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By Suttinee Yuvejwattana and Daniel Ten Kate - 2012-05-30T05:06:45Z

Thai editor of the popular Prachatai news website, Chiranuch Premchaiporn smiles after the verdict at the Criminal Court in Bangkok on May 30,2012. A Thai court on May 30 convicted an online editor for hosting posts critical of the revered monarchy on her website, but suspended her jail sentence amid demands to reform the lese majeste law. Photograph: Pornchai Kittiwongsakul/AFP/GettyImages

Thai editor of the popular Prachatai news website, Chiranuch Premchaiporn smiles after the verdict at the Criminal Court in Bangkok on May 30,2012. A Thai court on May 30 convicted an online editor for hosting posts critical of the revered monarchy on her website, but suspended her jail sentence amid demands to reform the lese majeste law. Photograph: Pornchai Kittiwongsakul/AFP/GettyImages

A Thai court sentenced a webmaster to an eight-month suspended jail term today for failing to quickly remove royal insults from a Bangkok-based news website that has received U.S. government funding.

Chiranuch Premchaiporn, who manages the web-board for Prachatai, violated the Computer Crimes Act because she failed to erase the content deemed insulting to the monarchy, according to Bangkoks Criminal Court. Police charged her in 2009 under a crackdown initiated by former Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and she faced as many as 20 years in prison, Human Rights Watch said in an April 24 statement.

The sentence is the latest in a growing number of convictions for royal insults that has prompted academics to call for revisions to the lese-majeste law, a move all of the countrys major political parties have denounced. The U.S., European Union and United Nations called on Thailand to respect freedom of speech following convictions last year.

The law, which falls under Article 112 of the criminal code, mandates jail sentences as long as 15 years for defaming, insulting or threatening the king, queen, heir apparent or regent. Yesterday the Campaign Committee for the Amendment of Article 112 submitted almost 30,000 signatures supporting a proposal to change the law, including reducing the maximum penalty to three years for insulting the king and two years for other family members, the Bangkok Post reported.

Prachatai is a non-profit daily web newspaper established in June 2004 that often includes articles about the monarchy. It has received $50,000 the past three years from the U.S.-taxpayer funded National Endowment for Democracy, according to its website.

To contact the reporters on this story: Suttinee Yuvejwattana in Bangkok at suttinee1@bloomberg.net; Daniel Ten Kate in Bangkok at dtenkate@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Hirschberg at phirschberg@bloomberg.net

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Thai Webmaster Gets Suspended Jail Term Over Royal Insults

By Amy Sawitta Lefevre

BANGKOK (Reuters) - A Thai court handed an eight-month suspended sentence on Wednesday to a website editor for failing to quickly remove posts deemed offensive to the monarchy in a case that adds to growing debate over Thailand's draconian royal censorship laws.

The Bangkok Criminal Court ruled posts on the Prachatai news website (www.prachatai.com) were offensive to the royal family and that its editor, Chiranuch Premchaiporn, failed to remove them promptly, as requested by the court, allowing at least one to stay online for 20 days.

Thailand has some of the world's toughest lese majeste laws to penalise insults against the king, queen and crown prince, but critics say the legislation is used to discredit activists and politicians opposed to the royalist establishment.

Chiranuch, 44, was charged in 2010 in a crackdown on royal defamation under former Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, whose supporters include Bangkok's traditional elite of top generals, royal advisers, middle-class bureaucrats and old-money families.

She faced a maximum 20 years in jail on 10 counts of supporting illegal content and violating the Computer Crimes Act, a controversial and wide-ranging law passed by a military-installed legislature following a 2006 coup.

The suspended sentence is a rare moment of leniency in a series of tough and highly criticised decisions by courts to protect the monarchy, an effort that has increased during what many see as the twilight of the reign of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Thailand's long-hospitalised 84-year-old monarch.

"For someone involved in a lese-majeste content issue, this was a comparatively reasonable sentence," said David Streckfuss, a scholar and expert on Thailand's lese-majeste laws.

Many Thais revere the king, the world's longest-ruling monarch, and regard him as a unifying figure, but national unease over what follows his reign has added to recent political turbulence.

Deadly street riots, mob takeovers of airports and a coup in recent years reveal a country divided broadly between a yellow-shirted royalist elite and lower-income red-shirted supporters of former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, toppled in 2006.

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Webmaster gets suspended sentence in Thai royal insult case

Outer Critics Circle Awards Presented By Josh Gad, James Earl Jones, Montego Glover and More May 24

By Andrew Gans 24 May 2012

The 62nd Annual Outer Critics Circle Awards, honoring the best of Broadway and Off-Broadway, will be presented May 24 at 4 PM at Sardi's Restaurant in Manhattan.

Presenters include Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, Josh Gad, Montego Glover, Jon Robin Baitz, James Corden, Tracie Bennett, Audra McDonald, James Earl Jones, Michael McGrath and Judy Kaye.

