The Web Foundation exists to bridge the 'digital divide' in Internet usage. Only about 25% of the world population uses the Web today, however more than 70% of people have access to mobile or fixed communication devices capable of displaying Web content. According to the W3C, "the gap in Web usage is partly attributable to the lack of accessible or relatable content, and the lack of available training on how to use the Web to its full potential."

The Web Foundation was founded in 2008 by Tim Berners-Lee, with the aim of studying the Web and expanding access to the billions of people worldwide who aren't currently online. Today, the Web Foundation launched a fundraising campaign and announced two partnerships.

On the former, Web Foundation CEO Steve Bratt hopes to raise $10-20 million per year, much of which will be put towards programs that train people to use the Web.

One of the partnerships is with the University Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which aims to expedite "re-greening" initiatives throughout the African continent. The other partnership is with the CDI (Center for Digital Inclusion), a social enterprise based in Brazil dedicated to educating disadvantaged youth about information technologies. The Web Foundation and CDI plan to develop training programs to teach young people how to create accessible Web content.

It's interesting to note that many of the Web Foundation initiatives have a big Mobile Web component. In the CDI partnership, Web-based applications are being created that will be "mobile ready." Accessibility is also a key aspect of these projects. The CDI web apps will integrate voice and graphical elements.

In a previous trip to Africa in September, Tim Berners-Lee visited Ghana to meet with officials and educators. He's currently at the 2009 Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt - where he made today's announcements. Starting next week, Berners-Lee will travel to Kenya and Uganda.

Below is a video of Berners-Lee in Ghana, courtesy of BBC's Digital Revolution program, talking with a Ghanaian about why he values the Web. You can see more of these videos here.

Our Brazil channel is edited by Diego Gomes. Diego and his team will combine translation of ReadWriteWeb posts with original posts about Brazil's emerging Web market.

ReadWriteWeb has a natural affinity for the international Web - after all, the company was founded by a New Zealander (yours truly)! For more context about our global strategy, read Bernard Lunn's post Do You Speak Global Innovation?.

RWW Brazil Sponsor Opportunities

ReadWriteWeb Brazil already has two key sponsors, who we'd like to thank here:

• UOL HOST, the top .com domain registrar in Brazil and a provider of quality web hosting, e-commerce, e-mail marketing and data center services.
• PagSeguro, the leading Brazilian online payments and money transfer service. It allows users to send and receive payments via e-mail or using credit cards, bank account transfers or bank payment slip.

If you're a Brazilian Internet company or an international company seeking to reach an influential readership in Brazil, please contact the RWW Brazil editor to find out about their sponsor and partner opportunities.

Brazil's Web Market

We last wrote about the Brazil web market back in September 2006, at a time when Brazilians were 70% of the user base of Google's social network Orkut. We noted at the time that Brazilian Web users had a special affinity for community, which was reflected in the web apps that were popular in Brazil at that time.

For an up-to-date review of Brazil's web market, check out this presentation by comScore:

We want to take a moment to highlight five international companies that will be at the Summit. We really appreciate the distance they are traveling to help make this event an important one. You can learn about more highlighted participants signed up so far on this page and you can sign up to join us here.

Faroo (UK)

Faroo is a P2P real-time search engine that combines explicit and implicit data to power its indexing and ranking technologies. The company specializes in difficult real-time analysis of international content, like breaking up long strings of Chinese characters for text analysis. Faroo is also a sponsor of the Real-Time Web Summit, so they are helping it happen as well as helping its international relevance!

PostRank (Canada)

PostRank provides social media analytics on top of traditional web content analytics. We've written about PostRank over and over again here (we're going to again later today) and we use their technology every day. We're very excited that PostRank is going so strong that it's a major sponsor of the Summit as well.

Mendeley (UK)

Mendeley Research Networks is a fascinating real-time citation tracking, recommendation and organization tool for scientific research papers. It's backed by founders of Last.fm and Skype. It's like Last.fm for scientific research. The company believes it is on a pace to have the largest online repository of academic articles in the world sometime next year.

Twingly (Sweden)

Twingly offers blog search, trackback discovery and comment aggregation in real time. The company already has a thriving business providing real-time inbound links for European newspapers and just launched a new product called Twingly Channels this week. (Watch this space for a review later today.)

