The first day of the World Blog­ging Forum 2009 was all about empow­er­ment and influ­ence: since 99% of the par­tic­i­pants are blog­gers it’s no sur­prise that we all agree on the total and com­plete dead­ness of old media — that’s just a ques­tion of the van­ish­ing point. But how to har­ness the power of the web to strengthen the civil soci­ety in dic­ta­to­r­ial states? This issue is far from easy to tackle!

Blogs and cit­i­zen journalism

Wael Abbass kicked off the first ses­sion: The Egypt­ian blog­ger and human rights activists pointed out the var­i­ous prob­lems blog­gers face in Egypt: Mubarak does not use direct cen­sor­ship but rather relies on “infor­mal” meth­ods of incred­i­ble pres­sure. “I’m almost out of opti­mism”, Wael said in his very mov­ing speech, as even though police vio­lence and tor­ture videos have been leaked and pub­lished, the sit­u­a­tion hasn’t changed at all — for 40 years. For us Western-European blog­gers, the pri­mary prob­lem is how to mon­e­tize our blogs, while Wael has to strug­gle to just be able to con­tinue his work — and when we talked last night, Wael explained that lit­er­ally no brands want to adver­tise on his highly crit­i­cal blog as they are afraid of the polit­i­cal consequenes.

Zhou Shuguang also has to face a quite restric­tive gov­ern­ment: China, famous for its “big Fire­wall”, does not fight the inter­net per se, but it’s doing every­thing to wall the gar­den — yet nobody is sure if block­ing e.g. Twitter.com is a polit­i­cal or an eco­nomic deci­sion, push­ing national copycat-service. For exam­ple: the fact that Twit­ter clients work in China is at least a par­tial proof that the “cen­sor­ship” is not just about keep­ing thoughts, but rather about keep­ing the com­pe­ti­tion out.

Jeff Jedras vom Canada, Michael Reuter, the Bavar­ian founder of Germany’s Yigg and Ramon Stop­pe­len­burg from Ams­ter­dam (“I’ve got a typ­i­cal Span­ish first name and a very typ­i­cal Dutch sur­name — com­plain with my par­ents!”) run their blogs in coun­tries where cen­sor­ship is not an issue — but mon­e­ti­za­tion def­i­nitely is. Michael thinks it’s vital to turn (polit­i­cal) blog­ging into a sus­tain­able busi­ness as well, and I totally agree with him in that this does not have to go hand-in-hand with any loss of cred­i­bil­ity. Ramon talked about his “Let me stay for a day” project which brought him to 72 coun­tries via invi­ta­tions of pri­vate folks:

And then it hit me — this is what the inter­net is really about, to get in touch with peo­ple. […] So I can travel and also have an oppor­tu­nity to open the eyes of peo­ple who can’t!

This exten­sion of vir­tual rela­tion­ships to actu­ally get­ting to know peo­ple from all over the world phys­i­cally, to even stay at their place (Couchsurfing.com has about 2mio pro­files by now) leads to a new qual­ity of under­stand­ing, Ramon believes:

The more we share, the more we put online about each other, about our­selves, the more we under­stand each other.

Again: nobody in here (not even the Roman­ian pres­i­dent) believes in old media. They are slow, biassed and tend to over­stretch the truth a lot — so it’s always a good idea to take a look for your­self if possible!

Dobó Mátyás from Hun­gary took a dif­fer­ent approach: he stressed the impor­tance of mon­e­ti­za­tion pos­si­bilites, because in his opin­ion, eco­nomic free­dom is the only safe road to stay free from inter­fer­ing influ­ences. I can hardly believe that it was me who had to add that money is not the only and not even the pri­mary moti­va­tion for a lot of blog­gers. The last keynote before lunch was very inter­est­ing: Andrea Vas­cel­lari from Fin­land told the story of his 5 min­utes of CNN fame: after the infa­mous school shoot­ing old media pro­duc­ers asked him to report, which he did and to inter­view peo­ple, which he denied:

I didn’t want to inter­fere with peo­ple suf­fer­ing, and I’m inter­ested in cre­at­ing a bet­ter web, so I can­not apply tra­di­tional old media strategies.

