A Latvian blogging site, blogiem.lv, has opened for registration and use by the general public. Until now, it has been a work in progress and limited to invitation-only (to keep the number of users under control while the system was being stabilized). The site is a labor of love by Kristaps Kaupe, a programmer at a small Latvian IT company and one of the bloggers featured in the cover story on bloggers in the annual IT magazine published by Dienas bizness, the newspaper where I work (until December, when I take a new job).
Kristaps has been writing his own blog on IT issues, music, and nationalist politics. He manages to keep these balanced in such a way that I keep reading him even though I disagree with his politics (I started a Latvian-language blog on libertarianism on blogiem.lv just for fun and to present an alternative to the --to my mind-- somewhat loonie-tunes politics of the other bloggers on blogiem.lv, Kristaps' friends and political sympathizers) and his musical taste is that of another generation. As a matter of fact, his IT posts are also too geeky for me to fully understand, but I like reading stuff that is written by someone who seems to be smarter than I on some issues. That's how you learn.
As blogiem.lv opens up, I think we will see a greater diversity of views and subjects, although I suspect most of the blogs will be people writing about what they fed their hamster etc. But even these have a certain charm. There is one blog, for example (part of the pre-open site) written by an average, I would guess, 15 or 16 year old girl who is simply happy to have taken an exam, or that there is a school vacation, or that friend called her. I glance at it to be reminded that there are nice, normal kids growing up here in Latvia.
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