I have spent the last few hours catching up on what I have missed in the past few months: the troubles and turmoils of the Jordanian blogosphere.
As all that I read is essentially old news, I will not bother to repeat it here. But it involves the death of JordanPlanet, the birth of JordanBlogs.net (where this blog is also being aggregated, thank you very much) and QwaiderPlanet, some news about the removal of some blogs for JordanBlogs and the ensuing discussion and so on and so forth.
I have to admit that I’ve become quite disconnected with the happening of the Jordanian Blogosphere for some time. Pressure at work is one reason. The other is that my interests in the areas of technology and design mostly lead me to blogs outside our little corner of the world.
Aggregators that attempt to cover the ‘national blogosphere’ have obviously become difficult to manage. When the number of bloggers on an aggregator increases beyond 100, the user experience is bound to suffer.
And let’s admit that the nature of the Jordanian blogosphere has changed dramatically. In the early days it was a small community of young people who had what I would call a ‘liberal’ background. Then, as blogging became more popular, the community grew and started to reflect Jordanian society and its various divisions.
Blog aggregators are still a new animal and everyone is still experimenting with their format. Issues like categorization, personalization, filtering, editorial control are just some of the issues any aggregator has to grapple with.
As I took my little tour through Jordanian blogs, I was impressed at how they’ve evolved. At the end of the tour I was lucky to catch the hopeful post about the diversity of the Jordanian blogosphere on Black Iris:
And I admit, it is comforting. In some strange way it is a comforting feeling when I see various Jordanian bloggers celebrating their various origins, be they religious, ethnic and/or cultural.
Comments
2 responses to “The Jordanian blogosphere: growth and change”
I guess you as a pioneer of these fields have been there and back several times in the past. You probably can asses the need for these emerging communities to help bridge the gap between readers and writers vs writers and their interactive-readers. To generate a sort of a self sustaining society that would be able to reward and self correct the collective, all while spreading the culture from native perspective compared to external views that are rarely kind to the details of the societies
Thanks for the mention, much appreciated. The link might be incorrect though
I agree with you Qwaider. Virtual blog communities are an extremely important aspect of the citizen/user generated/social media phenomenon. But it’s time they evolved to the next level.
Thanks for the comment. I corrected the link