Skimming through the Romanian blogging landscape

I started a brief research on the blogging activity in Romania, as I am already thinking to focus on one or some specific New Media applications in Romania as subject of my master dissertation. I found out that in April 2007 there were about 30 000 Romanians that were blogging, according to some statistics results that were published in an online version of a Romanian newspaper. I would say that the number is relatively large considering that at the end of last year there were only around 7 million internet users within Romania according to another online version of a Romanian newspaper,  out of a population of approximately 21.6 millions. Besides the most common uses of blogs: to publicly express personal experiences and feelings, to present news with a personal touch, to display entertaining content such as in jokes, links to videos on YouTube, to create image if you’re already in the public sphere (for e.g. politicians), etc., I discovered some uses of Romanian blogs that impressed me. On various blogs there are occasionally organized fund raising campaigns aimed at causes related to the blog’s content, such as a campaign to collect books for orphans, organised by a cultural blog. But an even more developed path than this random initiatives of fund-raising through New Media applications that I was impressed to discover, was an attempt to offer Romanian NGOs some basic theoretical but mostly methodological knowledge about the use of New Media in order to help accomplish the mission of their organization. That’s how a blog about blogging that serves advocacy purposes of NGOs was born: www.blONG.eu. Remarkable as I find the initiative, as a New Media student, I can’t help wondering how suitable specialists in old media or journalism are for offering training in Web 2.0 applications.