I want to write both about the incredible progress of the blogosphere these past couple months, but also some problems that all of us bloggers face. I think I’m gonna divide it into two different posts, progress first, problems later.

BOBs

No, not our legal expert Bobby, but the Dutch-based, international Best of Blogs competition has come to a close and in my opinion has done a pretty good job highlighting some of the best content and design around the world.

War and Peace … and blogs

Last week I was listening to a podcast of BBC’s In Our Time and the show was on Zorastrianism. One of the guests pointed out that war was often a catalyst to the sharing of ideas. He used the Greco-Persian wars as an example, but it’s obvious the theory still holds true today. Sadly, without the war in Iraq, blogs like Baghdad Burning, Raed in the Middle, Iraq the Model, and A Family in Baghdad would not have 1/100^th the readership they do now. It’s good that Americans - and people all over the world really - have a heightened interest in hearing directly for the voices of the country we are occupying/at war with/liberating/invading/whatever, but how do we keep such a global interest alive during times of peace? How come nobody’s reading blogs from Belarus?

Blogging and International Relations

International Relations is most often summed up as a way of analyzing how power is distributed in the global sphere. But it is also, just as it sounds, how countries relate and communicate and influence one another. Which is why so many books pouring out of International Relations departments lately have been focused on globalization. An important up and coming influence in international relations has been all but left behind by the academics. Blogging has had and will continue to have an enormous influence on international relations and yet the only professor who has studied and written on blogging’s international effects is Dan Drezner, himself an avid blogger.

As Drezner describes, blogs in Iran have had an enormous political impact. In fact, the NY Times just jumped on the bandwagon of what Persian blogger, Hossein Derakhshan, has been saying for months now: that in a country where media is state controlled, the blogosphere offers the best place for civic discourse. Same with China and North Korea and I can guarantee you Cuba is not far off. Ethan Zuckerman’s weblog is a great resource of how blogging is changing media and government in Ghana and throughout Africa. Global Voices Online is another great resource for the intersection of blogging and international relations.

Blogs offer an amazing opportunity to learn more about other countries and cultures from an individual’s perspective. Most of the foreign blogs I read are from Mexico and many of those are in Spanish, but you can see a complete list of blogs I read, categorized by region, via my Bloglines account (I update this account daily via LiveLines).

A Nobel Prize Winner and a Judge

I’d like to welcome the blogosphere’s first Nobel Prize winning blogger and federal judge blogger … Gary Becker and Richard Posner are trying their hands at blogging.