AN EGYPTIAN blogger was jailed for four years yesterday after being convicted of insulting Islam and Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak.

Abdel Karim Suleiman, 22, a former law student, was the first blogger to stand trial in Egypt for his internet writings. He was charged in connection with eight articles written since 2004.

As activists and international civil rights groups condemn the deteriorating state of press freedom in Egypt, more Egyptians seem to drink their morning coffee reading the Egyptian blogs instead of flipping through the newspaper.

When the trial of Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice opens next week, scores of journalists are expected to throng the federal courtroom in Washington, far too many for the 100 seats set aside for the media.

But for the first time in a federal court, two of these seats will be reserved for bloggers.

Like any growing medium, weblogging has picked up the interest of marketers who are spotting that, you know, there might be something in this whole internet thing. Look at all these people, they say: what can they do for us?

It's not something that's strictly new, but this week the New Statesman picked up on one way that corporate marketers are attempting to gain influence in the blogosphere. PayPerPost is a service that promises to hook up bloggers with corporates and get them to write about particular products, all for a nice fee at the end of it all.

Zoomclouds is a service that lets you generate a tagcloud from an RSS feed:

Tag clouds are cool, informative, appealing representations about what's happening in your blog, or anywhere else.

With ZoomClouds you can put in a matter of minutes a tag cloud in your site, based on whichever RSS feed you like.

You can define height, width, colours ... the entire look and feel of the tagcloud.

When you're done, you get the code which you then can post on your blog, or website.

As an example I've created three clouds, spanning a 7 day period. One for my column, one for the main page of Newsvine, but just the Wire part, and one for the main page of Newsvine, the Vine part. You can see the result at your right.

When you click a tag, you get taken to a page with the most recent articles / seeds mentioning that specific word.

If you want to have a look for yourself, without immediately signing up, you can do so at the sample page for Newsvine - Irma.

Peter Hirshberg, Chairman of Technorati, lends an inside look at his expertise to the world blogging and how it has come to be. He shares how blogging has helped shape the internet in the global market today. He also speaks about the advances of the medium and how it has helped to shape not only the internet, but society today in everyday life.

Don't miss a second of it, click to view the webcast of Peter's remarks.

From the page:

-- What's the best way to assuage censorship concerns? Throw a temp under the bus. SixApart's apologies to Tribe.net founder Mark Pincus came swiftly after Pincus made a proper stink about attempted censorship. --

From the page:

-- Reading blogs via popular RSS or Atom feeds may expose computer users to hacker attacks, a security expert warned.

Attackers could insert malicious JavaScript in content that is transferred to subscribers of data feeds that use the popular RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom formats, Bob Auger, a security engineer with Web security company SPI Dynamics said in a presentation at the Black Hat security event here Thursday. --

From the page:

-- A Chinese university professor has successfully sued one of the country's largest blog website, Blogcn.com, after it carried defamatory remarks on a blog written by one of his students. --

From the page:

-- Across the front line between Lebanon and Israel, bloggers hiding in bomb shelters and watching from rooftops are trading terrifying experiences, bitter barbs and words of sympathy. --

From the page:

-- Wallace, who himself is a somewhat militant grammarian, has argued that descriptivism is hopeless as a scientific endeavor: Using what people actually say and write to determine appropriate English usage is, he says, like writing an ethics textbook based on what people actually do. But descriptive linguists have finally found persuasive champions in Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum, who have collected a series of essays from their blog Language Log into a new book, Far From the Madding Gerund. --

From the page:

-- Should journalists, bloggers and activists be held responsible for what others do with the facts they make public? --

From the page:

-- In a state where protests are rare, John Aglionby sees a columnist inspire a small band of Singaporeans to take to the streets. --

From the page:

-- Of all the political bloggers in America, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, creator of the left-wing website the Daily Kos, is perhaps the most powerful. Famous for dishing out criticism, he is now under attack himself, accused of being an election loser who bestows favours on his flatterers. --

From the page:

-- Just saw this on TechCrunch (referencing a BusinessWeek article): PayPerPost is a new system that pays bloggers a bounty to write about products and services. Companies sign up for the network (currently there are offers to cover iTunes, Superman Returns, Match.com, and many other products) and pay bloggers when they cover their products. There's no requirement that the blog run a disclosure that the item is paid. --

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign has hired Peter Daou, one of the most prominent political bloggers in the nation, to help disseminate her message in a forum that has not always been that hospitable to her.

From the page:

-- A media watchdog group protested the conviction of an Italian blogger for defamation, warning Friday that such a verdict could lead to censorship of blogs in Italy. --

-- When the history of the online media revolution is written, 2006 should merit special mention as a turning point for the blogosphere. This is the year, for better or for worse, when bloggers earned their first official media stripes.

