THIS news item attests to the power of citizen journalism in circumventing censorship laws that might shackle mainstream media.

BEIJING–In the strictly controlled media world of communist China, “citizen journalism” is beating a way through censorship, breaking taboos and offering a pressure valve for social tensions.

In one striking example this month, the Internet was largely responsible for breaking open a slave scandal in two Chinese provinces that some local authorities had been complicit in.

A letter posted on the Internet by 400 parents of children working as slaves in brickyards was the trigger for the national press to finally report on the scandal that some rights groups say had been going on for years.

AILEEN APOLO, Google country representative to the Philippines, is organizing a blogger event on July 3. Over 100 bloggers are being encouraged to sign up for a sampling of Taste of Asia located at the SM Hypermart at the SM Mall of Asia. Specifically, the details are as follows:

WHO: Bloggers of all ages and sizes
WHAT: SM Hypermarket invites bloggers to get a “Taste of Asia”
WHEN: July 3, 2007 7 p.m.
WHERE: Taste of Asia, SM Mall of Asia

To join, you just need to have a blog and register by leaving a comment here or here, here or here. There are limited slots available (100!) so try your best to grab slots within the coordinators’ blogs.

FINALLY, it’s here! No, it’s not Silver Surfer (obviously I just finished watching F4). It’s the young Playstation.blog. First off, I don’t own a PlayStation 3. But I do hope to buy one soon because of certain games I can’t play on a rival game console pushed by a software giant.

Why only now? Well, I can speculate on some reasons. But that’s another point for discussion in another blog (calling Alex!).

According to this blog, this is THE blog of Sony Computer Entertainment America, which means it is a company blog. But the people behind it hope to reach out to like-minded inviduals who love to annihilate monsters, squash little bugs, and explore a virtual world that seems bigger than our real world. [Read the rest of this entry »]

SURE, we’ve seen players and coaches being ejected from the game in different sports, but a blogger?

It’s true. Check out this story that came out in the Los Angeles Times.

Excerpt:

[Read the rest of this entry »]

HERE’S an interesting blog called Chuva of the Chenes maintained by the “nawawalang anak ni Gretchen Barreto at Jestoni Alarcon.”

In her most recent blog entry, the author waxes nostalgic over Cubao billboards.

Excerpt:

When I was a kid, we frequented Cubao a lot, usually on Sundays to shop or window-shop at Rustan’s, SM, Ali Mall, and Marikina Shoe Expo (now Cubao X). Whenever we needed to buy something or we needed to visit our pedia (Medispecialist Center 2nd floor Rustan’s), we went to Cubao. When my erpat’s with us, we would go to Perfect Pitch and all those music shops in the area. A trip to Cubao is usually punctuated with flavored popcorn from Goldilocks at Rustan’s (love apple popcorn!). Cubao is very much intertwined with my childhood; it’s a place of nostalgia and of good memories.

One particular Cubao fixture that is close to my aorta and vena cava is the gigantic movie billboard area found along the intersection of Aurora Blvd and EDSA. Unlike today’s printed billboards, these were made by hand, painted by artists.

AT LEAST, that’s what Six Apart hopes to achieve as it upgraded TypePad and Movable Type.

Make no mistake about it: More companies will see blogging as a vital business tool, and with its upgraded blogging solutions Six Apart aims to help these firms create full-blown business sites.

Here’s an excerpt from the Reuters story that came out on eWeek.com:

[Read the rest of this entry »]

WE also had our share of using technology such as short message service (SMS) or text messaging to organize a mass protest against then President Joseph Estrada. But imagine if blogging was widely available at the time. We would have seen Filipinos liveblogging about it.

In China where political bloggers are censored, the recent mass protest in Xiamen against the planned construction of a toxic chemical plant dangerously close to the city core on June 1 was seen as a landmark move for China’s leading independent blogger’s collective Bullog, Global Voices wrote.

Excerpt:

With a media blackout on news of the demonstration, the time, location and target turnout of one million people were spread almost exclusively by SMS, bbs postings and on blogs. The government was able to stop the SMS from spreading for several days and nearly all bbs webmasters and blog service providers were swift to delete any related discussion, leaving Bullog members free to go on to post several in-depth posts this past week looking at various angles of the situation, including one of of the key public figures lobbying against the PX plant, Southern Metropolis Daily columnist and Xiamen resident Lian Yue.

Several other Bullogers took it a step further by attending the demonstration in person, leaving one at home to post their SMS live updates straight onto Bullog, giving it a national exclusive as to what was happening minute-by-minute down on the ground which, by the afternoon of the 1st, had attracted enough readers that Bullog’s host server was left unable to keep up. With Bullog inaccessible, the live SMScast was temporarily moved here, from where many of the below discussions mixed in with the live reporting were taken.