The World Blog­ging Forum 2009 has started today. In the morn­ing, Mr. Tra­ian Basescu, for­mer mayor of Bucharest and now pres­i­dent of Roma­nia, greeted us with a warm wel­come; I actu­ally expected him to just drop by for a cou­ple of encour­ag­ing words, but Mr. Basescu obvi­ously is a quite avid fol­low­ers of the blo­gos­phere and even pointed out that he prefers polit­i­cal blogs over tra­di­tional media as they are a lot less biassed.

One of the orga­niz­ers also told me yes­ter­day in the evening, that one of the Romania’s A-bloggers got leaked some info about the event way too early — seems he was diss­ing the event and/or think­ing it’s a fake. Guess what — you couldn’t have been more wrong — thins is as real as events get

The loca­tion def­i­nitely is most impres­sive: the con­fer­ence takes place at the Palace of Par­lia­ment — I guess one could eas­ily get lost in here as this enor­mous struc­ture is the sec­ond largest build­ing in the world! We are sit­ting in a large cir­cle in a huge, heav­ily dec­o­rated room, we got simul­ta­ne­ous Eng­lish trans­la­tors, excel­lent WiFi and big expec­ta­tions. Apart from the noble set­ting, the event resem­bles a “tra­di­tional” (it *is* a weird attribute in this con­text though) BarCamp.

Today the WBF09 will deal with two top­ics: from morn­ing to noon it’s all about Blogs and cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism, in the after­noon we will take a close look at E-Democracy | Blogs and free­dom of expres­sion. Want to visit the Palace of Par­lia­ment vir­tu­ally? Check out the

WBF09 Live Stream

…or dis­cuss with us via Twit­ter, the offi­cial hash­tag is #wbf09. Right now, Loic Lemeur is start­ing his keynote about the fun­da­men­tal change from one-to-many to many-to-many media. Gotta lis­ten now!

Mihaela, Head Orga­nizer of the event and Loic LeMeur

btw, one more thing about Bucharest: traf­fic here def­i­nitely is crazy… I’m not the only one who noted that:

After checking-in at our hotel and dump­ing our bags, it was off with my fel­low blog­gers on the bus to the wel­come party. And that brings me to another obser­va­tion about Bucharest: the traf­fic here is crazy. Not Bangalore-bad, Ban­ga­lore was mad­ness, but it was jam-packed and peo­ple were con­stantly jock­ey­ing for posi­tion, with lights only some­times obeyed. It made for an inter­est­ing trip.

Palace of Parliament

Now that’s a chan­de­lier!