Blogs & Blogging

The Rising Voices, a project by Global Voices‘ David Sasaki, has released a wonderful, straightforward introduction to the subject we love – An Introduction to Citizen Media.

The booklet has an overview of blogs, blogging, podcasts and vblogging with case studies along with a few interesting quotations on media. It can be a good resource to understand these aspects of citizen media and blogs for the novice or wanna-to-be bloggers. Direct Download.

And, here is something that may be useful to the established bloggers – Tips for Conference Bloggers. Produced by Bruno Giussani and Ethan Zuckerman, this is an interesting reading describing how to blog during conferences and rewards of conference blogging. Direct Download.

In Nepal, I rarely see this as useful booklet because:

• A lot of bloggers, including me, are still on planning phase to buy a laptop.
• I am yet to attend a seminar in Nepal that provides internet facility.

The students of Mass Communication and Journalism at Madan Bhandari Memorial College, Kathmandu invited me for a lecture session on blogging on Saturday morning. It has been long since I have formally talked about blogging to the people; and I was happy to resume the talks.

I felt all good seeing nearly five dozens of youngsters, along with the MC&J faculties and assistant campus chief, eagerly waiting to learn something about blogs and blogging. The talks went as usual – introduction to blogging, blogging experience, the question of objectivity, how can blogs supplement journalism or fill the vacancy left by mainstream media and a practical session on creating and maintaining blogs (the dial-up internet was little slow as the time ran out). The whole program lasted for almost two hours; and the best part of it was the enthusiasm shown by the participants.

Thank you!

To keep updated, I am posting links to two articles about citizen journalism:

• Voices of Freedom: Blogs and podcasts enable a powerful and authentic voice for marginalised communities sidelined by mainstream media (The Guardian, UK)
• The Participatory Nature of OhmyNews: Citizen reporters passionately committed to social change (OhMyNews, Korea)

Two things I noticed during the last fortnight was pleasantly surprising – both related to Citizen Journalism.

First is the question paper of Masters in Mass Communication and Journalism of the Purbanchal University. The Advanced Concept of Electronoc Publication paper for the students of the second semester carried a question on blogs.

Explain blogs as an alternative journalism mean in Nepalese context.

The five-mark question is, I believe, a proof that blog buzz is catching up in Nepal.

Second incident was a few days ago during the Training Techniques for Experienced Trainers workshop organized by Federation of Nepalese Journalists (FNJ) and International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). The course was meant for the journalists of various executive level in FNJ and was conducted by Jacqueline Park – the Asia Pacific Director.

I was there as the interpreter for Park and on the final day was a group project for the participants. One of the group comprising of experiened print journalists came up with the idea of citizen journalism. Although more of their session focused on how citizen can use the traditional media, I was impressed because I hadn’t hoped print journalists of that experience would came up with such an issue.

Their defination to citizen journalism: direct reach and participation of citizens in journalism which citizen use by directly sending news, views and opinion in the media.

They listed out benefits of citizen journalism. Some of the major benefits were active participation of citizen in journalism, citizen’s true feeling is raised, citizen’s love for media increases, newspapers do not need many staff reporters and increased sale of media.

Though throughout the discussion, blog was never mentioned, I loved the feeling of knowing that citizen journalism is not a very new concept and even the established journalists have begun feeling the need to integrate it for their benefits. Continue reading…

Archana Shrestha, the blogger lady with IT background, has come up with a brilliant idea of creating a list of Nepali blog sites. The Nepali Bloggers enlists 170 blog sites in alphabetical order. Bloggers can submit their blogs using a very easy form on the sidebar and that’s the beaty of it.

It is indeed one stop to peek into all Nepali bloggers. It has just begun. I hope that in coming days it will become the directory of Nepali bloggers with subjectwise division of blogs and some commentry. It’s a great effort and let’s support it.

An afterthought on Harsha’s comments on exclusion of blogs from the media content study during the period of Royal Rule in Nepal.

Khoj Patrakarita Kendra (Centre for Investigative Journalism) has published a book, Sankatkalma Samachar(News during Emergency ). It is a content analysis of main print media in Nepal for three months of the state of emergency. It also includes the scenario of FM radios. But it has left online media.

Continue reading…

Blogging gives a different identity – the online presence. But whey would someone doesn’t like to get that recognition; and blog anonymously. This is my personal exploration on the topic drawing from experience of Radio Free Nepal (RFN), Say Na Something and somewhat anonymous Zade. Continue reading…

If morning shows the day, then the Year 2007 is going to interesting for the bloggers. Two magazines this month ran the stories of bloggers and blogging:-)

In VOW (Voice of Women), Rosha Basnet invited Darshan Karki (Zade), Sujana Upadhyay and Archana Shrestha for a regular column – My Cup of Tea. The World of Blogging is a nice reading as the female bloggers shared their experience of blogging.

The Infotiser ran a feature on blogging. It has experience of Deepak Adhikari, Sailendra Kharel, Archana and Zade. Sadly, the story hasn’t been online so far.

Meanwhile, have a look at the new report that says Citizen Media is Here to Stay. Continue reading…