Press Freedom Index 2013

Unintentionally I scrolled down. I knew Azerbaijan wont be anywhere in the high or middle ranking countries. If only Azerbaijani government wanted to strive to be first on every list, including one on press freedom. We are 156th among 179 countries (down by six places) ranked by Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index for 2013.

Why not strive to be like Finland? Or Norway? Alas, this wont be in line with our leadership's policies!

May I simply wish that as part of this New Year resolutions, the ruling party will make it its priority in setting an example of a country with highest standards of press freedom (and for real, without having to deny the truths and realities); release all of the imprisoned journalists, youth activists and promise a better future? 

Yes, childish and naive... Hey, its that time of the year when you could wish for anything...

Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber- Dissidents

I have been meaning to upload this great report for a while now but since Turkey banned blogger.com and you can only access it through bypass proxies and changing your DNS servers, its been rather frustrating keeping my blog updated recently. 

This "Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber Activists" is a useful guide book for all those who want to make sure that they are safe and secured from a number of different actors and most importantly their authoritarian governments (yes, there are still many countries in the world that are authoritarian, and Azerbaijan is just one of them). Prepared by the Reporters Without Borders, this handbook looks at terminology of today's online community and its residents, guidelines for how to set up and run blogs, ethics especially for those bloggers who write of news in their countries and become sources of valuable information for external actors, and much more. 

Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber- Dissidents