italian? Portugese? What?
And then I thought about Google's language translation tool. AND THEN I came home and looked at my google tool bar. AND THEN I thought, yes. They could do that. Google could add a translation engine behind the blog interface and give us an easy way to translate what we're writing and reading into our languages of choice. No, it wouldn't be perfect. Yes, some miscommunication might arise among onliners whose thoughts get garbled in the translation. But this happens among those of us talking to one another in a common language too. So what's the difference? Anything that keeps the conversation going and arching outward is significant.
So google, my wish number one is to make your language translation machine more robust--offering more languages and more precise execution--and for you to bundle it in my blogging application with your usual grace and ease and understanding of what we want, and what we haven't even thought of wanting yet...
