I remember from last year's Netsquared conference my sense of excited anticipation at how the rest of the world would use all these groovy new tools once they spread beyond Silicon Valley :). I've just written a blog post about digital diasporas & human rights and I'd like to follow it with a look at the non-Western use of web 2.0 for social change. If you've got any good examples then please leave a comment or contact me.

Of course, one of the most interesting things about the architecture of participation is that people are just going to do it anyway, without waiting for NGO's to catch up. So allow me to draw your attention to Egypt and the way brave individuals like Wael Abbas & others have used Youtube to help leverage the first ever prosecutions of Egyptian police for torture. Sadly, this goes alongside the rather more widely known prosecution & imprisonment of Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer.

p.s. on a lighter note, I've been mulling over a quote from Celine Petrossian (who's research ‘Liberating the Silenced: Iranian Bloggers in the Diaspora’ I've referenced in my digital diasporas post). She says "Iranian bloggers serve as 'merchants' of culture and information, trading cultural knowledge and news from both Iran to the outside world and from the West to the Iranian people living in Iran." Does that mean that blogosphere maps like these show the new Silk Routes?