Blogging is not a luxury, it's a civic responsibility

--->BLOGGING WHILE BLACK
Christopher Rabb, Afro-Netizen. Blogging is not
a luxury, it's a civic responsibility.

http://alternet.org/mediaculture/21301/

BLOGS (N. PL.) (FROM "WEB LOGS"): online journals housed on a web site whose content ranges from accounts of the authors' personal lives to celebrity gossip to electoral politics.

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Last summer I was fortunate to be one of the 37 bloggers "credentialed" at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. An added distinction to this history-making role was that I was the only official blogger whose readership was predominantly black.

<snip>
In this post-civil rights era, it seems we have embraced the consumerist fiction of simple charismatic leadership, without understanding the reality of the grassroots organizing that gave the Civil Rights Movement its direction, power and effectiveness. Many of us forget that it was a movement that was executed through organized struggle. And behind the marches was the power of technology that allowed freedom fighters young and old to spread the word.

<snip>
For those millions of us Afro-netizens who go online to shop, research, and communicate with one another, the epicenter of black life has become the media. But until the media we rely upon includes blogs in particular, we are literally ceding our best of hope of communicating and organizing amongst ourselves – two bedrocks for any viable movement for a community's uplift.
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--->BUILDING BLOGS
Zack Pelta-Heller, AlterNet. Online journals are
under fire in Iran, but bloggers there and around
the world refuse to let their voices be silenced.
http://alternet.org/mediaculture/21316/