Pinkie’s Realm

The interview I read with Rebecca MacKinnon entitled “Making Global Voices Heard” in Kline and Burstein’s book Blog! was very professional, worldy, and political. As it turns out, Mackinnon originally worked for CNN and resigned after discovering how honest and fresh the blogosphere was. After that she created an international weblog aggregator called Global Voices. She wanted to reach people internationally, and in the interivew she spoke a lot about censorship in countries like North Korea and China. Since the interview was wit Rebecca mackinnon and since she is the creator of Global Voices, that was the blog I was most curious about. Surprisingly, she didn’t concentrate very much on Global Voices in the interview, so I had no expectation beforehand.

The layout of the website (found at www.globalvoicesonline.org) is very simple and clean, using cool calm colors like blue, green, and white. It’s certainly not as cluttered as other blogs–not much artwork, very few photos, and no video clips either that I could see. Many blogs are filled with random posts with photos, tagclouds, and sidebars are often filled with pictures and links to various websites, videos, and other blogs. I like the headling underneath the title of the site, however. Beneath “Global Voices” it says, “The World is Talking. Are you Listening?”.  I found the website mildly dry…of course, many will probably disagree and insist that it’s vastly innovative and breaking down boundaries, however that doesn’t mean it’s an interactive blog that I feel I could become actively involved with. The posts are regarding various countries across the Earth, but it just seems more like an online newspaper than a blog to me. The posts are very political, and discuss issues involving voting rights, laws, and cultural experiences, and the writing is very formal. Whereas Global Voices isn’t exactly my type of blog, I don’t mean to say that I’m not concerned with global affairs, or that it isn’t more suited to many other internet surfers around the world. However…though I hate to say it, I don’t think I’m alone in my opinions seeing as the majority of the posts had 0 comments. I do think it shows promise, but I think it needs work if it is to appeal to the diverse population of the world.

*Bold text indicates template used from Graff and Birkenstein’s “They Say/I Say”.