“The idea that I can reach out and take a person’s voice and help yield it up to that many people — I’m proud of that,” he says. “That’s really more interesting to me than my own voice.”

Be inspired by John Scott-Railton:

When the Egyptian government blocked the Internet last week in response to demonstrators’ use of social media like Twitter and Facebook to organize mass rallies, it not only cut off communication between ordinary Egyptians — it also muted their dialogue with the rest of the world.

For John Scott-Railton, a graduate student at University of California-Los Angeles, that silence was a personal blow. He had been visiting Egypt since 2006, going over there to see a close friend, and as the country accelerated towards revolt, he had been following the news on the Internet. Suddenly his connection was gone.

So Scott-Railton decided that if Egyptians couldn’t communicate with the world, he would do it for them, and set out to replicate the cacophony of voices he had been so drawn to. Reaching out to friends in Egypt by telephone, he started gathering updates from different neighborhoods and posting them online at his Twitter account @Jan25voices, named for the day the protests began. When he heard that Egypt’s mobile-phone networks were likely to be shut down, he drew up a list of people he knew with landlines. Over the roughly 24 hours on Friday when cellular communications were turned off, many journalists struggled to file their stories on the protests. But anyone following Jan25voices knew what was going on. “Some of the updates I was getting were from people’s aunts standing at the window, holding their phone out so I could hear what was happening,” he says.

In an earlier age, Scott-Railton would have had no choice but to wait, perhaps as he searched the dial for mentions of the events in Egypt. Today, the 27-year-old Michigan native is in the middle of the information flow, one of a host of bloggers and Tweeters who are — in many cases — doing as much as professional journalists to deliver news the Egyptian government is struggling to contain.

Scott-Railton’s Twitter account lists him as having just over 4,000 followers, but that considerably understates his influence, as his tweets — which he posts at a rate of around 50 a day — are visible to all those who search for information on the protests. Blake Hounshell, managing editor of Foreign Policy Magazine, subscribes to his posts, as do the editors of several other major news publications. And Scott-Railton says that the BBC, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Al Jazeera and the Wall Street Journal have all reached out to him for analysis or help finding Egyptians to interview. “In years past, the idea was that you could only understand the situation if you were on the ground,” says Sree Sreenivasan, a professor of digital media at Columbia Journalism School in NYC, who has been tracking the developments in Egypt. “What we have learned though is that there is a real role for social media for people who are far away from the action to bring context, understanding and analysis.”

Scott-Railton, who speaks rudimentary Arabic and has mostly used English — and occasionally French — in his reporting, has no training as a journalist. And yet, “a lot of the questions of journalistic ethics are now on my mind,” he says. “How do you confirm information? How do you avoid echo chambers? How do you substantiate?” When new sources began emailing him after his initial postings, he insisted they provide contacts, preferably in the U.S., who could vouch for their identities. He says his goal is to provide the “human component” of the story, “to make it feel as exciting and as relevant as the pictures of tanks rolling around.”

Once, news organizations spent years, if not decades, building up institutional credibility so that their viewers felt comfortable trusting them. Scott-Railton has had a week. “I’ve definitely taken a side,” he says. “I’m tweeting the voices of protestors. It’s not like I’m tweeting the police. But the tone I’m trying to take is not breathless. I’m trying to be careful — especially because the medium pushes you in the other direction.”

“Can you hold on a second?” Scott-Railton interrupts our interview to share another scrap of news. “I have people [in the Middle East] watching different news networks and feeding me information,” he says. And indeed not much more than a second later, it’s there on his Twitter feed: “Arabeya [sic]: Closure of Egyptian Rail #Egypt #Jan25.” In the language of the uninitiated, he’s told all those watching Twitter for news on the protests that the Dubai-based Al Arabiya news channel has just reported that country’s rail-lines have been shut down.

Since he first set up Jan25voices, Scott-Railton has expanded his efforts, recruiting partners in Egypt and around the Middle East to monitor what the Arab-language news channels are reporting. Sometimes he doesn’t just post the information he receives from a phone call, but also the call itself. One recording of a young Egyptian talking to him from inside the protests has been listened to more than 275,000 times. “The idea that I can reach out and take a person’s voice and help yield it up to that many people — I’m proud of that,” he says. “That’s really more interesting to me than my own voice.”

