GFW BLOG（功夫网与翻墙）

Action Alert: Free Esraa and her Companions

2008-04-15T20:16:00.000-07:00

作者：Amine 来源：DigiActive

What? Join one of the Facebook groups pushing for the freedom of the 3 digital activists jailed in Egypt: Esraa Abdel-Fattah Ahmed, Mahamed El Sharkawi,and Kareem El Beheiri

When? Now!

Where? The Facebook groups to join are divided linguistically. Join the one in the language you are most comfortable with, as you will likely be receiving messages in that language from the group.

Arabic: Free Esraa افرجوا عن إسراء ورفاقها

English: Free Esraa and her Companions! أفرجوا عن إسراء ورفاقها

French: Libérez Esraa et ses Camarades. Free Esraa.

Norsk: Free Esraa and her Companions!

How? Click one of the links above to visit the group you would and then click the “Join” button on that page.

Why? On April 6th we covered the story of Egyptian activists using a Facebook group, 6 April - اضراب عام لشعب مصر (April 6 - General Strike for the People of Egypt), to drum up participation in a general strike on Sunday, April 6. The group’s founder Esraa Abdel-Fattah Ahmed, and bloggers Mahamed El Sharkawi and Kareem El Beheiri were arrested by Egyptian police in connection with the Facebook group and the call of the strike.

Who is organizing the action? There are slightly different officers and admins for the 4 groups, but Egyptians Hany Elkhayat, Samy Harak, Wael Nawara, Manal Fahmy, and Mohamed Zaki Elsheemi seem to be involved with most of them. Dina Ibrahim is the sole admin of the French group.

"Google-bombing for Alaa" as a Test Case in Web 2.0 Activism

2007-06-10T01:11:00.001-07:00

作者: Mary Joyce 来源: internationaldemoblog.blogspot.com

I know we have hardly begun this campaign, but it's never too early to sit back an take stock. G-B4A is pioneering ways to use new media/Web 2.o for the purposes of political activism. Let's take a look at the tools we've used and how we've used them.

1. e-mail/online collaboration - this is pretty basic (hardly Web 2.0) but it nevertheless allowed three people in different countries (Morocco, Bahrain, Lebanon) to collaborate and launch a project. Total time from proposition of idea to completion of Free Alaa website - 24 hours. Online collaboration allowed a global division of labor. A man in Holland made a Flash animation. A group in Cambridge made a petition page. A man in Florida started a Wikipedia entry.

2. Blogger (the site) - By using a templated webpage service we able to create a professional-looking website in a few hours

3. bloggers (the people) - Google-bombing for Alaa rests on the fact that now millions of people have personal websites (their blogs). A few years ago, a google-bombing might not have worked very well because people did not have access to websites in order to insert links. Now every person with a blog is also a webmaster, capable of changing the face of the internet.

Blogger culture will also be key in the success of G-B4A (Google-bombing for Alaa) because blogger culture has a built-in method of idea dissemination. Bloggers read each other. It is not necessary to send an e-mail to every blogger asking him or her to post a google bomb. It is only necessary that a few high-traffic blogs post google bombs. Then these blogs will not only serve the cause by google-bombing, but will also publicize the campaign when other bloggers read the google bomb post.

3. Technorati - By asking bloggers to tag their Google bombs googlebombingforalaa Technorati acts as an ad-hoc aggregator for G-B4A posts.

4. wiki - a wiki was created to catalogue all the blog posts that include G-B4A's. Because it is a wiki, anyone can edit the page and add the URLs of new posts.

5. Google - I'm saving the most important for last. This campaign rests most critically on our ability to use the Google algorithm to manipulate the search engine's page ranking for our own purposes. Let's be honest with ourselves here. Even though we believe our action is for a good cause, it is an act of mischief or even vandalism (of Google's beautiful architecture, that is). It is quite possible that Google will find a way to block us. If so, we will have to find other methods. We are trailblazers here, finding new uses for new tools. As I said to Mustapha, this isn't only about the action , it is about the process.

Incidentally:
the total cost of launching a global human rights campaign using digital tools: $0
the total time need to launch a global human rights campaign using digital tools: 24 hours

This Egypt is Egypt only Egypt the Egypt beginning.

Free Alaa Campaign

2007-06-10T01:11:00.000-07:00

来源: The Beirut Spring

Here are some banners I designed to be used in the “Release Alaa” campaign.

