Blogging, China-style

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.

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