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First Latin-American Blog Contest

Atina Chile(ES), a social action movement that promotes blogging in Chile, organize the blog contest “Atina Blog Awards”(ES). Anyone could inscribe, the only barrier was that they be written in Spanish. The categories include, Politics, Science and Technology, Design, Journalism, Arst and Culture, personal and Group Blog and special mention. Bloggers have had the chance to vote for the competing blogs during the last five months. Now, each category has 10 semi-finalists. The jury will choose the best ones from these lists.

The panels of judges are well known bloggers. From Mexico, Eduardo Arcos (ES) from Uruguay Walter Kobylanski (ES), from Argentina Mariano Amartino (ES), from Spain Ignacio Escolar (ES) and from Chile Fernando Flores (ES) and Leo Prieto (ES).

“Periodismo Global”, a semifinalist blog in the journalism category said “to have been selected as a semifinalist in this contest, the first one in latinamerica, where more than 1200 blogs have participated, fills me with satisfaction.”

About this contest, “Mangas Verdes” (ES) posts ” They have published the semifinalist blogs of the Atina Blog Awards, the best thing is that there are blogs I didn't know about.”

The jury will decide the final results the 30 of April.

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The Week That Was - Bolivian Blogs

Eduardo Avila · 18:06 · Americas

Este artículo también está disponible en español.

Bolivia lacks access to the ocean, so the country shouldn’t have any reason to fear pirates, right? Well, they may not be the kind with a parrot on their shoulder, but another type of pirate has become a serious problem for many Bolivian filmmakers and a target of local authorities. Shortly after a film’s premiere, one can find a bootlegged or pirated copy of the same move in the streets of any major Bolivian city. Financial incentives to produce one of the few Bolivian movies have been undermined by these illegal sellers.

An editorial (ES) in the La Paz daily, La Razón recently announced that the Union of Cinematic Workers and the street vendors came to an agreement that would prohibit the sale of national films by the street vendors. In addition, the vendors must wait “a little bit later” to sell international or Hollywood films, after the film premieres in one of the handful of theaters in the city of La Paz.

Gustavo Siles, who blogs at Almada de Noche (ES), does not agree with the editorial’s stance, which says that the agreement basically gives victory to the illegal vendors. Siles thinks that the agreement will help protect the national industry and it become easier to find national movies at video clubs or sold as DVDs (ES), since they may be better protected from piracy. In addition, he writes:

“I particularly wouldn’t purchase a movie off the street, especially one that I really would like to enjoy. One must remember that the quality of pirated movies is often very poor.”

However, he believes the fight against piracy in Bolivia is not well-targeted.
(more…)

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Landing at the Iraqi Blogodrome

Salam Adil · 11:48 · Middle East & North Africa

As a postscript to the 1970 Gil Scot Heron poem ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised‘,

There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock news…
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.
The revolution will be blogged.

And the Iraqi blogger are not letting us down. Today I have front line reports from the battle for Adhamiya, a salute to the Iraqi army, reports of Iraq in political crisis, a conversation between a ‘Green' zoner and a ‘Red' zoner, and, if you read to the end, an update on the missing kittens.

Kill us, but you won't enslave us

First, my deepest condolences go to Omar and Mohammed of Iraq The Model whose brother in law was assasinated last week:

Last week our little and peaceful family was struck by the tragic loss of one of its members in a savage criminal act of assassination. The member we lost was my sister's husband who lived with their two little children in our house.
He was a brilliant young doctor with a whole future awaiting him, the couple were the top graduates in their branch of specialty. They had to travel abroad to get their degrees and the war started while they were there but months after Saddam fallen they decided to come back to help rebuild the country and serve their people… (more…)

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What is self-censorship?

Frank Dai · 07:07 · East Asia

Many people think that in China the state media is censoring content online and offline vigorously under government order. However it's not always true since many of the censorship works are not done by the government officials but self-censored. Followed is a translation of recent blog post by Zhao Maoyu at the renowned Chinese blog “Mindmeters“, titled “Self-Castration Resulted from Self-Fear“, explaining the self-censorship policy at China Central Television, CCTV, the national and official TV media.

[In Translation]
Now all the people said the programs at Hunan TV (A provincial level TV) is much better than CCTV. The reasons behind it can be found at Wangxiaofeng's Blog. CCTV does not only produce rubbish programs but also attack its competitors with third-rated techniques. When I was home this year, my sister told me that CCTV did not attack other competitors because of fears. She did not want to tell me the real reasons.

I don't know whether anyone still remembers the “Red Horizon” soiree that is not released to the public. I think that anyone who have seen this program, as long as he did not bear extreme prejudice, should recognize that CCTV is not short of good producers and talented performance. I even dissert that the quality of this program exceeds all Hunan TV's programs. But such programs will not have a chance of getting to the public. What we saw on CCTV is only boring, lack of humor and full of philistinism. Indeed CCTV is not an institution of entertainment but of bureaucracy and politics.

