Singabloodypore

Clicking on the image above will take you to an enlarged image. On the 4th of October 2007 the blogosphere launched a global protest in support of the people of Burma. The first 650 signatures in the lead up to the day are the people I regard as the core of the network and their actions resulted in over 600,000 people signing the petition by the 5th of October 2007.

Not only blogs were used by Avaaz.org in garnering this support, as sites such as secondlife.com and facebook appearing in the cluster map indicate that the users also turned to internet applications beyond the blogosphere.

The endeavour was quite clearly a German led initiative with many blogs and sites having .de in their addresses with free-burma.org at the core. The site that led the inititatve is quite clearly mister-wong.de a social bookmarking site, with blogs basicthinking.de and simoncolumbus.de garnering the most links from the network . The first Burmese blogger to appear in the initial stages of the network was http://www.ko-htike.blogspot.com/ with Amnesty International being the first non-governmental organisation on the scene.


According to the website Avaaz.org is staffed by a global team of campaigners operating on 3 continents. They have administrative offices in London, New York, and Rio de Janeiro. Although the fight for Freedom in Burma is not yet completed the Avaaz team are still moving forward and turning the networking function of the blogosphere into street action.

A list of all bloggers who initiated the 'Big Burst' are included below and I have taken the liberty to remove websites such as wordpress, youtube and myspace.com links. The "Stand with the Burmese Protesters" has now generated protests around the world.

Update:15.39

Discovered that I am not the only one interested in this phenomenon. It also appears to have been monitored throughout its development by Benedikt Köhler who has produced a slide show of the network visualization of the Free Burma action.

Seven days that shook the blogosphere - Mobilizing protest in weblog communications



To see my list...