Venezuela: Iria Puyosa · Global Voices
David Sasaki

Before Blog Day 2006 Rebecca MacKinnon elicited responses to a series of questions regarding how and why bloggers around the world devote so much time to an activity that pays little to nothing at all. Here is how Global Voices Venezuelan contributor Iria Puyosa responded (ES).
* I started my first blog because I needed a social space to share my ideas about fiction and about other topics that interested me, but which I didn't have time to formally develop.
* I still maintain my blog about fiction, Rulemanes para Telémaco (ES), where I mostly write about literature and film, but where I also get sidetracked by other topics from football to freedom of information and my travels.
Ten months ago now I opened another blog, Reste@dos (ES), in which I comment about citizen participation and Venezuelan politics.
And less than a month ago I started No suma cero (ES), which will hopefully be an incubator of collaborative projects related to knowledge management, environmental scanning for business intelligence, and social networks.
* I write in Spanish because it's the language I'm proficient at and it is the language of the people with whom I'm most interested in conversing. Occasionally I write in English – on Global Voices – because I'm interested in the role of serving as a bridge between different groups, in this case, separated by language.
* It is difficult to speak of personal motivations without resorting to clichés. I suppose that I like to foster conversations and I'm less timid when I write.
* It's hard for me to refer to those who read and comment on my blogs as “my audience”; it comes off to me as “one medium, many receptors” and that's not the idea. Also, the people that converse in Rulemanes para Telémaco come from different countries, Mexico and Spain being the principal ones; I've also observed that many (like me) live in a different country from where they were born. However, Reste@dos is a site that mostly attracts Venezuelans. No suma cero is still in diapers so I have no idea how cosmopolitan or local it might become; in its first three weeks, half of the visits have come from the USA.
* I have the impression that my family ignores the activity of my blogs even though I think I have invited them to get to know the blogs better when I launched them. Nor does the majority of my family read weblogs (mine aren't just the exception); I think that the few friends that read my weblogs consider it to be one of my several eccentricities (one more peculiarity, certainly not the weirdest).
* I don't really have a “boss” and so I don't know how to answer the question of whether or not my boss knows about my blog(s). Could the President of the Central University of Venezuela be an anonymous reader?
* The Venezuelan media seem to have recently discovered that blogs exist. I think they read about it in the Washington Post or in El Mundo de España, or maybe in Clarín. I still don't think they have discovered that there are nearly three thousand Venezuelan blogs, some with more than three thousand daily visits. One day they will find out I suppose.
* I guess my posts tend to be soliloquies; in order for them to be conversations they need impassioned interlocutors. Sometimes I find them and other times no. The definition [of a blog] is important like a goal in the game, not its final score.
* I don't think that Venezuelan blogs are having an significant impact on public opinion and political debate (ES); I've already said that the major media ignores us.