Censorship is the sincerest form of flattery.
- From Ethan Zuckerman’s blog

The December 2010/January 2011 issue of the Africa Report, included an article on 11 Ideas for 2011 to make real change. I read through the ideas and thought that the idea that suggests, “Nobody can become President over the age of 69″ was the best for me. I found it to be a low cost solution enabling freedom of choice among Africans benefiting the majority. I truly agree with the sentiment that says we appreciate the goodness that comes with ‘old wine’ – that is wisdom, experience and perspective. Surely our much older leaders in Africa deserve a round of applause for exhibiting these characteristics. However, having them in leadership positions for too long brings major discomfort to citizens as promises made go undelivered. Also when a leader stays in power for too long citizens begin to see their imperfections more clearly.

The pursuit of African leaders to stay in power even when the populace is no longer comfortable with them has proven not to be a general thing of late. This is evident with the protests in Tunisia and Egypt.  The anger brewing in the hearts of these citizens in these countries has been put in the limelight for the whole world to see. And the possibility of having other protests rising in other African countries cannot be ruled out. As Cameroon, Egypt, Nigeria, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe go to vote in 2011 we hope to see a new age bracket of leaders govern our countries. Simply put, we want new faces in leadership positions.

We have to continue to pray and be patriotic towards our desired change in Africa. We truly desire to have selfless and visionary leaders at all levels of the government. There is a need also to have youths in leadership, as they are the future of tomorrow.

I conclude with a quote by Nelson Mandela, which says, “It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.”

Leaders will be more appreciated and recognized if they take steps towards these wise words.

I enjoyed reading The Standard editor’s latest instalment about Mudenge. I also took notice of the paper’s “Quote of the week” where Saviour Kasukuwere spoke about the black man’s right not to remain poop when the spoils of war resemble Aladdin’s cave. Kasukuwere speaks the language of Supa Mandiwanzira – or vice versa who a few weeks ago told us the indigenisation crusade will not be around forever and exhorted exiled patriots not to wait until “things are okay.” Yet Mudenge takes the cake as he reminds us about his love for game meat, meat which war veterans enjoyed in unforgettable barbecues during the height of farm invasions that claimed Martin Olds and other nameless black farm workers. Then we heard the same government complaining about the falling numbers of the national herd. Now when Mudenge speaks about wantonly killing and eating game meat, what does it say about Francis Nhema on the other hand crusading about the conservation of wild life? And  it goes further, Patrick Zhuwawo leading the takeover of tourist resorts and Walter Muzembi selling the country as a safe tourist destination. These are people supposedly working together! And we are expected to take them seriously?

“The best time to listen to a politician is when he is on a street corner, in the rain, late at night, when he is exhausted. Then he doesn’t lie.” Theodore H. White, US journalist (1969)

But I figure Mudenge, Zvuwawo and all still well-heeled as they are and protected from the elements are not lying. As the Carlifornia guv would say back in the day as a celluloid thespian, Zwuwawo said, they will back at Kuimbashiri. Are cops listening? You bet!

Charles Arthur writing for The Guardian:

Google and Twitter launch service enabling Egyptians to tweet by phone: Voice-to-tweet software allows citizens to send news from Egypt despite internet blackout

Google and Twitter have launched a service to allow people in Egypt to send Twitter messages by leaving a voicemail on a specific number after the last internet service provider in the country saw its access cut off late on Monday.

The new service, which has been created by co-ordination between the two internet companies, uses Google’s speech-to-text recognition service to automatically translate a message left on the number, which will be sent out on Twitter with the “#egypt” hashtag.

Ujwal Singh, co-founder of SayNow and Abdel Karim Mardini, Google’s product manager for the Middle East and north Africa, said in a blog post that “over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service – the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection … We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time.”

Google listed three phone numbers for people to call to use the service. They are: +16504194196; +390662207294; and +97316199855.

No internet connection is required. That will be important for users in Egypt after Noor Group, which had been the last internet service provider connecting to the outside world, went dark late on Monday. It had remained online after the country’s four main internet providers – Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr – abruptly stopped shuttling internet traffic into and out of the country last Friday.

