From our foreign blogger

Following our recent scathing remarks on newspapers’ response to blogging, the Daily Telegraph has been in touch to point out that their foreign correspondents are actively blogging.

Credit where credit is due. I’ve been browsing through The Telegraph’s weblogs, and of course they are well written, as you would expect from professional writers. They give interesting insights into daily life in various countries. There isn’t enough space for all these nice touches in the paper. Travel is a theme that comes up - the terrible safety record of African airlines, the long, long queues at Charles de Gaulle Airport. A post that has attracted a few comments is about a mass murderer Joseph Kony, leader of the “Lord’s Resistance Army” plaguing Northern Uganda. (Monster at Large).

The Telegraph shows that blogs give extra space for wider expression by journalists. Indeed, their online editors have a weblog in which they express the view that blogs after 9/11 provided “more coverage”

But blogs are about much more than “more”. There is a big element that is missing from the Telegraph’s Weblogs. It’s interaction with other blogs. This is what makes blogs addictive and intriguing. It’s particularly powerful for blogs with an international viewpoint, because they bring together people from different countries. There should be an element of cruising the world’s weblogs and linking to them. Blogs will be very flattered to receive a link from the Telegraph, and will link back. Coversations will start. The Telegraph’s foreign weblogs will come alive.

Online websites run by businesses are very reluctant to link-out. It’s a big misunderstanding. The law of the web is that if you send people away to somewhere interesting, they will return to you to find more good destinations. (I paraphrase Dave Winer here). Google is the prime example.

On a technical point, it would be nice to aggregate all the Telegraph’s foreign correspondent blogs into one blog, so that we don’t have to keep on dipping in and out of various countries.

I look forward to the Telegraph’s weblogs becoming a global meeting point. When they start to twig about linking into the blogosphere, they might find that traffic to their weblogs starts to build month by month and that they have a major site on their hands - instead of the back end of the newspaper.

This entry was posted on January 17th, 2006 and is filed under Blog Home, Media, blogosphere. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.