EGYPT: Connected By A Thread

Over the weekend, peeps from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a Palo Alto CA firm that Google bought last week, joined forces and launched a service allowing anyone with access to voice service -- landline or mobile -- to leave a messsage that automatically gets transmitted into a tweet, so says the Google blog. Those unable to access Internet and/or mobile services in Egypt may dial up +16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855. Tweets from the call are sent with the hashtag #egypt.

Things went from bad to worse Monday as Egypt's last remaining Internet access provider, The Noor Group, vanished from the Web, placing "Egypt's Net on life support," according to a blog post from Renesys, a New Hampshire company that monitors Internet performance around the world.

Several Chinese websites, including online portals Sina.com and Netease.com, as well as China’s Twitter equivalent Weibo, have blocked the word “Egypt” in keyword searches, the New York Times reported Monday.