RConversation

Happy Blog Day!!

Happy Blog Day!!!

Today we celebrate the wonders of the growing and very global online conversation. Blog Day founder Nir Ofir suggests we celebrate by recommending five new blogs.  But I really want to take this opportunity to give thanks to our tremendously hard-working Global Voices editors - bloggers living around the world who work every day to aggregate and curate conversations coming from the blogs in their regions.

It's amazing to think that one year ago, Global Voices in its current form was only just getting started. A huge hug of thanks (in no particular order) to:

Georgia Popplewell, Regional Editor, Caribbean; Podcast Editor. Her blog is Caribbean Free Radio.

Nathan Hamm, Regional Editor, Central Asia. His blog is Registan.

Veronica Khokhlova, Regional Editor, Eastern & Central Europe; Language Editor, Russian & Ukrainian. Her blog is Neeka's Backlog.

David Sasaki, Regional Editor, Latin America; Language Editor, Spanish. He blogs at Oso, Moreno, Abogado.

Haitham Sabbah, Regional Editor, Middle East & North Africa; Language Editor, Arabic. His blog is Sabbah's Blog.

Oiwan Lam, Regional Editor, Northeast Asia. She blogs at Interlocals.

Preetam Rai, Regional Editor, Southeast Asia. His blog is Betterdays.

Neha Viswanathan, Regional Editor, South Asia. Her blog is Within-Without.

Alice Backer, Language Editor, Francophonia. Her blog is kiskeyAcity.

John Kennedy, Language Editor, Chinese. His blog is Feng37.

Farid Pouya, Language Editor, Persian. His blog is Webgardian.

Jose Murilo Junior, Language Editor, Portugese. His blog is Ecologia Digital.

Sokari Ekine, former Regional Editor, Sub Saharan Africa. Her blog is Black Looks.

Thanks also to all of our fabulous volunteer contributors, listed along the right hand column of the Global Voices front page.  We couldn't have done this with out everybody's hard work, links, and passionate belief in the value and importance of calling attention to citizens who are speaking out online all over the world.

International Blog Day on Thursday

(Cross-posted from Global Voices)

Don't forget!  The second annual international Blog Day is coming up this Thursday, August 31st. Please spread the blog love by participating. A very exciting thing is the vast array of languages in which people are blogging about Blog Day. It will be a day in which we celebrate our right to express ourselves online, and help each other to be heard above the din of spin and bad news... and in some places, help people to be heard despite efforts by governments, politicians or companies to silence independent speech online.  Thanks to Israeli blogger Nir Ofir who conceived and organized Blog Day. I repeat a recent quote from about why we should all participate:

On these days, of war in the middle east, I would like to remind you all that BlogDay is a celebration of people and for people. It is a celebration of the ability to visit blogs that are different from our own culture, point of view and attitude and it is a celebration of free content written by people like you and me. Wars, in the other hand, are being foughtby governments. Let us not let governments to stop the celebration of Internet, Blogging and democracy.

Here are Nir's instructions for participating:

In one long moment In August 31st, bloggers from all over the world will post a recommendation of 5 new Blogs, Preferably, Blogs different from their own culture, point of view and attitude. On this day, blog surfers will find themselves leaping and discovering new, unknown Blogs, celebrating the discovery of new people and new bloggers.

BlogDay posting instructions:

1. Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting
2. Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending on them on BlogDay 2005
3. Write a short description of the Blogs and place a a link to the recommended Blogs
4. Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st) and
5. Add the BlogDay tag using this link: http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2006 and a link to BlogDay web site at http://www.blogday.org

If you are interested, Global Voices invites you to help fellow bloggers living in other parts of the world get to know you better. We're finding that people in different countries blog for different reasons, and that blogospheres in different places have developed different kinds of relationships with the rest of their culture, politics, and mainstream media. We'd like to help people understand you and your region's blogosphere better. So if you have the time, please help us do this by writing a post any time between now and Thursday (or several if you like), answering some or all of the following questions:

• Why did you start blogging?
• What do you blog about mainly?
• Do you blog in your first language or in another language, and why?
• What motivates you to keep blogging even if (like most bloggers) you're not paid much for it?
• Is your audience mainly inside your own country or around the world?
• What do your family and friends think about the fact that you are a blogger?
• Does your boss know you have a blog?
• What is the relationship between blogs in your country or region and the mainstream media?
• When you blog, how would you describe what you write? Is it part of a conversation? Is it ranting? Is it a daily diary? Is it journalism? Is it some or all of these things at different times? Does the definition matter?
• Have blogs started to have an impact on politics in your country? Have they started to influence what stories get covered in your country's media? We'd love to know some examples.

When you're done, please trackback to this post at Global Voices, or leave a link to your post in the comments section of this post. If you don't have a blog but would like to share your views about the state of blogs and blogging in your country, please feel free to leave a comment on this post. On Blog Day, the Global Voices team will do a post or two summarizing, quoting, and linking to what you said.