This month's topic on Open Forum is essentially what The Committee to Protect Bloggers is all about: promoting and advocating for international voices.

Because that's what the collective blogosphere consists of. 

In blogs we find voices we recognise along with those we don't. We come across ideas that inspire and others that enrage; we hear from every corner of the earth if we're only willing to take a little time to search them out.

For me, blogs are what the web is all about. Sure we have social networks, news portals, dating tools, virtual shopping malls, games and various assorted tawdry offerings that make up much of the web, but blogs are where it gets personal.

The Committee's unofficial mantra is Article 19 from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." Adopted on 10 December, 1948, no one could have been thinking about all the ways it would apply in the Information Age.

The barriers to publishing your own thoughts and ideas have been lowered to both fantastic and sometimes dangerous levels. Fantastic because we can hear from so many others. Dangerous because people can sometimes put their words online without taking into account what they may face as a result.

The Committee to Protect Bloggers catalogues scores of cases of people being persecuted, jailed, arrested, fired from their jobs and even killed because of what they've said online. Some people take these risks knowingly. Others only find out after that fact.

Kareem Amer is an Egyptian blogger who was imprisoned for exercising his right to freedom of speech, is still in prison. Bui Tanh Hieu is a Vietnamese blogger held in jail for writing a blog post critical of state media coverage about the Pope. A woman in Virginia in the United States was arrested and charged by local police for reporting publicly available information about local narcotics enforcement practices on her blog.

Protecting bloggers is more than just protesting when they run afoul of some government, angry group or company. It's also about making more available resources about existing laws, sharing technology that allows them to bypass internet filters and firewalls, shows how proxy servers work and how to best adjust privacy settings so they aren't as easy to track down.

The great thing about this project is that almost anyone can do something from almost whereever they are. You can dedicate server space to mirror a popular but controversial blogger. You can share links from their posts with others, to increase the awareness about their writing. You can often (checking on their copy permission) repost their writing with links back to their site so that no matter what happens where they are, their work lives on.

Most importantly, you can read their blogs.

You can use services like Google Translate to read those you couldn't otherwise, at least somewhat. Search blogs outside your country and see what they have to say. The best thing about the argument over whether there is enough plurality represented in corporate media is that you don't really have to wait for corporate media to catch up. The voices are there, you just have to seek them out.

Andrew Ford Lyons is the editor of The Committee To Protect Bloggers website. He is a Web design and online media strategies consultant from the US living in UK. Andrew has worked on web projects with several organisations, including the International Solidarity Movement, Rachel Corrie Foundation and the Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project. He’s currently on the advisory board for the International Trauma Treatment Program and studying psychology. Visit www.committeetoprotectbloggers.org