Jonathan: In terms of your question: I am grateful for Bloglines, as it allows me to “mark” posts as I go along during the week. Then on Wednesday, I go back to all of the posts that were marked and see if there some sort of reoccurring theme. It’s definitely an inexact science, but somehow it has come together.

To respond to your point: Having 10 different recommended guidelines makes it pretty broad in terms of what “should” go in the weblog summaries. I would think the categories marked as (A) could be seen as content entries, as they are less about the blogger and more about the subject being written about.

I think that GV explores the relationship between blogs and journalism. Many blogs link to articles in the media and write their own analysis. But I personally find blogs that write about experiences and gives insight into a particular country that wouldn’t necessarily be found in newspaper articles. There was one blogger from the DR who wrote about helping her mother’s political campaign and being threatened by some thugs with some pretty big guns. That, to me, paints a fairly good picture of what goes on in the DR.

The great thing about the project is that there are so many people involved, each with an idea of what they think is important and what is interesting.

Part of the interesting part of this task to keep up with the Bolivian blogs, is that I enjoy seeing the list of blogs grow on the Blogs Bolivia site. This time six months ago, I could have named the Bolivian blogs, but it’s great to see new ones pop up all the time.

I think that blogs have surpassed the popularity of Geocities pages. I know which blogs catch my own personal interest, as you can see some of my favorite blogs on the right hand column of the main page. My only concern was that I didn’t want the blog summaries to be a reflection of my own personal tastes.

In addition, I think it’s okay to be fascinated with “bloggers”, because I find it very interesting to find out why people decided to blog and other issues associated with their blogs.

I don’t think any of what I just wrote responded to your comment, sorry.

My split of GV’s guidelines is that they are either fascinated/fixated with the “blogger phenomenon”(A) or fascinated with “bloggers as a class of people” (B)

See what I mean, GV recommends its editors post about:

1) “Bridge-blog” posts discussing what a certain blogosphere has been talking about lately (A)
2) Profiles of various country and/or regional blogospheres (A)
3) Profiles of particularly interesting bloggers in different countries (B)
4) News about what’s happening in various blogospheres around the world (A)
5) Discussion and demonstration of particularly interesting tools that bloggers are using to do innovative things in different places (A)
6) Posts about: “here is an issue in xxx country that the mainstream media isn’t talking about, but here’s what the bloggers are saying.” (B)
7) Posts about how a certain blogosphere is responding to a certain issue. (A) Posts showing how a certain part of the world’s blogosphere is reacting to a particular traumatic news event. (A)
9) Posts capturing a news story coming from blogs somewhere which appears to be quite important but which has not yet hit the Mainstream Media’s radar screen, but which needs to get more attention. (Exception to the rule)
10) Posts translating something interesting coming off a non-English blogosphere which the mainstream media isn’t covering and which the English-speaking blogosphere doesn’t seem to be aware of, but should be. (A)

This doesn’t leave much to be said about the content (except perhaps #9), relevance or timeliness, and that leaves you -as an editor- hanging. How long can these fascinations last? That is, before blogs become as popular as geocities homepages once were? (And suffer a similar end).

GV’s guidelines seem to function under the premise that bloggers will forever rejoice over how post-modern they are, how what they are doing is better that what the main stream has to offer and how the “blogosphere” will forever thrive as a closed club. The line between blogs and social-networking emporiums (such as MSM Spaces or MySpace) and commercial websites is blurring rapidly, and if we get stuck with these fascinations the great connectivity potential of blogs will end sooner than later.

Eduardo, this is part of a post I’m writing for my own site, A question though: what’s your scheedule for writing/updating the column? do you keep tabs all week or just write it all in one day?

Another place where they keep track of Bolivian blogs. The name is Bolivia - Blogalaxia. It is from the Perublogs site. They say they have 131 Bolivian blogs.