When baby needs to blog, and in this day and age it seem almost a life necessity with babies twittering from the cradle, where does mommy turn for a child and parent-friendly site for micro and macro baby publishing?

We’ve put together a short list of some of the trendiest budding baby sites, but only a mother really knows best. Which sites meet your mommy and me criteria? Keep reading and let us know where your baby blogs in the comments.

Baveo

Expecting mommies and daddies don’t have to wait until baby arrives to start baby blogging; they can turn to Baveo, which launched in private beta in October, to capture and share the memories that lead up to the miracle of birth. Parents can customize their baby’s public page, post from their mobile phone, and even start the delivery date countdown for all to watch as baby’s big day fast approaches. Baveo also offers new parents the convenience of incorporating registries, as well as notifying family and friends of every kick via SMS, email, or RSS.

Lil’Grams

Lil’Grams, which is still invite-only, is an upscale looking site for sharing baby’s precious moments in real time. Baby’s moments can be documented as FirstGrams for baby milestones, at FoodGrams to track baby’s diet, WordGrams (because your baby is a genius), MediaGrams, GrowthGrams, and StoryGrams. That’s a lot of lil grams. You can even nominate your giggling girl or boy to be lil’grams spokesbaby.

TotSpot

TotSpot, the social network for showcasing your kids, goes beyond the standard friend features and child profiles to now give parents the ability to easily upload and privately share videos of their children. TotSpot Video is the site’s new addition, giving parents 250 free megabytes per month of storage, or 2 gigabytes for $5/mo.

We’ve covered TotSpot before and noted how the site encourages data portability, and turns kids into real early adopters.

Wee Web

Wee Web is perfect for the little one with a proud parent that’s all-a-twitter. The site offers simple prompts like, “What did your kid eat today?” to help you share your wee one’s updates with your friends. You can add multiple kids, friends’ kids, and keep track of all the updates in your network on your home page.

The safe, invite-only, micro baby blogs (from the Founders of Meetup) bring Twitter and Tumblr features (you can share photos, videos, and stories; your friends can comment) to mommies and daddies looking to share wee bits without public scrutiny.

Kidmondo

Kidmondo offers baby his/her own first digital documentary complete with baby’s blog (diary), growth and dental charts, medical and food journals, photo and video gallery, and interactive timeline. Parents who want to blog their toddler’s every step will find Kidmondo’s UI simple and straightforward, with a particular place to note and share practically any baby news imaginable. Everything comes together in the interactive timeline which, is like your little one’s own lifestream.

BabySpot

When baby’s ready to really network, check out BabySpot, a site that looks and feels a lot like Facebook. BabySpot boasts activity feeds, online photo albums, videos, polls, music, groups, events, chat, and of course a baby journal.

Keepaboo

Keepaboo’s got all the baby basics for parents including baby’s diary notes, photos, growth charts, and major milestones in life, but what makes Keepaboo so great is the 3D flip book called a LifeBook—a product of your adoration and obsession over baby’s every move.

Also, Keepaboo lets parents create custom books around themes or special events, like birthdays, and share them with friends and family. Keepaboo’s site claims that they will soon be letting parents purchase hard copies of LifeBooks, which would make a great keepsake to ensure that those memories are more than just cached for the future.

MyBabyOurBaby

MyBabyOurBaby has all the baby goodies you’ve come to expect, presenting them as a baby book in blog format that friends and family can subscribe to for updates. The site also takes a slightly unique approach to the baby blogosphere by letting your friends and family who discover online photos of your precious bundle tag them for you, alerting you when/where you can find these digital treasures to add to the baby book. In addition, you can invite the family and allow them to contribute photographs or stories to your child’s online masterpiece.

Now that baby’s blogging, you might also want to check out 35 plus sites for web savvy families.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, tarinoel

By Nate Anderson | Published: December 07, 2008 – 03:10PM CT

If you think it’s tough to be a blogger because your Google AdWords revenue has been in the toilet lately, the Committee to Protect Journalists wants to remind you that Internet journalist—including bloggers—can and do suffer much more around the world. According to the group’s new report, Internet journalists now make up the largest single group of imprisoned journalists.

Of the 125 journalists imprisoned around the world for doing their jobs, 45 percent are “bloggers, Web-based reporters, or online editors.” China continues its ten-year winning streak when it comes to tossing writers into jail, with Cuba, Burma, Eritrea, and Uzbekistan next in line.

The numbers are down slightly from December 2007, but CPJ notes that the arrests are hitting freelancers the hardest. Without the resources of a major media company behind them, lone bloggers and freelance writers often lack the resources to mount a vigorous defense when they are detained.

Data source: CPJ

“The image of the solitary blogger working at home in pajamas may be appealing, but when the knock comes on the door they are alone and vulnerable,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. “All of us must stand up for their rights—from Internet companies to journalists and press freedom groups. The future of journalism is online and we are now in a battle with the enemies of press freedom who are using imprisonment to define the limits of public discourse.”

The results of angering a regime can be severe; CPJ’s complete capsule summaries of the detained journalists contain story after story of lives utterly changed by publishing information or opinion that displeased the government. In Burma, Nay Phone Latt wrote a blog of his own and ran several Internet cafes, but he irritated the Burmese ruling junta by publishing online caricatures of various generals. He was hauled away on January 29, tossed in jail, charged with “causing a public offense,” and sentenced to 20 years and six months in jail during a closed trial.

