blogs

Ethan Zuckerman is a Conference Bloggin' Ninja and he has just shared some of his "secrets". I first saw him in action at the 2nd AlJazeera Forum where he was pushing out blog posts as fast as our live broadcast was beaming over air. While there were a couple of people blogging the conference, Ethan sealed his Ninja status by live blogging the panel he was speaking on. Yes, he was up on stage with his MacBook pounding out this post. Now I'll admit to occassionally taking my laptop into especially boring and longwinded meeting (not any meeting you've invited me to of course...) to catch up on my RSS feeds but blogging while talking on a panel with Chris Dickie and Amy Goodman?

Of course, he was back the next year blogging again. Mind you, he slacked off a bit the second time round but then who can blame him - we're great company out here in Qatar!

Liveblogging isn't easy - the first time I tried it was at our Forum where I banged out a post on the session New Media: Blogging and Beyond which I had organised. I also gave it a go at the Future of Web Apps in London but the shoddy WiFi caused me to stop halfway. This left me with a folder on my desktop full of rough notes on each session which read like more of a transcript than anything else.

Which brings me to what differentiates a Conference Bloggin' Ninja from other livebloggers - the ability to weave a cohesive narrative into the post while also providing a bit of context and commentary into the mix. All within a couple of minutes...

A nice quote from Kevin Anderson on the difference between news stories and blogs :

"News stories should answer questions and tie up loose ends. Blogs should pose questions and leave some ends dangling to encourage debate."

via Richard Sambrook.

(on a side note, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy seeing the Director of Global News at the BBC blogging panel discussions)

I woke up this morning to an invitation to join the Facebook group "Bullardgate". It seems that David Bullard, the pompous Sunday Times coloumnist has kicked up a storm with a scathing piece on blogging and bloggers. Vincent Maher didn't take kindly to Bullard's piece - not only did he rip it to shreds pargraph by paragraph but also kicked off a campaign to get Bullard to apologise.

I'm all for kicking up a storm and fighting The Man yet I can't help but wonder if David Bullard has just successfully link-baited us all. Maybe next week he'll announce how many links his article got. :)

Of course, this isn't the first time someone has gotten blogs so wrong. At least Bullard admits to having read a few blogs. At the 3rd AlJazeera Forum, straight after Lawerence Lessig's keynote I heard a senior executive from a big news corporation ask the person next to him "what's a blog?".

Marc Lynch has an interesting post called "Brotherhood of the blog" on the Guardian's comment is free. From the article:

Over the last few months, young Muslim Brotherhood members have begun blogging in force. This sudden, dramatic development may come as a surprise to western observers, who generally assume that blogging empowers liberal, pro-western voices. And it's true that the first wave of Arab political blogging featured mostly westernized, relatively liberal voices writing in English - often brilliantly individual voices who made little claim to represent the broader political spectrum. Much coverage of the Arab blogosphere continues to focus on these voices....

But the Arab political blogosphere has changed. Over the last couple of years, a new wave of more politically engaged bloggers has emerged, often writing in Arabic and deeply connected to local political campaigns. The young Bahraini bloggers who denounce repression against human rights NGOs, or the young Egyptians using blogs to support the Kefaya movement and expose police brutality still fit a recognizably liberal story of popular empowerment. But the Egyptian Muslim Brothers using the same blogging platforms and the same campaign strategies to raise awareness of the imprisonment and mistreatment of their brethren do not.....

Still, the Brotherhood's online activity has more in common with the secular political activists of the younger generation than with the older members of the Brotherhood. Today's younger Muslim Brothers are trying to harness blogging technology to generate the kinds of solidarity, support and attention that Alaa Abd al-Fattah and Kareem have enjoyed

This is an interesting trend to watch since many may argue that the Muslim Brothers represent the broader Arab (or Muslim) opinion. When Ethan Zuckerman, a co-founder of Global Voices (GV) was in Doha last year one of the things we discussed was that the GV bloggers (while fantastic) were not neccessarily representative of the broader communities that they came from. My concern was that since they are mostly English speaking and affluent (at least affluent enough to use an internet cafe) and thus may not represent the same aspirations as the "Arab Street" (or South American Street or African Street...). Of course, the good folk at GV are aware of this and are currently looking to hire an Outreach Director to bring others into the conversation.

And now that the Muslim Brothers from Egypt are blogging, it would be interesting to see how much weight Global Voices (and other bloggers) give to these voices.