Global Voices Online

It was not a good start to the new year in Bangkok as a series of bombs exploded in the city killing two people and injuring several others.

From 2Bangkok's Youtube page

The lost boy has pictures from one of the explosion sites

At 6.45 p.m. today, less than 300 meters from my apartment at Victory Monument in Bangkok, a bomb exploded killing one and injuring four. The incident occurred at the bus station next to Center One mall. I arrived around 7.30 p.m. and the scene was a mixture of shock and curiosity. An area around 400 square meters had been cordoned off and there was a large crowd of military personnel, policemen, forensics experts, and onlookers.

People in Bangkok are trying to figure out who was behind the attacks. Almost immidiately after any terrorist incidents like this, the southern Thai islamic insurgents are blamed. But this time some of the official statements are pointing towards ousted Thai prime minister Thaksin's supporters or the opponents of current Thai regime. Lost boy says

I assume the question on the tip of everybody’s tongue is “Whodunnit?” At this point speculation is rife as to whether it was insurgents from the south, people acting on the current political climate, or a different group altogether. Whoever it was, they must have had a fairly high level of organisation; what that adds up to is mere guesswork. There have been simultaneous bombings in the south already this year (in October 23 banks were bombed in Yala) but the violence has yet to migrate to Kraung Thep.

[Krung Thep is another name for Bangkok]

Mai me arai comments

I don’t find the assertion that the bombs are the work of Thaksin supporters rather than southern insurgents very convincing, personally.

One of the comments on this post says “Wow. Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, really. It was never going to end in the south.” . Bangkok was pretty much spared by the violence in the South until now.

Mike commenting on a post about the blasts at MetroBlogging Bangkok says

I think this will mean the dictatorial regime is on its last legs. With the embarrassing stock market blunder and now the worst terrorist attack in Bangkok, what is their legitimacy. This all happened on their watch, and there were warnings. They don't know how to run a country and they aren't protecting it.

Another comment reflects the thinking of most tourists and foreign residents who love Bangkok.

I'm incredibly shocked and saddened to think that strife and hate still brews beneath the surface of one of Asia's most beautiful cities. I hope something good turns out from all these; the Thais do not deserve this.

Bangkok Pundit and Gnarlykitty were liveblogging the incident through the night.

Sleeping blogs, zombie computers, Saudi driving culture, Saddam Hussein's hanging, Arabic MTV, Saudi lesbian bloggers, Christmas, and more in this week's roundup. Let's get this started…

Relating to the demise of the blogging trend, mentioned in last week's roundup, Ahmad published a very interesting post about Saudi “sleeping blogs.” The number of Saudi blogs saw a sudden rise this past summer; many of these newly-born blogs have not been updated for more than two months so far. In a lighthearted manner, Saleh asks those reading his blog: “Is your computer a zombie?” He introduces a Wikipedia article titled “Zombie Computer” to his fellow Arabic readers. This past week in the Saudi blogosphere has also seen the emergence of two blogs published by Saudi girls that celebrate the lesbian lifestyle. “Saudi Ballerina” belongs to a 19-year-old single Saudi girl in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. “Two Dykes and a Closet,” however, belongs to a lesbian couple that is also from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

When it comes to Christmas, and celebrating it in Saudi, Saudi blogs are divided in their opinions. Al-Failasouf posted (in Arabic) against the availability of Christmas decorations and sweets in many Saudi stores. He said: “In simple words, we are not responsible for bringing them happiness on their holy occasion, while our brothers everywhere are dying because of Christians like them.” Ahmed (a.k.a. Saudi Jeans) strongly opposes this view in a post of his. His rebuttal was: “This is what makes people like Debbie Schlussel object to Barack Obama's nomination for presidency because his father was a Muslim.” Now, if you want to hear it from someone who converted from Christianity to Islam and happens to be living in Saudi Arabia, you should read Nzingha's post about the celebration of Christmas.
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There's a distinct sense of deja vu this New Year's Eve: Gazprom, Russia's largest (and state-controlled) company and the world's biggest extractor of natural gas, is in the spotlight again, both locally (due to an ambitious and controversial construction project in St. Petersburg) and internationally (due to a dispute over prices and control of a pipeline in Belarus, very similar to the Russia-Ukraine gas dispute exactly a year ago).

