A couple of blogs from the Mideast

I’ve been meaning to post links to these blogs for a while:

• A Gay Girl in Damascus
  What it says on the tin. Amina lived in the US for several years, and then moved back to Syria a while ago. I found her blog a few days ago thanks to a link from a coworker — around the same time the secret police started looking for her and she went underground. So far she’s still posting.
• Egyptian Chronicles
  A fascinating firsthand account of the revolution and the early days of the new Egypt

These blogs remind me of the fall of the Soviet Union, which had joined Usenet (then in its heyday) just a few months or maybe a year before. An employee of the Soviet Union’s first public ISP of my vague online acquaintance was going to the White House (the Russian parliament building), joining in demonstrations, listening to Yeltsin standing up on a tank defending the Parliament, and then going back to work and posting about it; history shared from across the world almost in real time by an ordinary person living it. It’s odd to think how new and incredible that concept was then, and how relatively commonplace it is now. (And of course, given how central Facebook and Twitter and YouTube have been to the Arab Spring, that sort of decentralized citizen journalism now makes history rather than just observing and recording it.)