Gadling publish a list of resources about the world’s navel: Cuzco. Of course, here in Zirma I published some months ago an article about this beatiful (and expensive) city.

Crisis times are moments where new business opportunities appear, some executives say. Of course, crisis also empowers the search for that “idea” that will save us economically while others sink.

The decadence of traditional economic activities, linked to agriculture and industry, has forced many people to look at the services sector to survive or to make business. And tourism appears as one of those interesting areas, and apparently it won’t stop growing during the next years at very promising rates. It doesn’t matter if data support this perception; the truth is that in the mind of many people, the reconvertion towards tourism seems a reasonable economic proposal in a context of growing social empoverishment.

Thus, industrial areas recycle their buildings into shopping centers and malls; country estates are dedicate to rural tourism; and the most diverse proposals arise, destined to take advantage of the existent infrastructure -architectonic, historic, even atomic tourism, as we said in a previous entry.

The problem is the idea that any cultural or social capital can be reconverted into tourism withour major problems. This attempt to touristify everything that surrounds us, many times is nothing but a desperate way to find an opportunity window in a moment of crisis. The most serious point is how this common sense of “everything can be touristic as long as we plan it” turns into economic demands towards the government, who presumibly has to support these initiatives, and invest in infrastructure and tax reductions to favor the tourism sector. Of course, afterwards, the profits will end up in private hands, as usual. Anyways, it is clear that this “economic support” is given in countries more developed than latin american countries.

Some examples of how the state assumes certain expenditure to help the tourism sector can be found here, here and in a PDF document by the Tourism World Organisation, which recommend to subsidy commercial practices related to ecotourism.

For instance, the touristic overexploitation of Machu Picchu can be damaging for Peru in the next years, if the ruins end up by falling apart. Despite many have benefited from this touristic attraction direct or indirectly, it’s obvious that the state will have to spend millions to fix the problem. Which is nothing trivial for a country like Peru, that has urgent social needs as any other country in the region.

According to the english sociologists Scott Lash and John Urry, the main interest in the tourism industry, when constructing expert knowledge, is to guarantee tourists a higher security in their travel, thus minimizing risk.

It’s known that we can always travel on our own; this will surely be cheaper, but will leave us vulnerable to any problem we might have in our destination. That is, we’ll have to figure on our own a series of inconvenients in lodging, transportation or food, in an unfamiliar place.

Tours, packages and other organised trips solve this inconvenient; travel agency services allow us to minimize destination problems. And, if there’s any, the agency will fix it. Of course, there’s a central point here: many people are not in the economic conditions to afford this service. So security has a price tag that not everyone can afford.

I bring this topic in relation to the great motivation that’s being referred to when talking about the poor perfomance of world numbers in tourism in 2001-2003: the fear of tourists to move around after the lack of security shown behind the terrorist attack on september 11. While this point plays an important role, I tend to think that the main reason of tourism growth desacceleration is linked to the bad economic performance in Europe, Japan and the United States. In this last case, besides, there’s the growing restrictions to the enter of foreigners, which unencourages the arrival of new tourists.

Sometimes I feel that so much emphasis in the subject of “security” tends to hide the most general problem of the low growth of the world economy, the empoverishment of middle classes and the changes in the labor market, due to the growing flexibilization of laboral relations and regulations of leisure time.

In the last weeks, I’ve dedicated a couple of posts to the topic of Afghanistan and its importance in the conformation of the current world (dis)order. This weekend, as I strolled around Parque Rivadavia, in Buenos Aires, I stumbled across John Lee Anderson’s The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan. The book has a completely different narrative style than Rashir Ahmed’s Taliban: Islam, Oil, and the New Great Game in Central Asia. While this last one rebuilds the history of Afghanistan since the appearing of the taliban (1994) to beginnings of 2000 -when it seemed this political force would take over the entire country-, Lee Anderson’s book is a series of journalistic chronicles made during the american invasion to Afghanistan after the september 11 2001 attacks. This time cut is interesting, since it finely complements Ahmed’s book. Although, I recommend reading this last book first not only for a chronological issue, but also because The Lion’s Grave takes for granted a series of knowledge about Afghanistan and the different political features in struggle.

Update: as far as this years goes, 64 U.S. soldiers have died in Afghanistan during confrontations with the taliban. This number marks a growing tendency. In 2004, 52 soldiers died; while in 2003, 47 and in 2002, 43. More at this AFP note.

