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Further, grumblings on Facebook accounts are hardly ‘anonymous’. Lastly, how anonymous can bloggers be, when every now and then a racist blogger gets arrested by the state? Think about it. These sorts of cases prove that the state does screen, survey and monitor the online community, and as all of us know there are many vehement anti-PAP comments and articles, much of which are outright slander and defamation.

Yet at the end of the day, it is the racist blogger, not the anti-government or anti-PAP blogger that gets arrested. The Singaporean model is a much more complex and sophisticated phenomenon than this Guardian writer gives it credit.

Why did this Guardian writer, anyway, pander to a favourite Western stereotype of that “far-off Asian undemocratic, repressive regime”? Is she really in Singapore as the Guardian claims? (“Kate Hodal in Singapore” is written at the top) Can the Guardian be anymore predictable and trite?

Arianna Huffington, her website and AOL were on the receiving end of a $105m (£64.5m) lawsuit by a group of angry bloggers unhappy that she sold the Huffington Post for $315m without them being paid a penny.The class action is led by Jonathan Tasini, a writer and trade unionist, who wrote more than 250 posts for Huffington Post on an unpaid basis until he dropped out shortly after the news and comment site was sold to AOL earlier this year.

"Huffington bloggers have essentially been turned into modern day slaves on Arianna Huffington's plantation" and said he was bringing the action because "people who create content ... have to be compensated" for their efforts.

The complainant and his lawyers estimate about 9,000 people wrote for the Huffington Post on an unpaid basis – and argue that their writings helped contribute about a third of the sale value of the site, the basis of their $105m claim for compensation.

TOC, Mr Brown, Leong Sze Hian and other bloggers received the information from Tan’s office yesterday and honoured the embargo on the news.

As the presumptive government-endorsed candidate, Tan's move can be seen as a landmark in relations between the state and Singapore’s intrepid and often unruly alternative online media. Until now, the government has refused to treat any of these sites as engaging in bona fide journalism. Bloggers have long complained that government departments do not respond to requests for information. When The Online Citizen organised a pre-election forum for all political parties to share their ideas last December, the People’s Action Party would have nothing to do with it. TOC highlighted the ruling party’s conspicuous absence by leaving an empty chair on stage. The election regulations’ ban on campaigning on the “cooling off” day and polling day also discriminate against citizen journalism: only licenced news organisations are exempted.

The sudden change of heart is undoubtedly one result of May’s groundbreaking general election. Online media were obviously influential, and the government may have decided that it has no choice but to do business with them.

This post is about how one should deal with a denialist of Delingpole's ilk.

I saw someone I follow on Twitter retweet an update from another Twitter user called @AGW_IS_A_HOAX, which was this: "NZ #Climate Scientists Admit Faking Temperatures http://bit.ly/fHbdPI RT @admrich #AGW #Climategate #Cop16 #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming".

So I click on it. And this is how you deal with a denialist claim. You actually look into it. Here is the text of that article reproduced in full: New Zealand Climate Scientists Admit To Faking Temperatures: The Actual Temps Show Little Warming Over Last 50 YearsRead here and here. Climate "scientists" across the world have been blatantly fabricating temperatures in hopes of convincing the public and politicians that modern global warming is unprecedented and accelerating. The scientists doing the fabrication are usually employed by the government agencies or universities, which thrive and exist on taxpayer research dollars dedicated to global warming research. A classic example of this is the New Zealand climate agency, which is now admitting their scientists produced bogus "warming" temperatures for New Zealand. "NIWA makes the huge admission that New Zealand has experienced hardly any warming during the last half-century. For all their talk about warming, for all their rushed invention of the “Eleven-Station Series” to prove warming, this new series shows that no warming has occurred here since about 1960. Almost all the warming took place from 1940-60, when the IPCC says that the effect of CO2 concentrations was trivial. Indeed, global temperatures were falling during that period.....Almost all of the 34 adjustments made by Dr Jim Salinger to the 7SS have been abandoned, along with his version of the comparative station methodology."A collection of temperature-fabrication charts.

Similarly, though some sites interviewed a "close friend" of Abdullah's, NPR reports that the source, Sandra Bagaria, only communicated with Abdullah via Facebook.

Bagaria also told NPR that, "Amina posted some 200 pictures [to Facebook] of someone who wasn't her." The person in question, is in fact Jelena Lecic, of London. Lecic told the BBC that she is not friends with Abdullah and has never met her. Her photo, however, has been used on several media sites to picture Abdullah.

While nobody knows the real truth, the discussion itself illustrates the many complications that can arise from Internet anonymity.

Of course, not everything in the mainstream media is always true. Mistakes are made. News organizations have political biases, sometimes reflecting the views and interests of their owners. But high-quality journalism has always relied on its reputation for probity. Editors, as well as reporters, at least tried to get the facts right. That is why people read Le Monde, The New York Times, or, indeed, the Washington Post. Filtering nonsense was one of their duties – and their main selling point.

It is unlikely that Rick Santorum, or many of his followers, have read any post-modern theorists. Santorum, after all, recently called Obama a “snob” for claiming that all Americans should be entitled to a college education. So he must surely loath writers who represent everything that the Tea Party and other radical right-wingers abhor: the highly educated, intellectual, urban, secular, and not always white. These writers are the left-wing elite, at least in academia.

But, as so often happens, ideas have a way of migrating in unexpected ways. The blogger who dismissed The Washington Post’s corrections of Santorum’s fictional portrayal of the Netherlands expressed himself like a perfect post-modernist. The most faithful followers of obscure leftist thinkers in Paris, New York, or Berkeley are the most reactionary elements in the American heartland. Of course, if this were pointed out to them, they would no doubt dismiss it as elitist propaganda.

the conversation should include scientists from academia and government; we also think it should include scientists from industry. Because industry is increasingly the interface between science and society.

