<<     October 2006     >>

"Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information..."

From an article on the BBC website comes a report that Amnesty International, the human rights group, is calling upon webloggers to stand up for the right to free speech everywhere by using the very tool that allows them to publish their thoughts to the net: their blogs.

"'Freedom of expression online is a right, not a privilege - but it's a right that needs defending,' said Steve Ballinger of Amnesty International. 'We're asking bloggers worldwide to show their solidarity with web users in countries where they can face jail just for criticising the government.'

The human rights group is also taking its campaign to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) - a group set up by the UN to act as a debating body for national net policies. The first big meeting of the IGF takes place in Athens from 30 October to 2 November."

Being addressed in particular are the rights of bloggers already being held captive for publishing their opinions to their blogs including: Iranian Kianoosh Sanjari who was jailed earlier this month and is still being held for attempting to report on clashes between security forces and supporters of Shi'a cleric Ayatollah Boroujerdi; and Vietnamese cyber-dissidents being held for blogging opinions contrary to the doctine of their government.

To learn more about how you can get involved, visit the Amnesty International website "Amnesty Irrepressible."

The third annual Web 2.0 Conference subtitled "Disruption and Opportunity" is scheduled for November 7-9 in San Francisco, California.

From the official event website:
"The Web 2.0 Conference focuses on emerging business and technology developments that utilize the Web as a platform and defines how the Web will drive business in the future. Now that the Web has become a robust platform with countless innovations driving its ongoing development, widespread disruptions in traditional business models are well underway. But within the chaos of disruption lies the seeds of opportunity."

The list of planned event speakers if full of big internet names including Jeff Bezos, Vinton Cerf, and event moderators John Battelle, and O'Reilly Media CEO and founder, Tim O'Reilly.
Among the topics for discussion is a presentation by the crew from BlogHer entitled "World Domination via Collaboration" which will focus on "building community, maintaining credibility, meeting organizational objectives...collaborating with users to build a product or experience that dominates the market..."
For the complete schedule of event conferences click here.

Registration information was available here, but the event has completely SOLD OUT! So, get a head start on next year and check out the info for the 2007 event.

Be sure your blog is listed in the directory, and include the URL of your feed and a brief description of your content in your message.
We'll take a look at what you're blogging about and consider your RSS for inclusion.

While Google is still updating everyone's page rank, we thought we'd give you a little info on what it is, why it matters, and how you can fix yours!

Google says: "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important.'"

Some say page rank may not be as important as it was once, as meta-tags used to be the be all and end all of search engine results, page rank too has lost some impact. However, these aspects of a website's existence are not useless and each adds a bit of weight when it comes to getting your site a better placement in search rankings.

To check your current page rank on 199 unique data sources click here, enter the URL you're interested in checking and hit the button.

Your results may be anything from 10 (sites like Microsoft and Google rate an easy 10) to negative 1 (and yes, there are tons of sites with such a deficit) - but wherever you are in the scale of things, it can be a fairly simple task getting that number nudged up a bit.
Here's how:

Links, links, links!
The more genuine links back to your site, the better! It's that simple.

So - If you know people like your blog, if your traffic shows the audience is there - give them a way to link back to you and show how much they love you!
Adding a simple 80 x 15 graphic button (you can make them here for free!) and a bit of code to allow your visitors to add your link to their own website is one way (like we've done here.)

And of course, listing your blog in our fabulous directory is an option.

If you have any suggestions for how else to increase page rank on a blog, or why it's important, leave a comment!