Can't stop time!

• I removed the batteries from all the clocks at home, but I forget to remove that of my mobile.
• I went to the track and started to jog in the opposite direction, but they didn't allow me to continue.
• .ti daer ot uoy rof drah eb lliw ti tub ,sdrowkcab enil siht gnitirw ma I
• I asked them to throw away all the calendars on my desk at work, but my laptop and blackberry kept on tilling me the date.
• I asked God to make my birthday wait for a while, but I was born in a leap year, and I will just be 30 years old in two days, even without having a birthday!

I hate to admit that, but I am going to be 30 in two days, and I still can't find a way to stop time :(

How can your blog post make it to Global Voices roundups

You sure have heard about Global Voices Online before. It's a service that tries to collect and translate blogs from all over the globe.

"Global Voices is a community of more than 200 bloggers around the world who work together to bring you translations and reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media", Global Voices About Section.

And many bloggers have been wondering about the secret sauce for a blog post to be noticed and included in a Global Voices roundup. And the answer is, there isn't any secret sauce out there, but let me try to invent my own secret formula based on my experience as an GV Author.

• Write about current events and breaking news soon: When an accident or an event takes place, we as authors find ourselves obligated to write about them as soon as possible, so most of the time the quickest bloggers to blog about an event are the most mentioned bloggers. You can take Zeinobia as an example here, I sometimes wonder if she writes about events the moment they happen, or do events just happen the moment she writes about them, and that's why it's really hard for us to ignore her blog posts, especially those posts about current events.
• Don't copy and paste from news websites: We tend to focus there on blogs and citizen media everywhere, so if you are going to just copy news articles from the the CNN or Almasry Alyoum's website, then we too can copy and paste articles. But the point is, we are not just a news website, we tend to report people's opinion about what's going on, instead of just reporting what's going on.
• Blog in English, in Arabic, or any other language: Sometimes I am too lazy to translate a post from Arabic to English, some other times I find that I'll not be adding any value if I am going to limit myself to only those posts written in English. So in brief we do not have any language preference there, but we, or at least me, prefer those articles written in clear and simple language that can easily be quoted or translated.

Finally, I have to say that we do not focus on breaking news only in Global Voices, but we just select whatever seems to be interesting, either they are blog posts, tweets, or whatever falls under the citizen media umbrella.

Disclaimer: What have been written here are just my own thoughts, and they do not reflect Global Voices official opinions or anything.