p2pnet news | Freedom:- Vietnamese bloggers, including Communist Party politicians, are using the Net to communicate freely with each other.

“In an online phenomenon that has exploded in a little over a year in this youthful and booming nation, millions of net surfers now reveal all as they share daily gossip and thoughts on their fast-changing society,” says Agency France-Presse, going on:

“Vietnam may be a one-party state that censors its official media and the Internet, but this hasn’t stopped millions of yong people embracing a world of carefree online chatting their parents could only have dreamed off.”

Bloggers have, “fought wars over the cultural divide between Vietnam’s north and south, but they have also raised funds for the needy, arranged organ donations and given support to people suffering deadly diseases,” says the story, citing Cuoi HK, aka Tuyen, a Vietnam Airlines employee who, “touched thousands as he chronicled his fight against cancer on a blog, and supporters held real-life ‘offline parties’ for him before he died earlier this year”.

Prominent historian and National assembly deputy Duong Trung Quoc, “recently became the legislature’s first blogger, posting an assembly diary as well as historical tit-bits about the 1,000-year-old capital city,” says AFP.

“Even Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has shared details of his personal life in a one-off online chat to reach out to young and tech-savvy citizens.”

But it’s mostly youngsters such as han Kim Ngan, a 13-year-old student from Hanoi, who are leading the way, says the post.

At least half her 40 classmates now have a blog, some even have two and, “Those who don’t have blogs are mostly those without a PC and an Internet connection at home,” AFP has her saying. “They can use an Internet cafe, but that makes it harder to regularly update their blogs.

“I write about my life, what I think, and what happens at school. I don’t share my blog with my parents and never with my teachers. We sometimes complain about them, so they can’t know about our entries.”

Meanwhile, “State and party censors have threatened fines and other penalties for ‘black blogs’ with pornographic and ‘out of stream’ content or ‘information against the party and the state’,” the story adds.

.Slashdot it!

Also See:
Agency France-Presse – Blogs sweep Vietnam as young push state-run media aside, September 6, 2007

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 7:01 am and is filed under Freedom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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