All the staff at the Chinese bureaucratical institutions tend to think one thing first before they did anything else: how their bosses will consider? They were always trying to figure out the bottom line of their boss because they worried about exceeding the limit of tolerance. Moreover, the bottom line is often underestimated by these staff. To put more bluntly, they scared themselves. Let's look at an example how the people at CCTV works: If we set the tolerance rate at 10 for President Hu, the rate for the Ministry of Propaganda would be degraded to 9; 8 for the Ministry of Broadcasting and 7 or 6 for the officials at CCTV. When comes to the program producers it would be a miracle if the rate stays at 2 or 3. How can a TV program be excellent with such bottom line principles?

Also take the recently controversial TV series “Shiliang the General” for example. Even the stupids can know that this series is specially prepared for the political situation in Taiwan Strait. Some people post on BBS to vote on the “most disgusting lines” in this series, and the champion goes to this one: “One girl who would be killed by the Qing soldier soon said “”compare with the days of living with separation from the mainland China, I would rather die“.

I believed that even the President Hu and other people from the propaganda machine would not like this line. But why did the screenplay writer think that “the bosses” need such a line? I think it is the result of underestimating the bottom line of the bosses that lead to wrong conclusion. From the up to down, the fear is magnified and the bottom line is degraded to almost ground zero. The bosses just hope to forbid flirting but when it goes down to the average citizens, no options other than castration would be available.

A most recent case of self-castration and self-fear can be well illustrated in the news that the deeds done by the major websites to comply with the “Civilized Internet” policy:

QianLong: 3 suspected forums were closed down with 800 articles, 3174 pictures and 134 posts deleted.

Sina: 15 forums and 8 columns closed, totally of 134015 posts, including 71016 unhealthy posts.

Sohu: 11 pages and forums shut down. In addition it will select 10 or 20 people as Sohu's “Civilized Internet Supervisors”.

Baidu: Delete and block of illegal pictures and texts.

Zhongsou: Initiative to stop BBS searching and forum services to clean content. 20 forums are eliminated with about 10000 posts and 20000 links.

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China: Dusty discussion

John Kennedy · 03:08 · East Asia

A storm in the Chinese blogsphere this week. Not the heated kind, though—this one's meteorological. A sandstorm has been raging through Beijing and parts of Northern China since April 10. Here are three posts from the last four days:

April 16
DARKS Temporary Base blog

来到西安快两年了
却是在几天前才遇上了沙尘暴
尽管感觉很恶劣
还是如同第一次见到雪那样大惊小怪起来

I've been in Xi'an close to two years now
But it's only in these last few days that I've seen a sandstorm
Despite feeling terrible
It's nothing worse than the shock of seeing my first snowstorm

那天醒来觉得很暗，以为无意中早起了
可是往窗外一看，天居然是土黄色的
于是干脆以此为理由蒙上被子逃掉了早上的课

It was dark out when I woke up that day, I thought I'd gotten up too early
But looking out the window I saw the sky was dirt-yellow
More than enough reason to pull up the blanket and skip class

下午路过寸草不生的足球场
不小心嘴里被吹进少许沙土，好象含了跳跳糖

In the afternoon I walked passed a barren football field
Wasn't careful and got a lot of sand blown in my mouth, seemed to taste rather sugary

(more…)

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A Brief Review of the Blogs in Córdoba

David Sasaki · 02:57 · Americas

The following is a translation of a post originally written in Spanish by Franco A. Giménez: at Weblog Sobre Weblogs. Giménez has been blogging from Córdoba - Argentina's second-largest city 700 kilometers west of Buenos Aires - since 2002.

It seems as if many years have gone by since that first Beer and Blogs meetup in Córdoba on September 4th, 2003, where we able to gather just five people, of which only three had blogs. It was just a few months later that Córdoba Weblogs was founded with the objective of bringing together Cordobeses that have online diaries.

Thanks to the publicity by Jose Luis Orihuela, the project kept gaining followers, and each month there were more bloggers from Córdoba joining the directory.

As time went on, there were many more Beers & Blogs, a group formed to redesign and program a new directory, and t-shirts were also made. Due to a lack of time with the people who were responsible for maintaining the blog, the project lost steam. Now, the idea is to get it going again and integrate Cordosfera and its creator with our team.

In these three years, we've seen a lot of blogs and bloggers pass through. Today, Córdoba Weblogs lists nearly 90 blogs, some of which are no longer online and surely others are still yet to be added. In this coming and going of blogs, we have a few local gems to emphasize: Franco Piccato is a well-known journalist in Córdoba who this year launched Rompecabeza, a blog about digital journalism. In Un periodista dice, Sergio Carreras tries to present his articles in a form more suited for the internet than the printing press, according to his own description. En Español is the name of an interesting project by Matías Bellone, which translates articles of interest for geeks into Spanish (hence the blog title).

Something that has been noted by the majority of those who have been blogging for a long time is that they've lost enthusiasm and the act of creating content has turned into a mere digest of others' news. Luckily, new people appear and we always have good blogs from Córdoba to read.

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