NEWS ABOUT BLOGS AND BLOGGERS

obmar · NEWS ABOUT BLOGS AND BLOGGERS

China to Have Nearly 100 Mln Bloggers by 2007: Report

2006-05-06 14:26:23 Xinhua

China is expected to have nearly 100 million bloggers in 2007 with the fast increase in the number of netizens, according to a recent report.

The number of bloggers in the country this year is predicted at more than 60 million, said the report released by the research center of media management under Qinghua University.

The most eye-catching Internet event in 2005 was the spread of bloggers, the report said.

According to a survey by baidu.com, a major Chinese Internet search engine, there were about 36.82 million registered Chinese blog sites used by 16 million bloggers last year. That means each blogger has 2.3 sites on the average. Around 660 server companies are specialized in offering storage service to bloggers.

China now has more than 110 million netizens and the number is growing steadily.

obmar

On the day that parliament is digesting two reports into the horror that afflicted London on 7/7 it's worth pondering how young men get suckered into extremism and how the government might prevent it.

One factor is undoubtedly propaganda. The example above from Northern Ireland, and easily locatable on YouTube.com (enter "irish" + "republican") is a skilfully filmed and edited homage to nationalist petrol bombers fighting the security forces, but it could quite easily have come from either Iraq, Afghanistan, or Chechnya.

This video is one of the many posted by a group called Irish Republican Media. Others include shots of terrorists patrolling "Free Derry" in the 1970's and graffiti from the continuity IRA saying it won't disarm.

These clips, many of which were available as videos in republican shops in west Belfast during the troubles, come pretty close to contravening the government's new prohibition on the glorification of terrorism or an incitement to riot.

If the IRA continues its ceasefire I doubt there'll be any investigation or, far less likely, prosecutions but the videos are useful tools in what in the Islamic context Scotland Yard calls "ideological grooming".

Anti-terrorism police say that Mohammad Sidique Khan, the ringleader of the 7/7 bombers, used grooming to encourage his younger converts, Jermaine Lindsay, Shehzad Tanweer and Hasib Hussain of the need to murder innocent civilians in the name of defending their religion.

As well as bonding over whitewater rafting, and finding recipes for the bombs on the internet, jihadi videos were his main propaganda tool to convert the angry and disaffected three young men into suicide bombers.

While it's overstating their influence to state that these videos can create bombers, it is not unreasonable to ask whether the British government believes it can't do anything to stop their dissemination.

Security services across the world know the value of internet video propaganda to al-Qaida and its fellow travellers and their sites and message boards are under attack from anti-jihadi hackers.

Many of these sites are hidden and only accessible with known passwords but I discovered this morning just how easy it is to find some of these videos. I'm a relative novice in all things internet related (despite having a job on an online newspaper) and was astounded when I entered "jihad" and "video" into youtube.com's search engine.

The first video I found was a gratuitous celebration of killing in what I took to be Chechnya but couldn't tell. A scroll down and I came across something truly chilling.

A video called "flying american army" showing a bomb in iraq, with what looked like dead US soldiers flying through the air following a bomb, helpfully repeated with the bodies ringed by a red marker on the screen.

It is exactly images like this which emboldened the men involved in 7/7 and any now planning repeat performances and the growth of video sharing sites like youtube.come will only make it harder for western governments to counter or for hackers to pull down.

So what can all democrats do? Humour is probably the best weapon. My favourite response is this al-Qaida video of jihadi in trendy trainers set to equally silly music found on another site mySpace.com.
Contemporaria
This post was last changed at 03:06 PM, May 11 2006, at a time when the top headline on Guardian Unlimited was 7/7 bombers were being watched, and the top headline from the BBC was Resourcing blamed over London attacks, and there were posts elsewhere tagged with these same keywords:

The post was written by Oliver King. You can email the author at oliver.king@guardian.co.uk
Comments

It's less important that we UNDERSTAND what makes these POOR, DISENFRANCHISED, etc. etc. young men get involved with terrorism and RADICALISED than that we find them and make sure they can't do anyone any harm. Not taking the piss, honestly.
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In other words, stop being such a bunch of wet pants and let's just put people out of their misery. Seeing pictures of the bus bombing in Tavistock Square doesn't exactly me want to understand the problems and all that, but let's have a quick go anyway: young Muslim men don't have enough outlets for teenage hormones, be it adolescent sexual contact with the opposite sex (or each other?), a surreptitious drink or some good old rebellious jiggery-pokery. How many more stories of girls being "honour" killed by their teenage brothers do we need to hear before we stop being so 'understanding' and start protecting people who are living with the result of all this misdirected frustration? Sorry to offend anyone's sense of "you have to respect someone else's culture" - but you don't, if it's not a culture worthy of your respect.
Posted by jonnyboy71 on May 11, 2006 05:07 PM.
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