Danný O'Brien reports from Africa mobile conference for Irish Times: " if al-Jazeera, with its critical but homegrown analysis of the Middle East, was the godfather of the Arab Spring, it’s Africa’s bloggers who are presaging a new era of a domestic African free press."

A look at the evolution of military blogging by James Dao of the New York Times. While the US military initially tried to shut down military blogs, they now actively participate in social media. “Milbloggers are among the few that actually seem to realize that we’re still at war,” comments a former advisor to the US Army on social media.

India: A government proposal seeking to police blogs has come in for severe criticism from legal experts and outraged the online community. The draft rules, drawn up by the government under the Information Technology Amendment Act, 2008, deal with due diligence to be observed by an intermediary.

Saudi Arabia: "Online newspapers, blogs and forums will now need to register with the Ministry of Information and Culture for licenses to operate, according to new regulations that the ministry announced Saturday it is to introduce."

Nick Denton's piece on LifeHacker explaining and defending Gawker's move away from the now-traditional blogging format to a tv/newspaper hybrid. His argument is based on building audience numbers through scoops, and the limitations of the blog format to support discovery (and advertising) around those pieces. He argues that time-based rather than content-based advertising is the future of publishing.

Reuters analysis of senior blog publisher Gawker Media's decision to move the network of websites away from a blog (reverse chronological format) to a tv/newspaper style. Nick Denton, Gawker's founder, argues that the blog format cannot support a serious publication.

"The Middle East's modest window for dissent, created by a surge in blogging and online journalism over the past decade, looks poised to narrow with a raft of measures across the region.

A draft Internet law awaiting parliamentary approval in Syria is one such measure. The government says it would give a needed legal framework to online activity by forcing bloggers to register as union members, conferring rights such as a press card to online journalists for the first time, and potentially requiring content be withdrawn from websites."

"Daghestanis are responsible for 185 of the 528 blogs being conducted either by people living in the North Caucasus or by North Caucasians living elsewhere, according to a survey conducted by an Ingushetia blogger who goes by the screen name timag82."

Analysis of the North Caucasian blogosphere

"A criminal case has been started against Alexander Sorokin (aka LJ user commentator40), Echo Moskvy reported [RUS]. He is charged with libel against Kemerovo governor Aman Tuleev [EN] for the post [RUS] in which he compares Russian regional governors to Latin American dictators. It is the second famous case [EN] of prosecuting a blogger in this region in 2010."

More news on Hodder

Hossein Derakhshan (Hoder) went on trial in June this year

Cameron Neylon: "Good writing on the web lives and dies by the links, the eyeballs that come to it, the expert attention that is brought there by trusted curators. Scientists still largely trust journals to apportion up their valuable attention, and people will still trust the front page of ScienceBlogs and others to deliver quality content. But what the web teaches us over and over again is that a single criterion for authority, to quality curation, to editing is not enough."

"Sure, the web connects the globe, but most of us end up hearing mainly from people just like ourselves. Blogger and technologist Ethan Zuckerman wants to help share the stories of the whole wide world. He talks about clever strategies to open up your Twitter world and read the news in languages you don't even know."

The account of one Russian blogger, on being approached to blog favourably about the Russian police for money.

The French senator Jean-Louis Masson submitted on 3 May 2010 a draft law that would end anonymity of bloggers who, according to the text, would have to provide on their blogs identification data such as name, phone number and address.

SOme good notes on the Russian blogosphere

Ethan muses on the future for Global Voices

From global voices

"The Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2010 will be held in Santiago, Chile on May 6-7. The theme of the meeting is "Next generation citizen media, public access and citizen participation.”"

This is a really fascinating report on how the Russian blogosphere kept alive questions over the potential coverup of a car crash involving a senior Russian businessman, and the deaths of two ordinary Russians. Includes a translation of a spoof rap song made to highlight the suspicion that "some are more equal than others" in today's Russia.

This short report includes a list of other reports from people who attended BlogCamp Mumbai.

OSI's new blog

This blog post from the New York Review of Books asks whether Russian bloggers can start a transformation in open debate similar to the one that took place in the Soviet Union twenty years ago.