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.

GLOBAL Voices Online reports that Egyptian blogger Abdulmonem Mahmood will be freed.

Here’s an excerpt from the Global Voices Online entry:

A recent clampdown on Egyptian bloggers encompassed bloggers of different political orientations. Egyptian blogger Abdul Monem Mahmood who has been detained for 46 days on political allegations belongs to the banned Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. However, various bloggers of different backgrounds showed support to Monem without discrimination.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

ONE of Egypt’s most prominent political bloggers, known only as Sandmonkey, is now offline.

Here’s an excerpt from the Agence France-Presse article:

The Egypt-based blogger, known only as “Sandmonkey” — a derogatory term for people of Arab descent — posted his last entry on Saturday.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

HUMAN Rights Watch has called for the release of Egyptian TV journalist and blogger Abd al-Monim Mahmud. 

Here’s an excerpt from the Human Rights Watch statement posted on the Human Rights Education Associates site.
 

Around midnight on April 14, security forces at the Cairo airport detained
`Abd al-Monim Mahmud, a 27-year-old journalist for the London-based
satellite channel Al-Hiwar and prominent blogger affiliated with the
Muslim Brotherhood, as he attempted to travel to Sudan to do reporting for
an Al-Hiwar segment on human rights in the Arab world.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

I RECEIVED an e-mail from a Malaysian journalist last week. It was about a story from Malaysiakini.com highlighting a recent warning from its Internal Security Ministry against newspapers quoting or citing “anti-government” content from blogs and online portals.

Unfortunately, Malaysiakini.com’s story is only available for its paying subscribers. But for the purpose of our discussion on blogs and free expression, I have picked a few points from the article to highlight:

• The Ministry sent a letter to newspapers reminding them of the Printing Presses and Publications Act of 1984. According to Section 8A(2) of the law, newspapers should ensure “correctness and truth of news before publishing them.”

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HERE’S an excerpt from the AFP wire story that came out in INQUIRER.net Infotech:

CAIRO–The Egyptian judge, who chairs the court that is to hear a blogger’s appeal against a four-year jail sentence that drew criticism from around the world, is seeking to gag 21 websites, a judicial source told AFP Sunday.

The chairman of the appeals court in the second city of Alexandria, Abdel Fattah Murad, has taken the unusual step of applying to the administrative court for an injunction to close down the websites for allegedly harming the reputation of President Hosni Mubarak, the sources said.

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