Sysomos (Canada)

Some of these companies are bringing multiple representatives and we hope that even more international participants will sign up in the next two weeks leading up to the event. To register to join these companies and many more at the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, please visit this link. Feeling unable to make it? Make sure to put the event down on your calendar anyway, we'll be broadcasting select discussion sessions live via Justin.tv. See you on the 15th!

One man in particular is staging a protest against the censorship: He is calling for everyone in China to abandon the Internet on the day the new rule takes effect. According to GlobalPost, Beijing artist and prominent political critic Ai Weiwei wants other Chinese citizens to realize their own power.

Weiwei has a reputation for being a hugely prolific blogger, generating around 3,000 posts in his first three years of writing online. He also uses Twitter, Chinese microblogging service Fanfou, and other sites to spread the word about freedom of expression and overt criticism of the government in China.

On July 1, he is calling for all of China's 300 million Internet users to completely log off for the day. In the original post, even Ai noted, "Chinese people are very practical. They think 'Oh, what's that going to do?'" He is aware the action he's requesting is huge; however, he feels that even a small gesture of protest will have an impact.

In his own words, "A small act is worth a million thoughts."

Given Westerners' sudden bout of green-tinted solidarity with Iranian protesters, we do wonder if Weiwei's call to action (via online inaction) will spread beyond China. What effect do you think Weiwei's protest will have? How can those of us in other countries best express our own disapproval of that nation's censorship policies? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

It can't be assumed that all the proxies were created to support Iranian protesters, but they were probably all shared for that purpose. Renesys reports that the rate of proxy creation appears to have slumped dramatically over the last few days and newly shared proxies are now being added quickly to the official list of filtered destinations online. This could have consequences for the political movement's global visibility and underlines how important it is for everyday people to create proxies and share them with friends overseas ahead of time.

Renesys offers the following explanation of how proxies work:

A proxy server is a simple bit of software that you run on your computer. It effectively lets you share your computer with anonymous strangers as a "repeater" for content that they aren't allowed to fetch themselves. For example, an Iranian web browser might be manually configured to use your computer (identified by an IP address and a port number) as a Web proxy. When your anonymous friend reads twitter.com, or posts a tweet, the request goes via your computer, instead of to Twitter's web server directly. Except for a little delay, and the fact that your friend gets to see what the uncensored Internet looks like from New York or London or São Paolo instead of Tabriz or Qom, surfing through a proxy is pretty much like surfing without one.

The United States may have offered up more proxies than anywhere else, but the effort has truly been global. "The USA and Western Europe were well-represented, but so were China, India, Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Vietnam," the firm wrote today. "87 countries in all, a pretty impressive breadth of representation, considering the relatively small size of this sample."

Unfortunately the construction of Iran's sophisticated censorship system was a global effort as well; the Wall St. Journal reported this weekend that Siemens and Nokia sold the Iranian government the technology that's being used to track down and silence protesters.

Renesys notes that public sharing of the proxies is making it too easy for the Iranian government to find and control them. The company suggests that it's far better to create proxies and start sharing them with people living under repressive governments ahead of major conflict - "don't wait until the tanks are in the streets to figure this out, because by that point, you may have already lost the proxy war."

If you would like to think ahead and set up a proxy for sharing with friends who could need it, Glype.com is one service you might begin with.

How Does it Work?

According to Sensaris,

"Whether used by pedestrians or cyclists, the sensors provide noise and ozone levels in real time over the Internet and web based visualization (mashups). Our Senspod technology forms the basis for innovative citizen centric services. We look forward to helping other cities use it for their own community action and urban life quality improvement plans."

We think this is potentially a wonderful tool that will empower citizens to become involved and take back some control over their quality of life. Hopefully it will force cities to pay more attention to air and noise pollution problems in less affluent neighborhoods and take steps to improve conditions.

The presidential elections in Iran are being held on June 12, 2009 and will be the country's 10th such election. There are 3 leading candidates right now. Incumbant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is running against Iran Reform Movement candidate and former Prime Minister Mousavi. Former Speaker of the Majlis (Parliament) Mehdi Karroubi, another Reformist candidate, also intends to run.

