Those of you who will try to follow the thread here might get lost a bit, as the discussion has been hijacked by some self-appointed flickr police users, who are acting as rabid dogs calling for deleting my account. But here’s the latest:

1- The Irish and Palestinian murals photos have been un-flagged by the flickr team, who also unflagged the other pix of activists taken in Cairo.

2- The flickr team claims these photos were censored by mistake and it was actually me who did that! This is not true, coz these photos were part of batches uploaded together with other photos, via flickr uploader, all with the same settings. So if I had flagged those photos by “mistake” this would have meant that the entire batch would have been also flagged and would have become invisible to the public except those who are signed into flickr. But this wasn’t the case. These photos were selectively flagged.

3- In all cases, I’m not gonna continue making a fuss about the above since they have been unflagged by the team now, HOWEVER, my account is still considered NIPSA (Not In Public Search Areas) by flickr team, which could negatively affect its chances to be found by search engines on the net.

4- What the flickr team had asked for is me taking down ALL the photos of strikes and demonstrations taken by other bloggers, photographers as well as labor organizers. Then I can request the NIPSA status to be reviewed. My answer is simply, I CANNOT AND WILL NOT do that:
a) I never claimed credit for those photos, and, unlike others, I always mention the source of the photos and give credit to the photographer.
b) These photos were published with the permission of the photographers and activists, and in the case of Nasser Nouri and Amr Abdallah, I had copyrighted their pix so that they would not be downloaded except with their permission. My photos however continue to be on a Creative Commons License so that other labor activists and human rights campaigners can use it for free.
b) Some of those photographers and bloggers launched later flickr accounts of their own, (a number of them with my help, and others did it on their own) but most haven’t, and they find it difficult to deal with a non-Arabic flickr interface, so until flickr launches an Arabic version, they’ll continue to be dependent on my flickr account, and will continue to email me their pix which I’ll upload coz whether I personally like it or not, I’ve become their sole source of spreading their images in the cyberspace.
c) Taking down the strikes and demonstrations pictures simply would mean the disruption of thousands if not tens of thousands of blog postings and reports that either linked to or embedded those pictures previously.
d) While anyone who follows my account should be aware that the overwhelming majority of pix I took it myself, and I hardly post stuff by others in recent times, I cannot guarantee in the future I won’t be uploading pix that were not taken by me, coz if we get another uprising like Mahalla or Boroloss, or strikes breaking out in some area and I receive their photos, it would be my duty to spread them as widely as I can, unless those who emailed them to me already have uploaded them to flickr or to another website. And believe me, there’s nothing more heartwarming for me than seeing the dissidents and photographers themselves launch their own accounts: This saves me time and effort that I can put into my own reporting, activism and photography, in addition to ensuring that if I get targeted at any time there would be others who would continue uploading those pictures and expose Mubarak’s regime.

5- As much as dissidents and organizers in Egypt and elsewhere are grateful they came across a useful service that they can use to help bring about social change, even when the latter was not necessarily on the agenda of the founders of these “social networks,” Flickr (and its sisters) should also be grateful for the promotion and publicity given to them by those activists. And instead of getting all evangelical about “guidelines” and “rules” which are at the end of the day applied selectively, they should engage with those activists and discuss ways they can help them and make their service user friendly. YouTube discussed with Wael, after they deleted his account, the launching of a special channel for human activists. What happened to that? Nothing.. Twitter stayed orgasmic for months after the publicity they received coz of James Buck and the Egyptian activists. What happened afterward? They canceled the service in Egypt. Facebook enjoyed very much the publicity they received coz of the “Facebook Activism” in Egypt.. and then simply went on to delete Wael Abbas’s account, and only reactivated it after a campaign giving him bullshit excuses.
What it comes down to: We are dealing with corporations. Companies that base their decisions at the end of the day to their balance sheet of profits and losses, no matter what sort of “social” rhetoric they use. And at times, when they are faced with the prospects of losing markets they are more than happy to strike deals and sell us out to our governments, most infamously in China. We won’t be able to depend on them in the long run. The activist community has to start thinking of finding (and founding) alternative IT tools that we guarantee they would neither be unplugged nor censored… This is not necessarily my original idea.. Some leading bloggers like the Gharbeia brothers in Egypt and their counterparts in other countries have been warning us about this for a long time, and I know they as well as others abroad are working on alternative projects… I wish them luck in their efforts, coz the future of independent blogging and cyberactivism will be crucially dependent on initiatives like these and open source tools…