Cambodia Blogger Meetup Forgot my 'Moto Taxi' cap! But people found each other anyway at our first ever Cambodia Blogger Pub Night. The Phnom Penh came two hours early and sorted Cantina's Wi-Fi connection. Tharum spotted me from my photo. Kampuchea Crossings completely forgot but wandered by for food. Left to right: Kampuchea Crossings,The Phnom Penh,Tharum,Jinja. We were dive-bombed by little grasshoppers; summer is upon us. But it was a fairly cool evening, it's been cool all week. Great to meet everyone, we compared notes on how we do that thing we do. Tharum works in IT and has plenty of technical skills. He wants to make it easier for Cambodians to do blogs, and is keen on a portal site for newbie Camboside bloggers. The Phnom Penh thinks that unicode Khmer fonts are the way forward. I suggested we have a little 'Cambodia Blogs' button for our sidebars. (Probably 'Global Voices' too.) And we all concurred that there should be some directory for our growing list of Cambodia weblogs - maybe a wiki page. It's good to see all these blogs starting up in the provinces... the big question is, will they continue? I'm estimating the number of in-Cambodia weblogs at 50 and rising. I haven't even checked LiveJournal's listings yet, we are just getting started! Many regional blogs are coming out of the Cambodia Community Information Centers (CICs). They are also developing regional portals and are proving to be a valuable resource. Will they eventually become self-supporting? NGO funding is OK for now, but won't last forever. Time will tell. We also had some paeleobloggers ('dead tree bloggers' quoth bar proprietor Hurley): the Phnom Penh Post and Cambodia Daily. They weren't there specifically for the story, just hanging out because Hurley's Cantina is crossroads of the world. Both were interested to get a general understanding of our motivations and aspirations. Not sure how articulate I/we were, we are still just figuring things out! I think that it would be a real accomplishment to see a regular weblog in a Khmer font - from Cambodia. (Wanna's already given it a shot.) However, there are advantages to English - Tharum is being interviewed by the Cambodia Daily and they would never have discovered him if it wasn't for him writing in a second language. Is the Cambodian Blogosphere "poised to explode"? Well, it was really just four people meeting in a pub. But it was fun and we'll do it again. And who knows what'll come in the future? ******************************************* Postscript: The Phnom Penh's Notes on blogger meetup: http://thephnompenh.blogspot.com/2005/07/cambodia-bloggers.html Cambodia4Kids has some techie tips: http://beth.typepad.com/cambodia4kidsorg/2005/07/the_first_cambo.html Global Voices Wiki Page. Blogs ahoy! http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/dyn/globalvoices/wiki/index.php/Cambodia Where's this regional blog training coming from? Aha. http://www.iri.org/progweeklysummary.asp?id=4561230337 P.S. btw If you're looking for art updates you often see here, a lot of the announcements and press releases - (Java Arts, French Cultural Centre, Sovanna Phum, etc.) I'm forwarding directly to 'What's On', a dedicated blog for Khmer arts info. French, English, Khmer all welcome.

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