But this week is more of a meta thursday bridge blog.

i googled for Bridge blogging, hoping that recent efforts had been reflected, but was curious to discover that there was in fact a wiki entry for Bridge blogging

sorry but I quote from there in extenso now:

What are BridgeBlogs?

Hossein Derakhshan (aka. Hoder) proposed three models for ways people can use weblogs to communicate between cultures: windows, bridges and cafés. Windows allow us to look into another culture, but not interact - an example might be a weblog of someone in another country, talking about her daily life to her friends and family. We've got a chance to look in, but we're not invited to interact.

Cafés are complex spaces where groups of people can meet to discuss in ways that they can't meet in the real world, due to geography, politics or language.Joi Ito's IRC channel is a good example of a café.

Bridges are more interactive than windows, but less complex than cafés. They're usually the project of a single blogger, or a small group of authors. Bridge bloggers write for an audience outside their everyday reality - for instance, when Ory Okolloh writes about corruption in Kenya, reaching family at home and readers at Harvard, she is bridge blogging. (And when people comment on her blog from outside Kenya, they're bridging back.

Some other great examples of bridge blogs:

Editor, Myself - Hossein Derakshan's English-language blog

Where is Raed? - Salam Pax's blog from Baghdad, now on indefinite hiatus. One of the original and most widely known bridgeblogs.

Black Looks - Sokari Ekine's blog on African Women's issues

Screenshots - Jeff's Ooi's blog on Malaysian politics

We're interested in creating an index of these types of online spaces, with a special emphasis on bridge spaces. This index, as it grows will be a resource for people who want to understand what's going on in different parts of the world from a personal perspective, as well as a journalistic or encyclopedic perspective. We hope this will be a resource for the mainstream media as they look for local voices to expand coverage in parts of the world they routinely fail to cover, as well as for individuals.

including IRC chans, Usenet lists, Yahoo groups, etc?

yes, if they meet other aspects of the definition. It's easiest for us to track blogs and wikis because of RSS, but we're very open to the notion that lots of this content is posted in other kinds of spaces... EthanZ 16:20, 6 Jun 2005 (EDT)

Everybody that links to Salam Pax, has to be taken seriously of course. Well, he (and my brother...) brought me to the blogging world.

there are others of course: emergentchaos he has the snappy quote: those bloggers who make an effort to blog about their country in a way that an outsider or foreigner can understand

and

Asteres says this:
?? ????? blog, ??????? ?? ???? ??? ??? monitor ??? ????????? ??? ?? ??????????  ?? ??????? ??? ?? ?????? ??? ?????????? ??? ???????? ????????????? ???  ???????, ????? ?? ?? ?????????? ??? ?????????? ??? ??? bridge blogging;
O.K.? O.K.

(those are supposed to be greek letters....

It all started however with this call by Rebecca MacKinnon.

more is here to find

But seriously, are we a bridge(and not a freight train) here at European Tribune.

I would most certainly think so.

With these rather fractious thoughts I wish you a good Thursday.

Update [2005-10-19 23:4:51 by PeWi]:this is an interesting link collection and he blogged about bridges as well.