Head Tale

Sometimes an idea for the day’s FFL pops right in your in-box on a
Friday morning. Here’s something fellow Librarian Activist editor,
David Jackson, sent me today.

“I Bless The Rains Down in Africa” is an article from music web site Pitchfork,
comparing the presence of information about Africa with information
about the Star Wars universe on the Internet. Perhaps not surprisingly,
Africa doesn’t fare very well. As author Chris Dahlen points out, “This
is partly because sci-fi nerds in the Western world have better net
access than most Africans. People also seem more drawn to the relative
simplicity of pop culture than to the complexities of real life. Pop
culture gives us a world we can understand, and problems we can solve.”

If you don’t read the complete article, I’ll pull one thing that might be of interest. GlobalVoicesOnline.org
is a blog aggregator that “gathers online news and opinion from the
global blogosphere. With a staff of almost 20 editors and more than 100
contributors, it’s a major resource for world news at a time when fewer
and fewer [North] American newspapers collect the stuff on their own.
Global Voices collects “bridge bloggers,” or bloggers who can talk
about their region to a worldwide audience…A great bridge blogger is
hard to find, and the countries that need the most representation have
the least access to the internet.”