Hoder is going to visit Iran and is looking for support: donations and the protection that public-ness can provide. [Technorati tag: hoder]

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From Reporters without Borders:

Reporters Without Borders voiced deep concern today about the fate of 25-year-old blogger Mojtaba Saminejad, who has been sentenced to two years in prison by a Tehran revolutionary court for “insulting the Supreme Guide” and who is due to be tried soon on a separate charge of insulting the prophets, which carries a possible death penalty…

…arious initiatives are under way on the Iranian Internet in support of Mojtaba. Internet users have dedicated a blog to him in both English (http://mojtaba-samienejad.blogspot.com) and in Farsi (http://en-mojtaba-samienejad.blogspot.com). Some 50 Iranian bloggers are openly backing him. The Penlog bloggers group has also firmly condemned his conviction (see http://penlog.blogspot.com/2005/06/blog-post_05.html).

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Global Voices has set up a Bloglines page that aggregates feeds from “bridgebloggers” — bloggers giving insight into their countries. Very interesting to poke around in. For example, From the Rock in Libya has been writing about trying to reconnect with a friend after communication was cut off by sanctions. At Amarji – A Heretic’s Blog the Syrian author Ammar Abdulhamid gives a vivid picture of the life of dissent. And at Indonesia – Everyone’s Tagged Photos you’ll find Flickr’s Indonesia tagstream. . [Technorati tags: blogs GlobalVoices]

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OpenDemocracy, Hoder and others have started a blog — Iran Scan — to cover the upcoming election in Iran in June. I’m guessing that it’s going to be one of the very best sources of information about that event. It’ll sure beat the round-up articles we’ll see in the MSM. [Technorati tags: globalvoices iran]

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Global Voices aggregates Iranian bloggers blogging a meeting with a reformist presidential candidate who writes his own Persian blog. This is pretty fascinating. Check Adventures of Mr. Behi (in English). Omid Memarian (Iranian Prospect) writes that it was the most open candidate meeting ever, perhaps an example of the openness of the Net affecting the openness of the real world.

Global Voices’ daily roundup also points to a powerful, provocative piece by Martin Mbugua Kimani (African Bullets & Honey) called “Confessions of a Middle Class Kenyan” (with comments here).

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Global Voices now is running roundups of the news. Surprisingly, there are things going on in the world! GV is a daily must-read for me.

And to hear some actual voices, you can listen to Ben Walker’s Theory of Everything episode about GV here. [Technorati tag: globalvoices]

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John D. Erickson points to Halfway Down the Danube, a group blog by a German-American couple living in Romania with lots of comments from expat Americans and Europeans… [Technorati tags: BridgeBlog GlobalVoices]

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Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah has a fascinating post about how photo upload sites and image editing packages look to someone whose skin is dark and who is shooting in very bright sunlight. This is just an example of a broader theme in the post: “The Subtle Business of Software Localization,” as Ethan puts it. Snippets:

The first thing I very quickly noticed: somehow all the photos that I uploaded to Yahoo Photos turned out darker than on Flickr (the services both resize uploaded photos). The photo-resizing algorithm used by Yahoo Photos was giving worse results. This was noticeable to me because a large number of photos featured darker-skinned people such as myself. The originals were fine and where there were lighter skin tones everything looked good, but with darker skintones, the resized photos were not so good.

…Thirdly, when retouching photos, the Quick Fix or Auto Correct options in Photoshop seemed tailored for lighter skintones so I was constantly having to do manual tweaking of my photos. Now this is not a big deal for a few photos and indeed it’s fun to fiddle with photos but after a couple of hundred images, it gets tiresome. I found mysef longing for “smarter” recognition by the software or for at least, a nice ‘dark skin’ option that I could set in a preferences dialog.

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This morning during the “fellows hour,” we hear from Tuan Nguyen who founded Vietnam Net (English version) in 1997, an ISP and content provider. He began in 1995 by putting together computers, installing linux, etc. In 1997, the government officially permitted people to connnect to the Internet. The site now has 1.5M viewers/day. (Vietnam’s population is 85M. About 5M people in Vietnam are on the Internet. About 6M have mobile phones.) The site has a newspaper license which enables its reporters to go anywhere and talk with anyone. The leaders of the party provide “guidelines” rather than ruling particular stories in or out. Mr. Nguyen also talks about some ways in which these talks and his site’s actions have affected government policy.

He says that the Internet is good for democracy in Vietnam, and has caused the mainstream media to become more open. The media in general have been a force for democracy, including in the fight against corruption. He points to the comments section of the site and to the ability of readers to post articles and comments — they receive about 1,000 submissions per day. They select and edit them, and post about 700/day. (His ISP services connects to a gateway that censors about .001% of web sites, mainly foreign ones critical of the government, based on the Ministry of Security’s directives.)

The site has a staff of 280. He is excited that his company advances people based on merit, including women. The company is profitable because of its mobile phone business; it loses money on its Internet operations. He invested in providing content to mobile phones. About 1M SMS messages go through his system every day. (It’s $0.20 for a ringtone.)

He concludes be expressing his excitement about how the Net is improving democracy in Vietnam, and what an exciting time this is.

(Take a look at Vietnam.net’s photo essay on “seeing off the Kitchen Gods.” More photo galleries here, including: Boat festival, Tet, first Valentine festival.)

[Technorati tags: vietnam blogs] [Technorati tags: vietnam blogs globalvoices]

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Global Voices has published a remarkable first-person account of the overthrow of the Kyrgysztan government. It’s by Elina Karakulova, a 21-year old Kyrgyz student who gives an excellent picture — personal and ambivalent — of what’s going on and how it feels. [Technorati tags: kyrgyzstan globalvoices]

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