cell phone image of protests published on the site of a Tibetan rights NGO based in India

According to the Vancouver Sun, “Amateur cellphone photos and video clips showing what were described as confrontations between police and Tibetans protesting Chinese rule poured onto websites big and small, including those for major news media,

If you are an American citizen and a resident of any of the following states, please vote in your state primary on Tuesday, February 5 (Super Duper Tuesday).  Particularly for the Democrats, the race between the presidential candidates is very tight, so please take a moment out of your work day to participate in our democracy.  We

This case clearly put YouTube in an awkward situation. Clearly the videos of torture were violent and possibly offensive, but they undoubtedly had political value as they exposed the crimes of the Egyptian government. Wael is not a young hooligan posting inappropriate material, but an award-winning journalist trying to stoke political reform in his country. I hope that YouTube (owned by Google) will consider the implications of its actions more carefully in the future.

In the mean time, activists should be aware that the principal concern of many of the most useful digital activism technologies (YouTube, Blogger, Google, Skype) is not justice but profit. You cannot necessarily trust them to defend your content and your rights if they come under government pressure to remove your content or reveal your identity. For this reason, it is important to back up your content in a second location in case it is deleted and use these services anonymously if you think that the revelation of your identity by the services you use could be dangerous to your safety.

This is a video made a crazed fan of Britney Spears defending her against her detractors. The over-the-top melodrama made it an instant hit and the creator, Chris Crocker, gained his 15 seconds of fame,

Tonight, beginning at 7pm EST, CNN will broadcast a new kind of debate in which people send in their questions to presidential candidates as YouTube videos. Here comes the new debate, same as the old debate.

The reason that this debate structure isn't really so revolutionary is that CNN will still be picking the questions, continuing a style of "filtered" debates that make us forget what a real no-holds-barred debate is like. Media critic Jeff Jarvis parses this issue quite well:

CNN did give itself too

Abdel-Monem Mahmoud is a prolific Egyptian blogger. Though an outspoken member of the Muslim Brotherhood, his message of greater political freedoms for all Egyptians has made him an admired figure across the political spectrum. He has been imprisoned by the Mubarak regime several times and was once tortured while in police custody. His most recent arrested in mid-April of this year resulted in a global Free Monem campaign.

After approximately six weeks in jail, Monem was released from prision and got right back to blogging. His time in jail did not temper his strong criticism of the Egyptian government

I like to pay credit where credit is due. Not many people are treating digital activism with the rigor of deep intellectual analysis, so I'd like to point out Ethan Zuckerman's contribution to this area. Ethan, co-founder of Geek Corps and Global Voices, is also the originator of the Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism.

This theory states that while many Web 2.0 tools were created to help people share information about their cats (Flickr: look at my cute cat!, blogging: read about what my