Thailand: BlogconThai 2006 · Global Voices
Enda Nasution

BlogCon Thailand 2006, the first blogger meeting that discuss Weblogs, Online Information and Collaboration Thailand was successfully held on Sunday, 19 March 2006 with about 25 participants that came not only from Bangkok, but also from Phuket, Chiang Mai  and even Bali.
Took place at Thammasat University Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication in Bangkok, the event will not be as successful without the kind support of the university and faculty that lend us the place (and provided refreshments!), but the highest credit has to go to Paola Di Maio that initiated the WOICT Groups that planned and organized the meeting with the generous help from two outstanding Thai bloggers, Jim Puntasen and Chinarut Ruangchotvit.
Several discussion and interesting information came up from speakers at the conference.
Don Sambandaraksa, the Bangkok Post IT columnist point to The Media Slut, a an anonymous collaborative blog among IT Journalists in South East Asia that has been posting Thailand anti-government rally photos from Bangkok since at the start of movement.
Ric Shreves, who now lives in Bali, another Bangkok Post IT Columnist, mentioned his blog Post DB Open Source Project that carries Bangkok Post logo, which might be the only blog in Thailand associated with mainstream media.
Other discussion range from blog as social tools that brought up by Michael Bauwens the founder of P2P Foundation to more pragmatic issues at hand such as Thai Education and Technology Development for Poor Rural Area and how blogs can help create awareness about these issues also discussed.
Interesting data shared by Derek Brown, who is the Marketing Director of Microsoft Thailand, that there are 990,000 MSN Space users (MSN Blogging application) in Thailand. He estimated that majority of this users, who is also MSN IM users, use the tools to share media online such as pictures, music and videos.
We also introduced to Thailand's brewed blog application, GotoKnow.org (The Gateway of Thailand's Online Knowledge Management) owned and maintained The Knowledge Management Institute (KMI) Thailand, an organization that works towards driving Thai society to become knowledge-based society in government, private enterprise and in particular civil society.
Freely available, the site GotoKnow.org home page work as an aggregator of newest postings on the site with list of blogrolls on the left column identified some of popular bloggers as Superstar or Star blogger.
After four hours of discussion, the meeting end at 5pm with closing remarks, and cheerfully agreed by everybody, that the meeting has been very interesting and a useful learning experience.
For the time being the discussion will move to the online group, however second meeting of Thai Bloggers already been discuss and plan to have in 6 months time in Chiang Mai.
Individuals or Bloggers that interested in the event are suggested to join the group or watch or new information posted on the BlogCon Thailand blog or this wiki.
Blogcon Thailand 2006 MP3's are available to download on this site.
For pictures of the event go here.
Until next time. :)