The bloggers who blog on 'corporate blogs' on SB are necessarily credentialed scientists (we make sure of that), in some cases highly credentialed scientists who have published extensively in peer-reviewed journals. The fact that they work at a profit-making company does not automatically disqualify their science in our mind. And frankly, nor does it disqualify them in the eyes of the Nobel Prize Committee either.

All editorial content is written by PepsiCo's scientists or scientists invited by PepsiCo and/or ScienceBlogs. All posts carry a byline above the fold indicating the scientist's affiliation and conflicts of interest." This must be 100% transparent so our readers can evaluate the merit of the post for themselves.

Fed economist Karthik Athreya's rant -- Economics is hard, don't let bloggers tell you otherwise -- against bloggers (both experts and non-experts, and he names them) holding forth on the Big Economic Questions of our time has had at least one good effect: many bloggers, including those not named in Athreya's rant, have risen up to defend the role of blogs in policy debates; some have also used this occasion to talk about the role of blogging in their professional lives.

Stung by myriad criticisms of the Fed, Athreya attempted to defend the priesthood of economics. “Writers who have not taken a year of PhD coursework in a decent economics department (and passed their PhD qualifying exams), cannot meaningfully advance the discussion on economic policy,” he wrote. Predictably, it provoked a firestorm of criticism from the blogosphere.

But Athreya’s circle the wagon’s defense raises a valid point — economics is too important to leave to just anyone. Especially economists.

all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.

wrote a piece about James Delingpole's unfortunate appearance on the BBC program Horizon on Monday. In that piece I refered to one of his own Telegraph articles in which he criticizes renowned sceptic Dr Ben Goldacre for betraying the principles of scepticism in his regard of the climate change debate. That article turns out to be rather instructional as it highlights perfectly the difference between real scepticism and the false scepticism commonly described as denialism.

It appears that James has tremendous respect for Ben Goldacre, who is a qualified medical doctor and has written a best-selling book about science scepticism called Bad Science and continues to write a popular Guardian science column. Here's what Delingpole has to say about Dr Goldacre: Many of Goldacre’s campaigns I support. I like and admire what he does. But where I don’t respect him one jot is in his views on ‘Climate Change,’ for they jar so very obviously with supposed stance of determined scepticism in the face of establishment lies.

Scepticism is not some sort of rebellion against the establishment as Delingpole claims. It is not in itself an ideology. It is merely an approach to evaluating new information. There are varying definitions of scepticism, but Goldacre's variety goes like this: A sceptic does not support or promote any new theory until it is proven to his or her satisfaction that the new theory is the best available. Evidence is examined and accepted or discarded depending on its persuasiveness and reliability. Sceptics like Ben Goldacre have a deep appreciation for the scientific method of testing a hypothesis through experimentation and are generally happy to change their minds when the evidence supports the opposing view. Sceptics are not true believers, but they search for the truth. Far from challenging the established scientific consensus, Goldacre in Bad Science typcially defends the scientific consensus against alternative medical views that fall back on untestable positions. In science the consensus is sometimes proven wrong, and while this process is imperfect it eventually results in the old consensus being replaced with a new one.

At the time of the post describing Amina's arrest, "A Gay Girl in Damascus" was generally accepted at face value. But the young woman's story began to fall apart under the scrutiny of the bloggers and journalists attempting to fact-check it and follow up. She frequently canceled interviews at the last minute. A photo that Amina sent to The Guardian turned out to be stolen from the Facebook account of a British-Croatian woman named Jelena Lecic. NPR's Andy Carvin discovered that no one—not even her Canadian girlfriend—had met Amina in person.

MacMaster confessed on the blog: Apology to readers I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about. I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience. This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism. However, I have been deeply touched by the reactions of readers. Best, Tom MacMaster, Istanbul, Turkey July 12, 2011 The sole author of all posts on this blog

MacMaster, fighting the good fight against liberal Orientalism, hasn't harmed anyone, huh? We wonder if "Amina"'s girlfriend feels the same way.

Privately, several independent bloggers have voiced unease at the ugly mob behaviour that swamped cyberspace during the general election. The experience has sparked internal discussions about how best to manage readers’ comments, in particular, since that’s where irrationality has run riot.

There are also established bloggers who are no longer content to speak among the converted. They want to widen the online debate so that it does not attract only anti-government voices. (I've made a similar point in an earlier piece.) Don’t be surprised, therefore, if you see some of Singapore’s influential independent bloggers creating new platforms for national debate in the coming months, either by developing new websites or by reorienting their existing ones.

But even if they build them, will government sympathisers and spokesmen come? One thing that will have to change is the PAP’s politics of intolerance, which has contributed to the polarisation of debate in Singapore. Its “with-us-or-against-us” philosophy has compelled establishment types to stay clear of plural spaces. (The classic illustration was the PAP’s refusal to take part in The Online Citizen’s multi-party forum before the general election.)

The data that is sent back to Facebook's servers include the IP address, or unique identifier of your computer, and a log of what you have been viewing. These information help Facebook make billions of dollars each year from advertising, as such information is highly valuable.

The tracking practices were exposed by Australian technology blogger Nik Cubrilovic, who found that when a user signs up to Facebook, monitoring files known as "cookies" get stored on the user's computer. Mr Cubrilovic wrote: "Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit. The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate (web) browser for Facebook interactions."

A Dutch researcher revealed earlier this year that Facebook was gathering browser data from Internet users who had never even been to Facebook.com.

The legal letters point this out in claiming that the material "is seriously abusive and defamatory of Mr Dacre."