It's been six months since the Libyan uprising began. How was the Libyan blogging scene before the February 17 revolution, and how has it evolved over the last few months? Sometime in 2009 and way before the Feb 17 Revolution as it is now known, a large number of the Libyan blogging community members had shifted their conversations to Facebook and later on to Twitter, which they felt was more interactive and ‘immediate’. In this regard, the different English and Arabic blogs were a bit like an empty house with occasional updates on what seemed to be very important events in their life or when ‘guilt’ would prevail. However, this did not mean that the scene was empty but simply that it was somehow less spicy – apart from the usual suspects or hardcore earliest bloggers such as Khadijateri and Imtidad, as well as those who actually loved to write long prose, which was more than 140 characters. Khalid Al Jorni, a Libyan blogger who had since closed shop, had deployed a great effort in aggregating a large number of the Libyan blogs and Libyan related blogs in one place called All Libyan Blogs. He even classified them in English and Arabic and whoever was administering the site kept doing so until February 2011 at least. Khalid's writing from inside Libya bordered on what could be considered acceptable criticism of the government and its economic policy and the social situation in Libya. The only reason I could think for him to stop blogging and delete his blog because he was very popular with the younger generation. He once wrote, and I am here paraphrasing, that talking about Libya's rich past and ancient ruins was nice, but that the youth wanted to see a modern Libya with functioning metropolises. I'm sure that if he could he would be online now. In previous posts we had shared with you on Global Voices the various topics discussed on the Libyan blogosphere. This community is divided into three main groups: (1) Libyans residing in Libya (these also include foreigners married to Libyans), (2) Libyans temporarily residing abroad for various reasons and (3) Diaspora Libyans. The majority started blogging in English, some moved to Arabic , while others only blogged in Arabic. Touring the Libyan blogs now, we notice that the percentage of Arabic language blogs seems to be higher, but they are less well known on the non-Libyan non Arabic speaking sphere because they have less exposure. Their voices too need to be heard as they bring up a complementary aspect of Libya. While they both have a personal theme and do speak about society, culture and politics, their audience and background would be different except for the dual language individuals who are straddling both sides. The Arabic language bloggers seem to focus more on stories, poetry, Libyan society themes, essays etc… while theEnglish speaking bloggers have a slightly higher individualistic trait treating the blog as a diary to reveal their personalities, lives and aspirations. It is in joining both conversations that we are able to get a fuller picture about Libya, which has been and remains largely a mystery to the outside world. The third category of bloggers, i.e. those living in the Diaspora, were the only Libyans to openly criticize and ridicule the Libyan government and even their compatriots back home. They were safe and established abroad. Category 2, Libyans temporary living overseas, spoke a lot about what they did bringing up family stories and very general things about Libya unless they had decided to join the opposition and so they stopped being shy of saying their opinion loudly. Category 1, people blogging directly from the homeland, were the ones taking the most physical risk and so were being careful in wording their sentences in a way that would not be threatening to the regime but that would still convey the image. Their blogs ranged from the diary type of “I did this and that today and passed my exams, met friends, went shopping, got engaged” to other more serious issues like environment, pollution, rubbish collection, economic projects and corruption. I think any criticism that they managed to dish out was an exercise in subtlety and understatement. Here is an example by Khadijateri: This is just getting ridiculous. It's like when you step in chewing gum, or even worse, dog poo, and it gets stuck on the bottom of your shib-shib [ar] (slipper) and you can't get it off. No matter how hard you try; you rub your shib-shib on the ground, on the grass, on the edge of the street curb, or you get a stick and try to push it off. But it just doesn't want to go.