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“This a country where barbers used to do the job of doctors,” says Abdelmonem Said, head of Egypt’s al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, who writes a newspaper column but does not consider himself a journalist. “We should not refer to [bloggers] as journalists unless they are qualified to perform the job of a journalist. Defending an activist in the name of journalism further complicates an already complicated situation.” Professionalism is the best defense for Arab and Iranian journalists; facts their ultimate ally. If everything written on the Web is equal, governments have an excuse to crack down on it all. And if journalist rights groups throw in their lot with political activists, it will be hard to make a case that jailed Iranian and Arab journalists shouldn’t be tried right alongside “cyberdissidents” advocating revolution and militants who throw bombs.

the Academy of Peace through Art, a school created under the umbrella of Iraq's national Symphony Orchestra.

dozens of teenagers with different backgrounds learn that boys should open doors for girls and the art of dinner party conversation.

"To some people it may seem irrelevant now, because there are so many problems - but we need people who care about beauty, and I am convinced that the day will come when everyone will realise it,"

My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness is the first biography of any Palestinian writer in any language – hard to fathom, but true

I am very excited that the Middle East Studies program has been able to bring Waltz with Bashir to Carlisle.  It will play for four nights at the Carlisle Theatre, a cool art deco relic.  On the last evening, next Wednesday, I will moderate a panel discussion after the showing.  Among the panelists will be someone who was serving in the Israeli army at the time of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon - the events remembered in the film - as well as someone who was protesting the war as a member of Peace Now.  How cool is that?

Montasser al-Zayat

Belonging to any external or regional organisation is considered a crime under Egyptian law, which is under a state of emergency - in place since 1981.

In many ways it was a pessimistic talk, which pushed back against expectations that new media technologies like blogs, Facebook or Twitter were going to radically change politics in the short or medium term.  Over the longer term, there is a more real transformative potential, especially for the individuals who use the technologies.  But analysts need to not be confused by the bright sparkling lights of fancy new technology or assume that it will have effects independently of the real lines of power and politics. 

politics come first, and that technology alone can have only a very limited impact in the face of authoritarian states.  Where internet activists have had a significant impact in Arab countries, it has usually been tied to distinct political opportunities – such as the Kwuaiti royal transition or elections --- or else led by people who were activists first and used technology as a tool.  New media did help activists in Egypt, Bahrain and elsewhere to punch well above their weight for a while... but eventually the regimes caught up and the real balance of power showed. 

I have a hard time thinking of a communications technology more poorly suited for organizing high-risk political collective action than Facebook. 

“It’s a very dangerous network because it’s all centralized,” he said, “not only on a technological level, where it goes through one set of servers — but it also goes through one set of business interests that’s anything but transparent.” Danger may sound a bit overzealous for a Web service that barely existed two years ago, but for a media landscape in the middle of a profound shift, two years can be the span between eras. Twitter is becoming a major source for news, commerce and free expression and, as with a free press itself, defenders don’t want a few profit-motivated individuals making all the decisions about how it should evolve. Like Facebook and YouTube before it, Twitter is now transitioning from a freely available, much-loved Web service to a well-funded business venture looking to cash in on the audience and cachet it built in its freewheeling early days.

Both critics have installed their own smaller, open-source micro-messaging systems outside of Twitter’s domain. Laporte calls his the Twit Army. The software they’re using was developed by Evan Prodromou, a developer in Montreal. Prodromou is the force behind Laconica — an open-source, Twitter-like system that anyone can install; hundreds of administrators already have, creating a dispersed, decentralized network of Twitter clones that can all talk to one another. Prodromou compares the state of micro-messaging to the early days of consumer e-mail. In the early 1990s, the e-mail world was dominated by proprietary dial-up entities like CompuServe, MCI and Prodigy. But because those systems were competitive, they didn’t connect to one another, and you could send messages only to people inside your own service. “I couldn’t send you e-mail and you couldn’t send me e-mail,” Prodromou explained. “We were on these separate islands. Making the change to an open standard for Internet e-mail has meant e-mail has become ubiquitous. I think that’s where we’re at now with microblogging.”

The console is not meant to directly compete with the latest, powerful devices like Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, or the Wii. Rather, said Zeebo CEO John F. Rizzo, it is targeted at consumers in emerging markets like India, China, Brazil and Eastern Europe who generally can't afford the latest high-end consoles, or the games published for them. In many of these countries, cell phone service is more readily available and cheaper than wired broadband.

Zeebo hopes that by improving on systems like Mega Drive and offering wireless downloads of games, it will attract the emerging middle classes of India, China and Brazil to modern video games.