Global Voices collaborator Joi Ito has just joined the advisory board of Civiblog, a project designed to give blogs to civil society organizations around the world. Run by Citizen's Lab (a fantastic source of information on censorship and media freedom around the world), sponsored by Tucows and the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation, the project involves a cross-section of top Canadian do-gooders.
I've registered for a Civiblog account to check out the service and provide a review, which I'll post here. Civiblog promises to get back to applicants within 24 hours with blog location and login information. This is significantly slower than the immediate turnaround of full-service free blog hosts like Blogsome, but it's quite possible that the interlinking and promotion of the Civiblog service make the wait worthwhile. More to come if and when we're able to review the Civiblog service with our own account.
2 comments
Thanks for trying it out Ethan. Would love your thoughts and feedback.
Hi Ethan,
I thought i’d explain that 24 hour turn around. First i need to manually edit the DNS to add your sub-domain and that takes 3-4 hours to go through. Then I need to manually create your blog account, and while that only takes a few minutes to do, i built in all the extra time so that i can do a little screening of each application. Because we want to focus on civil society it is important that we aren’t signing up random people, also, by signing up joe blogger we would be undercutting Blogware business, which we don’t wish to do – we need to make sure we’re staying within the boundaries established when tucows decided to support the project.
I would really enjoy any feedback you have, and to reading your new blog.
Cheers,
Graeme
Manager, Civiblog Project