Blog musings in Portugal

The meeting of bloggers in Portugal today coincides with my starting Pedro Mexia's book "Fora do Mund O" (Out of this world). His book is a collection of the posts from two blogs, one of which was Coluna infame, written as a blog challenge "contra a hegemonia intelectual da esquerda " (against the intellectual hegenomy of the left). One of the authors of this blog, João Pedro Coudinho, now has a sort of web page/blog Dominical - a genre I haven't seen before. Pedro Lomba, who previously co-authored Coluna infame, now keeps a blog with Pedro Mexia and Francisco José Viegas. The three are journalists, and I see that Francisco José Viegas has a big name for himself as poet and narrator in Germany.

Ana Pago writes in the DN (Diário de Noticias) that blogs «influenciam pouco» journalism in Portugal. But José Pacheco Pereira, in an article in the Publico, reckons that "Cerca de 20 a 30 blogues portugueses fornecem todos os dias novas ideias, reflexões, informações, que um cidadão avisado e culto não deve perder. (About 20 to 30 Portuguese blogs provide all the new ideas, reflections, information that an informed and educated person shouldn't miss). He describes how this year the Portuguese blog world has gone from being a small group of pioneers using it as at an intimate space to becoming more agressive and politicised in a negative sense.

My own blog reading is the political, cultural sort in Portuguese, while in English it's from the world of new technologies and learning. I think I might experiment a bit with the site Weblog em Portugal and see how it compares to the blogspot I'm using.