Angelo calls this photo "Lisa Goldman - doing her thing!"
You can see all the We Media conference photos posted on Flickr here.
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On the Face in the News
Lebanese and Israelis blog
the war: edited by Michael Totten This Month
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Wednesday, May 10
Photos from "We Media"
by
Lisa Goldman
on Wed 10 May 2006 03:45 PM IDT
Angelo calls this photo "Lisa Goldman - doing her thing!" You can see all the We Media conference photos posted on Flickr here.
Way down in Egypt land: let the blogger go
by
Lisa Goldman
on Wed 10 May 2006 12:07 AM IDT
 See that sweet-faced guy on the right? His name is Alaa Ahmed Seif al-Islam. He and his wife Manal, pictured on the left, won a special award from Reporters Without Borders at the 2005 Deutsche-Welle Blogging Awards for their aggregate blog, Manal and Alaa's Bit Bucket. The couple is famous in the Egyptian blogging community for their democracy activism; their blog provides a valuable service by aggregating all the Egyptian blogs. Last week Alaa and several others were detained by the police while demonstrating peacefully in support of the independence of the judiciary in From Manal: Alaa and the rest of the group that was kidnapped yesterday, will be detained for 15 days. They didnt go directly to the prison as we thought, but spent the night at the Khalifa’s police station and are supposed to be transferred to the prisons now. The 3 women will go to El Qanater prison, as Tora prison where the rest of the 40 detainees are held has no section for women, and the men are supposed to join the rest and go to Tora prison, but some think that they will also taken to El Qanater prison (which has sections for both men and women). Click here to read a complete summary of what Egyptian bloggers are reporting about the detention of the demonstrators. The Egyptian Sandmonkey has templates for letters of protest to be sent to US and Egyptian officials here. A bloggers' campaign to free Alaa has been set up here. Rachel Rawlins, the managing editor of Global Voices Online, suggests that we use a Google bomb to shame the Egyptian government into freeing Alaa and the other detainees. Here's how it works: link the word Egypt to the Free Alaa! blog as many times as possible, and you will help push it higher on the rank of Google searches for Egypt. In other words, people searching for information on Egypt will find the link to the Free Alaa! blog. This is one of those stories that you probably wouldn't hear much about if not for blogs. There are thousands of people detained unjustly all over the world. Mostly, we never hear about them - or if we do, we just shake our heads at the horror of it all and go on with our lives. Here's a chance to do something. I'm not saying that you should skip that planned vacation in the (Egyptian) Sinai this year. I don't actually believe in boycotts that are more likely to hurt poor people who are trying to make a living in the tourist industry than affect government policy. But there's no conflict of interest between lolling on a beach in the (Egyptian) Sinai and protesting the (Egyptian) government's unjust detention of a citizen who was simply demonstrating peacefully. There are already reports of the detainees being mistreated - food is being held back, a diabetic has been denied his insulin. Egyptian prisons are notorious places - torture is common. Fifteen days would seem like an eternity, and that term could be renewed.  Update: Mary Joyce has set up a Wiki with URLs for all the blog posts that contain Google bombs for Alaa. Click here to view. For those of you who know how to use Technorati tags (that doesn't include me just yet), she also suggests adding the tag googlebombingforalaa to your post. Israeli bloggers - I think it would be a really nice gesture on our part if we were to make an effort to support democracy in the Middle East by participating "en groupe" in the Google bomb campaign to help free Alaa. How 'bout it? It doesn't take much: Check out the examples on the Wiki to see how short your post can be - just linking the word "Egypt" once to the Free Alaa! blog is enough. Update 2: Israeli bloggers who have posted about Alaa: AbbaGav Dry Bones Dutchblog Israel Jameel from the Muqata KatrinaYellow Yael Savtadotty Shalom Israel SomethingSomething West Bank Blog Peter S. has also written a Wikipedia entry on Alaa. HTML code for a Free Alaa! badge that you can place on your blog is here. |
The most blogged war: a retrospective
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