Sweden is setting up shop in Second Life, the Internet fantasy world whose 3 million users interact with one another through cyber-characters called avatars. The country will be opening a virtual embassy, a 3D copy of the real thing in Washington, where Second Life users can get information about Sweden.

No, the Second Life embassy will not be issuing passports or visas; it'll just tell you how to get them in real life. No word yet on whether virtual Swedish meatballs and lingonberries will be served.

As for Swedish furniture giant IKEA, it seems they're missing a market opportunity here. I don't think it will be long, however, until IKEA follows Sears's lead and opens its own Second Life showroom.       

The apocalypse is nigh:

SECOND LIFE, Jan 19 (Reuters) - Reuters will conduct a series of interviews with artists, politicians and executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland next week, in front of a live Second Life audience.

Reuters Bureau Chief Adam Pasick will talk with guests including Linden Lab Chairman Mitch Kapor, author and entrepreneur John Battelle, former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, and musician Peter Gabriel during the WEF, which takes place Jan. 24-28. They will have their own customized avatars and will take questions from residents.

The theme of this year's WEF annual meeting is, appropriately enough, The Shifting Power Equation. Second Life, for those of you who may not know about it, is "a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents." Reuters now runs a Second Life "bureau" staffed by real-world tech journalist Adam Pasick, but his avatar's name is Adam Reuters. According to Reuters, $1,184,358 real U.S. dollars--that's million with an "m"--were spent in Second Life over the past 24 hours.

Flickr: kavehkhkh

Iranian blog king Hossein Derakhshan, better known as Hoder, was treated to a fawning profile in Haaretz on Friday. Despite having to sign a false confession before relocating to Canada and watching as the regime blocked his super-popular blog (www.hoder.com), Derakhshan, 31, remains unperturbed. He expresses his enthusiasm for the Iranian Revolution (much like Foucault, he thinks it embodied "a post-modernist idea"), labels the fact that women are forced to wear the hijab "an external matter," and describes Iran, after Israel, as the freest country in the Middle East. As for its anti-Jewish president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Derakhshan describes him as an Iranian George W. Bush: a nuisance that nobody likes anyway.

But where Derakhshan's bourgeois complacency really gets alarming is in his description of Tehran's nightlife:

I love Tehran. It's a huge, lively and varied city that's alive 24 hours a day. The restaurants are open until four in the morning." In fact, it's rather similar to Tel Aviv, he says, in terms of both architecture and character. "Young people in Tel Aviv and Tehran are listening to the same music and using the same drugs."

Is Derakhshan completely opiated? Doesn't he understand the nature of the Faustian bargain between middle class and regime in Iran? It's the classic example of a tottering authoritarian regime creating a radical disjuncture between political and civil society, granting the bourgeoisie the latter and sealing off the former.

Perhaps Iranian blog-surfers aren't missing much after all.

YouTube was recently blocked in much of Brazil when one of the country's largest fixed-line telephone operators responded to a judicial order banning a video of Brazilian supermodel Daniela Cicarelli, ex-wife of soccer star Ronaldo, apparently having not-so-surreptitious sex with her boyfriend on the beach.

The judge in the case said fixed-line operators that allow access to Internet providers must participate in the ban until YouTube complies with an order to prevent the steamy video from being viewed in Brazil.

It's a hot story in and of itself, but the case raises broader questions over who controls the Internet, or if regulation of any type is even possible. YouTube is based in the United States, but its videos are of course accessible worldwide. Whose laws should it obey, if it even can obey? YouTube says it has removed the racy clip, but people continue to upload it to the site using different names, according to the lawyer of Cicarelli's boyfriend.

The Cicarelli case proves that, for better or worse, the World Wide Web is still the Wild, Wild West—an unbridled force in a world with no universally recognized government. 

After nearly two years of media buzz, Germany has called it quits for Quaero, the European search engine. In April 2005, French president Jacques Chirac and then German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder announced the multibillion-euro project, a public-private venture funded by telecoms and governments from both countries.  Quaero, which means "I seek" in Latin, was the most prominent and best-funded of international search engine projects meant to compete with Google.

But when Angela Merkel was elected chancellor in September 2005, she failed to show the same enthusiasm for the project as her predecessor. And over the past year, the Germans were said to favor the development of a next-generation text-based search engine, while the French preferred a more multimedia approach. Finally last week, Europe's largest country withdrew its support. The French vow to continue plugging away, but how long will it be until they realize that the wheel has already been invented?

