Egyptian bloggers/Net activists paved the way for uprising

With the Mubarak dictatorship in control of all major media in Egypt, brave Egyptian "citizen journalists" risked imprisonment and torture to blog or tweet about human rights abuses. Here's renowned Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas interviewed on BBC. Over the years, Abbas was harassed, censored and assaulted by authorities -- and was briefly detained during the uprising early in 2011.

P.S. Sharif Abdel Kouddous covered the 18-day uprising last year for Democracy Now!, and he was the central character in an HBO documentary about the Egyptian revolution. For his work in Egypt, he received last year's Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media.