On the Local Blogosphere
I was playing around with my wordpress installation trying to upgrade this blog and bring it back to life when it hit me. emoodZ.com is more than 4 years old, I have been blogging for 4 years.. well .. on and off..
It is always an issue of time management at my end, when you have so much going in your life you have to go with your priorities, and blogging doesn’t happen to be anywhere high up in my list.. but that’s a separate story..
What’s saddening is that it’s not only me who stopped blogging, but most other local bloggers I used to follow just decided to disappear as well, for no obvious reason.
We had a decent online community, and a good thing going. I used to skim BahrainBlogs before my daily round on newspapers and local forums for my local news digest.. We have just lost all of that.. Why?!
And don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to overlook the current local bloggers. But we had a much stronger community, I clearly remember discussing setting up a society for local bloggers. What exactly happened?
The coverage is still there, thanks to Global Voices, Google and international media. Our words are reaching out to the rest of the world, why can’t we have a blogging community as strong as our neighbors? Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE even Qatar all have a very strong blogging community and bloggers. Why is it just us that are behind? Why did blogging suddenly stop flourishing and suddenly go under the radar?
Whatever happened to Lulu’s Bahrain, Blabbing Bahrania, Silly Bahraini Girl? Life in Bahrain? Why can’t I read the rambling of Silveroo and the beautiful poetry of NewMe? The amazing posts of AlKhuzaie? Why can’t I read for Layal7 anymore? Eyad? Citizen X? Intuitive Strums of BuZain? Jaffar AlOmran? Yaqoob’s Dome? Why is bahrainblogs.org blocked and without us finding a way around that?
Why have we all stopped? The country needs you to talk, readers, news agencies and other bloggers are out there hungry for what you have to say about everything that is going on in the country and beyond, we all had something going, why just let it die?
Could it be the lack of interaction? The lack of recognition? Maybe we couldn’t “market” blogging out like it supposed to be? And get more people in the community? New blood? Local forums are flourishing, people do write, do interact and discuss. Why can’t we have that here? Through blogs?
Help me out here, what has changed?!
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* Image in use courtesy of: concurringopinions.com
Nothing really changed, just people. Blogging is a tough job, somedays even you will know that you simply just dont feel like writing anything and then life gets in the way. Old blogs do wither and fade away but new ones take their place.
You just got to find new ones.
[...] round on newspapers and local forums for my local news digest.. We have just lost all of that.. Why?!“ Cancel this [...]
It’s a worldwide general trend. People are ditching their blogs and switching to services like Twitter to push out little size-bites of info in SMS style.
Much easier.
good question mohd.. why did bahrainis stop blogging?
i think for two main reasons.. the first being, as Mike stated, that social networking is taking over.. and filling the status box is much more easier and requires way less mental effort than creating a new blog post..
the second reason is that people do not feel comfortable enough to speak up anymore.. especially those with exposed identities.. think of what made us crave bahraini blogs so bad.. it’s exactly what is missing today..
anyway i hope that the gathering you guys had today makes a difference in the local scene.. we need to be clear about what is needed from it..
all the best
look who’s tallking !
u have ur reasons od absence just like others.
i try to follow up everybody and yes everybody is just like u, post a couple of posts and leave for another couple of years.
I will have to agree with Mike here; I had the rss feed set up to pull my posts to facebook wall and the number of comments I got there is nearly double of the ones I got here. As a blogger it’s natural that the more comments and readers I get the more encouraged I would be to write. The readers are there; I had links to my posts and regained some traffic as soon as I started posting again. It’s just… that we need to cater for the new preference of “little-bite info” locally.. facebook & twitter..
The point of the matter is, we need a proper online voice for the people of Bahrain, the local forums and the local public media are infested with propaganda and sectarianism.
We need to get our voice out there..
1. natural blogging lifecycle: people’s lives change, those of us who were students and used to blog, now work, married etc and have a different relationship with the ‘online’ community
3. a handful of bloggers with a loud voice: people like Mahmood, chanad etc started early and built a large online foreign community around them, when they went, that entire readership went with them
4. early starters, late finishers: we were on the scene before most of the others in the ME and before blogging took off in egypt, saudi etc and that explains most of the interest in bahraini blogs at the start, whoever as blogging took off elsewhere, the handful of us, moved on to other Web 2.0 social networking platforms.
2. poor replacement rate: the problem isn’t with people who have stopped blogging, the problem is that people are not starting new blogs ie the uptake has slowed down and popularity decline
3. Symptom of a wider fatigue and disillusionment with politics
4. Rise of the bahraini arabic blogs: as we witness the demise of english blogging in the country, blogging in arabic accelerated over the last 2 years.
Good to see you still here BB !!
Funnily enough – I was thinkning the same thing. So I put up a post myself
Good to hear you’re all alive though.
More here
Dude spot on!
I dunno why I stopped blogging or why the rest of the guys stopped contributing? I for one stopped because I got busy with my work abroad but I dunno why the others stopped.
I really need to try and get back to blogging. Good thing is, am coming back to Bahrain for good soon so am sure to find something to rant about again and flame the old passion
But yeah we all need to make a comeback… We all do…