web2fordev conference has started

A great first day on the web2fordev conference lies behind me. I arrived on Sunday and already had the pleasure to sit around with my fellow bloggers - journalists from Africa. Lately they already made some very interesting podcasts and during the conference we will have video interviews, but also direct video coverage from selected sessions. It is so far a great atmosphere with people from all around the world as far as the Fidschi, South Sea. Today we focused on training for web2.0 beginners. I did two presentation on blogging and tagging together with Tobias Eigen, Karel Novotny and Pier Andrea Pirani and many more were involved.

We are the FAO headquarter in Rome and we already had interesting discussions on web2fordev. I really liked a presentation by Janyanta Chatterjee about Sharing farmers knowledge through audioblog, which shows the impressive potential of these new technologies. And it will become even more effective ones it goes over mobile phones.

I really liked the openness and high interest of all participants, which was very motivating as a presenter. Once again I experienced how complex web2.0 is and how many facets it has. Blogging was fairly easy to present, whereas the different purposes of blogging are often not known. I presented the personal blog approach, a perspective on an internal group blog, the Nata village blog and the Voices of the field blog.

Very intriguing was a discussion during our tagging presentation. Even though tagging sounds in general easy, I experienced once again, how different tagging is used and therefore how tricky it is to explain it. Nevertheless the interest by audience showed to me that many sense the power in it. I will write the next days more posts from the conference either here or at the web2fordev blog.