Quite a few Russian bloggers have posted this banner on their blogs, linking to a flash game that was created by St. Petersburg branch of the Yabloko Party:

The monster hulking over St. Petersburg's Smolny Cathedral isn't Godzilla. It is Gazilla, and it represents Gazprom, and its name, allegedly, was coined by LJ user alexvert a year ago (according to LJ user aneta_spb (RUS)).

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Several Iranian bloggers talked about Saddam Hussein's death and remembered the Iran-Iraq war.

Alpar says this year can be considered one of the worst for dictators, adding that Monday's newspapers could carry the following headline: “Four less dictators for 2007″. Alpar writes that Iranian people will celebrate this event, even though the Iranian government will forget it soon, and reminds readers about the victims of the Iran-Iraq war, the war refugees and so on [Fa]. He also asks the following questions: Will Saddam’s death be a lesson for our dictators? What do people in Iraq think about today's events? Did Saddam himself think that one day he would die in these humilating conditions?

Haji Washington titles his post “Death of a Monster”. The blogger observes that on USA TV channels, we're shown Saddam with Arab leaders, but never with Donald Rumsfeld, former US Defense Secretary, when he visited Iraq during Iran-Iraq war [Fa]. (more…)

… for the last time.

Today I post without comment on blogger reactions to Saddam's execution. I'll be posting more updates as the blogs develops.

From my honorary Iraqi of the week. A cartoon by Latuff that sums up the mood of many:

Like a gathering storm, realization that the execution was imminent became apparent hours before the event. Neurotic Wife an Iraqi woman who works inside Baghdad's Green Zone gets a tip-off: (more…)

15 years ago we came into existence. I mean - we existed before, but no one knew. 15 years ago after the 1991 August putsch in Moscow, and followed collapse of the Soviet Union, new Central Asian countries, including Kazakhstan, came into existence for the rest of the world (ok, for some it still exists only in Borat's film!).

15 years ago we were different: we had huge lines to the shops that had nothing to sell, we experienced electricity black-outs, lack of heating, state monopoly on everything and huge inflation.

15 years have changed us: we now have polite salespeople in Gucci stores, we go to corporate parties with our colleagues from multinationals, and we travel around the world (that is when we are asked about Borat's film!).

What are we going to become in 15 years? It is difficult to give a meaningful forecast even for the nearest future. Authoritarian government, oil-dependent economy, rising nationalism and factors as unexpected as the death of a Turkmen president over the border - complicate the forecast.

James of neweurasia had an idea of a cross-blog survey of what is the region going to look like in 15 years. He decided to compile the stories, analysis and surveys by English-language bloggers interested in the region, and by Russian-language local bloggers. Five different people from Kazakhstan wrote their essays about the country's future - fun, fantastic and serious, with or without them: Adam, Marat, Ksenia, Slavoraya, and Vitaly (RU). You can read the summary of the posts and the translation of the most interesting parts of them after the jump. (more…)

Guangzhou, China's third largest city just a few hours north of Hong Kong, is the last major city to do away with motorbikes, effective January 1, 2007, in a move aimed at tackling pollution, traffic congestion and, more seriously, the high levels of street crime for which Guangzhou and a small number of its estimated 100,000 motorbike drivers are nationally known.

Ask almost anyone in China and they'll tell you a story they've heard about someone who was robbed or worse near Guangzhou's central train station, where most of the criminal motorbike drivers tend to hang out. Uploaded to Sina.com's blog page today is a series of video clips shot across the street from and around that train station. Footage seems to have been shot by police themselves, was uploaded by a user calling herself Feever, and shows several drive-by robberies in action, a mid-freeway chase halfway through, renegade motorbikers resisting arrest and how municipal police work to catch them:

[Note to viewers outside China: this video may be unviewable (without a proxy server) until the underwater cables damaged in the recent earthquake near Taiwan are repaired.]

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There is nothing worse for Indonesian bloggers in particular around the new year eve but to see the sudden temporary “demise” of internet connection.

