Guatemalan Blogs in 2006 · Global Voices
David Sasaki

TIME declared 2004 as the beginning of the golden age for blogs and ABC News declared Bloggers as the people of the year, during 2005 blog's growth didn't stop and according to Technorati there are more than 24 million blogs. Christian Van Der Henst, Guatemalan director of MaestrosdelWeb.com (webmasters), in the editorial“Do you have a blog already?”, lays out the characteristics which, to my criteria, have allowed blogs to become so highly accepted. If you don't know what a blog is, you can find the definition of blog  in the Wikipedia.
In Guatemala there are blogs that are already heading for their third anniversary, such as Zaxl ‘s and Cvander, and particularly Guate360, a collaborative blog maintained by youth, which I consider the virtual headquarter of all the Guatemalan blogs for being the blog with most national content and interesting discussions within its comments. Guate360 speaks to us about diverse topics but beginning this year we have to emphasize that beside all the content generated by this site in 2005 the young people that promote it have translated their interest to action and succeeded in multiplying smiles this Christmas thanks to the support of many Guatemalans, many of them residents overseas, who collaborated with an interesting fund-raising campaign and toy drive which took place completely on the Internet, showing the potential reach that the Internet can have with just a little bit of good will.
During 2005 I got to know many Guatemalan blogs and I decided to maintain and share with everyone a list of blogs of Guatemala, which beginning now will classify the active blogs and abandoned blogs and will add other web sites that sindicate news and information, among those El Periodico, Recrearte and the SAT; the latter of which is my job's website where we've worked to take advantage of the benefits of content syndication for our portal and within newsletters. Also worthy of notice this year is the EnRed program developed by the PrensaLibre and supported by young and very professional webmasters who in the great majority are also well-known Guatemalan bloggers.
I would have to write a complete news story to cover 2005 in the Guatemalan blogosphere, something that fills me with satisfaction when I see the ability and quality of the work being done. I have yet to find all the Guatemalan blogs that participated in my game of the “Testigo Chapín” (Guatemalan witness), I know they are plenty because recently I was checking the access registry to my page and I found at least 5 blogs that were new for me. I promise that in January I ‘ll compile them all and will write a post listing all the Guatemalan witnesses.
Guatemala, then, has interesting blogs of different types and they are all very good: I can't really say which one I like over another. Therefore, as a final recommendation, I'm listing the blogs that in this first week of the year have already published something, confirming that 2006 will be a better year for Guatemalan bloggers.
In this simple list of blogs you'll see a bit of everything: personal blogs expressing the feelings of the writer, technology blogs, webmaster blogs, system administrator blogs, blogs belonging to Guatemalan writers, to students to businessmen and even loving couples. If you wish to know more Guatemalan pages, visit my list of Guatemalan Blogs.
What is your opinion on Guatemalan blogs for 2006?