"Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. One thing's for sure: they're rocking the foundations of the media in countries as different as the United States, China and Iran." (Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents, Reporters without borders, September 2005)

mvblogosphere is an attempt to track, map and analyze the exponentially growing Maldivian blogopsphere, in order to draw a larger portrait of the social, cultural, political and economic structures they represent. mvblogosphere is also a venue to explore more information about blogging and what other Maldivians are blogging about, which in turn will help to strengthen the quality and quantity of the overall blog content, and may even revive some dormant blogs.

Before 1995, there were only less than 3 Maldivians with a personal home page. Ten years later it has grown to a level that is hard to keep track of. More recently with the emergence of blogging, a lot more Maldivians have started to release their thoughts into the blogosphere. Some Maldivian blogs have more information in it than what an average Maldivian 100 years ago would have ever read in their lifetime. Some reveal private inner thoughts, others offer analysis of their political, social, economic views. The influx of information in the plethora of weblogs is a reflection of the social culture of the Maldivian community all over the world.

An interesting observation is the way each blog is linked to another. As we humans are social animals, we tend to form different levels of links with others in the society. By bloghopping from a random maldivian blog, one would be able to surf through over a hundred other maldivian blogs at any given time.

The mvblogosphere project got initiated when Senn (visual artist / network technician) compiled a list of the Maldivian blogs he was able to visit from one random point and showed it to Shahee (media designer). With a collaborative effort, they were able to come up with techniques to visualize the blogosphere. When Simon (programmer) and Inash (developer) saw the visualized list and the images, they in turn developed modules enhancing the project further. These modules include generating of recently updated blog entries page (by automatically detecting the feed address and the titles of the blogs from the mvblogosphere database). Also a module for exporting of the entire list or a select list of blogs as an OPML file which is used by RSS / News readers / aggregators (such as Bloglines / Newsgator etc) to exchange lists of RSS feeds.

After launching the project on 20 Jan 2006, 12:00am, MVT, the project developer blog may be a bit more slow, but if you would like to participate in the project please feel free to check it out and email info@mvblogs.org. You could also email comments and suggestions to us. Also, if you would like to remove a link from our database do contact us as well.

Thanks and keep on blogging.

20 Jan 2006

Coordinated by Shahee & Senn
Developed and Programmed by Simon, Inash, Senn & Shahee
Search Tool by Waddey using Google Co-op.
Visual Design by Ayesh & Shahee.