At about 11pm local time Monday, the Noor Group became unreachable, said James Cowie, chief technology officer of Renesys, a security firm based in Manchester, New Hampshire, which monitors huge directories of “routes”, or set paths that define how web traffic moves from one place to another.

The Noor Group’s routes have disappeared, he said.

Cowie said engineers at the Noor Group and other service providers could quickly shut down the internet by logging on to certain computers and changing a configuration file. The original blackout on Friday took just 20 minutes to fully go into effect, he said. However it is not clear whether the Noor Group’s disconnection was planned or accidental.

Mobile phone service was restored in Egypt on Saturday, but text messaging services have been disrupted during the continuing protests.

In an op-ed for the New York Times Egyptian author Mansoura Ez-Eldin gives a personal account of the Egyptian protests:

ON Friday, the “day of rage,” I was in the streets with the protesters. Friends and I participated in a peaceful demonstration that started at the Amr Ibn al-As Mosque in Old Cairo near the Church of St. George. We set off chanting, “The people want the regime to fall!” and we were greeted with a torrent of tear gas fired by the police. We began to shout, “Peaceful, Peaceful,” trying to show the police that we were not hostile, we were demanding nothing but our liberty. That only increased their brutality. Fighting began to spread to the side streets in the ancient, largely Coptic neighborhood.

…Clearly, the scent of Tunisia’s “jasmine revolution” has quickly reached Egypt. Following the successful expulsion in Tunis of the dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the call arose on Facebook for an Egyptian revolution, to begin on Jan. 25. Yet the public here mocked those young people who had taken to Twitter and Facebook to post calls for protest: Since when was the spark of revolution ignited on a pre-planned date? Had revolution become like a romantic rendezvous?

…In Suez, where the demonstrations have been tremendously violent, live ammunition was used against civilians from the first day. A friend of mine who lives there sent me a message saying that, Thursday morning, the city looked as if it had emerged from a particularly brutal war: its streets were burned and destroyed, dead bodies were strewn everywhere; we would never know how many victims had fallen to the police bullets in Suez, my friend solemnly concluded.

After having escaped from Old Cairo on Friday, my friends and I headed for Tahrir Square, the focal point of the modern city and site of the largest protests. We joined another demonstration making its way through downtown, consisting mostly of young people. From a distance, we could hear the rumble of the protest in Tahrir Square, punctuated by the sounds of bullets and screams. Minute by painstaking minute, we protesters were gaining ground, and our numbers were growing. People shared Coca-Cola bottles, moistening their faces with soda to avoid the effects of tear gas. Some people wore masks, while others had sprinkled vinegar into their kaffiyehs.

Shopkeepers handed out bottles of mineral water to the protesters, and civilians distributed food periodically. Women and children leaned from windows and balconies, chanting with the dissidents. I will never forget the sight of an aristocratic woman driving through the narrow side streets in her luxurious car, urging the protesters to keep up their spirits, telling them that they would soon be joined by tens of thousands of other citizens arriving from different parts of the city.

…Hour by hour on Friday evening, the chaos increased. Police stations and offices of the ruling National Democratic Party were on fire across the country. I wept when news came that 3,000 volunteers had formed a human chain around the national museum to protect it from looting and vandalism. Those who do such things are certainly highly educated, cultivated people, neither vandals nor looters, as they are accused of being by those who have vandalized and looted Egypt for generations.

…Late Saturday, as I headed toward Corniche Street on the Nile River, I walked through a side street in the affluent Garden City neighbourhood, where I found a woman crying. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me that her son, a worker at a luxury hotel, had been shot in the throat by a police bullet, despite not being a part of the demonstrations. He was now lying paralysed in a hospital bed, and she was on her way to the hotel to request medical leave for him. I embraced her, trying to console her, and she said through her tears, “We cannot be silent about what has happened. Silence is a crime. The blood of those who fell cannot be wasted.”

I agree. Silence is a crime. Even if the regime continues to bombard us with bullets and tear gas, continues to block Internet access and cut off our mobile phones, we will find ways to get our voices across to the world, to demand freedom and justice.