Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog

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?".

That's the tagline of the 3rd Annual AlJazeera Forum this year. You'll find indepth coverage over on Ethan Zuckermans blog (he does this cool thing where he live blogs everything - including the panel he is speaking on), AlJazeera Talk, the News Dissector (the blog of journalist, filmmaker, activist andf friend Danny Schecter) and the Forum blog.

While there are lots of interesting folks around, I'm really looking forward to tomorrows keynote by Lawrence Lessig. It's great that he is going to be here - I seeded the idea of having him speak at the Forum a while ago and Nasser Khan helped convinced the conveners of why getting Lessig was a great idea.

More tomorrow...

While I was away, my team pulled together a fantastic demonstration of new content creation technologies and opportunities for the news industry. We're at the 3rd Annual AlJazeera Forum (I blogged about the 2nd one here) where we have a booth and our Technology Director launched the AlJazeera New Era strategy that we worked on for the last couple of months. We're showcasing all sorts of fun things like shooting interviews with conference attendees on mobile phones and then uploading them to YouTube live.

Well done guys!