Bloggers have considered themselves media almost since the beginning of their brief existence. They proudly claim the "citizen media" mantle and call their work by names like "grassroots journalism," "participatory journalism" and "public journalism." But self-proclamation doesn't carry the same weight as official recognition -- something bloggers have only just begun to win.

The first significant victory came in March, when the Federal Election Commission largely exempted blogs from campaign finance rules on the grounds that they are media. They applied to blogs the same exemption that governs newspapers, broadcasters and other traditional outlets.

The commission had hinted at such a decision in a November advisory opinion that said the costs incurred by one blog publisher "in covering or carrying news stories, commentary, or editorials on its Web sites are encompassed by the press exception."

The later rules, which the agency approved unanimously, recognized "the Internet as a unique and evolving mode of mass communication and political speech that is distinct from other media in a manner that warrants a restrained regulatory approach."

More recently, bloggers have scored wins in the state judicial and legislative branches, including a ruling for independent journalists who had been sued in California by Apple Computer.

The defendants in that case, Apple Insider and PowerPage, had posted information about a forthcoming product. The information was provided by anonymous company sources, and Apple argued that the publication of the information violated trade secrets. They wanted the blogs to disclose their sources.

The bloggers, defended by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said California's "shield law" for protecting journalistic sources applied to them. The state district court sided with Apple, but the appeals court overturned that ruling.

"We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes 'legitimate journalis[m],'" the court wrote on May 26. "The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here." The court added that the Web postings were "conceptually indistinguishable from publishing a newspaper, and we see no theoretical basis for treating it differently."

Earlier that month, an advertising agency dropped a similar lawsuit against a blog named the Maine Web Report after bad publicity in the blogosphere. And in Connecticut, state legislators passed a shield law after rejecting an effort to exclude blog authors and people without journalism degrees.

All of those developments indicate the government's growing acceptance of grassroots publications as valid sources of information. "[A] solid body of law is being developed upholding the principles that citizen media deserves the same First Amendment protections as 'professional' journalists," Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos wrote after the Apple ruling.

There are still obstacles to the official recognition of the convergence between old and new media, however. The debate about shield laws is a case in point. Not all states have them, and while bills before Congress would let journalists protect their anonymous sources, not everyone is keen on the idea of giving such protection to citizens who think of themselves as journalists. --

-- More women are blogging in the Kingdom, getting the attention of censors and their conservative counterparts.

In this country where women are forced to completely cover themselves in public, are barred from driving, and need permission to travel abroad, it's small wonder many are embracing the freedom of anonymity on the Internet.

As Internet usage continues to climb here, so do the numbers of women who have started Web logs, or blogs, to express themselves in ways they might never do in public. --

-- When David Miliband became the first Cabinet minister to launch an online diary a few months back, he boldly declared that he intended to "bridge the gap between politicians and the public". What Miliband failed to mention was just how much the "blog" would be costing the British taxpayer.

According to research by the Liberal Democrats' urbane front bencher, Chris Huhne, the amount is somewhere approaching £40,000 a year.

Huhne has come to this whopping figure after tabling a written question to the recently promoted Environment Secretary's office earlier this month to ask what sort of manpower was involved in maintaining the site. He was told that two members of staff employed by Defra had recently dedicated as much as 40 per cent of their office time working on it.

So far, claims Huhne, this also means the blog has cost around £1 a word to upkeep. "How can it cost £40,000 a year of taxpayers' money for staff to capture David Miliband's hot air on climate change?" he says. --

-- Beijing blogger and podcaster Dong Lu registered his 10 millionth hit on Friday morning, racing to the landmark on the back of China's obsession with the World Cup.

The 36-year-old's irreverent take on soccer's showpiece, produced with the help of three friends in the living room of his apartment on the northeast outskirts of Beijing, has proved hugely popular with China's on-line audience.

Sporting a multi-colored Afro wig and a fake mustache, Dong presents a podcast every other day featuring caricatures of leading players, parodies of the many soccer-themed adverts on Chinese television and the occasional song.

"We do it for fun, out of passion for football," Dong, looking suitably bleary-eyed after another all-night session in front the TV watching the action from Germany, told Reuters.

"The World Cup is a great event for everybody whether from small countries or large ones, rich or poor." --

-- Internet blogs are giving rise to a new breed of Arab activist as ordinary residents increasingly use them to press for more political rights and civil liberties in conservative Gulf states.

