Blogging without frontiers.

Adam Shostack in the States has an article on his blog Emergent Chaos about the current "Anonymous Blogging Roundtable" held recently in Tennesee focussing on countries you can get locked up for blogging as well as some "within the borders" censorship issues.

Adam may be wondering why he is getting no comments, it's because they aren't working. Tried a couple of times with blank results.

Anyway Adam writes:

I think the roundtable went well. Mark Glasser started us off with a review of the state of the world, with China having 67 bloggers in jail, Bahrain requiring bloggers to register, Cuba having a black market in email accounts with one costing $240, out of an average annual income of $1700.

We talked a lot about technology, and less than I would have liked about what holds people back from blogging. Hossein Derakhshan had some great input both at the panel and afterwards about the need for a variety of reading tools...Reporters Sans Frontiers has a list of issues country by country. (I'm in his "Building a bloggosphere" talk now, and he again mentioned that his blog has more readers via email than web or RSS, and that he evades blocks by buying new domains.)

I first came across the Reporters Sans Frontiers website via Adam's blog, it makes for some depressive reading given the relatively freer nature of blogging and reporting in the west (or so we think).

Take note of the CBS Iraqi national being held in Iraq by the USA for a month now with no evidence against him. There seems to be much less hue and cry going out for Abdel Amir Hussein than Aussie engineer Douglas Wood who seems to have had some exposure and knowledge of the workings of Bechtel subcontracting work. I suppose someone has to rebuild and profit from all that stuff has been bombed liberated that seemed to be working before.