Know Your Audience

As the team cranks hard on creating the next version of Härnu, I decided to spend my time researching the world of, well, world affairs bloggers. Specifically, I researched those that write for Global Voices since they're exactly the kind of people that we hope will give Härnu a whirl once we start featuring their content.


I thoroughly enjoyed researching who these people are, where they're from, what they write about, and what they do. Some of course stood out more than others, particularly a guy called Hossein Derakshan whom the Iranian authorities jailed for 19.5 years simply for writing about his country. I was ashamed I'd never heard of him until now and I'm asking myself why the world isn't doing more to fight for his release. I'm also asking myself what a regular person like me could do to help. If you have any ideas, do please let me know.

Aside from Hossein, there were also a number of bloggers that back in '05 or '06 were just getting their start on Global Voices and have since grown into full-fledged celebrities such as the wildly popular Saudi comedian Fahad Albutairi as well as notable CEOs such as Rashmi Sinha - founder of Slideshare, Ory Okolloh - founder of Ushahidi, and many other successful entrepreneurs. Make no mistake, these people are smart, articulate, connected, and highly successful in their chosen field of endeavor.

However, the pleasure in reading about them wasn't restricted to just celebs and entrepreneurs. Instead, it was the unexpected that caught my attention - a lovely YouTube video of a Hungarian band courtesy of a blogger called Marietta, the discovery of the word "homophily" courtesy of a blogger called Dan Wescott, and countless other great nuggets of life I'd never have found any other way.

So, who are these amazing people that are literally changing the world? Well, to start poking around that question, I compiled a list of 593 bloggers from the author section of the Global Voices site. I omitted those whose primary role seemed to be translators simply because I was most interested in the writers. I also probably missed a few here and there, so this crude analysis is by no means infallible. I then searched for their own personal blogs and Twitter accounts if they had them (and I was actually able to find them). All told, I spent about a lot more time than I'd planned on this little diversion but felt it was important to get more familiar with this community.

And here are some of the factoids I uncovered:

• As near as I can tell, Global Voices has ~134 countries covered though it's a really long tail. What I mean by that is that there are 12 countries with 10 or more bloggers, 102 countries have 5 or less bloggers and fully 38 countries have just 1 blogger. 
• Like most UGC sites, the Pareto Principle applies and then some. Of the ~76K posts, 56K of them come from just 20 bloggers. Said differently, 74% of the content comes from 3% of the bloggers. (Would be interesting to know if Global Voices themselves agrees / disagrees with that finding. Where there may be an issue is if a blogger has a dual role of author & translator and I've credited them for all of those posts...)
• The authors have an average (median) of 8 posts published.
• Their average (median) tenure on Global Voices defined as their last post minus their join date is basically 1 year (342 days if you care about details).
• The average (median) post frequency is 24 days per post. In other words, they are blogging about once every 3.5 weeks on Global Voices. However a cursory glance of their own personal blogs suggest they write much more frequently than that.
• Global Voices seems to be adding about 85 - 95 new bloggers each year.
• So far in 2012, 217 different bloggers have posted on Global Voices - about 37% of all bloggers I researched.
• Of 593 bloggers, I was able to find a personal blog for 61% of them which suggests I need to improve my Googling skills... 
• Same thing re: Twitter - 65% of them have a Twitter account that I could find with an average (median) following of 993. 
• Of those with a Twitter account, 10% have a follower count > 10,000.
• The most followed blogger is a lady called Beth Kanter, with Fahad Albutairi in 2nd spot.

While the stats may be mildly interesting to some, what's most important is that the bloggers are passionate, they are writing, and their content is being read. My hope is that as we begin featuring their content on Härnu, they'll welcome the increased engagement from our users and our users will welcome the alternative perspectives from the bloggers.

  

Like the World, Not Just Walmart

Foreign news reporting is on the decline - that's no secret. As traditional media has struggled to adapt to the online world, the reaction has been largely to cut costs instead of innovating. For example, according to a recent AJR study 18 major U.S. newspapers and 2 chains have completely shut all their foreign news bureaus since 1998 – newspapers such as the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune are prime examples. Foreign news now accounts for less than 5% of all news found in a typical newspaper and this trend is not limited to American media - it's also happening in places such as the U.K. where foreign news reporting has declined by 40% over the past three decades.

Declining Interest in Foreign News
As foreign news reporting has declined, so too has American interest in foreign affairs. According to a recent Pew Center study, only 17% of Americans are following the economic crisis in Europe and only 12% are following events in Syria - about the same percentage that were following the John Edwards trial. This is compared to 2011, when 39% of Americans were following the situation in Egypt.

Massive Investment in Hyper-Local News
It'd be easy to say that foreign news has declined while local news has flourished, and indeed, a lot of investment has been made in that direction, but that too appears to be a fools errand as hyper-local display advertising has declined, likely attributable to more accountable alternatives like Groupon and LivingSocial as well as the ubiquitous Google AdWords and now Facebook advertising and a whole host of "so-lo-mo" apps and services targeting the hyper-local market.

