Britain bans two anti-Islam U.S. bloggers

The British government has banned two prominent U.S. anti-Islam bloggers who had planned to enter the United Kingdom to speak at a far-right rally, the Home Office said Wednesday.

Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, co-founders of Stop Islamization of America, were planning to appear at a march by the far-right English Defense League in Woolwich, the site in southeast London of the hacking death of a British solider in May.

On their blogs, Geller and Spencer posted copies of a letter from the British Home Office issuing the ban.
A government spokesman said individuals whose presence "is not conducive to the public good" could be excluded by the home secretary, the BBC reported.

"We condemn all those whose behaviors and views run counter to our shared values and will not stand for extremism in any form," he added.

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French bloggers' Libya trip turns tragic

A trip by six young French bloggers to the revolution in Libya turned to tragedy after one was left paralyzed by a stray bullet in the shell-shocked city of Misrata.

"We didn't come here to cover a war, we just wanted to see a revolution like the one in Tunisia," one of the bloggers told reporters Friday, saying that they had expected the revolt to come to a swift end with the fall of Moamer Kadhafi. The four men and two women travelled by boat in late March to Misrata, where fighting quickly intensified after Kadhafi's forces launched a deadly crackdown on protests inspired by regime-changing movements in Tunisia and Egypt.

The bloggers, aged between 24 and 26 who had met while studying in the northwestern French city of Rennes, decided to stay on to bear witness to the conflict because they said initially so few foreign reporters were in the city. For weeks they they posted video images on the internet and filed blogs and reports to the French news website Rue89 about Misrata, a western city where hundreds have died since Kadhafi forces laid siege to it nearly two months ago.

But then a week ago one blogger, Baptiste Dubonnet, was struck down by a stray bullet.

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FFWD: The rise of political blogs - by Trevor Howell

For the complete report from FFWD click on this link

The rise of political blogs - by Trevor Howell

The pay is terrible. Ideas, no matter how well thought out and crafted, may only draw a readership that can be measured by the dozen. Politicians threaten lawsuits if you outsmart them. In short, even as a hobby, writing a blog isn’t the most prestigious gig.

Blogs, or weblogs, have come a long way since their mid-’90s inception. Back then, they were primarily viewed as online diaries. By the early part of this century, they evolved into effective tools where one could espouse their views and report on issues mainstream media were missing. David Climenhaga, a journalist and self-described unsophisticated blogger, contends incredibly bad management on the part of people who run newspapers is as much to blame as the failing economic model. “I tend to feel that newspaper management drove their core readership onto the Internet rather than people were abandoning newspapers for the Internet willingly,” he says.

IHT: Free speech in danger? - Bloggers beware when you criticize the rich and powerful - by Doreen Carvajal

For the complete report from the International Herald Tribune click on this link

Bloggers beware when you criticize the rich and powerful - by Doreen Carvajal

The daily Web log, or blog, of the former U.K. ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, vanished after Murray's British Internet provider received a flurry of ominous legal letters demanding the removal of "potentially defamatory" information about Alisher Usmanov, a mining mogul with a rising stake in the English soccer club Arsenal. Two weeks later, Murray is not blogging, but his blistering opinions are about to surface again through a Dutch Internet provider that offers refuge to controversial bloggers in the United States and in England, where libel laws are more lax. And with that journey, Murray has stirred support and a common outrage among bloggers and Internet service providers who complain that chilling demands from companies are becoming more frequent in a number of countries.

"I'm personally predicting that the next growth area is not censorship of bomb-making Web sites," said Richard Clayton, a computer security researcher at Cambridge University and part of the OpenNet Initiative that tracks Internet filtering around the world, "but complaints about defamation and civil suits."

Companies in the United States, Canada and Australia have moved against bloggers to remove copyrighted material with takedown complaints or have demanded removal of critical comments posted by blog visitors. British bloggers are particularly vulnerable to defamation complaints because of a previous court ruling that found that Internet providers qualified as publishers of libelous material if they did not react when alerted about a problem.

ITworld.com - Bugs in Blogger prompt user complaints - by Juan Carlos Perez

For the complete report in ITworld.com please click on this link

Bugs in Blogger prompt user complaints - by Juan Carlos Perez

Google Inc.'s Blogger service has been generating a steady stream of complaints from users this year, including hours-long outages, feature malfunctions and data loss.

The problems are particularly frustrating to users who migrated to the service's new version and expected to benefit from its more solid platform. Users contacted in recent days via e-mail report a variety of problems. For its part, Google says that most bugs are isolated incidents affecting relatively few people at a time and that Blogger's stability will improve as the migration to the new platform progresses.