E-Democracy | Blogs and free­dom of expression

Giorgi Jakhai became famous in Geor­gia when he started writ­ing about the Russian-Georgian war. In his keynote he adressed the ques­tion: What is free­dom? Hav­ing had to leave his home­town due to “eth­nic clean­ings” dur­ing the war, Giorgi has expe­ri­enced the sit­u­a­tion of help­less­ness first hand and made dis­trib­ut­ing infor­ma­tion about the war his mission.

Par­vana Per­siyani from Azer­bai­jan talked about the sit­u­a­tion of blog­gers in the Baltic states — even though the free­dom of expres­sion does exist in the­ory, the wrong blog post­ing can have dire con­se­quences — like get­ting kicked out of the uni­ver­sity. And it’s also about eco­nomic hur­dles: if the price for inter­net access is too high, peo­ple sim­ply can’t afford this kind of com­mu­nica­tive freedom.

Mod­er­a­tor Dumitru Bor­tun, Pres­i­dent of the Hon­orific Jury, Roman­ian Asso­ci­a­tion of Pub­lic Rela­tions , summed up the two keynotes in a very con­cise way:

Both par­tic­i­pants take part in a war — an infor­ma­tion war. And the keynotes help us under­stand how this war works. What can we learn from that? Any kind of democ­racy requires infra­struc­ture (i.e. Greek agora), which is eas­ily overseen.

The follow-up sep­a­ker, Stela Popa from Mol­davia, is an atyp­i­cal vis­i­tor as she is not a blog­ger — but she is defend­ing two Mol­da­vian blog­gers who got into seri­ous cen­sor­ship trou­bles and it was fas­ci­nat­ing yet spooky at the same time to hear about the wicked ways of the Mol­da­vian (jail­time) cen­sor­ship. Speaker Luca Sar­toni from Italy, who works for 123people (he seri­ously claims that the com­pany helps peo­ple with “rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment” when the whole busi­ness model is just aggre­gat­ing unwanted spam) is con­vinced that democ­racy means cir­cu­lat­ing any kind of infor­ma­tion, not just polit­i­cal programs.

After the cof­fee break, Roman­ian jour­nal­ist Mihaela Onofrei, who has seen a fair share of con­flict areas from Azer­bei­d­jan to Afghanistan pre­sented her Transnistria-project and talked about the role of blog­gers in chang­ing pub­lic images. Petru Terguta vrom Mol­davia repeated the well-known plot of “evil gov­ern­ment” — and once again the blo­gos­phere played and impor­tant role in cir­cu­lat­ing and pub­lish­ing the kind of top­ics which would not turn up in Moldov­ian main­stream press.

Onnik Kriko­rian was born in the United King­dom, but moved to Yere­van in Arme­nia 11 years ago. In his double-role as a writer and pho­tog­ra­pher for main­stream media on the one hand and as a blog­ger on the other, he pre­sented some very inter­est­ing insights in the Armen­ian media system.

My upshot of the first day: #intense #chal­leng­ing #dif­fer­ent Why dif­fer­ent? Because I immensly enjoy get­ting to know so many peo­ple I usu­ally don’t meet at the aver­age 2.0 event. I’d like to say that I learned a lot and I laughed a lot, but even though the atmos­phere was just great, there were not that many funny facts on such a seri­ous topic. But the day brought an impor­tant insight for me: I strongly believe that we as blog­gers, as part of an inter­na­tional net­work, do have the respon­si­bil­ity to fig­ure out new ways of dis­trib­ut­ing infor­ma­tion — not nec­es­sar­ily via a new hi-tech aggre­ga­tor or via some com­pli­cated sys­tem, because maybe sim­ply offer­ing our blog-brothers and –sis­ters in dic­ta­to­r­ial coun­tries some space on our blogs to broad­cast their mes­sages might offer some relief as well as inter­na­tional aware­ness — I’ll pro­pose that tonight and I hope we can fig­ure out some­thing out that helps our friends in dic­ta­to­r­ial countries.