Batir Wardam Blog: Giving a shot at Professional Blogging

The first wave of blogs in the Arab World were naturally based on personal insights and perspectives with a dominance of political flavour in some cases. My own assumption is that the next wave will introduce thematic blogs that will focus on one or two particular issues and be designed as a service oriented blog media.

In the past couple of months I have followed the global professional blogs. In some definitions professional blogs aim at generating money out of blogging, but the general trend is that professional blogs do focus on certain thematic issues in a professional way and provide service that is needed by journalists, practitioners, researchers and even policy makers.

From what I learned professional blogging requires a lot of time, effort, patience and most importantly passion about the subject you select. I have opted to be a part of the emerging wave of professional blogs but could not decide whether to focus on my political/ economic blog (Jordan Watch) or my bilingual environmental blog (Arab Environment Monitor) . There is no way to have both. It is like not being fair to one of the two wives.

After some careful observations I realized that my passion is really for the environmental blog. It is the only environmental blog in the Arab region to the best of my knowledge, and I was happily surprised to know that around 250,000 hits have been received within 18 months. This is an indication of the need for environmental blogging in this area of the world.

In addition, my academic background and expertise is in environment. Thus I can have the tools and identity required for professional blogging which will be more credible than writing about politics as an observer without having the academic and scientific expertise.

The third reason is that we have a lot of quality Jordanian blogs that cover political and socio-economic issues while not environmental blogs so the niche is ready to be gained by a quality environmental blog.

I am planning to dedicate two hours per day for my environmental blog. This will leave very little time for this Jordan Watch blog apart from occasional blogging and commenting on other blogs. Professional blogging is all about providing an added value and a unique service that will make readers/ browsers chose the blog as a source of information. Time is important not only for writing content but also for interacting with other bloggers, gathering information, keeping updated and so on.

Such a task requires detailed and updated knowledge of what is going on in the subject covered which will be much easier for me tackling environmental issues as part of my specialization.

The environmental blog will need also to focus on an identity which will be "innovations and best practices in environmental management in the Arab World". We are in need of good examples and a lot of ground has been covered after the initial awareness campaigns of the 1990s and we must move on to implementation and innovation now.

Environmental blogging is lovely. It is all about positive change and it gives a feeling of optimism rather than the depression of politics and economy. This can help making blogging as an enkoyable experience rather than struggling with opinion differences all the time.

I hope this will become an interesting journey in professional blogging. I am giving it a minimum of 9 months to assess the impact and success and I hope to be able to provide a needed service.