[Sunday Times] Social media for press freedom

Jaiku
The Times has set up a jaiku channel, #mondli, to track this “to track this major event in Media history”, as Justin Hartman, new media strategist at The Times, puts it on his blog. The channel tracks posts from Afrigator, Amatomu, Muti, Technorati and Twitter - and yours truly is adding the stories from Bizcommunity, of course.

If you’re a blogger and you write about this issue all you need to do is tag your posts with mondli and it will automatically appear in the Jaiku channel. If you’re not a blogger but want to comment on this issue you can also do so by visiting the channel and having your say.

There’s also an accompanying widget, aimed at blogs and news sites, which displays the latest content from this channel (see it in action on the righthand side of this blog).

Yellow ribbon
Then the deputy editor of The Daily Dispatch, Andrew Trench, is displaying a yellow ribbon on his blog which he will not remove until Mondi Makhanya and Jocelyn Maker until are “free from threat, arrest or prosecution”.

Facebook
Sarah Britten, a blogumist at The Times, has created a Facebook group, “Stand up for media freedom in South Africa”.

PS Ironies of ironies: on one of the biggest stories of the year for the Sunday Times and The Times, their Internet access (all of Avusa/Johncom in Rosebank, Johannesburg) went down this morning for a good few hours.

Update: If you want to see an online timeline tracking Manto and the Sunday Times, check out the blog post from Gregor Rohrig, deputy multimedia editor at The Times.