“Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness.” Nietzsche, Friedrich W., Beyond Good And Evil, 1886

Along with the features stated previously plus a few more power mvblogs.org will go horizontal today. 26th July 2009 marks the 44th anniversary of Maldives officially gaining political Independence from the United Kingdom.

As individuals, the followers of mvblogs.org now have the power to choose some aspects of the website. They can either enable or disable flickr, youtube, blogs and twitter feeds. They can switch layouts between horizontal and vertical. And their browser will remember their last settings. The cascading boxes of previous 5 articles from the last 5 days can be expanded and contracted with a click. The boxes also gives an idea of who the most active bloggers were on that 5 day period. The feed will still remain the same, with improved validation.

Of course there is still no power for the viewers to choose contents. No power to self-censor selective blogs is built on to this. There are plugins for mvblogs to filter its content by users.

And nothing is absolutely independent or free! Enjoy and keep expressing thoughts

mvblogs has survived over three and a half years making it arguably one of the most active and the longest surviving social (or anti-social) web project for Maldives. It is no more than a robot which reads the blogs people submitted to it over the years. It then displays the most recent updates. The robot would probably be utterly grateful to the bloggers if it has the capacity to construe what it reads. This robot has read the most controversial writings by Maldivians and this is the only venue for some of them to reach others in the society.

About an year ago (July 2008) someone redesigned mvblogs.org but it wasn’t made online then. It was mainly an [inter-]facelift. It also included tweets and youtube videos from Maldives along with selective formating for displaying Thaana blog posts in addition to previous functions. It had a cascading mechanism for displaying older blog posts (for the period) and orientation was changed to horizontal with an automatic scrolling function. It also had a hidden link to change the orientation with a single click.

Social media has created an opening for a more bottom up system for distributing ideas, disturbing and worrying the traditional top down system. So what about trying something horizontal now, emphasizing equality of expression more? Although it may sound like this is something hard to adopt, why not give it a try?

[mvblogs horizontal (beta)]

mvblogs will become horizontal in a few days. You can test drive it now and get ready for this change. There may still be some changes made to the look and feel in the meantime. The feed readers will still get the same results.