Blog Like An Egyptian

11:00 AM Aug 30, 2005

A couple of really interesting stories have run in the last few days on blogging's rapid blastulation in Egypt, a country currently in the midst of an election campaign in which the strongman is fated to win 98% of the vote.

Talk about online democracy. We have monkeyshine flamewars in the U.S. over whether pro-war bloggers shouldn't be signing up for service. Blogging dissension in a place like Egypt is signing up for service, the sort liable to deploy to an oubliette for the best part of one's youth.

The excellent Alternet, a DIA community member, logs a Christian Science Monitor story on the phenomenon here.

Yahoo has this story, bizarrely filed in its "Entertainment" section, from AFP. One of its principals, Mohammad of From Cairo With Love, could give counsel to a few stateside blog evangelists:

"'What I don't believe, is that blogs and the Internet will reform the Arab world and make the people rise up. I think it could be used as a tool for better connection and dissemination of information,' he says."

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