CNBlog.org just released a new project called "
Digital Nomads"，a non-profit service supporting Chinese people(but not limited) to set up their independent blogs. The project, also supported by Social Brain Foundation, is especially designed for people's free speech and will serve those grassroots journalists as the topmost mission. "Digital Nomads" the name came from
my speech in Accton Taiwan by the invitation of one of my best friends Joy Tang.
The service is actually inherited from early ideas of "
Adopt a Chinese Blog" program by cnblog. As more and more blog hosting services in China started to cooperate with government censorship, many independant voices were actually blocked and slowed. Though there are some brave people started to fight with those "self-censorship"(from businesses) in relative weak legal context, seems the most direct way is to support bloggers to become real independant from those censorships in technical ways. So there comes the project idea and right volunteers teaming up.
As it's a project supported by SBF, Digital Nomads project won't be a for-profit one. Instead, it only requires the supportees to pay their doman name and basic hosting fees to cover the cost. The service will be more than that with the voluteers efforts to promote the blogs and incorporate advanced technologies to help bloggers empowered(like OpenID, Microformat, etc.). Also the team will help bloggers to well use media creation tools to make their blogs richer in content. We would like to see how the project develops itself to demonstrate how important free speech is and how powerful the distributed grassroots voice sphere would be.
If you would like to help promote the project in other areas(not limited to Chinese speaker people), I'd like to transfer the message to the team and try any possibilities to support too.
Labels: Blogosphere, China, DigitalNomads, GFW
With
Yahoo Pipes and
Anothr.com, I have just burnt
a feed to show the updates about Wikimania 2007 conference. The feed
can be subscribed with Gtalk/Skype/MSN messenger once there are any updates from Blogosphere(merged the search result from
Technorati and
Google Blog Search).
Labels: Blogosphere, Wikimania
I can not match the Chinese and English name of Macedonia until recently. I got times of impressions in these days about this country either from Friends' mentioning or some advertisements on media. Seems the small ex-Yugoslavia country has a strong ambition to attract foreign investment. So there are a series of policy incentives defined and publicized to market. Some taxation and facility advantages seems very attractive to offshore business configuration. I'm willing to visit this country once I found a right opportunity from my business. But what I want to start exploration is from blogosphere. Firstly I found( via twitter) my friend
Joi's recent visit to this country to open CC mecedonia. Then I googled out some interesting blogs about Macedonia(also in English) . It's unavoidable that English is becoming a formal blogging language that people can easily plug into the
global blog network. Also some non-English speaking people may feel easy to express in English. It could be a psychological topic to find why and may cause
cultrual debate on whether their native languages is being eclipsed. Anway, I enjoy the global connectivity in a six(or five, or less) degree of separation. Ok, I will turn to
Wikipedia to continue my Macedonia exploration from more angles...
Labels: Blog, Blogosphere, Language, Macedonia
