GVO: Ugandan bloggers all play, no peace talks

My next piece is up at Global Voices Online:

At last month’s Uganda Bloggers Happy Hour, I took an informal poll of why the blogren do what they do. My favorite response came from Carlo, who said that blogging is “just like Facebook,” the social networking site that’s currently sweeping the young, internet-connected world. Every blogger present declared blogging in Uganda to be a purely social exercise, evidenced by the recent “8 Random Things” meme circulating among Ivan, Magoola, Magintu and others.

Perhaps that’s why hardly anyone has mentioned last week’s one-year anniversary of the beginning of the peace talks between the Government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a “sadistic rebel militia which ha[s] made a hell out of the north of the country for two decades.”

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