Global Voices Online

Bahraini Ammaro talks about how fast it takes to spread rumours in Bahrain and make them ‘viral.'

Taran Rampersad is glad “to see that social media is being seen as a tool for fighting crime in Trinidad and Tobago”, but says there are more effective ways in which to do it.

Cuba's Generation Y sends a questionnaire to U.S. President Obama “with some of the issues that keep [her] from sleeping” and publishes his responses.

Syrian blogger Rami wrote [ar] a post comparing internet speeds and costs in Syria with those in Romania. He was frustrated with having to struggle to obtain a 256Kbps connection in Syria in contrast with 100Mbps in Romania for roughly the same cost.

David on Formosa publishes a series of posts introducing some of the best Taiwan blogs in English(bridge bloggers).

Profy writes about the IT dimension of president Medvedev's annual address: “The draft speech was initially published online as a lengthy article by the president and he invited all the citizens to voice their opinions out via the Kremlin official website - and people were definitely very willing to participate given more than 18 thousand comments received.” NetEffect writes about “tweeting your way to Gulag”: turns out that in Russia, “the police are avid readers of ‘the Internet' and particularly of Twitter.”

Profy writes about the newly-launched ForbesRussia.ru website and “their obvious lack of interest in anything local and specific to the Russian market, in particular in the field of social media and social networking.”

Dr. Filomena and Profy are musing on what it means to be a blogger.

“It's true that Pakistan faces some serious challenges, but if, as a nation, it can keep providing a service for outsourcing IT skills internationally even while bullets are flying, that's a good sign for the future,” comments Alamzeb Khan.