The US makes the list, too, for its treatment of journalists in Iraq. According to CPJ, “US military authorities have jailed dozens of journalists in Iraq—some for days, others for months at a time—without charge or due process. No charges have ever been substantiated in these cases.” This is the fifth straight year that America has made the list.

WordPress is quickly becoming the standard software for the majority of blogs.  This fact makes every major release of the software seem like a huge event, but the thing is that this time it is.  WordPress 2.7 comes with a huge number of changes, a good chunk of them making some older plugins redundant. This will be a huge upgrade for all blog owners.

The following lists 20 of the biggest changes coming, but all together there have been over 400 changes to the program this time around. Any way you slice it, there is a little bit of something for everyone in this release.  Take a look through and you’re sure to find something that appeals to you.

Unfortunately this is only available for the blogs on WordPress.com for now, but it will be released for self-hosted blogs on December 10th.

What are the changes you are most excited about?

Comments

Close Comments On Old Posts – Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to continue letting comments come in on an old post, and it is a favorite trick of spammers anyway. WordPress 2.7 will allow you to close comments on older posts, eliminating the need for yet another plugin.

Comment Paging – Comments broken into pages instead of being a never ending bottom to your post.

Comment Replies From the Admin Section – A feature that has long been needed is the ability to reply to comments from your admin section without having to go to the front end of your blog.

Comment Threading – It’s not just admin comment replies that are getting love, but all comments will now be in a threaded format. Great for those long debates you get into about what “sux” or why someone is a “newb,” at last no one will be confused about to whom you are referring!

XMLRPC Comments API -Support for the XML-RPC protocol which is a simplified API that encodes your comments in XML and transports them via HTTP.

Keyboard Shortcuts For Comments -Once you’re in your comments, you can use the keys j and k to navigate through the comments. Once selected, some of the keys you can use will be “a” to approve, “s” to mark as spam and “d” to delete.

Theme & Plugin Related

One-Click Plugin Installs – Another long time plugin favorite is going the way of the dinosaurs with the introduction of the ability to install plugins from the dashboard.

Plugin Browser – Browsing for plugins, one of the favorite pastimes of many bloggers, will be made easier by being able to do it without ever leaving your WordPress install.

Sticky Posts – There have been numerous WordPress plugins over the years to make a post “sticky” so that it stays as the top post on your front page no matter how many posts you publish after it. The feature has now been built in to the core program.

Updating the Core WordPress – Yet another WordPress plugin finds its way into the core WordPress program. For those users who haven’t used something like Fantastico or Simple Scripts to install their blog, there will now be a more automated way for you to keep up with all of those pesky security updates.

Theme Update API Notices – You will receive updates when your installed themes are updated just like WordPress does now with plugins.

Greater Controls

Batch Editing for Posts – Ever needed to edit the tags for several posts, but couldn’t do it because of the work involved? Batch editing will now allow you to do mass edits of your posts so that you can make as many changes as you want to your blog no matter how old it is.

Column Control – On any management page that shows columns, you will now be able to choose which columns are shown and how.

Ping & Trackback Moderation – With the ever increasing wave of “splogs” trackbacking your blog, there will finally be moderation of them in a more manageable, frame-like format.

QuickPress – Ever wanted to just do a quick post without having to load the entire write page?  Now you can directly from the Dashboard page with QuickPress.

Recent Drafts – There will now be a module on your dashboard to get to your most recent drafts so you can quickly get access to your posts that are in progress.

Other Tweaks

Dashboard and Write Rearrangements – There have been significant redesigns to navigation and general layouts of the dashboard and write pages.

PHPXref – Ever go slightly loopy trying to make sense of PHP files? PHPXref will help you by making PHP into easy to digest documents that you can read through. All of this will be hosted on WordPress.org.

Image Size Tweaks – Thumbnail and Medium commands will stay the same, but Large will now be restricted to 1024 pixels, or the constraints of your theme. If you want no restrictions and post insane sized pictures, you will now be able to select “Full Size” which will post your image at its original size. You will also now see the dimensions for each size next to the radio buttons.

Redundant Coding – Theme authors will be happy to see some changes to the wp_page_menu wrapper that will simplify their coding and add conveniences like making “Home” part of the list.

By JENNA WORTHAM
Published: November 23, 2008

It’s a long way from $700 billion, but the media start-up Six Apart is introducing its own economic bailout plan.

The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program offers recently terminated bloggers and journalists a free pro account (worth $150 annually) on the company’s popular blogging platform. In addition to the free yearly membership, the 20 to 30 journalists who are accepted will receive professional tech support, placement on the company’s blog aggregation site, Blogs.com, and automatic enrollment in the company’s advertising revenue-sharing program.

Anil Dash, a former blogger and current vice president at Six Apart, announced the program Nov. 14, shortly after the company made its own staff cuts. Mr. Dash fired off a blog post: “Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We’re Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you.”

On Monday morning, he had roughly 50 e-mail applications in his inbox, and they have continued to pour in, totaling nearly 300 so far. “It was a bit of a surprise how quickly word got out,” Mr. Dash said. “This has struck a nerve.”

Brooke-Sidney Gavins, a broadcast journalism student at the University of Southern California, is hoping to be chosen to help her nascent writing career. “I understand that there may not be a ‘guaranteed’ job with a major media organization after I graduate,” Ms. Gavins said. “A lot of new journalists are going to have to build their careers more guerrilla-style by selling their stories and promoting their work all the time.”

