China’s Beijing Games will have to contend with the blogging phenomenon: The International Olympic Committee is for the first time permitting athletes to write blogs. The IOC has set out guidelines for blogging at the Beijing Games to ensure copyright agreements are not infringed. They include bans on posting any audio or visual material of…
Showing all posts tagged internet
Dark days ahead
A friend writes from Tehran: Here the political weather is terrible. You might know that the parliamentary election is near and the reformist nearly are not allowed to be involved. About 80 per cent of reformist candidates has been labeled as unqualified by the Government. Mr Khatami and Rafsanjani had a meeting with the Supreme…
Blogging for freedom (and torture)
The democratisation of media continues apace: Since CNN embraced the citizen journalist movement in August 2006 with the launch of its iReport initiative, the news organization has received nearly 100,000 news-related photos and videos from viewers. Yet fewer than 10% of those submissions have appeared on CNN.com or the cable channel. That’s all about to…
Talking to our “enemy”
Despite the seemingly never-ending rhetoric between Israel and Iran, bloggers in both countries are starting to communicate with each other. The internet is breaking down the barriers that politicians and commentators are so keen to erect.
The need for a post-Fidel world
Take your mind back to Cuba, in the 1990s, and the introduction of the internet: In 1995, the Republic of Cuba received a Class B license from InterNIC, the US-based cooperative that registers servers joining the Internet, effectively giving the Cuban government an address in cyberspace. In October 1996, the revolution connected full-time to the…
Behold the Chinese web
Tudou, the Chinese video sharing site, claims to have overtaken YouTube with over one billion megabytes of data transfers every day.
Before the Olympic storm
The fear: A Western journalist set to cover the upcoming Beijing Olympics games said recently that he is concerned that communist authorities will crack down and arrest reporters who cover social repression in the country. Francesco Liello, China correspondent for La Gazetta dello Sport of Italy and the first reporter credentialed for the games told…
Fighting back against a major
Western internet companies should get ready for many more cases like this one: A Chinese scholar who challenged the Communist government by setting up a democratic opposition party has vowed to sue the US internet company Google for excising his name from its local search results. If a company such as Google censors its own…
What they think of the US of A
Voices without Votes is a new project that “opens a window on what non-Americans are saying in blogs and citizen media about US foreign policy and the 2008 presidential elections.” Take a Haitian blogger on the US election or the Arab world on Barack Obama and religion.