Ethan is once again knowledgeable and provocative, this time about what it takes for a coup to get some attention in this country. He compares the media’s interest in Honduras’ institutional coup (as a guy called it last night on The News Hour) with the almost complete ignoring of various coups in Africa.

Ethan concludes (but read the whole thing):

So why does Honduras get the Iran treatment, while Niger is ignored like Madagascar? Proximity? Strategic importance? (though Niger’s got massive uranium reserves – you remember yellowcake, right?) It’s not population – Niger’s roughly twice the size of Honduras. Expectation? Perhaps we’re sufficiently accustomed to African coups (Madagascar, Mauritania and Guinea in the past year) that Niger’s not a surprise.

Or perhaps all the pundits are still trying to figure out which one’s Nigeria and which one’s Niger…

Ethan conspicuously leaves out racism — the soft racism (as that ol’ phrase President George W. Bush once put it) of not knowing, not caring, and not bothering to develop a narrative.

(By the way, be sure to click on the link in the quote from Ethan. It leads to one of The Onion’s funniest videos ever.)

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman africa niger honduras racism media ]

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And here I thought that having an emotional attachment to the red Sriracha hot sauce you find on the counters of Asian and vaguely Asian restaurants was like having a crush on ketchup! But Ethan has validated my feelings, as he so often does, as well as presenting a recipe for Sriracha caramel candies that simply has to be better than it sounds.

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman sriracha candy_recipes hot_sauce ]

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Yet another important post from Ethan Zuckerman. He’s working through what it takes to connect with others who are unlike us, and why the Internet has not done much of a job replacing airplane tickets as the way to learn to love difference. Most of the post — which proceeds by telling several stories — puts it in terms of the value of dorkiness. But at the end, Ethan expresses its fuller form: We have to be willing to be a fool in public — and a foreign public, in this case — if we are to forge the bonds that will let us love the difference in others. And all I’d add to this magnificent post is that (it seems to me) in the moment we let ourselves become the fool, we acknowledge the dignity of the place, and we become the foreigner in a homeland.

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman homophily difference everything_is_miscellaneous peace ]

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Joi Ito posts about whether we’ve agreed upon the syntax of retweeting: If I want to twitter one of your tweets and add my own comment, do I do it as “RT @you: your comment Me: My comment” or as “RT @you:your comment [Me: my comment]” or what? Of course, there was a bunch of twittering about this, which Joi captures.

It’s fun to watch syntax emerge. As Ethanz tweets: “Microformat development in 140 chars or less…”

[Tags: twitter standards ethan_zuckerman joi_ito everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Conference coverage like this and this makes me sorry that Ethan Zuckerman is chairing the Global Voices meeting instead of live blogging it. We need an “and,” not an “or” here. Clearly it’s time that Ethan cloned himself.

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman global_voices pdf ]

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He’s doing well, although the recovery is going slower than he’d like.

Men well, ethanz.

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman ]

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Best of luck to Ethan Zuckerman, he of the big heart and huge brain, as he undergoes eye surgery…

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman ]

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Ethan Zuckerman presented his “cute cat” theory — how repressive gov’ts use Web 2.0 to further their repressive aims — at eTech. You can read Wired’s coverage here.

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman web_2.0 twitter politics censorship etech ]

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