ReadWriteWeb

Kovas Boguta, the head of analytics at Weebly and a guest author on ReadWriteWeb, has created another powerful data visualization, this time of the "the pro-democracy movement in Egypt and across the Middle East."

The visualization drew from Twitter use by Egyptians and influential others around the #jan25 uprising. Those writing in Arabic only are represented in red, only in English are in blue and overlap by various shades of purple. Influence, in terms of follows, are represented by lines and those who influence each other are located in proximity.

The man believed to have been imprisoned longer than anyone else in the world for the contents of a blog, Egyptian Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, has been released after four years and 10 days of detention, his supporters have announced on their blog.

Suleiman, who blogged under the name Kareem Amer, was sentenced in 2006 to four years of jail for insulting religion and the leadership of Egypt on his blog. He was critical of, among other things, Egypt's treatment of women and of its Coptic Christian minority. Supporters report that during those four years, Amer was tortured, beaten, attacked by other prisoners, disowned by his family and had his books, letters and personal effects taken away. His case is of international interest not just because of his humanity, but because of the political conflict between authoritarian states and a new world of freely self-published bloggers who would challenge them with new Web technology.

The New York Times is currently working on a new metered paywall structure for their online news portal that will limit non-subscribed news readers to a limited amount of stories per day. With the release of some new data from the Pew Research Center yesterday, some wondered if the new paywall would deter bloggers from linking to the Times' content. According to the Times, however, their upcoming paywall technology will exempt readers coming into the site via links from third-party sites.

Eventually I'll test my thesis that says, "The bigger the product launch, the more social media users get banged in the tanty." (Pardon my French.) In the meantime, let's see how much ill was done by whom to people like you.

Facebook account removals criticized. Jillian York wrote an extensive examination of Facebook users around the world who have had their accounts closed out. "Facebook has not spoken publicly about how this process works, but my suspicion is that when a number of users report the same user, their profile is automatically disabled." If this is true, it's disturbing. Because it's mob rule.

During this, the Week of the iPad, governments across the globe found just enough time in between loading apps to squeak in some good old-fashioned evil. This evil included, but was not limited to, arrests and censorious legislation. Let's take a look at this Week in Online Tyranny, from the top.

Tunisia blocks another video site. The Tunisian government blocked YouTube and DailyMotion. What was left to block? Why, WAT.TV, of course. This one seems to have been blocked for hosting opposition videos.

Have you become the Mayor of Buttita Plaza Pawn on Foursquare? Or the Archbishop of Myung Dong Tofu Cabin, or the...Deputy Sheriff of the Twilight Bowl? Yay for you! Meanwhile, bloggers in Morocco and Vietnam have become the Governor of Prison and the Water Commissioner of the Interrogation Room.

Feel bad? I'm not going to tell you you shouldn't. All this technology we use and write about and enthuse on has higher stakes than we think. Here are some of them.

Earlier this month we noticed PRManna climbing up the Hacker News front page and reached out to the creator for an interview. Ryan Waggoner started PRManna in his spare time and was open in saying that the project was inspired by Peter Shankman's Help a Reporter Out. The difference between PRManna and HARO is that Waggoner's product was specifically meant for startup companies to answer blogger and journalist tech queries. Whereas, HARO is a general news service. The question is, are the sites far enough apart to be considered different products?

YouTube is, by far, the most popular online video service, but we actually know very little about how bloggers use the service to embed videos on their own sites. Sysomos, the Toronto-based social media analytics and monitoring firm, just took a closer look at how the blogosphere links to and embeds YouTube videos. Overall, the company analyzed over 2.5 million YouTube videos that were embedded in blog posts between July and December 2009.

While few of us are bold enough to lay claim to Nostradamus-like powers of prophecy, it's still interesting to read industry predictions. ReadWriteWeb recently released a list of tech predictions for 2010 and as of a yesterday, Senior VP Steve Rubel and the folks at Edelman PR agency uploaded their predictions entitled Digital Visions: 10 Ideas for the New Decade.

Back in the day, it was assumed that heavy Internet geeks were a bunch of basement-dwelling, trenchcoat-wearing, socially maladjusted introverts.

However, a new study from the Pew Internet Project shows that geeks, including IM users and bloggers, are more likely to help neighbors, get out of the house, volunteer, and behave as upstanding members of their IRL communities.