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BayWords by The Pirate Bay

Just as yesterday I was talking about the return of Demonoid, I read off the ever hardworking people at Mashables that another popular bit torrent sites, the Pirate Bay is launching a free blogging service called BayWords.

According to the current statement on Baywords:

We’re proud to present a new service – baywords.com. Because of the need of freedom of speech and secure hosting facility of the words being said we could not agree to how people behave towards bloggers.

Many blogs are being shut down for uncomfortable thoughts and ideas. We will not do that. Our goal is to protect freedom of speech and your thoughts. As long as you don’t break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it.

Technically, BayWords is based on a Multi-User WordPress engine. Currently is is plain vanilla, without nothing on top of the basic install. But CAPTCHA and some ads to be served are in the pipelines.

Now, that is something that (some) bloggers can look forward to. So how does this affect the blogging environment?

Surely spammers will go ahead and spam that site bad. That is number one.

Number two, it should provide an alternative for some writers to move from WordPress.com to there given that WordPress.com does have some limitations on what can be written and what cannot be.

For those self hosting wordpress site, it might be worth considering to move to BayWord if your are writing really sensitive stuff. Any authority may not be able to act on you, but they can exert their influence on your webhost. And webhosting company will (more often than not) forgo their less than $10 from your share hosting fees and take down your site to save themselves some trouble.

Guess for Singapore, Baywords should offer a alternative platform for bloggers. Politically sensitive blogs could end up there. But off course, at the current stand, I am not too sure how much the “Swedish Law” can protect bloggers on Baywords should our government decide to act upon blogs on Baywords.

Lastly, I have this interesting questions. In order to protect freedom of speech and thoughts, will commenting be moderated on Baywords? Free speech is a double edge sword.