For Johanna Neuman, a veteran White House reporter and blogger who was recently laid off by The Los Angeles Times, the program would be a chance to continue writing about politics and float book ideas in the hopes of landing a publishing deal. “I might just start putting chapters up and see who salutes,” Ms. Neuman said.

Mr. Dash says he hopes to eventually accept every applicant. “How do we do right by all these people?” he said. “That’s exactly what’s keeping me up at night.” JENNA WORTHAM

Andrew Warner is an Internet entrepreneur and the founder of Mixergy.com.

Tim Ferriss’ relationships with bloggers helped him reach the New York Times bestseller list with his book, The Four Hour Work Week. I recently called Tim to ask him how to market to bloggers. Here’s what he taught me:

Start before you need something

“I reached out to certain bloggers as far as a year in advance of the book being published,” Tim told me. By building his connections ahead of time, he never had to start a relationship with a blogger by asking for a favor.

Meet bloggers in person

Tim started building his relationships face to face. “The least crowded channel for meeting high profile bloggers is in person,” Tim said. “Email is the most difficult, the most crowded… I’m a top 1,000 blogger, not a top 100 blogger, and I get hundreds of pitches by email every week. Most of them I don’t even see because my assistant declines them.”

Don’t be a promoter

Nobody wants to get to know a guy who does nothing but promote himself. “Your job is to convince them of the messenger, not the message,” he told me. “Don’t try to push your message until you establish yourself as someone they’re willing to listen to.”

Don’t join the crowd

Top bloggers can be mobbed at events. Instead of joining the crowds, Tim got to know the people behind the top bloggers. The first time he met Robert Scoble, Tim said, “You know what man, everyone wants to talk to you. I don’t have a really good question for you, so I’m not going to hassle you.” And he got to know Robert’s wife and coworkers instead.

Be part of something bigger

Instead of pitching his book, Tim talked to bloggers about a trend that his book related to: outsourcing as a way to save time. When he called them, he’d say, “Here’s a concept or phenomenon that I think would be fun to talk about with your readers.” He told me that bloggers would often give him credit for the idea, and when they mentioned the name Tim Ferriss, they “inevitably linked to my page or my Amazon book page.”

Do you know any other tips for promoting to bloggers? Add them to the comments.

Andrew Warner’s last internet company was a big stinking failure and he had to shut it down. To keep from having a company collapse again, he’s interviewing as many Internet successes as he can. You can hear his interviews on Mixergy.

by Lucie Morillon, November 14, 2008

In many countries, you have to commit a serious crime to be sentenced to 20 years in jail, but in Burma this can happen just for using the Internet.

There are almost 69 cyber-dissidents in jail worldwide, yet Burma’s Nay Phone Latt has become the first blogger to receive such a lengthy prison term. His crime? To have informed the outside world about the military junta’s brutal crackdown during pro-democracy protests in September 2007.

Nay Phone Latt

A Rangoon court judge sentenced Nay Phone Latt to two years for violating Article 505 (b) of the Criminal Code (which criminalizes defamation of the state), three years and six months for violating Article 32 (b) of the Video Act, and 15 years for violating Article 33 (a) of the Electronic Act. In total, Latt was sentenced to over 20 years in prison.

Nay Phone Latt is the pen name of Nay Myo Kyaw, 28, the owner of two Rangoon Internet cafés. Latt also kept a blog describing the hardships of daily life in Rangoon and the obstacles faced by young Burmese people in criticizing the government since the September 2007 protests. Latt is also a youth member of the National League for Democracy (NLD), the opposition party led by the detained Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Aung San Suu Kyi. Aung San Suu was elected prime minister in 1990, but Burmese generals have yet to acknowledge her victory; the military government has kept Aung San Suu under house arrest since 2003.

Latt was arrested in Rangoon last January while in possession of a video banned by the military government. Charged in July, Nay Phone Latt has since been detained at the infamous Insein Prison, where he has been denied basic medical care.

Extremely Harsh Punishment

Nay Phone Latt’s mother, who was not allowed to attend the trial inside the prison, said: “I was expecting him to get 10 to 12 years in prison at the most. I never imagined he would get this much. The authorities have been excessively cruel with him.” According to Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media Association, the blogger’s lawyer himself was jailed for criticizing the special court’s procedures.

Free Nay Phone Latt

Burmese bloggers regard Nay Phone Latt as an inspirational figure — a person who contributed greatly to the 2007 “Saffron Revolution” by showing the world digital photos of the massive anti-government demonstrations and the brutal crackdown that followed. According to the BBC World Service, his blog provided invaluable information about events within the locked-down country during the uprising.

This extremely harsh punishment is seen as an attempt by the military junta to set an example and intimidate those who use new technologies to circulate information not currently controlled by the Burmese Censorship Bureau. According to Global Voices:

A year after thousands of monks took to the streets of Burma’s towns and cities to protest against the tyrannical rule of the military junta [and photos of them] were broadcast across the world via the Internet, the junta has shown that it will not tolerate any semblance of critical opinion being voiced over the World Wide Web.”

Irrawaddy magazine, a Burmese news organization operating in exile, said the current crackdown is also intended to silence legal efforts to ensure fair trials for dissidents now appearing before judges in closed court sessions.

