Stories about Weblog from December, 2006
Bombs in Bangkok
It was not a good start to the new year in Bangkok as a series of bombs exploded in the city killing two people and injuring several others. From 2Bangkok's Youtube page The lost boy has pictures from one of the explosion sites At 6.45 p.m. today, less than 300...
The Saudi Blogosphere this Past Week
Sleeping blogs, zombie computers, Saudi driving culture, Saddam Hussein's hanging, Arabic MTV, Saudi lesbian bloggers, Christmas, and more in this week's roundup. Let's get this started… Relating to the demise of the blogging trend, mentioned in last week's roundup, Ahmad published a very interesting post about Saudi “sleeping blogs.” The...
Russia, Belarus: “Gazilla”
There's a distinct sense of deja vu this New Year's Eve: Gazprom, Russia's largest (and state-controlled) company and the world's biggest extractor of natural gas, is in the spotlight again, both locally (due to an ambitious and controversial construction project in St. Petersburg) and internationally (due to a dispute over...
The Iranian Blogestan on Saddam Hussein's death
Several Iranian bloggers talked about Saddam Hussein's death and remembered the Iran-Iraq war. Alpar says this year can be considered one of the worst for dictators, adding that Monday's newspapers could carry the following headline: “Four less dictators for 2007″. Alpar writes that Iranian people will celebrate this event, even...
Saddam at the Iraqi Blogodrome…
… for the last time. Today I post without comment on blogger reactions to Saddam's execution. I'll be posting more updates as the blogs develops. From my honorary Iraqi of the week. A cartoon by Latuff that sums up the mood of many: Like a gathering storm, realization that the...
Kazakhstan: where are we going to be in 15 years?
15 years ago we came into existence. I mean – we existed before, but no one knew. 15 years ago after the 1991 August putsch in Moscow, and followed collapse of the Soviet Union, new Central Asian countries, including Kazakhstan, came into existence for the rest of the world (ok,...
China: Cops and bikers
Guangzhou, China's third largest city just a few hours north of Hong Kong, is the last major city to do away with motorbikes, effective January 1, 2007, in a move aimed at tackling pollution, traffic congestion and, more seriously, the high levels of street crime for which Guangzhou and a...
Indonesia: Internet Outage and Flood in Aceh
There is nothing worse for Indonesian bloggers in particular around the new year eve but to see the sudden temporary “demise” of internet connection. The cause as reported by Budi Putra, , Sani Asy'ari and Enda Nasution is “the strong quake off Taiwan’s coast on December 26 damaged submarine cables...
Some lessons about blog attacks in the spanish-language blogosphere
Spanish version here: Algunas enseñanzas sobre los ataques a blogs In the last weeks there have been a series of quite similar attacks to popular blogs in Spanish. The series began at the immensely popular Chilean tech blog FayerWayer [ES], which not only was hacked, but also got all of...
Lusosphere: Who? Me? You!? Why not Hugo?
TIME Magazine's choice of ‘You’ as the ‘Person of the Year’ has created interesting reactions in Lusophone blogs. The coddling move from the editorial giant towards the new class of content creators among its audience initially seduced the web 2.0 crowds. Many commentators were quick to agree effusively with the...
The Blogoma backs Nichane while the major Moroccan Media ignore it
Morocco is celebrating Eid ul Adha next Sunday, so Merry Eid from the Moroccan Blogosphere(Blogoma). Let's joke about…Baby! The controversy over Nichane continues its escalation. Actually, and according to Farid it's virtually escalating since only the Moroccan blogs are concerned whith no major Media support(Fr). The view from Fez writes...
Serbia, USA: What Serbs Think About America
In his blog post called “America is shaking”, Neven Andjelic shares his opinion on the United States (SRP): This big country is shaking. A number of events have caused the current condition. None of them has anything to do with my arrival to Berkley four months ago when I first...
Chile: Two new Regions
The Chilean congress has approved two new regions in Chile. Currently, Chile has 12 regions and the capital, Santiago. As iquiquenoticias(ES) explains: Los miembros de la Cámara de Diputados aprobó con 106 votos a favor y 1 abstención, las modificaciones propuestas por la Cámara de Senadores al proyecto de Ley...
Russia: Moscow Half a Century Ago
LJ user fool_4_lifetime found a rare photo album in a Moscow dump – Im Flug nach Moskau, by Erich Einhorn, ARTIA, 1959 – and scanned and posted 60 spreads of Moscow photos from it in the moya_moskva (My Moscow) LJ community. (Warning: bandwidth intensive!) Here is one of the photos:...
China: Ping…ping…pfft
The earthquake near Taiwan last night which snapped six underwater internet cables, seems to have left a large part of Asia, particularly the Northeast, struggling for an internet fix. Those with internet censorship circumvention tools (proxies) already installed on their computers seem to be doing a little better, but for...
Lebanon: Foreign Intervention and Economics
The Lebanese bloggers are united this week in wishing their readers all the best during Christmas, Al Adha and the New Year. Some of these bloggers have taken up the issue of foreign intervention in the region as a subject of reflection while others highlight the sad state of economy...
Bolivia: Politics Falls Apart, Christmas Comes Together
This week's Bolivian blog summary was written by a guest collaborator, Miguel Buitrago, a Bolivian currently pursuing his Ph.D in political science in Hamburg, Germany. His Bolivian blog is called MABB. As the year winds down, and Bolivians prepare to celebrate what is considered one of the most important holydays...
Bloggers on the new US Congress and the US policy on Cuba
Not much has been said in the blogosphere about how the results of the recent mid-term elections in the United States, which put the Democrats in control of Congress back in November, can affect the future of current US policy regarding Cuba. The truth is that several Democratic representatives (and...
Libya:A view into the blogging scene
The Libyan blogosphere is rich and diverse, but quietly apolitical. I'm constantly surprised at how it has sprouted during the last three years. It may have less bloggers than other countries, but the fact that some people are actually blogging is a miracle per se. Libyans blog from inside Libya...
Iran: Interview with Omid Memarian, Blogger and Human Rights Activist
Omid Memarian is a journalist and blogger, well known in Iran for his news analysis, regular columns and blogs in English and Persian. In October 2004 Omid was arrested, along with two dozen other bloggers and journalists, and detained for two months. And in 2005 “Human Rights Watch” honored Omid...
A New Shuffle to the Mix- A More Personal Account of the 2006 Global Voices Summit
Hello Dear Readers, I have been charged with giving an account of the 2006 Global Voices Summit in New Delhi that took place last week. If you would like to read the transcripts, please see the conference blog, and of course, there have been various summaries posted on this site...