Internet Growth and Citizen Reporting in Developing Nations
With no sign that traditional media is going to pull out of this death spiral anytime soon, it'll be left to citizens to fill that void. Sites like Global Voices have risen to the challenge of reporting on the world and that reporting is going to get a whole lot more amplified when 2B new Internet users join the connected society, all from developing countries in Africa, Asia, and S. America. At the moment, there is more online content about Germany than Africa and S. America combined! That is all about to change rapidly, especially when you understand the implication of high-speed cable being laid all over Africa.

New Age of Discovery
So, at a time when major Western nations such as the U.S. and the U.K. are becoming more insular, not by choice, but instead thanks to declining foreign news reporting and social networks that don't encourage us to seek out alternative perspectives beyond our friends, we have the rest of the world coming online and embarking on a new digital Age of Discovery - one that will be noted for enlightened bi-directional sharing, collaboration, and learning instead of the previous age of selfish nation-state exploitation. 

The question is, will Americans be an integral part of this new Age of Discovery, or will we be content to spend our time checking in to the local coffee shop, getting on the free wi-fi, checking our friends' latest status, and liking Walmart (as 17MM Americans apparently do)?

Dispensing with Matryoshka Dolls

When we initially thought about starting Härnu, it was easy to dimensionalize the social & media landscape to fit within a construct that suggested a new service like ours needed to exist. In fact, in a burst of midnight PowerPointery, my assessment ended up looking something like this:

The point of view expressed above is not that controversial, but with the benefit of hindsight, nor is the situation quite that simple either. Basically, my initial assumptions could be summarized into the headline that we need to cut out the middle man. That is, the primary ways in which we consume media today have made us more insular, less informed, less empathetic, and big media isn't going to change any time soon.

Our goal from the beginning has been to act as an accelerant for empathy - connect people across the world in an authentic way and you can start to chip away at the biases that our media has helped reinforce. Connect people one-to-one and suddenly a like or a share is exposed as embarrassingly inadequate when trying to express solidarity for our fellow man / woman.

Basically, our solve for this was not to build out more nested Matryoshka dolls such as a mobile app on top of a social network on top of a relevance engine on top of an aggregator on top of a search engine on top of content for example, but to simply dispense with the nesting paradigm altogether - enable and encourage direct access to people in locales everywhere and anywhere. Simplify. A battle of Turkey versus Turducken if you will.

Want to know what's happening in Syria? Don't just watch CNN or read about it on [insert social network here]. Instead, actually talk to some Syrians and hear from them directly with Härnu translating all the conversations on the fly into each other's preferred language. Having done so, are you now better informed? Are you inspired to act?

Of course, not every interaction is going to result in someone taking the next plane to Damascus or lobbying the White House for action and in fact, a lot of the interactions are often seemingly mundane - where do you live?, what do you eat?, where do you work? etc. However, all of those interactions together have the capacity to add up to something more than a nanoKardashian.

So, those were the original assumptions. Now that we actually have a service out there, I've learned the following three things so far:

1. As much as we thought we needed to make Härnu completely private to offer a level of comfort to people in countries where censorship is de rigeur, we've realized that sharing features everywhere is simply a must-have for any online community. Perhaps everyone that reads this is saying "duh idiot!" but the point is that people talk about wanting more privacy but what they really want is more control and those two terms are not the same.
2. There's actually a lot of good content out there being produced by citizen journalists everywhere. An example would include GlobalVoices and Twitter is a great way to broadcast that content out into the Internet. However, the trick is still to close the gap between awareness and action. While tools like Twitter and Facebook enable awareness and engagement to some degree, I'd suggest that the missing link is still empathy such that the path to action looks like this: awareness-->engagement-->empathy-->action. More one-to-one conversations can balance the many-to-many speed of light content delivery and consumption tools we have out there today.
3. There's no substitute for face to face interaction...yet! While Härnu may or may not be able to deliver on its promise of instilling empathy for other cultures in a massive way some day, the 15 minutes I spent  last week at the Seattle Globalist launch chatting with a Pakistani editor who's now a refugee, gave me enough of a jolt to realize how lucky I am to be talking about building an online service versus fleeing authorities intent on killing me because I had the temerity to speak the truth as a journalist. If our media in this country were half as brave, perhaps we'd have a press more people would be satisfied with. As it is, a lot of brainpower is being spent trying to fix it or circumvent it entirely. 

I think that part of the solution involves connecting ordinary citizens everywhere and giving them the power to triangulate multiple perspectives. I don't believe it's simply a binary choice between people versus machine-learning algorithms, but rather that in a world of filter bubbles the ability to connect to anyone anywhere as we are to our friends and family today may prove to have merit.