Media in Middle East & North Africa

Footage purporting to show the unrest, with protesters fleeing gunfire and a man being shot, was later posted on the internet and used by the BBC and other news organisations. However, subsequent inquiries suggested this was footage originally uploaded more than a year ago.

A young man in his twenties wanted to express his gratitude about the victories the youth of 25th of January have achieved and chose to express it in the form of naming his firstborn girl “Facebook” Jamal Ibrahim

While the baby girl could just have easily been called “YouTube,” “Twitter” “Google” or even “Cellphone Camera,” it seems like Facebook has become the umbrella symbol for how social media can spread the message of freedom. There are countless manefestation of this, the above graffiti in Cairo, “Thank you Facebook” protest sign, and Wael Ghonim himself personally expressing his gratitude to Mark Zuckerberg on CNN.

bloggers often use Facebook and Twitter to promote their blog posts to a wider audience. Rather than being competitors, he said, they are complementary.

Among 34-to-45-year-olds who use the Internet, the percentage who blog increased six points, to 16 percent, in 2010 from two years earlier, the Pew survey found. Blogging by 46-to-55-year-olds increased five percentage points, to 11 percent, while blogging among 65-to-73-year-olds rose two percentage points, to 8 percent.

“The act of telling your story and sharing part of your life with somebody is alive and well — even more so than at the dawn of blogging,” Mr. Rainie said. “It’s just morphing onto other platforms.” The blurring of lines is readily apparent among users of Tumblr. Although Tumblr calls itself a blogging service, many of its users are unaware of the description and do not consider themselves bloggers — raising the possibility that the decline in blogging by the younger generation is merely a semantic issue.

On Tuesday the Libyan ruler, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, called Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, his first known direct outreach to a European leader.

Libya supplies much of Italy’s natural gas. In 2008, under Mr. Berlusconi, the two countries signed an accord in which Italy pledged $5 billion over 20 years in exchange for Libya’s help in blocking the flow of illegal immigrants toward Europe and granting favorable treatment for Italian companies seeking to do business in Libya.

Speaking on a panel called "New Media as a Strategic Weapon," Benayahu told the audience in Herzliya that Israeli soldiers are now forced to be more aware of the fact that new media users can be documenting their actions at all times.

"Visual material is what is most compelling online. It's evidence. It's proof in a way that a written statement isn't. If there is a big operation going on and we can provide visual evidence of what's happening, then other people can use that to make arguments and discuss things."

"Our version is supported by named sources and with medical documents. In a properly functioning society, the army's version, which has been spread by anonymous sources, would not be considered worthy of publication,"

Colonel Qaddafi spent the last 40 years hollowing out every single institution that might challenge his authority

Optimists hope that the opposition’s resolve persists; pessimists worry that unity will last only until Colonel Qaddafi is gone, and that a bloody witch hunt will ensue afterward.

a United States counterterrorism official

Abu Dhabi Media Summit is thought to have set the stage for a major transformation of that United Arab Emirate from a more reclusive presidency of the Gulf federation to an international media player. Although flashy neighboring Dubai has to date been the undisputed leader in the region with its Media City (http://www.dubaimediacity.com) hosting countless news and entertainment organizations, Abu Dhabi's low-key approach is slowly turning it into a news hub for the likes of CNN (www.cnn.com), which began broadcasting from studios there in recent months. An Arab media analyst credits UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdallah bin Zayed Al Nahyan for the beefed up media presence. Sheikh Abdallah, the late ruler's son, was his country's information minister and as a young man interned at the headquarters of an international news agency, where he is thought to have acquired a taste for the industry. Google, represented by CEO Eric Schmidt, is seeing its fastest revenue and user growth in the Middle East/North Africa region, Gulf News quoted the company chief as telling summit participants, although he apparently declined to provide specific numbers. Schmidt also said there was a shortage of Arabic content, and that Arabic websites were slow to be developed. The media summit drew almost 500 global media leaders and delegates, including AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, incoming Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg, Turkey's Dogan Media Group Vice Chairman Mehmet Ali Yalçindag, and Murdoch partner Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, to name a few. But critics dubbed it a summit for CEOs and geeks that excluded journalists from covering it first-hand.

A spat over rights to broadcast Turkish football matches has led a local court to issue a blanket ban on the popular blogging platform Blogger, angering Turkish Internet users with what experts said was a disproportionate response.

There are more than 600,000 Turkish bloggers actively using Blogger and some 18 million users from Turkey visited pages hosted by the site last month

“If two people plan a criminal activity on the phone, should we ban the use of telephones all over the country?” asked Deniz Ergürel, the secretary-general of the Media Association.

Libya this week which saw an established humanitarian organization specifically request a volunteer technical community for a live map of reports generated from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and mainstream media sources. Seriously, I have never been more impressed by the humanitarian community than I am today. The pro-active approach they have taken and their constructive engagement is absolutely remarkable. This is truly spectacular and the group deserve very high praise.

we are creating a live map of a hostile situation still unfolding. Haiti provided a permissive environment, politically and geographically. Libya couldn’t be more different. We experienced the serious challenges of crisis mapping a hostile environment when we created a crisis map of Khartoum at the request of local Sudanese activists. This was a stressful deployment but one that was able to provide an important window into what was happening in Khartoum. In the case of Libya, our humanitarian partner requested that the crisis map be password protected. We intend to make the map public after this phase of the humanitarian operations is over. In the meantime, the screenshots below provide a good picture of what the platform looks like. In the first 48 hours since the activation of the Task Force, over 220 individual reports have been mapped, many including pictures and some with video footage.

Has prison become the place for those who tell the truth and raise their voice?

"You touch them, you get burnt," journalist Ahmet Sik, who was working on a book critical of the police, shouted as officers led him out of his home

credibility waned as police began arresting intellectuals known as AKP opponents, and some suspects accused police of fabricating evidence