October 29th 2008
Yesterday’s announcement that The Christian Science Monitor will end daily publication this spring in favor of online journalism and a new weekly publication is more a relief (and a joy) than a shock to many of its biggest fans. I spent several years working with the church’s publications, including helping set online strategy for the […]
September 6th 2008
Jeff Ooi gained notoriety by writing a daily Malaysian political blog. Like a lot of bloggers, he poured hours of personal time into it every day. Along the way, he exposed corruption and found a voice for demanding more competent government. Last March he posted a banner ad on his site: “Get a Blogger Into Parliment.” […]
August 17th 2008
FCC Commissioner McDowell Proposed Crackpot Threat to Bloggers While addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell made a lame attempt to suggest this election is about preventing Democrats from using the FCC to regulate content on Internet blogs. Of course, there’s no legal basis for the FCC to regulate content on personal servers, and […]
August 3rd 2008
Bill Patry has decided to discontinue his popular copyright blog. He lists two reasons: The tendency of readers and the media to link his personal writing as a professional position. Patry is Google’s top copyright attorney (there, see? I’ve done it too). It’s easy to identify bloggers as whatever their current job is, especially if […]
July 16th 2008
The Iranian parliament is moving toward enforcing the death penalty as a punishment for blogging that encourages “corruption, prostitution or apostasy.” As I wrote last month, there are about 40 bloggers imprisoned worldwide. Blogs are filtered, and bloggers are deterred, but this is the first law that would try to eliminate bloggers altogether. Iranian President […]
June 21st 2008
The Christian Science Monitor reports that as blogging has become more popular, so has the oppression of bloggers by governments. Bloggers seem particularly susceptible to political imprisonment: The vigilante tone of many citizen journalists sends them down a prickly path with government censors; and they are often one-man operations, meaning there’s no editors or company […]
June 10th 2008
Do you ever wonder who owns the rights on blog comments? Would a blogger need to seek permission to republish your comment elsewhere? Can you take comments back? Amend them? Publish comments they inspire?
June 3rd 2008
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is considering blocking Facebook, the popular social networking site used in April to mobilize 80,000 supporters to protest rising food prices. As described in earlier postings, Facebook has been used around the world to coordinated even larger protests. Blogger Kareem el-Beheiri, who covered and promoted the protest was imprisioned for 73 . See […]
October 17th 2007
EFF Civil Liberties Director, Jennifer Granick, provides an excellent review of the Free Flow of Information Act (FFIA). Introduced by Senators Specter, Lugar, and Schumer the bill seeks to establish a federal journalist-shield privilege. The bill provides broad protection to anyone engaged in the regular gathering, writing or publishing of news or other matters of […]
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