Internet Under Control

Burma, which is on Reporters Without Borders’ list of Internet enemies, is described as “one of the world’s least-connected countries” with a rate of Internet penetration that does not even amount to 1% of the population, according to the International Telecommunication Union. The network is regulated by the state military’s Censorship Bureau, which controls the only two available ISPs in the country. It blocks access to large numbers of news websites as well as international messaging services, including Hotmail and Yahoo. Connection speeds remain the biggest obstacle to Internet access — downloading a single article can take an hour. To help Burmese Internet users get around official state censorship, overseas Internet users often send proxy lists to small networks of trusted local bloggers.

From the end of August to mid-October 2007, Burma experienced its biggest uprising since the 1988 student demonstrations, in which 3,000 died. Thousands of Buddhist monks, joined by students and activists, took to the streets to protest against deteriorating living conditions.

In response to this so-called “Saffron Revolution,” the government shut down all Internet connections in a deliberate attempt to isolate the country and prevent any witness accounts from reaching the outside world. During these two weeks of blackout, the Internet was only accessible a few hours a day and all cyber cafés were closed. The only news source available to Burmese citizens during this time was satellite TV or foreign radio stations.

According to an Open Net Initiative December 2007 report on Burma:

The shutdown of Internet connectivity was precipitated by its use by citizens to send photographs, updates and videos that documented the violent suppression of protests in Burma, information that contributed to widespread international condemnation of the Burmese military rulers’ gross violations of human rights.

Far From the World’s Eyes

One year ago, thanks to the information sent out by Burmese bloggers, news of the crackdown circled the globe. Since then, the world’s attention has shifted, and the regime has resumed its crackdown on dissidents.

Internet Blackholes

Philip Robertson, director of Asia Human Rights Labour Advocates, told Al Jazeera that “post [Cyclone] Nargis, the international community’s attention has moved elsewhere so we’re seeing a larger crackdown all over Myanmar, with student leaders, monks, and even senior lawyers working for the NLD being thrown in jail.”

Strong condemnations worldwide

However, Nay Phone Latt’s extremely harsh sentence, as well as the arrest of other dissidents and lawyers, has again sparked outraged reactions worldwide. The U.S. State Department recently called for the release of four detained defense lawyers. U.S. President George W. Bush has nominated Michael Green, a former top adviser on Asian affairs, as special envoy and policy chief for Myanmar to increase pressure on the country’s military government.

The foreign ministers of the 27 European Union countries have deplored the lack of progress in Burma since the violent repression of peaceful protests last year, and the European Union stated on Monday that it would consider Burmese elections scheduled for 2010 to be illegitimate unless the ruling military junta first frees all political prisoners — particularly Aung San Suu Kyi.

Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media Association have launched a campaign calling for the release of Nay Phone Latt. In a press release, they have asked “for bloggers all over the world to demonstrate their solidarity with Nay Phone Latt by posting his photo on their blogs and writing to Burmese embassies worldwide to demand his release.”

Lucie Morillon is the Washington, DC, director of Reporters Without Borders, an international press freedom organization. She covers press freedom issues in the U.S. and abroad and is a spokesperson for the group. She also handles advocacy work with Congress and has appeared on CNN, ABC and has been quoted in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other publications. Reporters Without Borders strives to obtain the release of jailed journalists and cyber-dissidents and supports an independent media and the free flow of information online. Morillon is the free-speech correspondent for MediaShift.

by Sokari Ekine, November 10, 2008

On October 19, U.S.-based Nigerian blogger and journalist Jonathan Elendu of Elendu Reports was arrested by the Nigerian State Security Services (SSS) upon his arrival at Abuja airport. It was some days before the SSS announced that Elendu had been charged, first with money laundering and then sedition.

Yet another report claimed he was charged with sponsoring a guerilla news agency. The charges relate to his supposed involvement with the online news site Sahara Reporters which, together with Elendu’s blog, is highly critical of both Nigerian President Yar’Adua and the government in general; both sites particularly criticize the government’s response to conflicts between foreign oil companies drilling in the Niger Delta and local ethnic minorities.

Sahara Reporters recently drew official scrutiny after publishing photos of Yar’Adua’s son holding a machine gun and playing with bundles of Nigerian money. Independent journalist Chidi Opara reported on his blog that the charges against Elendu were a ruse and that he was actually detained because he had discovered information that could be used against top politicians. In any case, we won’t know the truth until Elendu himself is able to speak.

Jonathan Elendu

However, Sahara Reporters has strongly denied any connection with Elendu. According to a report in the Daily Independent in Lagos, “Elendu was being kept in inhuman conditions and tortured to either disclose the sources of the several embarrassing news reports on prominent political leaders in Nigeria.” The Human Rights Writers Association (HURIWA) heard from Elendu’s lawyer that the online journalist “was also being reportedly pressured into framing up some others.”

Late on Thursday, October 29, reports began to appear that Elendu had been released and was receiving medical treatment. While this is excellent news for him and his family, the actions of the SSS and the Nigerian government are not what one would expect from a so-called democracy.

Governments Pressuring Bloggers

Jonathan Elendu is the first Nigerian blogger-journalist to be targeted by the government, but I doubt that he will be the last. He is, however, not the first African to be subjected to government pressure for his blogging — Egypt and Morocco have both taken oppressive steps towards bloggers and activists using social media like Facebook and Twitter. Egyptian blogger and activist Kareem Amer is now in his second year of imprisonment for criticizing Islam and the government on his blog.

As I wrote in a previous post, Nigeria has a vibrant and well established blogosphere, often highly critical of the government. However, it is noteworthy that most Nigerian bloggers write and comment anonymously; Elendu is one of the few, including myself, who write under their real names.

