The Regional Wrap

And in Central Asia…

July 23rd, 2007 by jrdruker

As many of you know TOL operates a blogging project in Central Asia along with our partners neweurasia. But we are gradually finding out about impressive initiatives in this part of our coverage region. One of these is a blog platform in Kyrgyzstan called Kloop, co-founded by Bektour Iskender. Bektour was a late addition to our new media course that we ran in early July, but we are very happy to have him and find out some of the details of his project. Ben Paarmann, founder of neweurasia, interviewed Bektour for Global Voices, and It’s recommended reading for anyone interested in seeing the grassroots development of new media. I was particularly struck by some of the incentives that Kloop has been promoting to get people to start blogging on Kloop’s platform rather than the ever-popular LiveJournal:

Q: Why do you think will Kloop be successful in Kyrgyzstan? What makes it different from other blog platforms such as LJ and Wordpress.com?

A: There is a very important financial reason: we are located on a local server. That means that for many Internet users in Kyrgyzstan it is much cheaper to have a blog on Kloop rather than on a foreign platform. Besides that, our bloggers don’t need to pay for better skins (as it is on LJ).

We are preparing more things for the future. That will be mostly connected with advertising. When our text ad service is ready (hopefully, that will happen before September), every blogger will be able to join our website advertising system and get some profit from it.

Some of us have struggled to convince people to switch over from LJ to technically better platforms such as WordPress (why would they when their communities are so ingrained on LJ and guarantee readers?). So even though Internet pricing schemes differ from country to country, it was interesting to see how Kloop was trying to answer this question with its potential audience–evidently with some success so far.

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