K, this just blew me away. I've been checking in on the Guardian feed on the protests in Egypt pretty regularly, and they have been providing a decent running commentary: http://www.guardian.co.uk/.... I'm very text-oriented, so I haven't even checked out the Al Jazeera video feeds.
But when I clicked on the link to a "speak-to-tweet" website that lets people from Egypt call a phone number to leave voice messages, that we can listen to online, I was not expecting to be moved so strongly by the first message I heard: http://www.saynow.com/...
To hear directly the voice of someone in Cairo, without media filters, or narratives, just a woman speaking about what she's experiencing, moved me profoundly. It made this real for me.
I don't use twitter, but if you go to this link: http://twitter.com/..., you can click the bit.ly link at the end of each tweet and listen to the message
So this was the story I read on the Guardian feed:
10.56pm: One way to get around Egypt's internet blackout: the engineers at Google have helped build a new "speak-to-tweet" feature for those in Egypt who want to get their message out.
From Google's blog:
Like many people we've been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. 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 worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It's already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.
We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.
Some of the messages are in Arabic, like this one: http://www.saynow.com/...
A bunch are just hang-ups, or dead space. The messages need some filtering and transcription. But I think everyone will be hearing these voices over the next few days...