But I was pleasantly surprised to find it a mostly pictorial blog full of posts that are at times critical, others amusing, Giner’s posts are always interesting.

In the style of ABC’s Media Watch or Crikey’s Media Briefs it takes a look at things like headline usage, page layout and editing in big papers from around the world.

All this is interspersed with the odd in-depth post from Giner about what he’s been up to in the media world.

Giner’s current blog-on-the-side, QE2: The Last Crossing, chronicles his journey on the final Atlantic crossing of the QE2 cruise ship.

In this post dated October 15th, he tells the story of how the blog came about. Apparently, he pitched the idea to several editors and newspapers and no-one was interested in the story so he went ahead and blogged on it himself.

Giner says he had overwhelming interest in his QE2 adventure and is now considering writing a book about it.

Giner’s QE2 success story gives a big middle fingered salute to snooty editors who think they now what is news and what isn’t.

Go Giner.

It describes itself as “a non-profit global citizens’ media project founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society,” which “seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.”

Global Voices works not only as a news source in its own right, but as a wire from the blogosphere (a blogwire?).

It works with traditional media rather than against it, transcending the online vs traditional journalism debate by encouraging both sides to work together.

It’s For Media section is a comprehensive resource for editors and journalists and encourages mainstream media to use the site to generate story ideas.

This spirit of cooperation is refreshing -a perfect example of how the quality of journalism (in all its forms) can be enhanced by combining new and old reporting methods.

Navigating the site is incredibly easy and I found it’s search by country method (accessed in the top-right of the homepage) a fantastic feature. For example when I chose Australia I found this blog post from John Kennedy about the reaction in China to Kevin Rudd’s election victory.

The post compiles translated Chinese blog posts praising the victory. It’s effectively a blog within a blog within a blog within… you get the picture and shows just how good GV is at bringing the global blogosphere together.

Trawling the internet to find this sort of material could take days without an innovative site like Global Voices to do it for us.

In case you can’t tell from my glowing praise above, I found Global Voices to be the best blog I came across during ALJ301 and will now be a frequent visitor.