It’s amazing how little do we know about what we call, unprecise and many times incorrectly, “arab countriesâ€?. In 1996 I wrote my graduate thesis about the argentinean media’s coverage of the AMIA attack. This event took place in Buenos Aires on july 18, 1994, and the target was an israeli mutual of long trayectory in Argentina, where one of the biggest jewish communities is located. Back then, justice and the government responsibilized irani diplomats, but also pointed at the muslim community located at the Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil triple borderline, as possible authors of the attack. The coberture, in general, was quite bad, full of unprecisions and with a remarkable recurrence to all of the despective representations of the “crazy arabâ€? seen at Hollywood films. Back then, my hypothesis was that since the attack was atributed to a foreign conflict -the conflictive relation between Israel, Palestine and Iran- local politics section journalists were forced to write about an international conflict they knew little about.

The complete thesis is available in the Internet since 1998 at jajg.tripod.com (spanish only).

With Afghanistan, something similar is taking place. Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban: Islam, Oil, and the New Great Game in Central Asia allows us tu see the complex situation that took place after the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. In the first place, because of the country’s strategic position for the passing of oilducts that could go to the Caspian Sea, and for drug traffic, particularly opium, all of the surrounding nations -and also the U.S. And Russia- have tried to influence this nation. For this reason, many prefered to negotiate with the taliban, or anyone for that matter, as long as they get their share of the deal.

Second, Afghanistan’s complex ethnic disposition, in which the taliban belong to one of those groups of pashtun ascendence. It’s no surprise that the media misinformed about what was going on on that civil war. Afghanistan has a completely marginal position for the western nations that possess the big media, and the situation is so complex that, with the small resources destined to its coberture, it was very hard to explain. The results: for years, as readers, we couldn’t access frequent information about what was going on in the most radical islam laboratory, nor could we follow the evolution of ideas that was taking place there. We were left out from the incredible game of oil exploitation in the area, or how the CIA tolerated the drug traffic in order to, first, defeat the communists, and then, to harass the irani. The taliban and Iran’s government didn’t get along, to the point that the latter was about to invade Afghanistan towards 1997, after the murdering of its diplomats in Kabul.

The ignorance of the this area’s politics allowed, for example, that some U.S. Government officers justified the invasion to Iraq because, supposedly, this government collaborated with Al Qaeda and the taliban. Anyone that reads a little about the Middle West and the arab countries will know that there was no relation at all between the laic Baas, Saddam Hussein’s party and the taliban’s islamic radicalism.

What responsibility does the media have to inform, in such an inadequate way, about what was happening in this region of the world? Some people might say that the public has no bigger interest in topics related to these countries, and therefore, there won’t be a bigger budget destined to cover these issues. We must point out that to cover this area of the world requires specific knowledge in hands of few journalists. And there’s also the government’s interests playing secret to favor their own interests and not caring at all about the press having access to good information sources.

But readers pay for this inadequate coberture. Remarkably, the quality of necessary information to analyze the politic situation of relevant areas of the world is inadequate, for its frequency and for the analysis as well. With the previous antecedent of the dissapearing of Afghanistan from the media’s agenda between 1989 and 2001 -right when the islamic radicalism consolidated and the taliban arised- that this country is left out from the coverture after the invasion of the U.S. is an disquieting situation.

One of the things I always found interesting about Bourdieu’s theories has to do with the ways in which fields, as social action spheres, tend to establish the limits of what’s thinkable. That is, to define what things is it reasonable to think about at determined moments and spaces.

In the case of the tourism field, these restrictions operate in a very particular way: they tend to sanction as useless any thougth about travel and tourism that doesn’t have as its objective any kind of sustainable commercial enterprise. Since I rather come from journalism and an academic context, fields where the analysis of any other kind of portion of reality shouldn’t necesarily be based on its commercial use, I always found quite problematic the reduction of “everything important should give money”.

In a way, this scheme establishes a clear limit of what’s thinkable: no critic reflection about the field itself is stimulated, since such reflections are understood as completely useless. According to this point of view, we should generate myths of place as business opportunities; but the evaluation of such imaginaries -that is, to take account of its production conditions from politics and economics- are not important.

This blog is part of a different bet: to analyze the different representations associated to the touristic field not as business opportunities but as social and political constructions. It’s a bet with no place in the touristic field, and for this reason its anchored in the academic, journalistic and literature side. In the same way the best travel stories are not written by travel journalists but those who come from sections more linked to politics -that’s the case of Ryszard Kapuscinski or Robert Kaplan- the best analysis of the tourism market will not come from the field itself, because this one refuses, systematically, to analyze any idea that is not comercially profitable.