Given the history of media censorship in Nigeria, the government’s reaction is not surprising. I felt that such a response was just a matter of time and I wonder how other Nigerian bloggers will respond to the news that one of their own was kidnapped by the same government they had all criticized so vocally. The first blogging report of his arrest came from Nigerian Curiosity. In addition to providing an excellent analysis of the situation, Nigerian Curiosity has been instrumental in disseminating information — partly because Solomon Sydelle has access to a relative of Elendu. Sydelle wrote:

There is enough fear in Nigerians when it comes to politics and standing up for what is right. We have suffered from Persistent Psychological Paralysis for long enough that a democratic president, in this case Yar’Adua, should not be party to further destroying national participation in what rightly belongs to the citizenry — the freedom to express their concerns and ideas. After all, the Nigerian Constitution guarantees, as “Fundamental Rights” the freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of thought and conscience, and freedom from discrimination.

Although there has been a lively discussion on Nigerian Curiosity and a few other blogs, by and large the blogosphere has been unusually silent about Elendu. After a week, Nigerian Curiosity and fellow blogger Mootbox created a Facebook group Free Nigerian Blogger, Jonathan Elendu. However, a Facebook group is only as good as its members. After 5 days, the group still only has 59 supporters. Although supporters left messages on various Nigeria-related Facebook groups and pages, there had been relatively little response.

Criticism of Elendu’s Reporting

The comments left on the Nigerian Forum, Nairaland (ranked in the top 10 Nigerian sites by Alexa) may explain the silence: Many see Elendu’s writing as being sensationalist and unreliable, and do not consider his detention a worthy cause. To quote just a few comments:

“I prefer to call it imaginative journalism, because the standards of that publication are so low!”

“Their stuffs sometimes reflect publicity stunts, they also churn out unsubstantiated facts, which is sometimes caused by Jonathan Elendu’s hallucination, what one of my role model Edgar Hoover calls mental halitosis.”

“I think these guys are just ‘sensational gangster-style’ journalists. I thought I was over critical of the quality of Elendu’s reportings until I read the views of other people. I can’t substantiate this fact, but I believe Elendu is making money from the sensationalism…If you read his story about the Sokoto State government before and after his visit to the state (God knows what transpired during the visit, I hear journalists too collect brown envelopes) you will wonder where his objectivity lies.”

“He also seems to be partisan in his views of the Nigerian politics. I suspect he might be on some politician’s payroll going by his write ups”

Whether the above accusations are true or not, the fact remains that a blogger-journalist was taken into custody by the State Security Services as he arrived at the airport, denied counsel, interrogated, possibly tortured, and finally released after 11 days. Even after his release, officials have refused to return Elendu’s passport, meaning that he cannot return to his home in Michigan.

Nigeria Turns Against the Media

His arrest is part of a culture of media censorship that has reigned for the past 30 years. Just last September, television station Channels TV was shut down by Presidential order after it mistakenly reported that he might resign due to ill health. This reaction was far too drastic; even if the station reported the details of the story wrong, surely a simple reprimand would have been a more appropriate response. In 2004 alone, there were 21 attacks against journalists in Nigeria. A commenter on Black Looks said:

Looking at the reasons behind the harassment and detention of journalists it is clear that their ‘crimes’ were reporting the truth such as election rigging, strikes, political disputes between the president and other members of government, or as in the case of Gbenga Faturoti of the Daily Independent, beaten almost unconscious for failing to turn off his mobile phone whilst in the Osun State Assembly. Altogether 21 journalists were victims of either the police or SSS in 2004 — arrested, beaten, threatened, detained. Most were tortured. All were released without charge after a period of 24 hours to 1 week. In addition two radio stations in Anambra State were vandalized and staff beaten up and the offices of Insider Weekly and Global Star were also vandalized and staff arrested.

In 2005, a friend and well known political activist had his weekly newspaper column suspended. He was sure that the regime had pressured the newspaper to drop him due to his repeated criticisms of then President Olusegun Obasanjo.

I asked one prominent online individual who wishes to remain anonymous what he felt about the Elendu matter. His response speaks to both the fear and intimidation under which all Nigerians live as well as the suspicions about Elendu and the perceived bias of his reporting:

I can’t really take a stand on the matter for two reasons:

(1) I live in Nigeria and I don’t want them to arrest me.

(2) I live in a country where people can be arrested for telling the truth. That makes it hard to leap to the defense of someone who was arrested for telling lies. He shouldn’t be detained without trial, but there are thousands of truly innocent people languishing in jail
and awaiting trial. Why support him and not them?

For Nigerian bloggers and online readers, the arrest of Elendu justifies their remaining anonymous — how else can they safely return home? For those who are “out,” the risk of returning is a heavy one. As for the Nigerian government, it will have to wake up to the fact that online media sites and citizen journalists — many of whom live abroad — cannot be intimidated and controlled in the same way as traditional media. As more Nigerians gain access to the Internet, more people will be in a position to challenge the repressive mindset of the military-influenced civilian leadership of the the last two presidents.

Sokari Ekine is an activist with a background in human rights in Africa. She presently works with The Global Women’s Strike and Kabissa: Space for Change in Africa. Sokari blogs at Black Looks, Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine and Niger Delta Solidarity Campaign, and is the African correspondent for MediaShift.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — In a vast office at the top of one of the world’s tallest buildings, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad sits at a broad, glass-topped desk, scribbling his thoughts on a pad of unlined paper.

