We microblog demos and strikes always, but not as much when it comes to lectures. I think it’s a good idea to encourage the audience to live-microblog events, if no wireless or laptops are available, using their mobile phones.

We can tweet or Jaiku quotes from the talks or debates we are attending, say, every five minutes, to update and share the event with a much bigger audience on the net.

So keep tweeting and Jaikuing ya shabab, but please make sure your mobile phones are on silent mode…

Yesterday, Issandr set up a temporary frontpage for the Arabist.Net, which included the RSS feeds of our delicious bookmarks..

So even if we can’t disseminate information in the proper format on our blogs, still we are able to provide the readers with the latest resources and updates we are bookmarking, generating some form of updated content..

Meanwhile, the campaign to free Philip Rizk and the pro-Gaza detainees continues, and microblogging is still central to what we do..

The delicious page created for Philip, I was happy to notice, was circulated widely by activists in the different social networks: It was Jaikued, Tweeted, Facebooked, linked to in blog postings and circulated by emails… The delicious link itself was even bookmarked by delicious users!

But if there are others on the delicious network who are also following and bookmarking news about Philip, why don’t we all tag our bookmarks with the same unique tag: “6FebProGazaMarch”

This means when I click on “Recent” to check out the latest bookmarks by ALL delicious users who’ve been using that tag…

… then I’ll be creating a new delicious page, aggregating ALL bookmarks me and others have been tagging with “6FebProGazaMarch”… If that applied successfully with wide particpation, then in effect we’ve set up one hell of a pool of information about our campaign, continuously updated, and the efforts would be shared by more than one person…

So instead of circulating this link:
http://delicious.com/elhamalawy/6FebProGazaMarch

… it might be a better idea to start circulating that one:
http://delicious.com/tag/6FebProGazaMarch

The new aggregated page also has RSS feeds…

… which could be aggregated to your personal feed readers, and, more importantly, posted on other websites and blogs…

As I’m writing, only Moftasa, Gohary and the Center of Socialist Studies are pooling their links, together with me, into that page, coz we are the only ones tagging our bookmarks with those tags. Sarah and Amr for example have a good number of bookmarks, but unfortunately theirs don’t appear on the aggregated page since they haven’t used the “6FebProGazaMarch” tag.

I think in the future we should give this a thought… In the same way we get together to discuss what sort of blog we are launching for any new campaign, we can also come up with a unified delicious tag for that specific campaign. And it has to be a bit unique and unusual like “6FebProGazaMarch” coz this decreases the chances our pool won’t get “polluted” by other bookmarks we don’t want… For example, Philip is a pro-Gaza AUC student who was detained. When we are bookmarking links about him, I’m sure users will be tagging: “Student” “AUC” “Gaza” Activism” “Detainees”, etc… But these are commonly used tags.. If we decided to pool in the bookmarks under “Student”, other bookmarks for example about “students” in New Zealand could appear too. So choosing “6FebProGazaMarch” could be a good way to avoid that in our case, as it’s highly unlikely someone else is randomly using this tag to bookmark resources about unrelated issues…

Losing my blog however (which should be temporarily, I hope, as we are in the process of moving to a new host) did not mean I lost the ability to disseminate news and information about arrests, detentions, or whatever breaking news I wanted to get to the outside world. How? The answer is simple: Microblogging…

Let’s take the latest case of the arrest of Philip Rizk, part of an Egyptian police crackdown on a pro-Gaza campaign…

In general, I devote my main effort to the blog.. breaking news, important announcements for sure take priority.. The readership of 3arabawy ranges from roughly 18,000 to 40,000 visitors a month, so it makes more sense to post urgent updates on the blog. But besides my blog, I already had set up accounts on Delicious, Jaiku, Twitter.. These are all important social networking tools with millions of users around the world…

As soon as I received the news of the crackdown on Friday, I started bookmarking news about Philip’s arrest, giving the bookmarks the usual tags, like: HumanRights, Egypt, Activism, Gaza, Police.. but I made sure to add a specific tag, which is “6FebProGazaMarch”… This in effect meant that I created a delicious page, devoted to news about Philip and the crackdown…

A page, with a URL address that could be circulated, say, by emails and posted on websites…

A page that also has RSS feed, so you make it easier for people to receive your updated links as soon as they get bookmarked…

I used the TinyURL.com service to shorten the URL address and then sent it out to my contacts on Jaiku…

And I had already set up TwitterFeed which automatically collects the feeds from my jaiku account and posts them on my twitter page.. This meant that the delicious link was sent out to my network of followers on Twitter…

So here you go.. Whether the blog is up or not, breaking news and updates can still be communicated to the rest of the activist community and the media circles…