This is just crazy, especially in an age where we are talking about attention trust and citizen journalism . It will be interesting to see how this plays out ... Robert Scoble to his great credit has added his voice to the conversation. Rebecca's post states clearly that Microsoft is the one that shut down the blog - I'm keen to hear their reasons for this, the 'politics' involved, if they had directives from the Chinese government and how they handle the issue. Hopefully this is another step towards transparency and our right to freedom of speech.

Attentiontrust
Citizen journalism

1:10:44 PM    comment []  trackback []

The first stage of The Indibloggies is complete. The blogs that have qualified through the nominations and juror votes are listed here. Please do go and vote for your favourites.

Kudos to Debashish and his team for doing a fab job of this - I was particularly thrilled to be able to use del.icio.us for the nominations phase and Scuttle for ratings, and to discover many many amazing blogs as a result of the process.

Debashish has some trivia :

With more than 300 nominations made over 10 days and close to 25 Jurors browsing through the myriad flavors of writing and rating them, Stage one of the Indibloggies 2005 edition has come to an end. I havenít got enough words of appreciation for the members of the Jury, many of them went out of the way to help me during the process. For the first time in the Indibloggies, and perhaps in the history of the internet, a social bookmarking tool was used in an award event.

• Indibloggies used the bookmarking tool del.icio.us for the nomination and Scuttle for the juror-rating phase.
• Jurors rated blogs in several award-categories on a scale of -1 to 5. A weighted score was calculated based on all Juror ratings for a blog in a particular category and a merit list prepared. The final list, in almost all categories, that makes it to second and the final stage comprises of blogs that were 40 percentile or above in the merit list.
• 63% of the nominated blogs were Blogger.com blogs. If few other blog-hosting services like live-journal may be ignored, Wordpress blogs must have been a close second.
• In all 193 blogs were rated by the jurors with about 15 blogs ending up with a negative or zero final score.
• Like last year, a private mailing list had all the Jurors deliberating and discussing over issues before and during the rating process.
• The whole rating process was also audited throughout, by three of the jurors to ensure a smooth completion.
• Juror Saket nominated the highest number of blogs, a whopping 115 blogs.

12:46:26 PM    comment []  trackback []