neweurasia.net is a group weblog delivering news and cultural information about Central Asia and the Caucasus. The main site covers material on these entire areas, while there are also separate country-specific sites (i.e. kazakhstan.neweurasia.net and uzbekistan.neweurasia.net). Like many weblogs, neweurasia.net allows reader comments, and they also actively solicit contributing authors for their site.
I find the design of the site generally appealing and easy to read, though recently there seems to have been a proliferation of buttons in the right-hand sidebar that clutters the look a bit. But really it is the content I find most appealing on this site. As an English-speaker living in Kazakhstan, I am always looking for good sources of news. neweurasia.net has a nice combination of news and analysis, along with cultural material.
Many of the people who contribute to neweurasia.net are foreigners who live elsewhere but have a special interest, whether personal or professional, in the region, but there are local voices as well. I particularly like the material posted by Leila Tanayeva, a Kazakhstani woman living now in Europe, I believe, though I think she may be in Kazakhstan from time to time. Leila is one of the site’s “bridge bloggers,” people from the region who are working to get more local people involved in reading and posting to the site. Perhaps this attempt at developing a local community of bloggers is the most important aspect of their work now. I think we should pay close attention to developing a community of users for our eventual site.
The site uses WordPress blogging software (a version of which we are using for this weblog) and it seems to be working very well for managing a complex site. I am very interested in the blog scan material that sits in the middle column and provides links to related material from other sites.
Overall neweurasia.net seems to me an excellent example of a news and community oriented site focused on this region. Though at this point I think we don’t have the resources to do something so ambitious, I think we should consider both its content and its design as positive examples to emulate.
-Frederick Emrich
Thanks for the thumbs up!