New York, April 30, 2009 - "With a military government that severely restricts Internet access and imprisons people for years for posting critical material, Burma is the worst place in the world to be a blogger, the Committee to Protect Journalists says in a new report. CPJ’s “10 Worst Countries to be a Blogger” also identifies a number of countries in the Middle East andAsia where...

The New York Times has an interesting piece about big online companies struggling to make profits in countries other than the USA and those of Western Europe. It costs Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and others the same - or even more, because of slow bandwidth in certain countries - to deliver content in different parts of the world. The earnings, however, are very different; compared to the US, in...

Bloggers are taking on Iran's mullahs and winning. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, bloggers are on the front line of the struggle for freedom. Today, there are about 80,000 bloggers in Iran living under constant threat of surveillance, harassment and imprisonment. One such blogger, Mojtaba Saminejad, 28, was arrested and tortured along with 30 others in 2004. He spent three months in solitary...

A little over a week ago came the anniversary of a domestic protest in Egypt, for which a group of students and activists attempted to organise a nationwide day of action. The April 6th 2009 protest was widely regarded as a failure, but raises questions about the use of new media in democratic movements and their coverage by the mainstream media in both the Middle East and the West. The...

April 14 (Bloomberg) - Politically speaking, Mustafa Naggar, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Mohammed Sherif, a self-styled revolutionary socialist, should have little to say to each other. The Brotherhood, the Middle East's prototype for Islamic- based politics, has long been at odds with those democrats who think religion's place is in the mosque, not the halls of power. Still, the...