The cause as reported by Budi Putra, , Sani Asy'ari and Enda Nasution is “the strong quake off Taiwan’s coast on December 26 damaged submarine cables and severely disrupted telecom links in the East, Southeast and South Asia.”

That makes almost 90 percent of Indonesia's internet connection disfunctional or very slow. According to Yulian Firdaus, quoting from a portal media, the recovery could take “as long as as one month” during which Indonesian online activities will witness the lowest traffic ever. Certainly one month, if it's true, a way too much for an internet addicts like Enda Nasution who wonders whether this is what end of days fell like.

Some Indonesian bloggers who are fortunate enough to still have internet connection like Willy Sudiarto Raharjo, still complains over how slow the connection is. Not to say how low the traffic to his blog could be.

Flood in Aceh

Exactly two years after the Tsunami, one of the biggest natural disaster ever happened, Aceh again has to face another natural calamity. Although it's not as big as Tsunami, the loss and severe it afflicts to the Acehnese is unbearable.

70,000 people has been evacuated or are fleeing home taking refuge in neighboring area. About 60 people dead.

So much to “celebrate” a New Year 2007 for Indonesian in general and Indonesian bloggers in particular.

Spanish version here: Algunas enseñanzas sobre los ataques a blogs

In the last weeks there have been a series of quite similar attacks to popular blogs in Spanish. The series began at the immensely popular Chilean tech blog FayerWayer [ES], which not only was hacked, but also got all of its posts and comments deleted, and all that was left was a pretty sour manifesto against Leo Prieto [ES], the site's creator. The blog had been backed up a few weeks prior, so it was mostly the comments which got lost. The posts, in some cases, were manually recovered. Next was Mariano Amartino's Denken Uber [ES]. In this case - despite having all his posts deleted - nothing big happened, except for a few hours offline status, since his hosting provider automatically saves copies of the database and it only needed to restablish a copy. Finally, the most serious case was that of Cronicas Moviles [ES], a site mainly dedicated to publishing video interviews. In this case - because it was hosted in Blogger - there was no backup at all, and all of its published contents was lost.

Despite the similarities of these acts - accessing the blog's administration interface in an unauthorized way and deleting all of its posts - there's no clue that indicates they were done by the same person. But it's surprising to see the extreme cruelty of these people trying to ruin many years of work. At the same time, it displays a clear fact: keeping a blog is not an easy task, and it forces us to follow certain basic routines. Among them, to modify our password frequently, change the name of some folders of access to the administration interface, and particularly, make back ups of the database or posts we've published, in case we're using some free blog publication site. All of these things, of course, take time. And the worst thing is we have to use more of our (little) time to maintain our blogs than to write on them.

TIME Magazine's choice of ‘You' as the ‘Person of the Year' has created interesting reactions in Lusophone blogs. The coddling move from the editorial giant towards the new class of content creators among its audience initially seduced the web 2.0 crowds. Many commentators were quick to agree effusively with the choice delivering self congratulatory notes. But others would would soon start demanding from their blog visitors the expected critical investigative attitude of ‘awarded' content-generators.

A internet revolucionou minha vida. Não chega a ser uma grande novidade, mas é um fato que merece destaque. Ela deu um 180° nos meus habitos de leitura, de consulta, de pesquisa, de interação, de conhecimento. E a revolução foi tão enorme, que a revista Time me elegeu como personalidade do ano. De forma simples, a internet me trouxe a liberdade de ler somente o que me interessa, de ouvir somente o que eu gosto, de descobrir os que as radios jamais tocariam, de assistir o que jamais a TV transmitiria. E principalmente me deu a ocasião de palpitar abertamente sobre tudo isso. O melhor de tudo é que os grandes meios de comunicação passaram a dividir seu espaço com fontes de informação alternativa, os ilustres blogueiros. E isso faz toda a diferença. Ler a opinião de um blogueiro sobre um assunto qualquer é, muitas vezes, mais emocionante do que ler uma materia sobre este mesmo assunto. O uso da primeira pessoa muda tudo.
Premio Tô me Achando 2006 - Tô me Achando

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