KosovaKosovo.com is going out of business. If you happen to have money or friends that happen to have money, help them out. KosovaKosovo.com is the most linked to address on this blog.
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Four-day-long world class Exit Music Festival in Novi Sad is over. Recap is here.
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Politics works in misterious ways. Macedonia's right wingers came on top in last week's elections. The winning VMRO-DPMME is the party that led the fight against Albanian guerrillas in western Macedonia in 2001. The guerrillas after the war transformed themsleves into a political party called BDI and joined the leftist SDSM in creating the government that overtook VMRO-DPMNE. Another Albanian party, PDSH, when it found itself out of government with the ouster of VMRO-DPMN, turned into vocally nationalist accussing BDI of giving up interests of Albanians in Macedonia and even going so far as calling for border changes in the Balkans. PDSH became the chicken hawk when the fighters turned into BDI and won the Albanian vote. Now PDSH has cocluded a broad agreement with its former coaltion partner during the war in Macedonia, the natioanlistic VMRO-DPME, to enter government. BDI might switch sides and do the same, having this way most of Albanian votes in Macedonia part of government.
SDSM says that it is ready to make a deal with anybody, 1) as long as it's not VMRO-DPME and 2) it allows the reforms that SDSM hopes will transform the Macedonian economy. Good luck! Kosovo will be watching.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
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2 comments:
Its sad that they are going out of business I think. But I must admit I'm angry at them because they didnt make a better go of it.
As a former project manager it would be relatively easy to get funds if the project was properly thought out, and more importantly carried out.
I'm thinking of writing them a letter to make some proposals. One of those proposals would be to make it feel less like an elitist middle class, politically correct, almost out of touch type of place and more like something which was relevant to ordinary Kosovo Serbs / Serbs/ Kosovo Albanians.
Its no big deal if there are disagreements amongst Serbs and Albanians, just because nationalists on both sides are active doesnt mean that its a good thing to never have disagreements.
Agreeing to disagree for example and to respect the difference of opinion is far superior than to try to bury disagreements under the carpet out of fear. As we know that kind of 'agreement' has a tendancy to blow up later on.
Its a huge disapointment that they didnt involve other Kosovo Albanian / Serbian independent journalists and try to expand their horizons and audience.
Our Belgrade Blog has more visitors and Kosova/Kosovo website wasnt even in the top 100,000 websites.
If I had the time I'd go to the BETA office in person with a project plan.
I dont know warchild if you have the inclination we could draft a joint letter. I'm not sure if I have time to conduct such a project but at least a letter might give them better ideas about how to go about maintaining international interest.
You can find my email in my profile if you are interested.
Bganon,
I'm sorry for the delayed response. First, the agencies didn't say that they lost the funding because they didn't have enough visitors. But still, I wouldn't want KosovaKosovo to be any different. You have to keep in mind that they were doing agency news. They are inevitably bound to be boring and maybe even not attract enough visitors. But those are also their strengths. I'm guessing that the masses in Serbia and Kosovo don't use the internet for news so I don't think any project no matter how good will make a difference directly. However, it is nice for the educated and better-off ones to visit one website and see both sides of the story told without emotions. Having the extremists tell their versions will not bring people together but rather play into already held beliefs about the other side (think US Fox News).
Btw, B92 blogs seemed interesting. Svilanovic's story I noticed later was printed across the Prishtina newspapers. I was kindly surprised to learn that he was born in Gjilan/Gnjilane.
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