The Twitter experiment...

On Friday, everyone's favorite photog Luke Thomas (who sadly insists on calling me Fay, although I would be honored to share a name with a tropical storm... it seems somehow eerily fitting!) urged me to try Twitter, so I'm going to roll with it for a month and see if it has any positive or negative impact on my life.

An example of positive impact would be, perhaps Beth and I would finally become BFFs? Just kidding.

Negative would be: my social circles will collide and implode, and everyone will see through my cool exterior into the inner nerd who spends way too much time online, and will no longer want to be seen with me. Just kidding, hopefully.

Thusly, please add me on twitter and help me do this little experiment to see if yet another online gadget will motivate me to get my iPhone sooner (really, I just want to be able to sit alone in a bar with my scotch and soda and Google Reader things):

kayvasilyeva

Bloggers rights here and abroad...

Afghanistan has no free media. No big surprise there, I hope. 25-year-old Nasim Fekrat of Afghan LORD champions the next best thing in Kabul: blogging. Yes, folks, blogging is good for more than just trash-talking gossip and exposing your crippled emotions to the world wide web. Some have thought above and beyond the personal blogging model and use online publishing tools to freely distribute useful ideas, scientific research, informed opinion, and independent news from the ground.

A blogger writing in a (re)developing country encounters many daily obstacles: electricity outages, lack of computers, lack of internet access, lack of transportation, government intimidation, you name it. That is Afghanistan. We are not surprised (although, with initiatives like Nasim's, we are hopeful).

Halfway around the world in New Hampshire, where - and please correct me if I missed something - freedom of expression on the Internet is still in effect, autism awareness blogger Kathleen Seidel faces intimidation tactics from a lawyer who doesn't like what she has to say. Following an in-depth exposé detailing the financial gains of the anti-vaccine attorney versus the impact of the cases he litigated on the medical community, Ms. Seidel was hit with a subpoena demanding 4 years worth of financial records, taxes, personal communications, research notes relevant to her blog, and other material listed here (pdf). Ms. Seidel won a self-drafted motion to quash the subpoena and the judge found the attorney's actions to be "an abuse of legal process, a waste of judicial resources and an unnecessary waste of the time and expense to the purported deponent", stating also that he has set a dangerous precident for the future silencing of bloggers.

In this case, the attorney thought he could get one past Ms. Seidel and intimidate her into silence. But while Ms. Seidel, armed with an extensive history in research as a professional librarian, was able to resolve the subpoena issue in her favor, many bloggers without the right resources would have simply acquiesced and deleted their statements (or online presence altogether) for fear of legal consequences.

Meanwhile in Kabul, Nasim says of his blogging workshops: "in order to build this country, we need to inform people", and Reporters without Borders supports his mission to enable citizens to share real, independent news.

We here in the States need to be more of an example.

Telling you something you already knew...

The increasingly small town of San Francisco (seriously, don't you just feel the borders shrinking every time you run into people you don't particularly want to have run-ins with? I do...) lacks any notable access to actual drunk, blundering celebrity and celebutant messes, so "writers" who would otherwise be moderately successful gossip bloggers in LA and NYC turn their undivided attention to the next best thing we have to offer in terms of people-whose-names-you-might-recognize: people running for, or holding, local office. You know, those guys who have a hard enough time trying to get anything done thanks to financial impediments, the ever present red tape, the bureaucratic tangle? Yea, them. Now they have to watch what they wear, too, lest they be caught looking or acting not at 100% by someone who can't see much further than their own nose.

Newsflash. This isn't Gossip Girl. this is a city facing some tough decisions in the near future.