Typical was a recent posting by a 33-year-old Saudi man. "Are we destined to just listen to the news of all the big changes around the world as we await a good deed from our king?" he questioned in his weblog, or blog.

And in one notable case, blogs in Kuwait were used to rally broad support last month for street demonstrations in favour of election law reforms.

The bloggers write in Arabic, English or a mixture of both. They are eager to set themselves apart from both newspaper and web columnists writing for established sites as well as the hugely popular Internet bulletin boards that often have a militant Islamic bent.

There are now about 1,000 Gulf Arab bloggers, up five times from 2004, according to Haitham Sabbah, a Bahrain-based blogger and Middle East editor for Global Voices, a program launched last year by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School in the US that tracks and collects blogs worldwide.

Ahmed al-Omran, a 22-year-old Saudi university student who has been blogging for two years under the name "Saudi Jeans," said his goal was not just to rant but to shed light on issues affecting his generation in the hope that change may come one day.

"When I criticize something, my goal is to have it fixed," Omran, a regular contributor to Global Voices, said in a telephone interview from Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia has the Gulf's biggest blogging community with about 300 bloggers, more than half of them women according to Omran. With Saudi's population of some 23 million it has one of the highest Internet penetration rates in the Arab world.

"Saudis are by nature not politically active and fear speaking out, so it is going to take some time," he said.

Popular Saudi blogs by women include "Farah's Sowaleef," "A Thought in the Kingdom of Lunacy," and "Saudi Eve." They are peppered with sharp-tongued criticism of their male-dominated Muslim society and logs of rare escapades from an environment that demands obedience and modesty. --

-- It's hard not to feel bad for Amir Tofangsazan. He has been found guilty in the court of public opinion of being a scammer, and a stupid one at that.

Tofangsazan, a 19-year-old U.K. resident, was put on the bad end of a very public humiliation after he allegedly sold his defunct laptop on eBay in November for £375. The buyer, Tom Sawyer, a.k.a, the eBay Avenger, received the computer two months later, allegedly broken and sans advertised features.

After having the computer fixed, Sawyer discovered more than a few embarrassing photos on the hard drive, including pictures of gay porn, foot fetish porn and camera phone shots of random women's legs.

So Sawyer did what any betrayed and vengeful vigilante would do.

He created amirtofangsazan. blogspot .com and posted the pictures online.

The site has received more than 3 million hits, and received widespread media coverage overseas.

Public support is largely on Sawyer's side. Amir has gone into hiding, issuing vague warnings of a libel suit through the media.

Welcome to the world of trial by Internet. --

-- After years of grousing among themselves over matters of grammar and punctuation, copy editors are waging their style wars before a wider audience – in the blogosphere.

From Washington to Dallas – we hope that's not a false range – style mavens are holding forth on hyphens, word usage (or is it use?) and the true meaning of Groundhog Day.

Copy blogs aren't quite in the major league of Web logs; one of the most-read of the 20 or so copy blogs garners about 13,000 unique visitors per month. Still, the copy editors' online diatribes have extended beyond the rim to grammar geeks, writers and English teachers, who fill the comments sections with polite but passionate debate on dangling participles and prepositional endings. --

-- An American cook's adventures in the kitchen have won the first literary prize for bloggers turned authors.

Julie Powell's tales of French cooking beat the intimate diary of a prostitute and a guide to the UK's best "greasy spoon" cafes to take the Blooker Prize. --

-- WASHINGTON — In blogs we don't trust.

This is, no doubt, a surprise to those who have proclaimed over the past year or two that the "old'' media (that's "old media scum,'' in the parlance of some right-wing bloggers) are fading dinosaurs being hastened into extinction by a newer, quicker and more freewheeling source of information that is more democratic and somehow less biased than the traditional press.

The blog fetish may have reached its height during Rathergate, the imbroglio over the airing in September 2004 of a "60 Minutes II" story purporting to show that President Bush got preferential treatment when he landed a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.

The trashing of CBS News anchorman Dan Rather and his subsequent hasty retirement were seen as the ultimate triumph of the bloggers, predominantly on the political right, who gleefully proclaimed that the documents "60 Minutes II" relied upon for the special-treatment allegation were forged.

In truth, an exhaustive investigation led by former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, a Republican, and former Associated Press president Lou Boccardi found that no definitive conclusion could be reached about whether the documents were authentic or not.

But never mind. The power of the blogs was confirmed, a development that stunned the mainstream press and impressed the political left — which of course decided that it, too, had to embrace the blogs or be undone by them. The "blogosphere,'' liberal doyenne Arianna Huffington (and star of her very own blog) wrote last week in the British newspaper the Guardian, "is now the most vital news source in America.''

Really? --