“Who are famous internet people *not* from North America?

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A while ago, an academic, Sue Thomas started an inquiry in the Media Anthropology Network’s mailing list: “Who are famous internet people *not* from North America”. In this category Turkey had an early entry indeed: Internet Mahir. Turkey seems to have a new personality: http://www.besttaxidriver.com/

http://www.besttaxidriver.com/templates/gk_sportmaxum/images/style1/sportmx_bg_header.jpg

A cab driver posting his experiences with foreigners on his website. Unfortunately, Turkish contributions are at the level of kitcsh, not all same in other countries in the following list:

Her post for the results of her inquiry is here:

Famous internet people *not* from North America

I posted a version of this query on a couple of email lists (the Association of Internet Researchers and the EASA Media Anthropology Network) and received an overwhelming number of replies:
From that inquiry:
Minerva from South Korea:
Raja Petra Kamaruddin aka RPK from Malaysia
Steven Gan, Editor and Founder, malaysiakini.com
Angry Birds, a flock from Finland
Andrey Ternovskiy, the founder of chatroulette
Chaos Computer Club
Joi Ito
Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks
Tim Breners-Lee
“Izumi Aizu, Japan (also written about in Rheingold’s virtual community)
Nii Quaynoor, Ghana (first ISP in West Africa)
Kanchana Kanchanasut (woman, first to send email from Thailand)
Some early key players in United Nations: Bruno Lanvin (France), Hans d’Orville (Germany), Rosa Delgado (Peru)
Pit Schulz (DE) and Geert Lovink (NL) who did some important stuff in the middle of the 1990s, e.g. creating the nettime mailinglist:
http://www.nettime.org/info.html
“In Nigeria, we talk of the blogger Jonathan Elendu (elendureports.com). His specialty is to reveal government secrets and the misconduct of government officials. He’s been in and out of detention for his writings. A step ahead him, in terms boldness, is saharareporters.com. I do not know the face behind saharareporters.
“For Indonesia:
http://id.wikibooks.org/wiki/Sejarah_Internet_Indonesia/Pelaku_Sejarah_Internet_Indonesia 

also, Merlyna Lim is one of the first Indonesian internet scholars: http://merlyna.org/

“Harald Tveit Alvestrand (from Norway)
More ambiguous and yet political senitive…(both to US and China, I
guess)
Second-generation Immigrants to North America (or specifically to US):
Jerry Yang (Yahoo! founder):  Taiwan-born American citizen
Steve Chen (one of the YouTube founders): Taipei-born American citizen
Kai-Fu Lee (former Google China): Taipei-born
It is also difficult to describe the allegiance of Keith Rupert Murdoch
the Mexican Blog del Narco
“crazy polish youtube celebrities:
http://vbeta.pl/2009/04/11/7-polskich-gwiazd-internetu
and one animal (but from US):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzCaowoZg_A
“Han Han from China is a writer, blogger and professional rally driver.
He is known for his witty and sarcastic style of writing that
obliquely takes on the issues of government corruption, Internet
censorship and social injustice. His blog has attracted more than 400
million hits and ranks second in the 2010 Time 100 Poll of most
influential people in the world. 

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/07/chinas-star-blogger-treads-fine-line/

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/04/han-han-%E9%9F%A9%E5%AF%92-star-of-the-people/

 

“regarding Italy and WWW you can find some names and data here:

http://mag.wired.it/rivista/storie/vent-anni-di-internet-dai-primi-vagiti-in-html-all-i-pad.html

Here is an old list of references,  yet there are also some Italian scholars involved from many years in ICT and CMC studies from a socio-anthropological point of
view:

http://www.analisiqualitativa.com/magma/0103/bibliografia.htm

For Sardinia see for example some projects and names here: http://www.crs4.it/

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