Through the 2006 summer war in Lebanon, blogging provided an outlet for Arabs in America to vent their frustrations, anxieties and criticisms of events. It also gave many a sense of reconnecting with other Arabs around the Diaspora, says Vivian Salama.

Paul Cochrane tracks Israel’s attempts to strike a lethal blow to Hizbullah’s satellite channel.

In all previous Arab-Israeli wars Israel had dominated on all counts. But in the 2006 war, the influence of the Israeli media on global opinion seemed to have been tempered by the greater range of Arab voices, argues Jihad Fakhreddine.

Lebanese women journalists braved bombs, bullets and missiles to report the conflict between Hizbullah and Israel in the summer of 2006, sometimes surpassing their male colleagues’ coverage by providing insight into the conflict’s human nature, says Magda Abu-Fadil.

The times, as Bob Dylan sang in another context, are a’ changin’. Across the Middle East, new television stations, radio stations and websites are sprouting like incongruous electronic mushrooms in what was once a media desert, says Co-Editor Lawrence Pintak.

This book is a useful resource for understanding the post-Oslo dynamics of the Palestinian Authority and the public sphere in general, but it fails to offer conclusive insights, says Julie Norman.

For its willingness to take on and expose dominant elite ideologies, this book deserves real credit, argues Courtney Radsch.

When Bahrain Online founder Ali Abdulemam and his partners were arrested in February 2005 for hosting a critical United Nations human-rights report about Bahrain, fittingly enough the first to respond were colleagues in the Bahraini blogosphere, reports Luke Schleusener.

The real-world impact of blogs in the Middle East remains to be seen. But women bloggers stress that there is agency and empowerment in just being able to write, reports Sharon Otterman.

The future of political blogging in Egypt greatly depends on its fostering links with mainstream independent media, says Rania Al Malky. But what, if anything, has the blogging-led reform movement achieved to date?