It is not as easy to use another person to find and comment on important news in Asia. Firstly, technology standards are not the same. While rss is common here, it is not as standardized in Asia. Many news sites do not have rss, or they do not work. Technology and internet access is not as widespread. Computers and internet access are still prohibitively expensive for many locals.

Secondly there is a significant language barrier between bloggers in North America and Asia. Their blogs will come out in Chinese, which is not as easy for me to read. I’m unsure if I could even read the rss from Chinese blogging software, though this would be the least of my issues. Asahi Shimbun’s English news rss comes to me in Japanese. How do our search terms, tags, and taxonomy translate to Chinese?

Thirdly, and most problematically, China is a communist country, and a technologically savvy one at that. Local Chinese that blog may be tracked down by the police, arrested, disciplined with jail time, and blog entries or entire blogs deleted. They are charged with leaking state secrets, in essence, treason. There are documented cases in the news, before Beijing courts and human rights tribunals, and I believe them. It is simply too dangerous for Chinese to freely post on the Internet. Other “grassroots” social computing structures are also discouraged by the government. China controls a central firewall for the whole country and has the knowledge, resources and the political will to screen ALL content going in and coming out of their country.

I hope that social network computing tools become popular in China, though there are significant barriers that we do not experience here in North America. The issues is not one of social networking software such as blogging, but more fundamentally of free speech and freedom. We take this for granted here in North America. I do not. While we use computing to foster knowledge and communication, technology can also be used to control and repress.

While I would prefer to get news from independent Chinese bloggers, I’ve always known that embedded reporters from news agencies are the next best thing, and have been for the last 25 years. Even they get harassed, followed, equipment smashed, arrested and occasionally thrown in jail. Documented cases have occurred as recently as the Beijing Olympics, August 2008. This is after the Chinese government, as a condition for hosting the Olympics, agreed to allow reporters to do their jobs without censorship. They have a hard road to travel but they know the risks.

My response is that there are two ways to filter: technologically, or socially. Clearly, search terms are a way to filter.

The other alternative, of social filtering, is to follow a small group of people whom I note read broadly but bookmark and blog selectively. The base interface is the same — feed technology — but instead of following primary sources, I’m following secondary sources. This is a function normally handled by newspapers, and now by individuals on the Internet in the age of peer production.

Since I’m currently immersed in academic research on open source, I was making the joke that I’ve been using a vice-president at IBM as my research assistant. It’s most true, since Bob Sutor bookmarks the most significant daily headlines, and he does a much better job of building on a base of knowledge than newspapers who have to mostly assume their readers don’t have a history or background in the topic.