Social Media

I have been busy skiing this week and working on my thesis. But I also found time to work on an assignment which was looking at what I think personifies excellence in geography. I settled on the use and application of social media. The ability for anyone with internet access to be able to publish material (like me!)

I made reference to Shawn in my last post - he was my example how how the application of social media can be used to do excellent things! He recently posted a new blog post after which I responded and directed me to one of his older posts.

I have replied to his comments with something I have been thinking about a lot due to this assignment. Whether it is feasible and possible for aid recipients to be able to video log themselves, rather than have someone like Shawn volunteer everything he had to go tell their stories. They could post videos to youtube, someone else in the international community could reply to that video with a translated version. Issues I see would be the availability and affordability of the internet access to upload the videos. Then there is the whole issue of the actual transfer of any donations. Maybe someone is a sort of free agent (not associated with any charity) like Shawn, could control the flow of funds if needed - once the people have posted the videos themselves.

In other news - my good friends from Bangladesh Ross and Melanie have started working on a project to design a mobile based technology allowing microcredit borrowers to compare the microfinance products of different MFIs. Very interesting stuff which might help to dispel some of the initial hesitation to join a bank - it would give some power back to the consumers.

Cheers,
Michael Clark