A newspaper article about Cambodian Weblogs was printed for the first time in July last year in the Cambodia Daily. ‘Nation’s ‘Bloggers’ Hope To Facilitate Dialogue,’ which appeared in the front-page of the English and Khmer language newspaper, is a magnet that attract many people to begin exploring this new living Weblogs on the Internet. 2005 marked the growing popularity of this citizen’s digital media. One of country’s lowest Internet penetration in South-east asia, although not one Weblog was created per an hour, at least one created every day. To its nature, most of them, after several weeks or so, become orphanage weblogs. Probably it can be compared to the Internet gold rush in the last century. Several days later another news article of the same author was published in the Wired Magazine. Titled ‘Blogs Taking Off in Cambodia,’ the news informed the world the growing popularity of this online conversation. When, as usual, expatriats take the lead in technology deployment and advacement, Cambodian young people, represents most of the country’s population, makes the news headlines.
This early March a German-language newspaper featured a 6-pages long documentary about Cambodia, which tells story about my life as well. In September 2005 I received an email from a group of Pannasastra University of Cambodia students. I was so surprised. Given advice by their professor, and after reading the Cambodia Daily news article, they run an email interview with me to feature in their ‘Mass Communication’ research project, which is part of their Fundamentals of Communication course. And when you visit Guardian Unlimited, type my name ‘tharum’ in the search box. That said, one of my Weblog post was mentioned in the International blogwatch of the British online newspaper site. “In Cambodia, the excellent ThaRum offers insight into why the country’s students are having to simultaneously enrol in up to three colleges …”
Inspiration happened, proliferation took place. I was invited to join as contributing-author for an ivory league’s project. Global Voices Online is a non-profit global citizens’ media project, sponsored by and launched from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. As part of the global team, I met many other authors from around the world in London in December 2005. Thus, it seems in less than two years I have explored so many amazing things.
Tharum,
thanks for this really useful post. Was not aware of most articles and found them very interesting.
Also, congratulations to all your achievements.
I would consider it a contribution than achievement.