There’s an interesting post on Global Voices Online called Brainstorming for a more global conversation. Global Voices was at BlogNashville (which just wrapped yesterday), trying to get its message of world awareness out to more people. The session had the following question as one of its main foci:
Why don’t American bloggers link very much to bloggers around the world? People in the room suggested there are 2 main reasons: One reason is that they don’t know where to find the good blogs from other countries – unless Instapundit or somebody has linked to them. Another reason is that people don’t have enough context or knowledge about events going on in foreign countries to blog about them.
The Global Voices project, with our Index and Aggregator, is trying to provide a solution to the first problem. The other problem has to do with lack of context. How do you get people linking to fascinating posts on Armenian or Bahraini blogs when they have no context about the situations in Armenia and Bahrain? This is more difficult and there are no clear solutions.
A few solutions are mentioned in the post, including a fascinating “blog tours” idea, but as indicated by the title, all of this is still in the brainstorming phase.
I know that I personally feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of blogs and news sources currently in my aggregator (yet I keep subscribing to more, like Japundit and the Human Rights Watch), and I’m not even a “professional” blogger. There is just so much to take in out in the world. Tagging helps with relevancy, but not everyone is doing that yet (including myself ;_;).
I hope everyone can find a way to sort the important stuff out of the deluge–other than by simply shutting the deluge off.