As All Facebook's Nick O'Neill puts it, "unfortunately for the Iranians, they have a regime in place that doesn't support freedom of speech and would prefer to run a dictatorship". Those of us who enjoy such freedoms should do our part to make sure that censorship like this never happens to us. We wish our brothers and sisters in Iran the best of luck.

Facebook Response:

When we first learned of this story we immediately contacted Facebook to see what they had to say. They were gracious to respond swiftly with this comment from a Facebook spokesperson:

"We are disappointed to learn of reports that users in Iran may not have access to
Facebook, especially at a time when voters are turning to the Internet as a source
of information about election candidates and their positions. We are investigating
these reports.

We believe that people around the world should be able to use Facebook to
communicate and share information with their friends, family and coworkers. It is
always a shame when a countries' cultural and political concerns lead to limits
being placed on the opportunity for sharing and expression that the Internet
provides."

Specific areas of interest for IBM investment include analytics, clean tech, cloud computing, smart grids, electronic health care, and green data centers. The company's expansion into Vietnam is a response to what they see as accelerated IT growth in that area.

"The country's IT sector is growing over 20 percent annually, fueled by massive Internet expansion and a younger population that's driving consumer demand for infrastructure improvements."

The first IBM Innovation Center in Vietnam is the sixth such site to open since 2007 and the forty-third in the past decade. The center will be based in Ho Chi Minh City and will focus on the development and marketing of new tech across banking, telecom, energy, and government industries. Here, local developers and others will find training and access to open standards-based tech.

The company will also be collaborating with local VCs to support the development of emerging technology products. Similar partnerships now account for nearly a third of IBM's revenue and have doubled since 2008, when IBM partnered with around 8,500 companies.

IBM is also turning its attention and earmarking funds to develop relationships with the University of Technology in Ho Chi Minh City and the College of Technology in Hanoi. Their goal is to create a curriculum in cloud computing at the former institution and service sciences at the latter. Computing labs and new departments will be created as a result.

IBM is also debuting the first local-language version of developerWorks, its online resource and social network for developers.

As for IBM's strategy of investment in growth sectors outside the U.S. and Western Europe, Freeman wrote, "The strategy is paying off.

"For example, in Brazil, more than half of the country's estimated 2,000 independent software vendors (ISVs) have become IBM partners. In China, IBM continues to recruit partners at record rates, with more than 11,000 registered so far this year. In India, IBM has over 2,500 business partners across 200 cities, ranging from small resellers to global systems integrators and ISVs - business partners now drive 35 percent of revenue for IBM in India."

Certainly, this smacks of global domination; after all, is not IBM the Starbucks of IT? The company's unrelenting expansion in areas that can least refuse its injections of tech and capital has been making headlines for years. It likely wouldn't hurt IBM to create dependent tech ecosystems in these areas, and we cannot overlook the fact that IT labor is cheaper in many of these parts of the world.

Some have also begun to question IBM's role in South Africa, an area that Freeman specifically mentioned as a growth area ripe for strong investments. The company has a rough history there; a U.S. federal court recently ruled that IBM can be held responsible for enabling apartheid by providing regime leaders with IT infrastructure used to disenfranchise and harm black citizens.

When IBM declared its lack of responsibility for how clients would use its products, the judge countered, "That level of willful blindness in the face of crimes in violation of the law of nations cannot defeat an otherwise clear showing of knowledge that the assistance IBM provided would directly and substantially support apartheid."

IBM is not UNICEF. Historically, like almost any multinational corporation, they have followed profit amorally, whether the revenue streams led to their helping oppress or enlighten the citizens of any geographical area. These partnerships in developing areas are highly profitable for the company. And let us not imagine that their desire to invest in green tech or healthcare-related tech comes from any kind of altruism: These are hot, bankable areas right now.

Still, sometimes capitalism does work for the best for all parties involved. Let's hope that Vietnamese techies benefit as much from IBM's expansion into their country as the company itself doubtless will.

TED Talks are brain stretching, tear-jerking, 18 minute nuggets of emerging wisdom. The new translation project is sponsored by Nokia and uses the awesome volunteer-powered translation service DotSub.

If you speak languages other than English, the rest of the DotSub site is quite worth a visit as well.

So far 306 translations have been completed, hopefully more will be performed soon. Bringing these TED videos to more people around the world is a big win for humanity. It is truly remarkable how TED has gone from a closed gathering for the global elite to becoming far, far more publicly available. Andy Carvin has some more details over at NPR.

