“The Internet represents freedom, but not everywhere.”

So begins the annual “Internet Enemies” report by Reporters Without Borders–and that’s probably the cheeriest line in the entire 39-page document. It goes down from there.

For the uninitiated, Reporters Without Borders is an anti-censorship watchdog organization. As blogs and news Web sites have grown in popularity, the group’s focus has similarly migrated to the Internet. Unfortunately, the report again paints a grim picture of Internet freedoms in parts of the world where it says the authorities regularly chuck bloggers in jail for online posts that displease the regime.

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Just as many of you settled into your seats to watch Thursday evening’s debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, Allen Stern of CenterNetworks was attracting his own crowd on Twitter after raising a question that strikes at heart of the blogosphere.

“It’s clear the link economy is broken,” he wrote, pointing to a write-up CNET News published on Friendster’s support for Facebook applications. The piece contained nine links, six of which pointed to previous CNET posts.

Not long after, Matthew Ingram piled on with a post dinging us for attempting “to prove how authoritative” we are “by making it look as though the only stories worth linking to are their own.

To say that their internal links are better than anything else they could possibly link to is just ridiculous.”

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Barring a come-to-Jesus moment by both sides, “MicroHoo” is dead and buried. So who won and who lost? Months from now, we’ll have a clear idea. In the meantime, here are my back-of-the-envelope picks.

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When Twitter suffered a brownout last weekend, the “twitterati” had a collective conniption. I suppose the good news for co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone is that the bad news kicked up such a storm.

Lots of people are so addicted to Twitter that the intermittent problems wreaked havoc with their daily routine.

Lead architect Blaine Cook and VP of engineering and operations Lee Mighdoll are now gone. And it’s up to management to come up with a plan. But this isn’t the first time a popular online communication service found itself a target of criticism. In August 1996, America Online got in even bigger trouble after going dark for 19 hours.

How big a deal was it? Consider this: AOL’s outage was the lead news item on the evening news programs for ABC, NBC and CBS. If you thought the grumbling about Twitter was bad, remember that AOL back then had more than 5 million subscribers and they were not a happy lot.

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After the derision that greeted the New York Times’s blogging-will-kill-you story on Sunday, I’m probably not going to do much for the reputation of the mainstream media with hard-core bloggers. So it goes.

Out of curiosity, I drew up a list of 55 technology journalists to find out how many use Twitter, arguably one of the most important social-media technologies on the scene. I included names of some online reporters–including colleagues from CNET as well as TechCrunch–but in the main, the list is comprised of people employed by A-list newspapers and periodicals.

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