The astronomical success of YouTube and other "Web 2.0" sites led TIME magazine to name "You" their person of the year, beating out Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. FP Editor Moisés Naím has a short piece out in the LA Times on "YouTube journalism"—the idea that video clips shot by ordinary people and disseminated online can change the world.

Fifteen years ago, the world marveled at the "CNN effect" and believed that the unblinking eyes of TV cameras, beyond the reach of censors, would bring greater global accountability. These expectations were, to some degree, fulfilled. Since the early 1990s, electoral frauds have been exposed, democratic uprisings energized, famines contained and wars started or stopped thanks to the CNN effect. But the YouTube effect will be even more powerful. Although international news operations employ thousands of professional journalists, they will never be as omnipresent as millions of people carrying cellphones that can record video. Thanks to the ubiquity of video technology, the world was able to witness a shooting in a 19,000-foot-high mountain pass in Tibet.

The full version will appear in the January/February print edition of Foreign Policy. If you're not a subscriber, sign up today!

Naím mentions several videos, some of which were flagged by Passport in recent weeks. We've assembled them for you at the links below.

• Murder in the mountains: Chinese soldiers shot down Tibetan monks, women, and children in cold blood, but a climber caught them on tape.
• China can't censor everything: A Sky News reporter risks detention, even harm to report on the simmering discontent brewing in China over land grabs. But the victims haven't been waiting around for him to discover their misery. His report builds on footage shot by ordinary Chinese of clashes between peasants and government hired thugs, and of ordinary people being forcibly evicted from their houses.
• Real or staged, we'll never know: This harrowing video, purportedly of U.S. troops crying and praying during a firefight with Iraqi insurgents, may be a fake. But that didn't stop 86,000 people from viewing it in the first 10 days after it was posted.
• Inside Egypt's jails: An Egyptian police officer slaps around a detainee, to the delight of his colleagues. He didn't think anyone was watching.
• Two U.S. humvees attacked in Baquba: A typical video posted by Iraqi insurgents of a roadside bomb attack on a U.S. convoy.

It's that time of year, and everyone is making predictions about the year to come. In its own predictions of 2007, analysts over at Gartner Group anticipate that blogging will reach its peak by the middle of next year and level out at about 100 million. Why? According to Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer:

A lot of people have been in and out of this thing... everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage asked to say it.

We'll have to wait and see if the latest web phenomenon will remain as popular as it is now. One thing's for sure, Passport is here to stay.

Germany's Deutche Welle hands out the Best of the Blogs awards each year to pioneering blogs in 10 languages, and this year's winners are a stellar lot. The judges (no strangers to blogging themselves) were clearly looking for sites that offer their readers a glimpse into different cultures and countries, exactly what a good blog should endeavor to achieve. Always one to promote our fellow bloggers around the world, Passport presents the top non-English-language blogs in the winner's circle.

• German: Letters from Rungholt. A German in Israel blogs about her life on a kibbutz.
• Spanish: La Huella Digital. A look at current events and media in Spain.
• Russian: Magazeta: Alles über China. A blog from Russia about neighboring China.
• Portuguese: Apocalipse Motorizado. A Sao Paulo-based blog self-described as "Scenes from a down-trodden city. Air pollution, aggressiveness, fear, stupidity, egoism, corruption. Survival in a city of tinted windows."
• Dutch: Bureau Belgrado. Dutch journalists blog about developments from Serbia and Montenegro.
• Persian: Zeitun. On this blog, currently banned inside Iran, a young woman in Tehran writes about her daily life.
• French: La Buvette des Alpages. Dedicated to shepherds, this blog champions biodiversity in the French countryside.
• Arabic: Jar el Kamar. This citizen journalist fearlessly blogs about political oppression in and around his hometown of Alexandria, Egypt.
• Chinese: The Colourful World - Shuweicao's Blog. This Chinese foodie tragically lost her stomach to cancer. She carries on blogging about gourmet delicacies, anyway.

Hat tip: Guardian news blog

Quick, name a mustachioed foreign journalist whose lust for women and penchant for quirky English earned him a massive Internet following. Did you guess Borat? Wrong. In the late 1990s, before British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen even had his own television show, the website of Turkish "jurnalist (sic), music and sport (sic) teacher" Mahir Cargi was drawing hundreds of thousands of hits.

Cargi is back in a recent Wired interview and he's mad. "All people know Sacha Baron Cohen imitate only me," he wrote to the magazine. "If possible you can help me too for stop this or find good lawyer?"

