Strengths of Web 2.0 for women!

What excites me most about Web 2.0 is the amount of information people with access to internet put about their views, opinions, work even their personal lives on the inter-webs particularly young people via social networking websites. This new era of creating and sharing of user-generated content both shows a risky behaviour and at the same time highly significant one.
Web 2.0 has given voices to women who had not been reached before, like Iran and disputed territories like Kashmir. In Pakistan where women’s voices are suppressed on every level the information that gets through Web 2.0 by women opens huge horizons of learning, sharing and networking.
I would focus more on the risk aspect due to something I have faced recently while working on bringing forward a case of a female school principal Ms. Victoria Anita who belonged to a religious minority in a small town of Layyah. After collecting the facts and opinions, I managed to put my first blog entry at www.iffatgill.com but to my surprise, within a few hours, my report and a photograph was copy pasted by someone on their website without my permission and they did not even acknowledge the source. This got me a bit worried at first but also, at the same time, the message is reaching more people now due to the little work I had done.
The empowerment aspect is still strong in the above mentioned incident as the local media was not bringing out the other side of the story at first and the concerned people did not know how to get their message across. After my work was online, the family and friends of the principal could get an overview of what was actually going on and knew how to share it with their contacts. This gave her a feeling of empowerment and she would also now want to learn more about these tools.