Palani Mohan for The I.H.T.

Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia blogs in English and Malay.

For 22 years, Mr. Mahathir was the most powerful person in this land, and his thoughts were commands as he reshaped the country in his own image.

But he has become an irritant and a spoiler five years after stepping down, turning against his handpicked successor, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and falling victim to the press controls he perfected as prime minister.

“Where is the press freedom?” he asked two years ago, apparently surprised at being suddenly ignored. “Broadcast what I have to say! What I say is not even accurately published in the press!”

This May, though, he discovered the power of the Internet. Like many other inconvenient critics, he joined what seemed to be a political wave of the future, creating his own blog — www.chedet.com — where he vents in English and Malay several times a week.

Around the region bloggers are becoming a Fifth Estate, challenging the government’s monopoly on information in Singapore, evading censors in Vietnam, and influencing events in places like Thailand, Cambodia and China.

In March, political experts said, Malaysia’s bloggers helped influence elections, contributing to the biggest upset that the governing party, the United Malays National Organization, had suffered since independence in 1957. For the first time in decades, it held fewer than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, and it lost control of 5 of the 13 states.

Among the opposition winners in the national and state governments were several bloggers, most prominently Jeff Ooi, who claimed to have prodded Mr. Mahathir into starting his own blog.

“The government doesn’t have a clue how to handle bloggers,” Mr. Ooi said in an interview. “If I were a dictator, I would be despairing. What do you do against this?”

The Internet has become the main battleground against censorship in Malaysia, where a system of self-censorship in an atmosphere of government pressure and intimidation has produced a constricted press.

Mr. Mahathir, 82, seems to be reveling now in challenging the system he once controlled, and he is as acerbic as he was during his days as prime minister.

“It is time the so-called intellectuals realize they were being duped by the Master of Spin,” he wrote on Aug. 21, referring to his bitter enemy, Anwar Ibrahim, who was his deputy prime minister and now leads the main opposition party. He also accused Mr. Anwar of being “the pious Muslim, who is also the bosom pal of Paul Wolfowitz, the neo-con Jew,” referring to the former United States deputy secretary of defense.

Blogging on Sept. 3, he offered a sort of mission statement. Many are with him as he harasses the government, he asserted. “But they are not prepared to say it openly,” he wrote. “That was why I started my blog. About six million had visited my blog site, and tens of thousands have commented and supported me.”

In case anyone doubts this, he posts comments to his blog by the dozens and hundreds, page after page, day after day. It turns out he has a lot of fans.

“Amazingly brilliant!” reads one comment. “I can’t stop laughing…you made my day Sir!”

And just to clear up any possible misunderstanding, another writes, “You, sir, are the most brilliant politician Malaysia has ever been blessed with.”

Mr. Ooi, 52, a former advertising copywriter who was one of Malaysia’s first political bloggers, started in 2003 and built a loyal following at www.jeffooi.com.

The government began an assault on Mr. Ooi that included threats of imprisonment without trial, attacks in the government-friendly press and defamation lawsuits, which are popular among leaders in Southeast Asia.

But that seemed only to make him a hero, and when he decided to run for Parliament as an opposition candidate, he already had a big head start.

“As a person that has consistently faced threats as a blogger, I had a kind of iconism and imagery that this is someone you can trust, someone the government fears, someone you need to put into Parliament,” Mr. Ooi said.

But he said it was much harder to blog from the inside. “The trade-off is that I have to write with measured words,” he said.

Earlier this year, Mr. Ooi said, he attended a public forum with Mr. Mahathir. It was there that he claimed he persuaded Mr. Mahathir to begin a blog.

“I threw him a challenge,” Mr. Ooi said. “A blogger shares a few prerequisites. One, he is strongly opinionated. Two, he could be controversial. And, thirdly, he is an agent provocateur on issues.

“I thought Mahathir fulfilled all three.”

The result, Mr. Ooi said, was “a miracle, he scored about 10 million visitors within months.”

Now, a convert to free speech, Mr. Mahathir is using his blog to champion the most recent victim of government censorship, Raja Petra Kamaruddin, the country’s most prominent blogger, who posts on www.malaysia-today.net, his Web site. The site has been blocked, but readers are redirected to another Web site, which continues to be updated.

The government has fallen back on the kind of tactics that Mr. Ooi faced. It charged Mr. Petra with sedition and jailed him for two years without trial for comments he had posted.

Mr. Mahathir sounded almost like Che Guevara when he said in his blog that the arrest showed “a degree of oppressive arrogance worthy of a totalitarian state.”

Furthermore, jailing people is futile, he said in an interview in his office. There is no way the government can arrest all the bloggers, even if it wants to.

At least, he said, “I hope so. Otherwise I’ll be in, too.”

by Simon Owens, November 6, 2008

During the Republican National Convention, NOW, a PBS weekly TV news magazine, posted an unscientific poll on its website asking viewers to vote on whether they thought vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin was qualified for the position. Like most polls the show posts every week, it was taken down from the front page and replaced by a new one after gathering a few thousand votes.

But in the weeks after it was removed, someone unearthed the still-present URL for the poll and linked to it at the conservative website, Free Republic. The site has become famous for sending hordes of readers to crash unscientific online polls, so much so that the act of doing so has been termed “freeping.” In this particular instance, members of the Free Republic felt that the poll showed a sign of bias, and the poster linked to it to “provide them with a result they did not expect.”

