The world is talking. Are you listening?

As a web surfer looking out for independent voices beyond the mainstream media, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by the millions of blogs from all over the planet. Global Voices makes your job easier by acting as a crossroads of the most relevant blogs out there. Its crew consists of hundreds of blogger -authors, -editors and translators who point you towards the most interesting grassroots perspectives and conversations online. They do this by selecting passages from a wide array of online citizen media posted in their region and interconnecting them on the Global Voices website, using a variety of technologies: weblogs, podcasts, photos, videos, wikis, tags, aggregators and online chats. Their criteria for selection include respectability and credibility of the original bloggers, as well as contextual relevance of the information and analysis.

In essence, Global Voices makes the dialog happen. It promotes freedom of expression by advocating against internet censorship and developing tools and relationships that expand the scope of influence of voices speaking from everywhere. It encourages the world’s citizens to put their voices forward by providing online tutorials and publicizing ways in which they can safely express themselves with open-source and free tools. Global Voices is available in sixteen different languages and addresses preoccupations that are often ignored by the international English-language dominated media, but are important to communities behind the scenes. Check out the Special Coverage section for blogposts ordered by major news events such as the 27th Annual AIDS Conference or the global food crisis. Or just peruse the links, roundups and featured stories from Cape Verde to Lesotho in the sub-Saharan Africa section.

Global Voices is a project of the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a research think-tank concerned with the relationship between cyberspace and civic activity.