The Nation includes an interesting article (by way of the Guardian) about blogging. Kareem is also briefly mentioned. Excerpts below:
The first entry on Scripting News effectively ushered in the first blog 10 years ago. In the intervening years these online diaries have been touted as the future of media, labelled “pathetic drivel”, and caused court cases, prison sentences and international incidents. But love them or loathe them, bloggers around the world have ensured incredible growth for the medium. Latest figures indicate an estimated 70 million blogs in existence, with around 1.5 million posts being written every day.
[...]
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.
Correction: Kareem is sentenced to four years in prison, not 3.
[...]
The rise of the blog also triggered the explosion of other sites on which ordinary people share their experiences, from social networks such as MySpace and Facebook to the video-sharing website YouTube. Keen says this “digital narcissism” is spurred on in large part by the Internet’s overemphasis of a libertarian political outlook, and a tendency to make individuals talk to themselves about themselves.
But he admits that there have also been some important contributions.
“Not every blogger is a narcissist who has nothing to say. In particular there are people in China and Iraq who are blogging – and that is very brave,” he said.
- Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent
