· April, 2010

Stories about Advocacy from April, 2010

Guide: Mirroring a Censored WordPress Blog

  22 April 2010

Global Voices Advocacy is pleased to release another Advocacy 2.0 guide: Mirroring a Censored WordPress Blog. The guide, which has been written by Sami Ben Gharbia (Global Voices Advocacy Director), with Rebekah Heacock (a research assistant for the OpenNet Initiative) and Jeremy Clarke (Global Voices web developer and Wordpress designer), is for bloggers with self-hosted* WordPress blogs who believe their sites may be blocked by government filters. Its goal is to help bloggers use a mirror site to make censored content available to readers despite these filters. It contains step-by-step instructions for setting up a mirror for an original (”source”) WordPress blog.

Egypt: Using Online Media & Digital Devices to Release Detainees

  21 April 2010

Earlier this month, the April 6 Youth Movement staged a protest in front of the Egyptian Peoples Assembly calling for more political freedoms and an end to Egypt's restrictive “emergency law”, which might be renewed this year, and might be enforced as well by a new “Counter-Terrorism law” which is expected to be extremely repressive. The Egyptian security forces responded to the protesting citizens with a brutal violence, making a score of arrests and convictions.

Guide: SEO Tips for Advocacy Bloggers

19 April 2010

Global Voices Advocacy is pleased to release its third Advocacy 2.0 Guides: SEO Tips for Advocacy Bloggers: How to Apply Search Engine Optimization to Grow Your Readership and Influence More People. The guide has been written by my friend and colleague, The Sudanese Thinker, a Global Voices author, an internet marketing and online business consultant, with an initial focus on SEO, and on managed 7-figure online properties.

President Chávez and his “Communicational Guerrilla”

  16 April 2010

On last sunday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez launched the program named “Communicational Thunder”, and seventy-five young students between ages 13 and 17, were sworn in his "Communicational Guerrilla", wearing khaki jackets and red bandanas tied around their necks. They had been trained to "fight against imperialist messages", either on social networks online, on walls and pamphlets or "through direct intervention".

Lebanon: First Threatened Voice

  2 April 2010

Lebanon has been known and envied in the MENA region for its free cyberspace. Well not any more since March has marked Lebanon's first cyber censhorship incident. Layal Al Khatib has more details in this post.

Censorship Without Borders: A Moroccan Blogger's Experience

  1 April 2010

Naoufel Chaara is a talented Moroccan blogger. His website [Ar] has been recently nominated for the Deutsche Welle's 2010 BOBs international award in the Best Arabic Blog category. Naoufel's usually caustic views on people and power in his country and the Arab world, often pack a strong punch with his...