The Internet in Asia

Iraqi PM and insurgents communication via email

Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki has set up an email account that was flashed during a broadcast Sunday night on state-run al-Iraqiya television. The address was advertised as an email account that insurgents could write to and be assured of confidentiality. The government did not repeat the address after the initial broadcast to prevent it from being flooded with junk mail. Iraqi presidential security adviser Wafiq al-Samaraie said the response so far had been low with only two authentic messages being received in four days.

Oman to start e-gov network

As part of the government's plans to realize the Digital Oman initiative and e-governance, senior Omani officials have signed an agreement to set up and implement the Unified e-Government Network. If the project takes of, it will allow electronic transactions to occur between departments. It is expected that the project will take about 18 months to be up and running.

Blogging in the gulf

Blogs are giving those in the Middle East a new way to express themselves, thereby creating a new breed of on-line activists who choose to blog on politics to the social situation there.  According to Haitham Sabbah, a Bahrain-based blogger and Middle East editor for Global Voices, a program launched last year by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, there are now about 1,000 Gulf Arab bloggers-- up five times from 2004.

Saudi Arabia has one of the highest Internet penetration rates in the area, and is also home to  the Gulf's biggest blogging community with about 300 bloggers, more than half of them women according to Omran.  Many women here also regularly post to their blogs on topics such as the social expectations of women there. As a result, some blogs such as Saudi Eve have been blocked by the government for immoral content.

Egyptian blogger arrested

23 year old Alaa Seif Al Islam, Cairo's most famous blogger has been sentenced to two weeks in prison over politically oriented comments on his blog Manal and Alaa's bit bucket which he publishes with his wife.  However, he is not the first Egyptian blogger arrested for similar reasons - 6 months ago, Abdel Karim was arrested and detained for 18 days.

Earlier this year, Alaa he received an international blogging award for his blog which attracts over 2000 visitors a day.

Iraqi blog up for prestigious Samuel Johnson literary prize

Baghdad Burning, a blog started by  Iraqi female citizen writing under the pen name Riverbend has been short listed for the Samuel Johnson British prize valued at USD 52,000. She is currently up against 18 other books out of 168 entries. She writes anonymously (and wishes to remain so), about the Iraqi war and the American  occupation of Iraq, which she started in August 2003. Marion Boyars, a small literary firm bought over her blog last year, classifying it under the genre of biography and memoir. The winner of the literary award will be announced at a dinner at the Savoy Hotel in London on 14 June.

Learning about the Internet in Iraq

The availability of Internet has had one of the biggest impacts of Iraqi society since 2003. During Saddam's reign, there were only 10,000 Internet users in a country of over 24 million people. Internet content was also filtered then, blocking free e-mail services, forcing Iraqi's to use the government filtered and controlled email system instead.

Today, there are over 200,000 Internet users in Iraq (who mostly use dial-up) , and other Internet related services such as Internet cafes are also flourishing. In fact, many Internet cafe owners teach their customers how to use computers and the Internet as many Iraqi's didn't even know that the Internet existed or much about it as recently as three years ago. One of the most popular services among Iraqis are the numerous chat functions available on the Internet.

Blogging in Iran

In the blogosphere today, Farsi is the fourth-most frequently used language, even though Iran was the first country to take action against bloggers in 2003. There are currently over 64,000 Iranian's blogging which is an amazing number considering that there are only 50 Iraqis doing so.  The increasingly harsh measures used to punish bloggers here has resulted in more and more bloggers choosing to publish anonymously instead.

Iranians use blogs for a variety of reasons from bypassing strict state censorship to publish their work on-line; established journalists post uncensored reports on their blogs; expatriate Iranians worldwide use their blogs to communicate with those back home; ordinary citizens record their thoughts and deeds in daily journals; and student groups and NGOs utilize their blogs as a means of coordinating their activities.

Blogs and other similar on-line communities in Iran have allowed the tech-savvy younger generation (of which nearly all of them have access to the Internet through their schools), to evade existing cultural and political restrictions which are strictly enforced in the offline world, for example socializing between the sexes. Perhaps more importantly, the Internet has also provided pro-democracy advocates in Iran and avenue to express themselves and to communicate with one another.

Internet boom alters political process in Iran

According to a recent study conducted by Standford University, Internet penetration is spreading faster in Iran than it is in any other Middle Eastern country. In fact, all eight candidates running for the Presidential seat in Iran this Friday have their own websites in addition to those of their supporters, allowing them to campaign online.  One of the main reasons for this could be that the rules that apply to campaigning online are less strict than those applied to campaigning elsewhere.

Although the Internet has not transformed the government, it has laid the groundwork for major change in the near future as it allows those on the 'outside' participate as actively as those on the 'inside' facilitating democratic purposes.  For a country where the Internet explosion only started in the late 1990s that's not too bad at all!