Surprise: Georgia university brings blogs to Toronto

The best thing about the conference for me was that I finally met Jeff Jarvis, who, like an older brother, has always supported me, despite our political differences. It was also very great to meet Rebecca MacKinnon, Jay Rosen and Jim Elve in person. (I had met Dan Gilmore in Vienna last summer)

So, aside from these personal aspects, I am glad that some of the high-profile Canadian bloggers finally got a chance to meet and share their thoughts -- and get some local press.

As I said last night and David Akin confirmed it, blogs are not as known -- never mind popular -- in Canada as they are in the States and part of it could be because the majority of mainstream Canadian journalists have not been able to understand this new medium and how they can use it for their own journalistic purposes. Therefore they see it as an unreliable, teenage-oriented hobby, same as chat rooms, instant messenger, etc.

We Canadian bloggers should think of creative ways to talk more about blogs and its socio-political implications, so the public could gradually understand why blogs are important and how they can use them for their own purposes.

One of the greatest ways to start, I think, is to quote from Canadian blogs -- and also introduce them this way -- in hip weekly magazines such as Now and Eye. Now, for example, has a technology page every week which could be great starting point for such thing.

P.S: I forgot to say that the five minute time for each of the Global Aspects panelists in the latest possible panel, while everyone was having dinner, was probably not a good idea. However, in such conference, that was even a big success: Who else in Georgia would even care about the outside world, let alone international blogs. So, special thanks to Leonard Witt, for his brilliant idea to bring blogs to traditional journalists, and then both of them to Toronto, which one might guess, due to its diverse society, would embrace blogs more than others.