Armchair journo

Morgunblaðið, one of Iceland’s two main dailies, has a great deal going for all those who want to get in their two cents’ worth [or ten]. They’ve set up a blogging service called blog.is, along the lines of Blogger, WordPress et al, that everybody and their grandmother [in Iceland] seems to be jumping on to. Reason? On their website mbl.is – the most visited site in Iceland* – they provide links to two featured blogs every time you visit the site, plus the first couple hundred words of that post. And often these are just as interesting as the news themselves.

That said, you might be forgiven for thinking that only the more prominent individuals in Icelandic society write blogs [pundits, media people, politicians and the like], as their sites seem to be featured most frequently. Some of them get tens of thousands of hits per week – and almost all get the sort of traffic that bloggers like our YT can only dream of.

However. To accommodate the ‘little blog people’, mbl.is also has a pretty cool feature called ‘blog this news item’. The way it works: you read a news item on their site that catches your interest, click on the ‘blog this news item’ link at the bottom, and have your say. Then, automatically, a link is generated to your post from the news item on mbl.is.

Pretty cool, huh? Seems it’s a win-win for everybody: bloggers get lots of exposure, and mbl.is gets added traffic to their site. Plus they hand the role of journalist over to the little people. Reality news reporting, anyone?

THE WEATHER
Looks okay at the moment – scattered clouds with some blue sky and moderate winds. However, earlier we had a mutha of a hailstorm, that virtually acted like a solar eclipse in that suddenly everything went [almost] dark. And as you know, that’s not the sort of thing we can afford right now, with our limited amount of daylight. We’ve been having scattered showers as well, that are forecast to continue today. Temps currently 2°C, sunrise was at 10.09 and sunset at 17.15.

* It gets around 250,000 hits a week, almost equivalent to Iceland’s entire population.