Notes from the Armenian Blogosphere

Unzipped and Unzipped: Gay Armenia posts a link to an article published by Hetq Online on blogging in Armenia. Interestingly, and despite an offer of an interview before and after the June Global Voices Online Budapest Summit, the author declined the opportunity and appears to have stuck with a small group of bloggers in her immediate circle. Before comments on both posts were deleted — I assume to avoid personal attacks based on partisan politics — one reader accused me of acting as if Global Voices Online was an “important project” and effectively questioned its role in promoting and amplifying the voices of bloggers.

In actual fact, Global Voices Online is an important project which influenced me to promote the Armenian-language, Russian-language and Armenian-language blogosphere since 25 January 2006. The idea came from Global Voices, and was later copied by The Armenian Observer since February 2007. Now, most of my time is spent promoting and mentoring Armenian bloggers perhaps more than anyone else. Anyway, there is a constant round-up of Armenian blogs on Global Voices Online and earlier work on my last blog are at the following link (click the ‘previous posts’ option at the bottom of the page for more than 120 other such posts):

Notes from the Armenian Blogosphere

Meanwhile, some concern has to be raised at the insular and polarized nature of the Armenian blogosphere which appears to have already developed into an all-too-common clan-like structure which affects nearly everything else in the country. It is still bizarre that journalists such as A1 Plus’ Shushan Harutyunyan purposely ignore projects such as Global Voices Online which directly influenced both myself and later The Armenian Observer to follow the example of promoting Armenian blogs.

Maybe it’s because she’s young and inexperienced as a journalist, but I suspect the reason has as much to do with the insular way of thinking here as well as attempts to control who is heard and who is not. Regardless, Global Voices Online continues to promote Armenian bloggers (and others) as does this site under the blogs category (290 posts to date). Meanwhile, local journalists such as Harutyunyan should be interested in Global Voices, yet ironically are not. Go figure.