“Send this email to every non-liberal you know,” the person wrote. “Let’s get some balance into this survey group. This is the easiest vote you will ever make. It takes literally two seconds.”

Predictably, the numbers on the poll in favor of Palin began to move up, but during the freep several liberal websites got wind of it. Typical of the blogosphere, the poll became a link-fest version of tug-of-war. Close to a hundred bloggers linked to it and liberals and conservatives began forwarding email chains to their friends asking them to vote (I actually received one of these emails less than an hour before I sat down to begin writing this article).

PZ Myers

One of the bloggers who eventually linked to the poll was PZ Myers. An associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota-Morris, Myers is arguably the most popular atheist and science blogger on the Net. His blog, Pharyngula, is published as part of the Science Blog network (owned by Seed Media Group) and averages more than 50,000 readers a day. In recent months, he and a small group of other atheist bloggers have begun a constant and often-successful campaign to crash online unscientific polls, usually to counterbalance or push back against what they see as either anti-science or overly-dogmatic beliefs.

After Myers finds a poll dealing with religion or science on a news website, he’ll provide a link to the site along with a pithy or mocking comment. “The Edmonton Sun asks, ‘Should God be left out of the University of Alberta’s convocation speech?’” he noted in one such post recently. “I should think so. They should also leave Odin, Zeus, and the Tooth Fairy out of it, unless it’s to make a joke. Surprisingly, though, 67% of the respondents disagree with me so far. Will that have changed when I wake up in the morning, I wonder…?”

Why Poll Crash?

I spoke to the science blogger, and Myers told me that when he links to a poll he can typically swing the results by 10,000 to 20,000 votes in a particular direction. Indeed, within an hour after he linked to the Sun’s poll, the results went from 67 percent of the respondents saying “no” to 91 percent “yes.” Though he has participated in poll crashes dating back to over a year ago, he has only begun conducting them on a semi-daily basis within the last month and a half.

“It’s a very popular thing with some people because they can flex a little itty bitty muscle, and a group going there and doing something shows we have some clout, a clout in expressing an opinion,” Myers said. “There have been a couple places where the polls are so poorly done and so easily manipulated, and people go nuts; they write a script and send in hundreds of thousands of votes. Which is kind of cheating, but the whole point is that these polls are silly and useless anyway.”

The bloggers’ motivation in linking to these polls, he said, was, in essence, to delegitimize them. Because these polls are unscientific and therefore largely biased toward the demographic of the website on which they’re posted, Myers argued that poll crashing makes it harder for people to use the polls simply to reaffirm their own biases.

“For instance, if I put a poll on my blog asking whether evolution is true, everyone would say ‘yes’ with just a few outliers,” he explained. “If you put it on something like [Christian conservative group] Focus on the Family, everyone there will say ‘no.’ So the point is to show that these are highly prejudicial polls, they’re sampling unscientifically, and they’re really kind of worthless. And you can’t use those results to say anything at all. I mean, what can you say about such a poll?”

But the inaccurate data isn’t the only problem that Myers has with these polls; he also detests the poor construction of many poll questions and the limited answer choices given. It’s not uncommon for him to link to a poll while issuing the caveat that — due to the perceived inanity of the question or answers — he doesn’t know which choice his readers should pick.

In speaking to Myers, I learned that his averseness to these polls sometimes carries over to even their scientific counterparts. He argued, as have others, that media coverage of elections is much too poll-obsessed and that covering a campaign in such a way perpetuates misconceptions about why voters should choose a particular candidate.

“If you look at the major networks’ coverage of the election, for instance, what you find is that they turn it into a horse race,” he said. “All they report is who’s ahead, who’s behind and by how much. It is distracting and detracts from the coverage of the actual issues. So that’s another reason to get in there and disrupt these polls: it’s because the polls really don’t matter. You shouldn’t vote on whether someone is ahead or not. What you should be voting for is whether they have policies that you agree with.”

Measuring Enthusiasm

I spoke to a few of the people responsible for publishing polls that Myers had crashed, and surprisingly there were no bitter feelings toward bloggers who deliberately try to skewer their results. In fact, both the people I interviewed said they welcomed such online participation. They argued that instances of poll crashes allowed them to gauge the level of enthusiasm for a particular issue.

Joel Schwartzbert, the director for new media for NOW, outright rejected the notion that the poll question on the website — whether Sarah Palin was qualified to be vice president — was somehow biased or leading. When the news magazine formulates each week’s poll question, he said, it bases it on a pressing issue that has become part of the national conversation. In this particular instance, there had been a sizable amount of discussion during the Republican National Convention over Palin’s qualifications for the position.

“As an example, during the Democratic convention, we asked people if they thought the party is unified,” he told me. “So we did not pull this issue out of a vacuum, it was the most relevant and talked-about issue. When the convention ended, that poll was retired. We don’t link to old polls, nor do we have an archive of old polls. So what people did was they found that poll sort of drifting in the vast outer space of the Internet, and looking at the source code found the URL, and that’s what became viral. It did not even begin to become viral until it was formerly retired on our website.”

To date, more than 50 million votes have been registered on the poll, both from constant freeping and from bots running rampant and falsely inflating the numbers. Eventually, NOW changed the poll to track a user’s cookie so they could only vote one time per computer.

