Threatened Voices

One of the core issues on Fustat during it´s 50 something months has been Egyptian bloggers, their rights and violations against them. During the same period, Global Voices among many others has been a true friend of the Egyptian bloggers,taking over the torch from the Committee to Protect Bloggers if i remember correctly, in trying to track and provide help in form of a platform, being one of the hubs in fighting censorship, protect the written word online, and those bloggers/online journalists whom constitutes 45 per cent of all media workers in prison worldwide.

Those of you who follow my twitter account, might have noticed that my interest for free speech online, and bloggers rights is stretched around the globe, and not only to Egypt and the Arab World, so it will really be interesting to follow the new Global Voices advocacy project that is being launched today - Threatened Voices - described on it´s website as:

A collaborative mapping project to build a database of bloggers who have been threatened, arrested or killed for speaking out online and to draw attention to the campaigns to free them.

.

I´m looking forward to follow how this progress, and want to wish Sami Ben Gharbia and all at Global Voices involved in this ,as well as their network of partners the very best of luck!

This will be cross posted at Fustat.

New study on the Iranian blogosphere

I have treated my Diwan as The Ugly Duckling for far too long. Having tried to revive it on numerous occasions.

So when the opportunity presents itself in the form of a very interesting and brand new study on the 60 000 or so blogs that constitutes one of the most dynamic and diverse blogospheres in the world, i simply can´t resist telling my patient audience about it.

The Iranian bloghosphere have intrigued me for quite some time now, even longer than my love story with blogging. It brings me great pleasure to present a 68 page long study from the same institution that gave us Global Voices, which to me is like my second home and family in a way. The study is the third in a series made by the Internet & Democracy Project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harward Law School

The study is called, Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere and is written by John Kelly and Bruce Etling. It can be found here(PDF).

So Diwan of Democracy is officially back in business!

UPDATE: Mapping Iran´s Online Public is now available in Persian as well, it can be found here.

UPDATE II: In February of this year an updated map was released, and Yesterday that was supplemented with an Interactive blogosphere map.

The way the study was conducted has been subject to critique by Will Ward:

Like most people who saw John Kelly and Bruce Etling’s recent paper on mapping the Iranian blogosphere, my jaw dropped at the sheer coolness of the project and the types of connections it was making. But, given my experience with qualitative blog analysis, I was a bit skeptical of the project’s enduring value for social science researchers because it represented just a snapshot in time (i.e. the paper and data set was a one off affair that could not give an idea of trends and changes in the blogosphere) and also because in addition to mapping the connections between bloggers themselves, the researchers were mapping their own subjective descriptors and categories (labels like “secular/ expat” or Twelver Shi‘a) onto the blogosphere. There was no way for outside researchers to dispute the Kelly and Etling team’s labeling of a given blog, review or challenge the global labeling schema, nor to suggest new, potentially interesting or valuable alternative ones.

Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere

On June 17th, The Internet and Democracy project at he Berkman Center for Internet and Society will present their long awaited study(at least by me)on the Arabic Blogosphere at the United States Institute for Peace in Washington D.C together with a discussion on Obama´s Cairo speech were bloggers from the Middle East will take part online. For those not in Washington, like myself, there will be a possibility to follow the event via a live webcast.