Get Ready for the Blogs

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In an August 2001 case study, for instance, Hourihan notes one blogger found a couple of pages on the Coca-Cola Web site touting its ?H2No? campaign, which instructed restaurant chains in ways to reduce their rates of ?tap water incidence.? The indignant blogger posted a link on a group blog site called Metafilter.org, and suddenly, Hourihan recounts, ?this non-story that no journalist would have thought to pick up became a PR nightmare as people online started talking about it. An article about the campaign ran shorly thereafter in The New York Times and the page was removed from Coca-Cola?s site.?

Eve Tushnet in the conservative journal The Weekly Standard (October 7, 2002) describes another positive development in the blog world: Of the more than half million blogs now online, a small but rapidly growing number (already in the thousands) are maintained by and for women in the Islamic world. Sites like Muslimah Ya-Ya (http://muslimahya-ya.blogspot.com/) and MuslimPundit (http://muslimpundit.blogspot.com/) provide safe places for women from Morocco to Malaysia to talk candidly about sex roles, the subjugation of women, and the political implications of Muhammad?s teachings. One Iranian woman blogger, writes Tushnet, ?has heard from men who say her blog helped change their view of women in Iran.?

Tushnet notes that this sort of open dialogue, which is not only discouraged but outright illegal in some Muslim countries, is crucial if democracy is ever to take hold there. ?Before a ?regime change? (whether from without or, much better, from within) can succeed, there must be a core of people who have some of the habits of freedom, including experience with free expression.?

Leif Utne is managing editor of utne.com.

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