Latest posts by Jose Murilo
Free Kareem: Lusophone Blogs Join the Crusade
As soon as the information about the verdict circulated on the net, Portuguese posts commenting the 4 year in prison sentence given to blogger Abdel Kareem Suleiman started to appear. Brazilian bloggers sensitiveness about any situation involving censorship is a direct consequence of the many recent attacks to their freedoms...
Lusosphere: Reporting Carnival
Olha a cabra!! (parte 2) – Socoh.net After four days of official Carnival revelry — and seven weeks of regular preparations and rehearsals since the year started — Brazilians will finally start thinking about getting back to work. The interested reader will be pleased to see how blogs are full...
Recife, Brazil: Trumpeting 100 Years of Frevo, and Musical Innovation on the Eve of Carnival
Recife is the capital city of the state of Pernambuco in the northeast of Brazil. The pulse of Carnival has been growing in a crescendo in recent days, justly honoring it's fame of being among the three cities with the hottest festivals, along with Rio de Janeiro and Salvador. Recife...
Requiem for a Blogger: Life and death issues from beyond the Portuguese keyboard
“Oxalis” by Poesie The year of 2007 started with the Lusosphere being surprised by the announcement of the death of a well known blogger. MEG [Maria Elisa Guimarães] became famous as the editor of SubRosa, one of the first-generation blogs in Brazil, and also because of her relentless promotion of...
Brazil Again: Blogs Banished from 2007 PanAm Games in Rio
The Brazilian blogosphere is becoming one of the main fronts in the battle against Internet censorship. The reason for that can be the growing audience created by the amount of time local internauts devote to web surfing, which was once again rated as the highest in the world. But it...
Brazilian Blogs on Chávez, Lula and the Mercosur Summit
Presidents from most South American countries are gathered in Rio de Janeiro for a meeting of the Mercosur trading group, and Hugo Chavez is again the attention drawer. Local bloggers have been substantially posting about the Venezuelan president since he announced the move to cancel the broadcasting license to (TV...
Guinea-Bissau: Former PM seeks asylum after accusing the nation's president of murder
Assata Speaks reports that Guinea-Bissau's interior minister had issued an arrest warrant for former Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Jr. earlier Wednesday. The arrest order followed allegations by Gomes that President Joao Bernardo Vieira was behind the assassination of an ex-military commander last week. Gomes sought asylum at the local U.N....
Cicarelli Case: Censorship and Boycott Dialectics in the Brazilian Blogosphere
Almost everybody with an Internet connection in Brazil has already seen Daniela Cicarelli's steamy video on the web since it first appeared four months ago and got linked on the first page of the main news portals. Funny as it is, the recent blocking of YouTube to many internauts in...
Lusosphere Debate Over Saddam's Last Scene
Despite the dreadful subject, Saddam's execution has become the very symbol of an year that has definitely changed the media as we knew it. The empowered delivery of citizen content through web 2.0 services and news sites is providing a totally new environment for news distribution, and the effects of...
Brazil: Vigilante Militias Take Over Rio de Janeiro Slums
Marginal Revolutions reports about the vigilante militias that allegedly have taken over Rio de Janeiro slums, ruling as feudal lords and imposing taxes, as a result of the collapse of legal policing in these areas.
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 World Championship of Brazilian 2.0 Football
Brazilians still have fresh memories of the defeat of the national team in the last World Cup in Germany, when the group of international shining stars was unable to show the needed will to win on the field. As a result, Porto Alegre's Internacional triumph in the Club World Cup...
The ‘Aerial Blackout’ in Brazil
Ten weeks have passed since the mid-air collision that produced Brazil’s worst air disaster, but the issue is still bouncing around many levels. As the investigations progressed, the blame game amplified by the media has triggered many reactions. The most widely felt effects have come from a movement among air...
Brazil: Sao Paulo's ICANN Board meeting has online participation website
Kieren McCarthy reports about the setting up of an online participation website for the ICANN Board meeting in Sao Paulo.
The Laptop “To Conquer Them All” Arrives in Brazil
The “$100 laptop” has arrived in Brazil and so has a significant discussion in the blogosphere. Last week, in a much-hyped ceremony at the Palacio do Planalto in Brasilia, MIT's Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte met President Lula to launch the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative in Brazil. The...
Web 2.0 in Brazil Displays the Powers of Participation
Web 2.0 is coming on strong in Brazil and showing its transformational impacts on the national mind. The recent elections were a dramatic example demonstrating that blogs and citizen media are playing an important role in the process of challenging mainstream institutions of Brazilian society and they seem to be...
Lusosphere's PanAmerican Elections Wrap-up
Elections across the American continents are still reverberating in the Lusosphere as citizen journalists and analysts are attempting to find the meaning of and predict the future politics set in place by recent events. As commentaries of all political flavors fly into cyberspace, there is both a general agreement that...
Holding the line for Internet freedoms in Brazilian Cyberspace
The Brazilian cyberspace was shaken this week by the announcement of a ‘Digital Crimes Bill’ under consideration at the Senate's Constitution and Justice Commission. Disclosing just one item in the bill was enough to ignite the fire. It stated that every user must fully identify herself before using the Net,...
Brazil: Congress wants to track Internet users
Boing Boing reports on a bill to be voted in the Brazilian Congress that would force every user and provider under its jurisdiction to identify them self in every transaction. The vote was scheduled for today but it was suspended.
Brazil: Lula's Victory
The presidential election results in Brazil showed, despite dire opposition predictions that victory for Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva would produce an untenable political situation, that Lula indeed has the political capital needed to lead Brazil for the next 4 years. Speculations about a divided country and the possible governance...
Brazil: Lula Cruises to Big Victory
Publiu's Pundit reports that Brazil’s incumbent President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva has cruised on to an easy victory in Brazil’s runoff election. With 94% of the tally counted, the final score was 61-39, a very strong showing.
