It’s International Blog Day today

KUALA Lumpur — I just found out from prolific Malaysian blogger Jeff Ooi, whom I just interviewed on the state of online free speech and expression in Malaysia in the aftermath of the incident involving yet another comment on his blog, that today, aside from being Merdeka Day here, is also International Blog Day.

It’s the second year that the day is being marked, as Global Voices‘ Rebecca MacKinnon puts it, “to celebrate our right to express ourselves online, and help each other to be heard above the din of spin and bad news…and in some places, help people to be heard despite efforts by governments, politicians or companies to silence independent speech online.”In this regard, Nir Ofir, an Israeli blogger who conceived and organized Blog Day, is encouraging bloggers around the world to post a recommendation of five new blogs, preferably, those that are different from their own culture, point of view and attitude. To participate in the activity, below are the posting instructions:

• Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting;
• Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending them on BlogDay 2006;
• Write a short description of the Blogs and place a link to the recommended Blogs;
• Post the BlogDay post (on August 31st); and
• Add the BlogDay tag using this link: http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2006 and a link to the BlogDay web site at http://www.blogday.org

From where I am, the site is currently inaccessible though.

Incidentally, I found an entry on Wikipedia about another day, an unofficial one, celebrating International Weblogger’s Day (or InWeDay) on June 14th. The day is meant to bring webloggers (or bloggers) from around the world together “to celebrate a year’s worth of changing the way the Internet sees personal journalism.”