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Some friend of mine told me about a possible situation between Cuban blogs and Blogger, of which their authors were being banned access to view and update/modify their content.

I immediately decided to try and see if I was still able to access my old blog at blogger, which I maintained before continuing my personal blog in the web site of the Opera Web Browser, and you can see that I was able to update it as I wrote this bilingual post about the situation. Nevertheless this doesn't prove anything, since Google may have blocked some and not all Cuban blogs. I am not aware of any Cuban blogger in a situation similar to the one described above.

I recently got some feedback from Belkys, the author of one of the Cuban blogs I found, as reported in my previous post. She pointed me some other blogs, and even a directory of Cuban blogs. This is what I found in a quick glance. Unfortunately the results of my rapid research were not so good, but anyway, is better than what I thought a few days ago.

http://blogueroscubanos.blogspot.com/2005/02/directorio-de-la-comunidad-blogs-de.html
Pretends to be a directory of Cuban blogs, but many links are broken. There is no information about how some other Cuban bloggers like me can register their blogs in this self-claimed directory. Also most links don't match the text of the link with the URL.

These are the blogs I found, and the apparent current state. None of this data has been verified and no blog author has been contacted. This is purely visual information taken out of each of the main blog pages by me. Some blogs listed in the above directory do not appear in this list, mostly those that gave me broken links.

http://bettyculturales.blogspot.com/
No posts since February 17, 2005

http://ilberto.blogia.com/
No posts since April 15, 2005

http://cubatrabaja.blogia.com/
No posts since November 11, 2005 and previous posts very far from one another in time.

http://georginatorriente.blogspot.com/
Currently active, but is more like an echo of some newspaper rather than original writings of the author. All posts are like headlines and articles of news related to Cuba. Mostly political news. It doesn't have the natural flavour of somebody writing naturally about what he/she likes.

http://imaginados.blogia.com/
Currently active. Some posts like georgina torriente above, but it's more natural and fresh.

http://venezuelavive.blogspot.com/
Currently active and very young blog about Cuban doctors experiences in Venezuela.

http://cubanisimo2.blogspot.com/
No posts since April 11, 2005. It's like georgina's blog above too.

http://cubasiempre.blogia.com/
Only two posts, and the last one was on February 21, 2005. No comments.

http://mundocubano.blogia.com/
Apparently active, but is not updated so often. It's mostly about the Cuban five. The articles seem too lengthy though, and they seem to be copy-paste from news articles in cuban newspapers and news agencies.

http://havanaonline.blogspot.com/
A single post on February 17, 2005.

http://dcuba.blogia.com/
Three posts, the last one on February 24, 2005.

http://encuentro.blogia.com/
No posts since February 23, 2005.

http://denesleonardo.blogspot.com/
No posts since February 17, 2005. Three posts overall.

http://jrgreguera.blogspot.com/
Four posts overall, all of them the same day, February 16, 2005.

I won't claim this to be an exhaustive coverage but I draw two conclusions from all these. First and most important, didn't you noticed the great amount of blogs with just a few posts, and dead since around February 2005? Well, most of the blogs listed in this directory are the result of some seminar given in Havana around that date about blogs. The seminar was given to journalists and most of the authors of those brief blogs are Cuban journalists. It seems that they started with some excitement, but it lasted for short. This is not my idea of a blogosphere.

The second conclusion is that many of these blogs were limited to copy/paste news articles from Cuban media sources. This conclusion is subjective and not verified at all, but it's my perception.

Although it was more active than I though, specially a year ago, in the end is disappointing. The Cuban blogosphere has a long way to go.

Tim Berners-Lee, considered one of the creators of the World Wide Web, is now blogging. It seems that his original intentions are just beginning to be fulfilled, after more than fifteen years (too much time for this ever-changing world of IT). Anyway, happy blogging and welcome to the blogosphere!

I won't comment much more here so go and read for your self. This will surely be a blog worth of adding into my aggregator. I must also acknowledge my original source. I first heard about Tim's blog in another blog, Read/Write Web, a name that, according to its author, is related to Tim's original goals.

I am seriously considering to switch definitely to this blog at the Opera Community web site, from my current blog at Blogger. Of course, finally being able to import that blog into this one plays a significant role in that potential desicion.

Some of the features that make this blog a better choice are

• Integrated services besides the blog itself: photo albums, links section, about page. All these gives a greater sense of belonging to a real community.
  
• That beautiful calendar on the right side of blog pages, with quick links to the days I've posted something.
  
• The tagging system, which gives the opportunity to categorize posts within the blog. This makes it easier for visitors to find posts a particular subject.
  
• The mechanism to include pictures and other files into my posts. Blogger has his won, but I like this one a lot more.
  
• The possibility to post private posts, or restrict access to my friends. In Blogger all posts are public.
  
• The naming convention for posts URLs is more convenient, because it does not depends on the post's name.
  
• Pages are truly dinamyc. Blogger pages are created statically when new posts are created.
  

I should also highlight major Blogger features that are not available here. However, I am confident that some (if not all) of them will be added. We must remember that this new Opera Community is a young project with a future ahead.

• Comments can be posted by any visitor, not just Blogger members. Here at Opera only the community members can comment on my posts. I understand this is to avoid comment spamming, but there are other ways.
  
• The spell-checker within the post editor.
  
• The preview and WYSIWYG editing mode in the post editor.
  
• The Blogger for Word utility, that makes it possible to write posts within Microsoft Word and submitting directly to Blogger, without having to open the Web interface.
  
• The ability to decide the date and time of a new post.
  

Also, being Blogger a part of Google, blogs over there are readily available on the new Google Blog Search. I would like to see my Opera blog also available over there. Blogging is a lot about being heard, and being indexed is certainly a part of it, mostly if it's Google's index we're talking about.