Bloggers Buzz

As i have reported earlier chartreuse set out to make a difference by finding out what was really happening in and around New Orleans. He was matched by some of the big names in blogging and today announced the 3 bloggers he is sending; Mishikea Brathwaite, Travis Campbell and Loren Feldman:

The three people will be meeting in New Orleans on Friday August 11.

There is a Thrifty rental car reserved for them at the Airport.

They will be staying at the Avenue Garden Hotel on St.Charles Ave. in the Garden District of the city. (One of the main reasons I chose it is because of Internet Access. High Speed is not available in some of the hotels I checked.)

Though they will be mostly on their own there are already interviews set up with people in a 150 mile range. These are people who supposedly have first hand knowledge of some of the atrocities mentioned in the email I received.(They will have to do some travelling but this isn’t a vacation.)

I will be looking forward to news of their travels and what is happening to the people and their lives after Hurricane Katrina.

Tags: New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, blogging,

Following on from my earlier report about Prince Campbell sending two volunteer bloggers to New Orleans, New Orleans Now has gone live with the news the two bloggers will be announced tomorrow (thursday).

Tags: new orleans, prince campbell, blogging, hurricane katrina

It might have dropped from the mainstream media but in areas ravaged by Hurricane Katrina things are still far from under control. A few days ago Prince Campbell who runs Chartreuse received an email detailing how bad things still are in the areas. Rather than sit by he decided on a course of action including putting up some of his own money to find out what is really happening:

I’m putting up $1000.00 of my own cash to send 2 people to New Orleans and the Gulf Region for a weekend to find out what’s really going on.

Since then his money has been boosted by other bloggers and has been swamped by tons of people willing to go.

I’m not making enough from blogging to be able to put up any money but i will do the best thing i can do and cover it. Good luck to Prince and his two bloggers.

Know More Media has an interesting post Mel Gibson’s DUI and Katrina discussing how blog media is often getting the jump on other forms of media and even carrying stories the mainstream media isn’t.

Tags: news, media, mel gibson, katrina

From BoingBoing comes the story that the Indian Government is blocking some blog sites:

India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) passed an order to ISPs Friday to block several websites. The list is confidential. Indian ISPs have been slowly coming into compliance. SpectraNet, MTNL, Reliance, and as of Monday afternoon, Airtel. State-backed BSNL and VSNL have not started yet but likely will soon. The known list of blocked domains is *.blogspot.com, *.typepad.com and geocities.com/*.

Yes folks, the Indian government has decided to censor blogs and refused to explain why. This morning Shivam Vij managed to talk to Dr Gulshan Rai, director of CERT-IN, the only body authorised to issue directives to ISPs. His response: "Somebody must have asked for some sites to be blocked. What is your problem?"

For full details visit BoingBoing and the readers blog who first carried the news.

Tags: blogging, censorship, india

TechCrunch has announced that the Blog Search Engine Technorati has recently raised additional funding.

Tags: blog search, technorati

Tags: netscape

A post by Jason Calacanis has alerted me that Netscape.com has left beta and has switched over the to the www.netscape.com domain.

Tags: Digg

TechCrunch has a short post on first thoughts of the new Digg 3.0