Apparently, earlier today Facebook users in India were greeted with a new message upon logging in: Facebook is now available in Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. As of 2001, (the latest numbers available) those languages had a combined 770 million speakers. Facebook has just over 200 million users, so this could be a huge opportunity for growth if the company can pull off more than just interface translation.

We expect Facebook will make an announcement about the availability of these six Indian languages sometime very soon - we were told about it by reader Nimish Adani, of Workosaur.com. Adani's take on the news? "This move isn't necessarily going to multiply Facebook's usage as most people here would continue to use Facebook in English," he says. "Usage of regional languages (in the online space and in the professional world in India) isn't as popular as is the case with countries like Russia, China or those in Europe.

"I'd see this development as a move to woo those from the smaller towns and cities of India who are currently on Orkut. The more urban and suave English-speaking audience have already moved from Orkut to Facebook. MySpace (despite having an office in India) is a complete non-entity in India. Bebo has also come in recently but again its a non-starter."

What do you think?

It's a dramatic move that could pave the way for other media companies to do the same and effectively open up international markets. People complain, but do you think that viewers would pay a similar monthly fee for international access to Hulu, for example? We do.

We're still waiting for examples of US customers willing to pay for online services (the iPhone app store is a related example) but it will be interesting to see if the rest of the world is. Last.fm's announcement is an interesting response to the advertising market's belief that only eyeballs from certain countries are "worth" advertising to.

Meanwhile, the vehement insistence by users that every damn thing on the web be free works hand in hand with the rise of over-saturation in advertising. Let's see what kinds of user experience, features and services we can get by paying a little cash - shall we?

Laura Ling, a Chinese-American, and Euna Lee, a Korean-American, are in North Korea reporting on refugees fleeing poverty.

It's been a difficult few days for people around the world using new media to challenge authoritarian governments. See also our coverage last night of Omid Reza Misayafi, an Iranian blogger reported to have died in prison.

No cause of death is yet known, but the Committee says torture of bloggers is common in Iran and they are usually placed in close proximity to the most dangerous criminals in any facility. Misayafi was sentenced in December to 30 months in prison "for insulting Islamic Republic Leaders." The man said he was a cultural blogger, not a political one, and only wrote a few satirical articles that got him into trouble.

We've reported here on a number of bloggers imprisoned in Iran and in Egypt for documenting government abuses or just writing critical words about governments that demand total compliance. In the middle of last year we wrote about Iran's parliament debating legislation that would add the death penalty to the list of possible punishments for using blogs to challenge government authority.

It is a timeless battle all around the world between freedom, art and self expression on one side and authority, expediency and abuse on the other. The rise of the web has made that battle different, though. Blogs give a voice to the previously voiceless, and the historical and moral importance of efforts to save those new voices from arrest, torture and death cannot be overstated.

We would love to see the Obama administration, which has made extensive use of online social media, publicly and explicitly condemn this death at the Iranian government's hands. We'd be surprised if that happened.

Social media is powerful and changing the world; we don't expect that this will be the last person to lose their life over it. Omid Reza Misayafi, brave Iranian blogger, may you rest in peace. May all those imprisoned for blogging in Iran, and around the world, be set free.

For ongoing coverage of this and all-too similar situations around the world, see The Committee to Protect Bloggers and associated organizations linked to on their site.

At a time when marketers are obsessed with getting traction on Facebook and are just beginning to take users outside the US seriously, Etsy's survey of its international members is fascinating - as is the company itself.

Etsy is Hot Stuff

Etsy is an online marketplace where people set up shops to sell physical goods they have made by hand. Knitters, painters, potters and musicians use Etsy like millions of other people use eBay. The Etsy community also meets offline, though, at Etsy-sponsored craft fairs in cities around the globe.

Etsy means business, too. It's raised more than $30 million in venture funding and has the backing of people from places like Facebook and Flickr. Probably the hippest VC fund in tech, Fred Wilson's Union Square Ventures, is an investor - as is early Facebook fund Accel.

This Fall Etsy started looking for a Director of International Marketing and announced major plans to expand its support for international buyers and sellers.

