Good article on the Egyptian blogosphere

Carolynne Wheeler writes a good article in the Totronto paper Globe & Mail on the Egyptian blogosphere, the point of departure being Kareem, but she tries to go beyond that and shed some light on some of the breaking stories that bloggers first adressed, that got media coverage with the help from the independent papers like Masry al Youm, al fajr and ad Dustour and some satelite channels like Egyptian channel dream and the pan-Arab newsstations al Jazeera and al Arabiyya and not least the American station , broadcasting in arabic al Hurra(much critized, but in this case we really have to give them due credit).

A soundbite from the article:

In Egypt, though, bloggers have also done groundbreaking work revealing police beatings, torture and arrests without cause, by the meticulous documenting of court hearings, first-hand accounts of torture cases and posting of photographs and video of police beatings and physical wounds left on victims, including autopsy pictures and, last year, a video of a bus driver being sodomized in a police station.

"They touch places that no official journalist dares to go," said Wael Abbas, a blogger who last fall broke the story of an anti-Mubarak rally in which numerous women were sexually assaulted by police during mass arrests.

I would like to end with a qoute from fellow blogger, Mohammed Khaled, that seems to echo the determination of Egyptian bloggers to carry on along the path already taken .

"I think it is a message from the government to us, to slow down a little," said Mohammed Khaled, whose blog was among the first to have videos of police torture. "But we've already crossed the line until we can't go back. Nobody is going to slow down from the bloggers."

UPDATE: Reuters reporter Alaá Shahine have a good piece on the same topic here

Kareem, Abd al Karim Sulaiman Nabil, Abdolkarim, Egyptian bloggers, Egyptian blogosphere, human rights, free speech, Egypt