2009 Russia may be a human rights nightmare, but this is encouraging: On April 22nd Dmitry Anatol’yevich Medvedev became the first Russian president to launch a comment-enabled blog on Russia’s broadest, most contentious political blogging platform, Zhivoy Zhurnal (LiveJournal), or ZheZhe as it is informally known. He will be blogging by video, so he inaugurated…
Showing all posts tagged internet
The fate of the lone blogger
Sadly, many of the countries below that repress bloggers are the same nations I feature in my book, The Blogging Revolution: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has just released a list of the ten worst countries in which to blog. Topping the list is Burma, followed closely by Iran, Syria, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam,…
The right to offend, strip and shout
The issue of internet censorship is one that has long fascinated me. It’s a subject, though, that defies easy definition. People in different countries view the question of governmental censorship very differently. It’s a relief, therefore, to read the results of this new global study that finds almost universal support for an open and free…
What will the web be like in 2012?
The amount of traffic generated each month by YouTube is now equivalent to the amount of traffic generated across the entire internet in all of 2000.
The Brotherhood is silenced, again
The issue of Egypt’s repression of dissenters and Muslim Brotherhood bloggers gets little coverage in the West. Is this because Egypt is a “moderate and pro-Western” dictatorship? Perhaps. I was interviewed last week by the US radio show, The World, about the detention of blogger Abdel Rahman Fares: [display_podcast]
Holding onto confused thoughts
What do Australian bloggers think of the Durban II conference in Geneva?
How much do you know about your mobile phone?
Western complicity in Iranian repression is something I examined in my book, The Blogging Revolution. It’s getting worse: Telecom giant Nokia has spiffy slogan: “Connecting People.” But a new report reveals that Nokia may be helping connect the wrong people: Iranian security agents and grassroots dissidents. It seems Nokia has helped Iran install electronic surveillance…
Tweet that buster
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times meets her match with one of the founders of Twitter: ME: If you were out with a girl and she started twittering about it in the middle, would that be a deal-breaker or a turn-on? BIZ (dryly): In the middle of what?