Session 1: The state of Global Voices (Part 2)

Ethan has taken over the mic now and is speaking:

Ethan explaining how GV works (via flickr)

the goal for the first session is to give us a littel history. We should take us back in time to a year ago, when there were a bunch of us siting at harvard…can you raise your hand if you were there last year? (maybe 15 people) – so that’s a pretty small subset. The rest of us have all gotten here within the year. So this is first about where we are, and then about where we want to be moving forward. So keep in mind that this is an open discussion. We’re handing the mikes to poeple, but also intend to hand it to others. We want to talk about today, and think about where we want to be the next time we sit down in a room together; whether it’s this one, or one soewhere else in the world. So one way to undrestand what’s happened is to look at this crazy graph here; it’s a way to measure the # of people who come to the gv site. So back in december of 04… when we started this up : we had a total of 800 visits in the entire month. Last month we had 300k individual people…that’s a minimum #. we know from the way web stats work that sth will go up on a page and more than one person will see it. On the average day now, we’re reaching 12k people.

[Ethan points to stats onscreen]

Often they’re coming b/c they google something, and in many cases we’re the best news out there for it. We’ve risen to a google rank of 8… a measure of how powerful your site is. So our ability to get things litsed in google is pretty profound at this point. So when you’re writing something, whether about venezualea, trinidad… there’s a good chance that the wors yo uwrite are going to be the answer in google. That’s good and bad, and we’re going to talk about what it means… we’ve got something over 3000 comments : most of our short pieces tend not to get commented on; but some others have long comment threads, over 100 comments; with debates with people from v different far reaches of the blogospher. After the london bombings, we had a really terrific debate condemning the bombings; from the arab world; and a very angry reaction from some people from london and in the us. It ended upcoming to a head on our comment thread. This means eoplea re engaging with one another, which is fantastic news. One of the ways we measure how we’re doing is who decides to point to us; who llinks to us. According to technorati, it’s 1800 sites so far; that’s probably a low number. Out of the 17m weblogs, we’ve sais domething interesting to 1800 of them that they’ve decidd to point to us at least once. In some times, 30-50 times.
An intersting # from blogpulse : we’re in the top 100, we’ve come an amazing way… in the sense that at this point, rebecca and I basically don’t do anything. Back in april/may/june, you would hvae seen one of us three putting everything up on the site; in the coming months, [a few key editors] doing the same; now the regional editors are doing less of it, too; but doing other work, posting roundups, 7c…
one fo the reasons it’s important to bring everyone together in the room, is you may only know your regional editor; it’s hard to know whether tha rum and adik? would ever get to sit next to one another in the real world… .this is taking a conversaiton that for the most part lives online, in irc, and bring it back to the real world.

These #s are important b/c we’ve become a very real influencer; when you look at the 300 people who come tlak to us in the psace of a month; a lot of them are journalists…They want to know what’s going on. so this project that started with a ‘hey! we want to…’ a year ago. Now people ar really listening to us. So this isn’t time to screw up. People are talking to us day after day, week afte week, about what’s going on in kenya, mideast, bangladesh.. elections, etc. If we’re not htere ot help them out, peopel start getting frustrated; why is my part of the world not represented? As we start stepping up, people start expeciting us to do better.

(Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)