internet - Puzzling contradictions

The Winter issue of the Nieman Reports of Harvard University is online with a few articles on the internet in China, one of yours truly. Luwei (Rose) Luqiu of Phoenix Satellite TV starts a weblog at Sina.com and discovers how it is to be a celebrity blogger.

The next day, I opened my blog. I was astonished; my blog already had 80,000 hits and 100 comments.

I try to explain why the internet is not bringing down authoritarian governments but - certainly in China - has strengthened the position of the central government.

In China, as in so many places throughout the world, the key propulsion for the enormous change is the Internet. That the pace of change doesn't match expectations of the digital vanguard, which predicted that authoritarian regimes would fall like autumn leaves, does not mean that the Internet in China is not profoundly reshaping its media terrain.

And in a related article, Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman explain how their Global Voices project..

...pulls together interesting threads of conversation and reporting from the global cacophony of blogging voices.'

The whole issue of the Nieman Reports "Goodbye Gutenberg" is available here.