Many users wish they had a personal wiki where to store documents and working papers privately. Unfortunately, up to now you usually had to have a personal hosting space and install there some wiki development software, such as Wikka or Wacko. But these days I ran into a site that provides a free alternative, Schtuff. Basically, it’s about creating “spaces” that can be used as wiki, blog, documents and images storage, among other uses. Some of the pages can even be shown public, although they’re private by default. The writing is just like in any other wiki. And they give plenty of space: 200 megas. For what I’v seen so far, it’s really worth it.

Of course, if you know of other alternatives of free wikis, leave it on the comments.

Last year I had to go the Jornadas de Investigadores en Comunicación (Communication Researchers Journeys, spanish only), that was held by the Journalism faculty of the Universidad de La Plata. There, I presented the topic of blogs, and commented about it in my other blog. At questions time, many of them could be summarized by one question: how are we, journalists, going to defend the specificity of our profession? In more clear terms: how are we goint to make it possible to live from this when increasingly more people are posting for free in the Net?

Despite I believe most blogs don’t do journalism, I can’t help to notice the fear of some journalists when facing this question. Now, the argentinean newspaper La Nación has published a note related to this topic and the endquote says it all: “at the end, yes, anyone can be a journalist, but under the condition of this being understood as the affirmation of how we all are born with the right to free expression, and that there’s room to ask if anyone can be a dentist and feel entitled to extract the fellow’s teeth”. The comparison, of course, is absolutely ridiculous. Pulling teeth is a specialized knowledge that requires long years of practice; to exert the right to free expression is a faculty that can be carried out by anyone. To start, at least in Argentina, anyone can be a journalist. It only takes to work as one. Journalistic companies have opposed historically to collegiate our profession. Thus, it’s not necessary to have any title at all to work as a journalist, a situation that companies love, since it allows them to have a broader labor supply and to keep wages low. When I got asked those questions at La Plata, I remarked something important: being a journalist implies having access to resources that a blogger doesn’t have. If we spend eight hours in an office and come up with articles worse than those published on blogs, then the problem is another one.

The mistake is believing that blogs can compete with journalism by its contents. In fact, if they’re changing the way people approach the news, it’s so by other means: by stimulating the participation of Internet users. Each article in a blog can be commented, complemented or argued through the same channel it was published on. That is, the blogger’s text and the users comments share the same space. Massive media, instead, don’t even dream about allowing that. If a reader points out mistakes, that’s seen as questioning the professionalism of the journalist. The forms of participations are the ones than can be filtered, such as readers letters. When I read the note in La Nación, the first thing that crossed my mind was how uncomfortable I felt for not being able to reply right there, exposing my position. I realize it’s complicated to open a comments space in a massive media; there will always be someone saying something stupid -like those who abuse of the terms “fascist”, “reactionary” or “leftie”-, publishing false information or even sending spam. But, then, there are alternatives, such as allowing trackbacks or other forms of notification.

The bottom line is that blogs build information in a collaborative way, while traditional press has always based on a different model: news are selected, worked and written within the journalistic system, and published without giving the reader a greater participation option, leaving him to assume a rather passive role. Blogs not only provide space to the reader, but also priviledge the “conversation” among many sites. It’s precisely there where the biggest impact of blogs can take place over the media: in the increasingly deep unsatisfaction of the readers with the media’s low participative model. Used to having more autonomy in blogs, Net users are turning to them to see what other people think. In the case of Jean Paul II’s death, this fact was quite clear: while blogs held a huge debate about the consequences of the Vatican’s conservative policy, the media simply dedicated to santify the Pope, not giving the least space to critic lectures: no talking about the Opus Dei, or the opposition to family planning and the using of preservatives, or the increasingly greater distance between the church and its fellowship, among other topics. This got to a point where many of us opted for not watching any news program, for days.

One thing is to respect everyone else’s beliefs and another one is to avoid debate. Blogs are an interesting platform to discuss topics. It has, of course, its problems. There’s always someone who abuses with insults, agressivity, and the difussion of rumours as confirmed facts. But the traditional model had its problems: by being fewer emisors, there was easier to control them. We’ll have to come up with new tactics to reduce the impact of those who want to use the Net to spread false information. But this won’t avoid another problem for the media: readers, Net users, want to have greater participation. They better start thinking how to satisfy this demand.

