Media in Middle East & North Africa

We label the poles as 1) Secular/Reformist, 2) Conservative/Religious, 3) Persian Poetry and Literature, and 4) Mixed Networks.

Surprisingly, a minority of bloggers in the secular/reformist pole appear to blog anonymously, even in the more politically-oriented part of it; instead, it is more common for bloggers in the religious/conservative pole to blog anonymously.

Once you start rickrolling people, and more importantly get a reputation for it, you're heading towards being the Zimbabwean dollar in the link economy: it doesn't matter how many you offer, people just aren't going to buy them.

If your Facebook page's principal URL said "click here for more about me!" and then linked to a Rick Astley video, what would people think of you? That you liked a practical joke, perhaps. This could be useful for them to know. But they wouldn't have learnt anything about you, apart from that fact. As we become simultaneously more promiscuous in making our online personalities visible, and therefore more likely to come across people without any other context than their own representation of themselves, there's less and less time to make an impression.

Without links, the web doesn't really work. You can't go anywhere. And if your fear is that the next link someone offers on will take you essentially nowhere — they get marked. On services where you can't see the full link — most URLs passed on Twitter are shortened via link-shortening services, to fit them into its 140-character limit — or where the link doesn't tell you much (as with any YouTube URL), it's all about trust. The pound or dollar in your pocket is a form of trust: you trust whoever you trade with to redeem a pound's worth of value from it. Same with links.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."