Ergebnisse

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!

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