Winners were announced May 14. Once, the new musical based on the film of the same name, and the London import One Man, Two Guvnors each won three awards apiece, the most of any production of the season.

Jeff Talbott's acclaimed Off-Broadway, race-themed play, The Submission, was awarded the John Gassner Award, which is presented for an American play, preferably by a new playwright.

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Winners follow (winners are in bold, preceded by an asterisk):

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY PLAY The Lyons *One Man, Two Guvnors Seminar Stick Fly

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL Bonnie & Clyde Newsies *Once Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

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Outer Critics Circle Awards Presented By Josh Gad, James Earl Jones, Montego Glover and More May 24

Googles Matt Cutts has put out a new Webmaster Help video discussing something thats probably on a lot of webmasters minds these days: what if you linked to a good piece of content, but at some point, that content turned spammy, and your site is still linking to it?

In light of all the link warnings Google has been sending out, and the Penguin update, a lot of webmasters are freaking out about their link profiles, and want to eliminate any questionable links that might be sending Google signals that could lead to lower rankings.

A user submitted the following question to Cutts:

Site A links to Site B because Site B has content that would be useful to Site As end users, and Google indexes the appropriate page. After the page is indexed, Site Bs content changes and becomes spammy. Does Site A incur a penalty in this case?

OK, so lets make it concrete, says Cutts. Suppose I link to a great site. I love it, and so I link to it. I think its good for my users. Google finds that page. Everybodys happy. Users are happy. Life is good. Except now, that site that I linked to went away. It didnt pay its domain registration or whatever, and now becomes maybe an expired domain porn site, and its doing some really nasty stuff. Am I going to be penalized for that? In general, no.

Its not the sort of thing where just having a few stale links that happen to link to spam are going to get you into problems, he continues. But if a vast majority of your site just happens to link to a whole bunch of really spammy porn or off-topic stuff, then that can start to affect your sites reputation. We look at the overall nature of the web, and certain amount of links are always going stale, going 404, pointing to information that can change or that can become spammy.

And so its not the case that just because you have one link that happens to go to bad content because the content has changed since you made that link, that youre going to run into an issue, he concludes. At the same time, we are able to suss out in a lot of ways when people are trying to link to abusive or manipulative or deceptive or malicious sites. So in the general case, I wouldnt worry about it at all. If you are trying to hide a whole bunch of spammy links, then that might be the sort of thing that you need to worry about, but just a particular site that happened to go bad, and you dont know about every single site, and you dont re-check every single link on your site, thats not the sort of thing that I would worry about.

Of course, a lot more people are worried about negative SEO practices, and inbound links, rather than the sites theyre linking to themselves.

More Penguin coverage here.

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Matt Cutts Shares Something You Should Know About Old Links

Googles Matt Cutts has put out a new Webmaster Help video discussing how to alert Google when your competitors are engaging in webspam and black hat SEO techniques. The video was in response to the following user-submitted question:

White hat search marketers read and follow Google Guidelines. What should they tell clients whose competitors use black hat techniques (such as using doorway pages) and whom continue to rank as a result of those techniques?

So first and foremost, I would say do a spam report, because if youre violating Googles guidelines in terms of cloaking or sneaky JavaScript redirects, buying links, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, all those kinds of things, we do want to know about it, he says. So you can do a spam report. Thats private. You can also stop by Googles Webmaster forum, and thats more public, but you can do a spam report there. You can sort of say, hey, I saw this content. It seems like its ranking higher than it should be ranking. Heres a real business, and its being outranked by this spammerthose kinds of things.

He notes that are both Google employees and super users who keep an eye on the forum, and can alert Google about issues.

The other thing that I would say is if you look at the history of which businesses have done well over time, youll find the sorts of sites and the sorts of businesses that are built to stand the test of time, says Cutts. If someone is using a technique that is a gimmick or something thats like the SEO fad of the day, thats a little less likely to really work well a few years from now. So a lot of the times, youll see people just chasing after, OK, Im going to use guest books, or iIm going to use link wheels or whatever. And then they find, Oh, that stopped working as well. And sometimes its because of broad algorithmic changes like Panda. Sometimes its because of specific web spam targeted algorithms.

Im sure youve heard of Penguin.

He references the JC Penney and Overstock.com incidents, in which Google took manual action. For some reason, he didnt bring up the Google Chrome incident.

This is actually a pretty timely video from Cutts, as another big paid linking controversy was uncovered by Josh Davis today (which Cutts acknowledged on Twitter).

So my short answer is go ahead and do a spam report, Cutts continues. You can also report it in the forums. But its definitely the case that if youre taking those higher risks, that can come back and bite you. And that can have a material impact.

Hes not joking about that. Overstock blamed Google for an ugly year when its revenue plummeted. Even Googles own Chrome penalty led to some questions about the browsers market share.

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Matt Cutts: Here’s How To Expose Your Competitors’ Black Hat SEO Practices