He sits quietly at the bottom of my newly organized blogroll, place assured because of the weblog name -- zem. And a visit to his weblog at least once a day is absolutely mandatory because zem is my portal for information about copyright, cryptography, censorship, and most importantly, freedom of speech. If there's action in regards to copyright and censorship, zem will be on top of it and know where to find the facts.

Case in point: during the fairly recent troubles between the Church of Scientology and Google's pulling of anti-Scientology web pages, zem provided links to information none of the more mainstream news sites such as News.com referenced. Through these links I found out that Google was returning Clambake pages before this information "hit the street" so to speak.

And when the Church of Scientology issue morphed into discussions of Freedom of Speech at this weblog, zem was there with a lot more knowledge about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of this country than most people who live here have.

Many of us start weblogs to write about whatever we feel like. Others begin to write on one specific topic and then eventually become "corrupted", writing about this and that like the rest of us. However, zem focuses his weblog on issues of, as he says in his tagline "cryptography, censorship, copyright, thoughtcrime" and hasn't moved from these topics since December of 2000 from what I can tell. I'm impressed.

But what about the man behind the zem? From researches at zem's weblog, I find out that he moved to Sydney from Melbourne, where he used to meet up with others for weekly roller blading forays through the streets of that city. His web site contains several photos of these events, including this one of zem himself, taken in January 1999. Time for a new photo, zem!

In addition, zem is another computer techie, not surprising considering the material he covers at his weblog.

Everyone, say hi to zem!