We want to take over the blogosphere for 16 days.

ka-BLOG! is a 16-day blog fest for the Take Back the Tech Campaign. It is open to anyone and everyone - girls, boys, everyone beyond and more -- who wants to share their thoughts, write poetry and prose, post graphics / pictures, rant, rave, heckle, make snide remarks, stick their tongue out at violence against women, and how online communications can exacerbate or help eliminate VAW.

If you are blogging, don't forget to tag your posts so we can aggregate them on this site, and amplify your voice!

[In Filipino slang, "ka-BLOG" means someone you blog with.]

How to ka-BLOG?

1. commit
Commit yourself to 16 days of blogging about violence against women and technology.

2. email
Email jac AT apcwomen DOT org, with your blog address & name/handle/nick OR
Register a kaBLOGGER account in this website by clicking "create account" on the bottom right navigation. Click on "kaBLOG profile", and add your details.

3. identify
Make it known by putting a takebackthetech icon on your blog - create your own or grab a few icons from our media library

4. post
Post something about the how you think violence against women connects with information communications technology. Anything goes! Just post one thing a day from 25 Nov to 10 Dec.

5. tag
Use "takebackthetech" to tag your posts

6. link
Don't forget to send in your blog url and and we'll aggregate your posts to the campaign website throughout the 16 days

7. expand
Widen the campaign to your readers by linking the campaign site to your blog.

What to ka-BLOG! About?

Anything as long as it's about violence against women and gender relations, and their connection to technology.

We've come up with some questions for exploration because we know can be difficult and exhausting to think of things to write about for 16 days:

1. Do role playing games or communities promote sexual violence?
2. Are webcam girls victims or sexually empowered?
3. Is online harassment really harmful?
4. How can right to privacy coexist with right to expression?
5. Is sex online ‘real’ or just harmless ‘fantasy’?
6. What does it mean to take back the tech when 5 billion people in the world have no internet access?
7. The State can’t even get serious about domestic violence, how is it possible for something like cyberstalking to be a public safety issue?
8. The internet is for… (porn?)
9. Should internet service providers like Yahoo! have a right to my data since they’re free?
10. Is internet censorship the only way to deal with violent or sexually degrading content?

If you have any ideas, share it with us through email, or blog about it. We'll find your post and add it to the list on the campaign website.

But also feel free to skip any of these and blog about anything that's on your mind :) It does not matter if the blog entries come in the form of jokes, limmericks, poetry, short stories, blurbs, graphics, pictures, articles, creative narratives.

Any language

Your blogs can be in any language you're comfortable in. We don't moderate, we just aggregate, so speak your mind!

How to Tag

Using a common tag will:

• make it easier for us to aggregate all the participating blogs; and
• make the campaign more visible on the WWW, specifically on blog search engines like Technorati

It's quite easy. Before posting your blog entry, cut and paste the following to the bottom of your entry:

<!-- technorati tags begin --><p style="font-size: 10px;" ds_newline="" align="right">technorati tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/takebackthetech" rel="tag" ds_newline="directory">takebackthetech</a></p><!-- technorati tags end -->

Don't have a blog? Want to keep yours private?

For those of you:

• who don't want to use your personal / professional blogs
• who don't have any blogs of your own just yet

You can post your ka-BLOG entries by creating an account on this campaign site.

1. Click on "create an account" on the bottom right navigation bar
2. After you have set up your account (including verification of your email), create your ka-BLOG profile.
3. Each time you want to post an entry, click "Create content" > "blog entry"
4. And you're ka-BLOGGING :)

If you have any questions or problems getting started, send an email to seti AT apcwomen DOT org, or post a comment.