The forum that turned media consumers into creators

It has given hundreds of millions of people the opportunity to be published and, in the process, created a legal minefield. The Blogger.com Web site, founded in 1999, gave this medium a platform and blogs took off after the September 11 attacks. \'We\'re seeing about 120 000 new Web logs being created worldwide each day,\' said Dave Sifry, the CE of the blog monitoring site Technorati. \'Blogging and other kinds of conversational media are the early tools of a truly read-write Web,\' said Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media. \'They\'ve helped turn media consumers into creators, and creators into collaborators – a shift whose impact we\'re just beginning to feel, much less understand.\' According to a Mail & Guardian Online report, in China, 50 bloggers and \'cyber-dissidents\' have been imprisoned in the past eight years, and most recently a man known as Kareem Amer was imprisoned for three years in Egypt for insulting Islam and the country\'s President, Hosni Mubarak, on his blog. In another high-profile case, prominent blogger Kathy Sierra has called on the blogosphere to combat the culture of abuse online. It follows a series of death threats that have forced her to cancel a public appearance and suspend her blog. BBC News reports that Sierra described on her blog how she had been subject to a campaign of threats, including a post that featured a picture of her next to a noose. Full Mail & Guardian Online report Full BBC News report

Josh Wolf, the blogger whose record seven and a half months in a US federal prison stirred debate about who qualifies as a journalist was freed last week after releasing video footage sought by prosecutors about an anarchist protest. According to a San Francisco Chronicle report, Wolf held in contempt by a federal judge last August for defying a grand jury subpoena, walked out of the federal prison after his lawyers and federal prosecutors reached a compromise during a mediation session before a federal magistrate. Wolf posted the uncut video on his Web site, gave prosecutors a copy and denied under oath that he knew anything about violent incidents at the July 2005 protest. In return, his lawyers said, prosecutors agreed not to summon him before the grand jury or ask him to identify any of the protesters shown on his video. Full San Francisco Chronicle report

Malaysia may compel bloggers to register with the authorities to curb the spread of malicious content on the Internet, a newspaper said last week, prompting cries of outrage from Web writers. Citing national security concerns, a Deputy Minister told parliament that the ruling might be imposed on bloggers using locally hosted Web sites. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the idea came after a pro–government newspaper sued two bloggers for defamation in January in a case the opposition says could stifle freedom of expression. Malaysia has promised it would not censor the Internet but has said bloggers were not above the law if they \'disrupt peace and harmony\'. Bloggers said the plan to limit Malaysian-based sites was unworkable, as writers would simply move their content to sites outside the country. Full report in The Sydney Morning Herald

A few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse. Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate. The New York Times notes that chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and should be able to delete threatening or libellous comments without facing cries of censorship. The code of conduct already has some early supporters, including David Weinberger, a well-known blogger and a fellow at the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. \'The aim of the code is not to homogenise the Web, but to make clearer the informal rules that are already in place anyway,\' he said. Full report in The New York Times