Rhod Sharp, Kevin Anderson and Chris Vallance blog for Up All Night

Iran, oil, military blogs and spying on MPs     17 January 2006

We began with Iran and the issue of potential sanctions. We started with a very short clip from Brussells based Iranian blogger Farid Pouya - he told us about a couple of posts from the Iranian blogs - including a thought provoking and critical post from pods and blogs contributor Mr Behi.

Iran is a key supplier of oil and the current tension is already having an affect on prices. To help us sort out the issues we spoke to Stuart Staniford of The Oil Drum blog.

There's a scandal in the US over the sale of mobile phone records. Personal cell phone records have been put up for sale by third parties on the internet, though not all cell phone networks seem to be affected and there are questions over the legality of the sale. The America Blog purchased a month of phone records belonging to former Gerneral Wesley Clarke to highlight the potential security risks. They seem to have succeeded.

Should MPs be subject to certain kinds of surveillance by the security services? The announcement of a possible end to the 40 year-old so-called Wilson doctrine preventing this was big news for security and privacy bloggers. We spoke to Mark of the Spyblog about the issue and the insightful debate in the comments section of his blog about the ethics of spying on MPs.

N&S

According to the Washington Post The US military has been offering some mil-bloggers (that is bloggers currently serving in the US armed forces) exclusive information. Some argue this is propoganda, others say it's legitimate for the military to put out information as a counter-balance to negative reporting by the mainstream media. To get a perspective on the issue Kevin spoke to a Sgt Trevor Snyder blogger and soldier working with US army public relations in Iraq.

A big investigative report by the website thesmokinggun.com claimed some of the key events in James Freys bestselling memoir of drug addiction "A Million Little Pieces" were inventions or at best exaggerations. Frey stands by his book, as do many of his supporters. But some book bloggers are highly critical of Frey. Among them blogger and memoir writer Neal Pollack.

Lastly, we spoke to a government scientist who managed to blog while on a fact-finding mission to Antarctica. Professor Howard Dalton, the Chief Scientific Adviser for Defra wrote about his trip to the British Antarctic Survey looking first hand at evidence of climate change. His blog is a great read and really gives you a sense of what it's like to be in the land of "The March of the Penguins".

Tue, 16 May 2006

• UNICEF podcasting and an alternative view of the US border

Tue, 09 May 2006

• Drowning not waving ...

Thu, 04 May 2006

• Evolution and Flashing 12s

Thu, 13 Apr 2006

• Britcaster, Complete Tosh and Student Radio

Mon, 27 Mar 2006

• Marches, comedy and silly patents

• Article archive