Alaa is a fellow blogger with a strong record in activism for free speech (also, alongside his wife Manal, winner of a special award by Reporters Without Borders). He was arrested by the Egyptian authorities for the sole “crime” of peacefully demonstrating.

All bloggers are encouraged to support this campaign. Today it’s Alaa, tomorrow it could be you.

Bloggers Launch Innovative Campaign to Free One of Their Own

2007-06-09T20:50:00.000-07:00

转自：sabbah.biz

Bloggers Launch Innovative Campaign to Free One of Their Own
For Immediate Release

Contact: Mary Joyce (MaryCJoyce@gmail.com, Skype name: demoblogger)

On Sunday May 7, Alaa Ahmed Seif El Islam, a prominent Egyptian blogger and political activist, was detained in Cairo by the Egyptian authorities while protesting the earlier detention of political activists rallying for a free judiciary.

Although illegal detentions are not uncommon in Egypt, this case drew special attention because Alaa’s blog aggregator, Alaa and Manal’s Bit Bucket, has made him a well-known figure in the blogosphere. Soon, news of Alaa’s arrest had spread to blogs across the world. Bloggers advocated different actions in an effort to free Alaa, including writing to Egyptian Embassies around the world and posting a “free Alaa” banner on their blogs.

On Tuesday, a group of bloggers connected to the site Global Voices decided to launch a different kind of campaign, one that would use the mechanics of the internet itself to bring world-wide attention to Alaa’s case. They launched a campaign called “Google bombing for Alaa,” an effort to manipulate the ranking of the world’s search engines so that a blog dedicated to freeing Alaa (http://freealaa.blogspot.com/) would be the first page displayed when a person searches for information on the word “Egypt.”

Internet search engines, most notably Google, determine the ranking of a site according to how many other sites link to it. If you search the term “Egypt” on Google, the first page you will see is the page most often linked to the word “Egypt” by other websites. Google bombing manipulates this formula. If many people around the world link the word “Egypt” to the Free Alaa blog, then that site will move up in the rankings.

Already, bloggers from around the world have written “Google bombs for Alaa,” blog posts that contain instances of the word “Egypt” linked to the Free Alaa site, in an effort to move the blog up in the rankings. Google-bombing for Alaa allows bloggers around the world to become activists, using the power of the link to bring attention to an unfair detention and free their fellow blogger. A certain passage of text has become popular in the posts and exemplifies the spirit of the campaign:

“Some governEgyptments think they can trampEgyptle the rights of those that oppEgyptose them and noEgyptone will notEgyptice. Well, that fact is changEgypting and we are changEgypting it.”

Examples of blogs participating in Google-bombing for Alaa:
http://www.kenyanpundit.com/?p=173
http://albsayed.weblogs.us/2006/05/09/alaa-and-egypt/
http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2006/05/09/google-bombing-action-for-alaa/
http://www.modspil.dk/politik/free_alaa____opsummering_og_opfordring.html

Background on Alaa’s arrest:
http://za.today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx…EGYPT-DETENTIONS-20060508.XML
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/07/AR2006050701220.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,,1770310,00.html
http://www.manalaa.net/alaa_detained_15_days
http://www.sandmonkey.org/2006/05/09/help-us-free-alaa/
http://elijahzarwan.net/blog/?p=108
http://www.sandmonkey.org/2006/05/07/alaa-arrested/
http://mostafa.foolab.org/node/241
http://www.manalaa.net/alaa_detained_english

People to contact for more information:
1. Manal (Alaa’s wife and co-blogger on Alaa & Manal’s Bit Bucket) - manal@manalaa.net
2. Amr Gharbeia (Alaa’s friend & fellow Egyptian blogger) - amr.gharbeia@gmail.com
3. Sandmonkey (prominent blogger and Free Alaa activist) - egyptiansandmonkey@hotmail.com
4. Mustapha (Google-bombing for Alaa coordinator, Lebanese blogger) - mustapha@beirutspring.com
5. Haitham Sabbah (Google-bombing for Alaa coordinator, Global Voices Middle East Regional Editor, blogger) - haitham.sabbah@gmail.com
6. Mary Joyce (Google-bombing for Alaa coordinator, digital democracy blogger) - Marycjoyce@gmail.com