Mozzeenet

I’m a member of the Digital Divide Network Discussion Forum Listserv and the last few posts on the list have been about civiblogging or civic community journalism and its potential for providing alternatives to mainstream media, disseminating information and knowledge and allowing a wider range of voices to be heard. For more details, read the post titled multimedia blogging from the DNC in Boston.

The discussion was pertinent to a blogging experience I witnessed yesterday. My friend, Amit, writes a great blog about web standards, accessibility, digital photography and a bit more at Karmakars.com. He utilises a service on his website from a HUGE global internet company. It so happened that he had written a couple of entries about this HUGE global internet company over the past few months. Yesterday, the HUGE global internet company asked him to remove the blog entries from his site. One of these entries, in my opinion, did not breach any of the conditions of the service he utilises from the company, was not critical and constituted merely some personal meanderings about his own use of the service.

He also has experienced this kind of censorship from his website hosting company who asked him to take down some fairly inoffensive “negative press” about them from his site. In light of the topics under discussion on the Digital Divide List, I found this really interesting and it raised questions for me about intellectual property and the extent to which freedom of speech is controlled on the web. I found the recogition of these controls in the web medium quite arresting.