Of blogs and human rights

Amnesty International just posted an interesting article about how blogging can contribute to the international human rights movement. Thanks to our friend Scott Taylor for pointing this out to us.

The article begins:

The new media landscape is evolving at unprecedented speed and one of its most powerful weapons yet is the mighty blog. It is arguably the year of the Blogosphere, a phenomenon that has profound implications for press freedom and human rights.

This online community is made up of over eight million people who regularly post material on the web-logs (blogs). It is built on the foundations of its predecessors -- newsgroups, websites, web forums and chatrooms -- but with some crucial differences. The network of blogs is more interactive than websites, more interconnected than newsgroups or web forums and more permanent than chat.

Blogging opens up unprecedented opportunities for the media and its ability to cover issues around the world. This was clearly shown in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami at the end of last year. It took only a few hours for text and video from Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia to be distributed across the web. These provided not just details for the news story, but also the individual stories that added a powerful personal element to the images of disaster.

To read the entire article, go here.