Because of this one poll, Schwartzbert said, both NOW and PBS as a whole have experienced traffic numbers that far surpassed previous viewership records by wide margins. And in attracting all that traffic, they were able to drive readers to other NOW content linked at the bottom of the Palin poll. In this respect, the poll was able to engage the online community and expose a much larger audience to more reputable and scientific information.

I asked the new media director about the unscientific nature of such polling and whether it could be misleading in displaying public opinion.

“I don’t find any online polls to be accurate enough to be worthy of public broadcast,” Schwartzbert said. “We do not announce these poll results on air. If we were going to announce them on air you can be assured that it’d be a scientific poll that’d be very official. We don’t offer up these results to measure scientifically any demographics. The point of these polls and other polls is so that people can register their vote…And the poll engine has a way to generate enough excitement to look at our investigative reports, which are still very thoroughly vetted and meticulously fact checked and very scientific.”

Schwartzbert said that people like polls in the same way that they like memes and lists, and part of using new media is understanding that “these other devices are a way to get people to come to your table. But you want to rely on your bread and butter, and, in our case, the video investigations are the meat of what we do, and what best serves our mission. So the poll is a way for people to express themselves and bring people to our larger core mission, which is to reveal what’s going on in our democracy.”

TV Series Finale gets poll crazy

Trevor Kimball, editor for the site TV Series Finale, agreed that the polls are more a measure of online enthusiasm for a particular issue than anything else. His website focuses on television shows that are canceled or on the verge of being canceled, and a few months ago he published an article about talk show host Montel Williams making a comeback. Along with that article, he ran a poll asking whether Williams should bring back psychic Sylvia Browne onto his new show, a poll that was later crashed by Myers.

Kimball told me that poll crashing isn’t an anomaly at TV Series Finale, but that when a website is dealing with hot button issues it should expect outside participation.

“We deal with a very passionate group of people,” he said in a phone interview. “Only a few million people may watch a television show; when it’s canceled, a lot of people feel very passionately about them. This happens even for television shows that, you know, most people might not even know exist or couldn’t care less about. On somewhat of a regular basis someone will post a link to an article that we’ve done and a poll that we have done, and say, ‘Hey, they’re asking about this canceled show, go voice your opinion.’ This kind of thing happens regularly.”

Although he agreed that the polls were entirely unscientific, Kimball said that in some ways they are able to assess the level of “passion” for a particular issue or show. He compared poll crashes to reviews on Amazon; people usually feel more inclined to voice their opinions when they have a negative view of a person, product or idea. So in this one instance, the level of disdain for psychics — whose supposed mental powers would no doubt be regarded as a product of superstition by an atheist like Myers — outweighed the level of admiration.

Online Polls Are Fun, Not Science

Greg Laden began using his science blog to engage in online poll crashing around the same time as Myers; in fact, he didn’t begin his own freeping until he noticed it on Pharyngula. Laden is an associate adviser with the Program for Individualized Learning at the the University of Minnesota. Though he and Myers share the same employer, they work at different campuses and, like Myers, he attacks the unscientific nature of these polls as being misleading.

“First of all, and this is the most important point, it’s that these are not polls,” Laden said. “Polling is a science, and polls work, and they work well. These are web widgets; it’s no more a poll than what someone put up on Flickr is the Mona Lisa. And you put them on your blog because they’re fun. Even CNN polls going back to the beginning of the Internet — the first online polls were these CNN polls. That’s how it all started really — even they put it up to entertain their readers, to entertain the masses.”

Though he agreed that the polls are a form of community engagement, he rejected the notion that they could somehow accurately measure how much enthusiasm or passion exists online about a particular issue. Instead, he said, the poll crashes are a key indicator that the blogosphere as a whole is trying to flex its muscles, and in doing so somehow assert its influence. He said many bloggers are moving beyond simple widgets to focuse on a new form of link crashing that results in an actual distribution of power: fundraising.

Crash Responsibly

Over the past few years, bloggers have continuously linked readers to pages where they could donate relatively small amounts of money to both campaigns and special interest groups. In effect, they are able to move large sums using a very grassroots strategy. Laden himself encourages readers to donate to causes, and, in doing so, he said that he is participating in a different form of poll crashing.

“It’s similar, but in some ways scarier,” he said. “Because when you’re done with that, the recipient has a lot of money, whereas before you just filled out this poll and it was completely harmless. The money is powerful because you can do something with it. That’s when bloggers have to sit back and say, ‘We have to have some responsibility here.’”

Interestingly, Laden also argued that a blogger’s responsibility even extends to poll crashing, in that it in some ways affects the level of discourse.

“People like to be part of a community that is a little organized but for the most part is an emergent self-fulfilling kind of thing,” he said. “They like being part of the community. A lot of the people are complaining at the Sarah Palin rallies that people are screaming things like ‘Kill the terrorist’ about Obama. And experienced commentators who have been watching politics their whole lives are saying there is a crowd control issue with any rally that they have, and Palin is being irresponsible. And I think that kind of thing comes to play.”

In this respect, he said, a blogger can be considered at least partially responsible if his followers conduct themselves irresponsibly when crashing these polls. Given that Myers himself has received death threats when a swarm of outraged people were directed his way by a recent campaign against him from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, he and others are no doubt aware of the havoc than can be wreaked by an unruly mob of semi-anonymous readers.

Note: Both NOW and MediaShift are independently produced for PBS. MediaShift recently added regular online polls, but they limit people to one vote per computer. Our newest poll on the home page is about poll-crashers.

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate blogger for MediaShift. He currently works as an online analyst for New Media Strategies. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.