The International Profile

Traffic monitoring services indicate that about half of Etsy's website traffic is coming from outside the US. Where do all these people live? The company's survey of almost 1600 international sellers showed that these members come predominantly from the UK and Europe, with healthy chunks from Canada and Australia. Sixty-seven different countries were represented and 97% of the respondents were women.

French, German and Spanish were the most popular languages spoken after English. Almost everyone said they preferred to be paid for the crafts they sell by PayPal, a great sign that PayPal's international woes may not be as bad as they used to be.

The most interesting parts of this survey may be how respondents learned about Etsy and how they promote their shops beyond the site. Word of mouth was far and away the leading way people discovered the site, something that any other website would be insanely jealous of. Discovery by blog was also bigger than search and advertising.

How did people promote their shops? Their personal blogs are the number one way, they said. Take that "post-blogging" cynics!

That's a snapshot of Etsy's method of international growth. We thought it was remarkable enough that we wanted to share it with readers here.

These are our favorites, we'd love to hear your suggestions as well.

It's not explicitly political but the Boston Globe's Big Picture website is a must-see collection of big photos of important events from around the world. Collections like Observing Ramadan, Scenes from the Gaza Strip and China's Lantern Festival are great for grasping what's going on in other places a little better, almost on an emotional level. Who doesn't like really big, high quality photos?

OpenCongress

The Sunlight Foundation is dedicated to casting light on the otherwise dark operations of government and one of the ways they do so is by creating really accessible political websites. OpenCongress is their best work, it's an easy-to-use site to keep track of what's being debated in Congress. Drop by for a quick glance at what the hot topics of the day are and what different sides of the debate have to say, or dive deep into the system to set up tracking feeds for your favorite politicians, legislation or issue. We reviewed OpenCongress in depth here this summer.

Obama on iTunes and YouTube

You use your computer a lot more than you listen to AM radio, we'd guess, and it's now easier than ever to keep an eye on the President thanks to the White House's video podcast feeds and YouTube channel. We thought this was pretty remarkable when it was first announced and we still think so today.

NPR Podcast Creator and Mobile Site

Want to catch an occasional short news piece about your home state or pet issue? Check out the handy new NPR podcast creation tool. We reviewed this in December when it launched and continue to be really impressed. Just enter keywords and you'll be given a custom RSS feed to subscribe to podcast news stories that contain those words. It's fast, free, easy and helpful.

Check out the very nice NPR mobile site, too. That's a great way to call in and get a few minutes of info about what's going on in the world. Have a little time while walking someplace? We like to take that opportunity to grab a few moments of learning.

Memeorandum Colors

So this one's a touch sophisticated but we just couldn't help but mention it. We presume readers here know about Techmeme, the best place to find the hottest conversations about technology on the internet. We hope you also know about the sister site Memeorandum, which aggregates hot political conversations.

That's a fun site but it's much more useful if you've got the Memeorandum Colors Greasemonkey Script installed. Take five minutes and install it, you'll be glad you did, it does not require any technical skill at all. The service uses data mining of historical linking patterns to color code the links on Memeorandum by political leanings. It's really nice to see a cluster of blog posts about a topic and be able to pick out the one conservative perspective, or one liberal one and one conservative one.

Honorable Mentions

A handful of other resources we'd also recommend you check out include:

10 Facts Every Westerner Should Know About the Middle East is simply a blog post by an atheist semantic web fan and IT security guy named Daniel Miessler. It's a good read, we like to pass it around.

LittleSis is an awesome collaborative research site that describes itself as "an involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited and maintained by people like you." It's a lot of fun to browse around and could prove useful for political blogging.

Global Voices Online is a long running site that brings together bloggers from around the world. Political holidays should not be marked in isolation, it's an international world.

BreakingNewsOn is a Twitter account that finds and publishes the most "breaking news" you're likely to find anywhere. It's a really neat little project, though with a very strange background story. According to a write up on TechCrunch, founder Michael van Poppel launched the project when he just happened to get his hands on an unpublished videotape of Osama Bin Laden which he subsequently sold to Reuters. So remember kids, if you happen to find any such materials, don't forget to see if you can parlay it into a news discovery project on Twitter too. Odd, isn't it?

So those are some of our favorite sites to grab a quick bit of politics. What are yours?