When thinking about what a blog is, one of the things that grabbed my attention about traditional definitions was that they only focused on one side: the presentation to the reader. That is, a blog was a site constituted by texts or entries, cronologically ordered, in such a way that the newest note appeared on top of the page.

Not that this is wrong, but I think this definition is incomplete. In my opinion, at least two more things should be included: the facility to update the contents and visual presentation, and the emphasis on taking advantage of the collaborative capabilities of the Net.

First, one of the biggest differences between a typical personal website, built in HTML with Dreamweaver, and a blog, takes place mostly in the upload interface. A blogger doesn’t need to work with the codes practically never, at least not in the contents. He can upload everything from a very simple style sheet, where font styles are defined very much like in a word processor. And the visual aspect doesn’t take long either: it’s possible to define the look of our blog with a simple template, which we can personalize if we want to. The point is: it’s much easier to maintain a blog than an old personal website, that requires HTML codes updating, links checks, uploading everything by FTP, etc.

Second, there’s the issue of collaboration. One of the reasons of the success of the blog format is its emphasis on the collaboration between users and bloggers. Those who comment on our site not only can let us know their disagreement with our ideas and even insult us; but also, and mostly, they can complement our information, add more of it, correct some affirmations, etc. Indeed, a blog is really useful when the blogger and his readers contribute to make it that way. The responsibility of the blogger doesn’t end in writing decently about interesting things, as it happens to journalists. The blogger also has to encourage participation, something we’re learning about. Tools like trackbacks and blogrolls reaffirm this collaborative position: they point to the development of discussions and the construction of a community of ideas.

Of course, the famous collaborative construction of ideas is not exclusive of blogs. Other tools, such as Wikis and phorums have long been doing this. Fortunately, they’re solutions that can complement in a relatively simple way. But let’s not forget this: an important distinction between blogs as successful supports, and other forms of rather unsuccessful contents presentations -such as portals- is based on the different forms of taking advantage of the collaboration capacity that the Internet provides, and the easier way to maintain the site -in content and graphic presentation as well. Not everything is the presentation to the reader: sometimes we have to see that bloggers practices and the architecture of a support has a lot to do with the final definition of the format.

Why is there so much interest today in launching specific search tools for blogs? In few days, news were released at Icerocket - the launching of a search blog tool, Blogpulse -new functionalities to follow the “conversations” among blogs-, and Yahoo! promising the launching of a new and specific tool for this market sector. All of them, of course, aim at Technorati, that for now is the main actor of this market, but it’s having many performance and reliability problems.

What’s the use of so many tools? One of the possibilities is to monetize the knowledge of the tendencies of opinions given in blogs, and to sell that information as a service to the agencies that manage the big companies public relations. That’s what Blogpulse and Edelman, one of the world’s biggest public relations agency, want to do with Targeterati (spanish only).

But one of the most interesting conclusions about this wave of searchers focused on blogs is that, finally, many sites are noticing the need of new functionalities to track the Net. Nowadays, keyword searches are not enough; it’s necessary, also, to count with tools that help determine the trustworthiness of the blogs we’re reading; to analyze its capacity to create conversations; to visualize how they’re cited by others; to check its trayectory in the Net. The emerging of these new tools will provide us some important clues to do this. But at the same time it has a con: to make it even harder for a blog to enter the circle of the most cited ones. We’re heading to an important consolidation of the blogosphere, in which those who have been working hard for the past four years have taken the lead. They’ve accumulated capital: hundreds or thousands of articles, many links to their blogs, a good pagerank, and eventually, even mentions in notes about blogs by the traditional media. Is it possible then that this sector of the Net is starting to lose the impressive dynamism it’s had? For now, it seems not -about 80 thousand new blogs are created everyday, according to Technorati developers- but it’s quite likely that in the future we’ll find, through the massive use of specific search tools in blogs, a clear separation between “reliable” sites and others that will have to earn this right.

In a space where keeping a blog for longer than three years is a new thing, surely the greater capacities to analyze the trayectory of a blog through particular tools -Technorati, Blogpulse, Blogscour, and whatever Yahoo! and Google come up with- will change the Net. And simplistic and condemnatory -”it’s a matter of ego”- analysis, or the celebratory easyness -”we’re creating a new media where everything is collaboration and participation”- just won’t be enough. The future brings better tools but also the threat of a bigger separation between blogs with trayectory and newer ones.