Global Voices Online

Part of the human and technical magic that allows Global Voices to function is a lively wiki, where users around the world are able to tell us about blogs and websites we should be paying attention to, and where we're able to jointly edit documents like the Guide to Anonymous Blogging.

One of the best ways to keep track of our wiki is to follow the “recent changes” page, which generally lists the last 50 pages edited on the wiki. On any given day, about a third of those changes are spam or vandalism, people adding long lists of links in the hopes of improving the Google ranking of their website. (I invite you to join the small but intrepid team of wiki gardeners who recreationally squash spam on our wiki - please see this useful article on rolling back wiki vandalism.)

But the other changes tend to be additions to the Bridgeblog Index, our vast and growing collection of bridgebloggers from around the world. And following the recent changes page (yes, you can subscribe to the RSS feed, if you're so inclined) lets you keep an eye on what countries have been recently edited and what new blogs have been added.

For those who don't find time to make it over to the wiki, I'll be periodically rounding up some of the recently changed wiki pages and featuring countries and blogs on the main Global Voices blog. Here's a roundup of some of the most interesting pages over the past week:

Our friends in Cambodia have been letting us know about an explosion of excellent Cambodian blogs, in English, French and Khmer. One of the most widely linked is King Norodom Sihanouk's website. It's not quite a blog - no RSS feed, for one thing - but the “daily documents” section is organized in reverse-chronological order and looks like a blog to me. There's even a photoblog of sorts - a record of His Majesty's daily activities in pictures. HM is evidently quite a music fan - many of the posts reference compositions or dances in his honor, and there's a collection of songs performed by the king available for streaming by Windows Media users.

I'm taking a wild guess that the folks at Cam-Blog are Global Voices fans. Their motto sounds a little familiar: “For All Friends! The World is Reading, are You Ready to Write?” The twelve authors listed on the group blog are, providing news and pictures from around the country, as well as a useful list of “Clogs”, Cambodian weblogs.

Representing Cambodian youth overseas (and at home) are the Khmer-Girlz and Khmer-Boyz blogs, which index profiles and links of young Cambodian bloggers, especially in France, but also throughout the world.

I've added ThaRum, a prolific and articulate Pnom Penh writer, to my aggregator. His recent post on the importance of local content in Khmer is very much worth reading.

The wiki page on Argentina is getting increasingly rich, with a number of rich, photographic blogs. One of the very best is Jeff Barry's “Buenos Aires: City of Faded Elegance”. An American expat, Jeff is clearly in love with the Argentine capital and does a great job of sharing his enthusiasm.

Blog de Viages is an excellent Spanish-language travel blog, covering adventure travel and tourism as a whole in South America. And for a comprehensive view of Argentines living aborad, group blog Argenauts covers “Argentinos desparramados por el mundo” (Argentines scattered around the world).

The richest page in the wiki may be the entry for India, which now features local blogs in English, the Indian Diaspora, Hindi Blogdom, and “Blog Directories and Cliques”. There's tons to explore here - groupblog DesiPundit is a great start, and my dear friend Dina Mehta's blog is completely indispensable.

Some other recently added gems:
- PolBlog - a “24/7″ source for news from Poland, in English
- Taiwan Tiger - a beautiful photo-heavy blog from an expat student in Taiwan.
- A great collection of Tunisia links, including the always lively Subzero Blue, and free speech proponent Neila Charchour Hachicha's french-language blog.
(Subzero Blue appears to be “suspended” - I greatly hope this is temporary.)