I am sitting in a day-long session with about 100 journalists and those learning the profession who are participating in a unique experiment.

Over the next five months we will all be blogging madly about development issues on a specially created site (http://development.thinkaboutit.eu/) TH!NK3: Developing World, the bloggling platform, focuses on "sustainable development and global co-operation ahead of the September 2010 meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York to review the Millennium Development Goals. The programme was launched in 2000 with the noble mission of ending poverty by 2015. They have got five years to go.

As a reporter who started his career reporting on development projects in Brazil and Botswana I can look at the progress so far with a jaundicied eye. Nothing much has happened from the ideals of the 1980s. And nothing much is expected to happen in the coming five years. There are stlll some two billion poor who live on less than $2 a day. Countries have made a lot of promises to help, but in the end they must look after their constituents and not someone in a place far far away.

But then I am the hoariest person in a roomfull of people from the EU's 27 member countries and around the world. This is a young crowd. Most seem to be 20 years younger than myself.

But I justify myself as this is not a game for the young only. I plan to blog the hell out of them, and learn something about the blogging/social networking process. Ideals are useful and a lot of them are sceptical enough of the process to ask some very revealing questions during this launch session.

Above all, I plan to have a lot of fun blogging, tweeting, podcasting and videocasting as journalism evolves to a more broader sense of who engages in this profession.

Th!ink About It is a blogging competition in its third edition, an experiment by the European Journalism Centre (ejc.net) in creating blogging sites around certain topics.

The first one dealt with the 2009 European parliamentary elections. The second round was launched soon after on Climate change, ahead of the EU summit on the subject in Copenhagen. That blog is still alive and hopefully this one will continue well past the deadline.

Moving on from Th!nk, I point to a direct example of how the internet is directly transforming the underdeveloped world. Scientists from the Institute for Tropical Medicine (ITM) are using the digital Moodle platform to help doctors deal with sicknesses in the underdeveloped world. Moodle is an open source application to create online training courses that can be used in the Belgium, Bermuda and Burundi by anyone with valuable skills to communicate. Try it for your own purposes, whether an individual or business (moodle.org)

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All hail to Google (again) for finally biting the bullet by deciding to stop censoring its web-search and news services in China. Is this just another case of one business behemoth going head-to-head with a political behemoth?

Google started this fight a few months ago by threating to pull out of China after it found out the country was cyberhacking the service to spy on its citizens. In the latest move, Google is in effect finally deciding to pull out of China. Let us not forget however that it was Google that decided to play with the devil so as to speak, when it went into China in the first place.

As a sign of commercialism rather than good intentions, Google made a deal with the devil when it first went into the country when it agreed to the great cyberwall of China. In effect Google agreed to censorship by allowing the government to prevent Chinese from searching for and accessing subjects the authoritian government did not want them to know about.

Google was not the only one agreeing to this deal, but it is the first one to pull out. As a commentator on theinquirer.net pointed out: "China is embarrassed by the loss of Google which managed to make it look incredibly bad before it left. However it has lots of other friends in American IT industry, such as Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple, who are all happy to do business in the country and help prop up the authoritarian Communist regime."

Google is in a tough place in China, but the censorship of search results is not confined to that country. It has to comply with laws in a number of countries. For example in Turkey, where it is a crime to defame the country's founder, Google restricts access to videos that might be seen to defame Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

In Germany it trys to cut out sites that are pro-Nazi or that deny the Holocast. These are just a few examples indicating that Google has blurred the line between who is responsible for content. Of course, I agree with Google's blocking of any child porn site, no matter if it is illegal in a country or not. It is the grey areas that pose problems, and the aims of some governments. We must appreciate that Google has a very difficult task in deciding what to do in many cases when it is challenged.

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