The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents is an all in one guide for both beginners and seasoned bloggers. The guide is roughly divided into two parts. The first covers “how to get started” and includes blogging tools, ethics, how to stand out and promote your blog. All of these can be found on many different sites on the internet such as on Wikipedia and blogger.com. The second part deals exclusively with blogging anonymously and how to get around issues of censorship for those blogging from countries where there are repressive regimes.

In countries were the mainstream media is censored and or under pressure, bloggers can often circumvent the censorship laws and provide the only real independent news. This puts bloggers in these countries under extreme danger from the government and in many cases they have been arrested by their government and thrown into prison. Countries such as Iran and China are particularly dangerous but bloggers in Tunisia and Egypt have also been arrested and detained.

However, blogging anonymously is not the only challenge faced by those who live under repressive regimes. How do you promote your blog and how do you circumvent filtering systems that the repressive government may have put in place? The guide provides step-by-step answers to these kind of questions.

The guide to being an “ethical blogger” and what makes your blog shine are probably the most contentious out of the whole book. Many bloggers feel that codes of ethnics do not belong in the blogosphere and that readers will make up their own minds on which blogs to trust and which not to, based on their own set of criteria. Setting up a blog is the easy part. Getting people to read it and even more important to trust the content is more difficult. If for example a blogger continues to make errors of fact and present commentary that is overly biased readers will soon tire and go elsewhere. In that sense then there is really no need to follow a strict code of ethics in the same way as one would in the mainstream media. Blogging is a tool of freedom of expression and bloggers do not want to feel they are constrained by the ethics or codes of mainstream media.

The chapters on how to blog anonymously and how to circumvent censorship are the most useful part of the guide. Blogging anonymously includes using cybercafés rather than your own computer at home, university or workplace. Alternatively you could set up web access via an “anonymous proxy” which would hide the real IP address of the computer you are using. Other options are explored such as using a “circumventor”, similar to a proxy server but requiring the help of a third party in a “safe country”. More complicated and technically challenging is the “invisibleblog” which requires posting via a specially formatted email system that is encrypted. All of these options are explained in detail with links to sites that can provide the blogger with further information and help on how to beat censorship laws and avoid detection by government security forces.

The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents is an extremely valuable guide for those bloggers living under repressive regimes where they are at risk of imprisonment. For the rest of the blogging world the guide provides useful tips on getting started and promoting your blog.

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