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Brooklyn, New York (Motherboard.tv) -- In 2009, Motherboard traveled to Liberia. While we were in Monrovia, we met Alfred Sirleaf, an advocate for freedom of information who runs the city's analog blog.
Sirleaf maintains that information should be available to everyone. The U.N. agrees. The organization recently released a report declaring that access to information is a human right. "People were not informed," Sirleaf told us empathetically.
To confront the matter of a lopsided, state-run media, Sirleaf created The Daily Talk, a free-of-charge, independent news aggregator written by hand on a blackboard. Each morning, at 10:45 a.m., Alfred Sirleaf heads down to his bulletin board to post the day's news, culling together a slate of stories his countrymen might otherwise never see. Grateful readers line up in droves -- on foot and in cars -- to read these updates. It's been described as the country's -- and most likely the world's -- only analog blog.
Watch the rest of The Analog Blogger at Motherboard.tv
Since 2000, in the midst of the country's second civil war, Sirleaf has provided information for Liberian citizens without access to the news.
While he was initially motivated by the need to educate the public about the war, now that warring factions no longer maintain a stranglehold on information, he uses his service to inform those who cannot afford to pick up a newspaper or connect to the Web.
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