Malaysiakini.com, one of the biggest alternative news blogs in the country. According to USINFO, a publication of the Department of State, alternative media played a key role in the March 8 parliamentary elections in Malaysia. The ruling Barisan National (BN) party received a surprising blow when it lost 58 seats in the 222-seat Dewan Rakyat. Although the BN still holds 63% of seats, it lost its commanding two-thirds majority. The BN has ruled Malaysia for 50 years. At a forum
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Today I joined Twitter,a service that lets you follow the public SMS dispatches of people you find interesting. I am equally willing to believe that it will be a fabulously useful new social networking medium or a sparkly excuse to distract myself with increasingly hummingbird-like multitasking. Guess I'll see. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/Mary_Joyce
I'm really pleased that my friend Ken Banks' text-messaging hub for grassroots NGOs, FrontlineSMS, has been selected as a finalist for the Stockholm Challenge, a prestigious competition that rewards the best in ICT for development. Read more on the Stockholm Challenge site.
Ushahidi is a visual map of human rights abuses reported by SMS (text message). The site was created by the bloggers behind KenyanPundit.com, WhiteAfrican.com, MentalAcrobatics.com, AfroMusing.com, and Skunkworks and was built by Kobia Interactive. "Ushahidi" means "witnessing" is Kiswahili and the site allows people to send an SMS to the site which describes an atrocity. The atrocity is then displayed on a map of Kenya using a colored pin and displayed on the home page. In this way, people can
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Twitter is a multi-platform service that allows users to send "updates" (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS (text message), instant messaging, and email. In its most common application, people send Twitter messages via SMS telling what they are doing at that very moment ("eating breakfast," "lots of traffic this morning," "lunch break"). Then people who have subscribed to that feed can then read these messages as they are sent out, allowing them to know what their friend
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A man (center) wears a gas mask to protest a proposed toxic chemical plant in Xiamen Despite the fact that China has the most elaborate system of internet censorship in the world, creative Chinese activists are still finding ways to use the medium for political activism. On June 1, one million residents of coastal Xiamen protested against the proposed construction of a toxic chemical plant near the city center. Cell phones and the internet made it possible. The Chinese blogger
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