So, add at least one Turk to the majority of Kazakhs who have it in for the actor who plays Borat. Despite Kazakhstan Deputy Foreign Minister Rakhat Aliyev's recent invitation for Cohen to visit Kazakhstan, many in the country remain unhappy with his character. For instance, after boasting about his country's democratic reforms, Kazakh opposition leader Zharmakhan Tuyakbai said of Borat, "If I see him, I'll hit him in the face."

"In a country where the rules are more strict than ours, there would have been a government decree to destroy Borat," said what the AP describes as Kazahkistan's "most liberal political voice." In other words, Cohen may have all the fame and money, but at least Cargi doesn't have an entire nation calling for his head.

The U.S. intelligence community, perhaps inspired by fans of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, has joined the Wiki craze, using Wikipedia's open-source software to create an online data-sharing system: Intellipedia. The system, which was launched in April, provides a forum for analysts from all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies to discuss and share information about global events. Officials hope that it will encourage innovative thinking and help avoid intelligence failures like those leading up to the war in Iraq. Intellipedia may even produce future National Intelligence Estimates. Its administrators have addressed security concerns by making the system private, imposing the same classification levels that exist in the offline world, and barring some information gathered from satellites and human sources. But still, something about an intel system developed with open-source software seems—how do I put this gently—extremely vulnerable to hacking.

It looks like Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has another reason to hate the United States. According the DC-based Institute of World Politics, several American bloggers are responsible for the breakdown of a $630 million deal in which Chávez was to buy military aircraft from the Spanish firm EADS CASA. The company is claiming that it would have lost money on the deal, but several bloggers who have been following the story, including Professor J. Michael Waller at Venezuelastan, are being credited with forcing EADS CASA to reconsider. SecureTheHomeland.org, for example, initated a letter-writing campaign so U.S. citizens could express their distaste for the deal, even helpfully spelling out some of the negative consequences it perceived the purchase would have for Americans. According to that blog,

Here’s why doing business with EADS CASA is bad for the United States:

It would reward EADS CASA for ignoring US national security interests.

It would reward EADS CASA for circumventing our nonproliferation laws and breaking our military embargo.

It would pump billions of American tax dollars into a foreign company whose largest shareholders are the governments of France, Germany, Spain and Russia.

It would help keep that company afloat as takes business away from American aircraft companies.

It would inject cash into a jobs program for the ruling Socialist Workers Party of Spain, at the expense of allies who have stood by the United States and at the expense of American workers and companies.

It would subsidize the profitless sale of aircraft to Hugo Chavez."

The campaign appears to have worked. Waller is calling the reversal "another example of the New Media's impact on international politics." (It's a phenomenon Dan Drezner and Henry Farrell documented in this FP article two years ago.)

For now, Chávez can be added to the venerable list of names thwarted by investigative bloggers. That is, at least until he finds some other country to sell him planes. A country that's perhaps less inclined to bend to American will. I'm sure he'll think of something.  

If you're Hungarian, your prime minister has been caught on tape admitting that he's lied and his administration "screwed up," and protestors demanding his ouster are descending on the capital city in violent riots, what's your first move? 

Join the protestors? Take a long trip to Prague? How about secure the rights to Web domain "elkurtuk.hu," "WeScrewedup.com" in Hungarian? Three Hungarians are duking it out over ownership rights to the newly fashionable address, possibly to post the video of the prime minister's unfortunate admission. Probably to profit from the traffic that is certain to follow, assuming the Hungarian agency charged with handing them out will even allow it.

It's good news that Hungarians are fully embracing the benefits they might garner from postcommunist free markets. May the best capitalist win! 

The Guardian has put together its list of the top 15:

1. eBay
2. Wikipedia
3. Napster
4. YouTube
5. Blogger
6. Friends Reunited
7. Drudge Report
8. MySpace
9. Amazon
10. Slashdot
11. Salon
12. Craigslist
13. Google
14. Yahoo
15. Easy Jet

More on the continuing saga of Google and China. On Tuesday, Google founder Sergey Brin appeared to express some regret about Google's self-censorship on its Chinese search engine. Then Wired magazine's blog reported yesterday that Google is the target of a U.S. federal lawsuit for rejecting an online advertisement for the website ChinaIsEvil.com. Activist Chris Langdon alleges that the company stonewalled him when he submitted an ad for his bare-bones site (which decries China's policies and claims that Google, AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft are practicing censorship by refusing to let him advertise). In a nice twist, I was alerted to the Wired blog posting by a news alert in my Gmail account.

It's a little surprising that these information technology companies haven't been more prepared for all the complications that come from doing business in China. I mean, they trade in information. In China. It's not soft drinks or hamburgers, folks.