On the morning of our interview, Veni Markovski posted a Facebook status message saying he thought that, "as long as there are people in Bulgaria like those with whom I talked the night before, there is hope".

Asked who he was referring to, Markovski points to the first row of tables in the hotel lobby we are sitting in, and, without naming his conversation partners by name, he says "we were actually sitting right here, at that table over there. These were three well established Bulgarian bloggers, who, besides blogging, also have a profession. If there are still people like them in this country there is still hope that things might become a little bit different."

Swamp media
"The majority of media has become very - not even populist in the English sense of the word - but they do not report facts, they create stories. They want to produce news instead of reporting the news," Markovski says.

"If you take a look at the Bulgarian media, there is a specific tense they use; I call it future undefined. In today’s newspaper there is a headline that they are raising the pension of 41 000 pensioners, but if you read the article, you see that nobody is raising anything. It is a proposal that some people are looking at. That’s why I call it future undefined; it may happen in the future, but we are not sure," he says.

According to Markovski, it is thanks to Bulgarian bloggers that one can still find some reliable information.

"Some bloggers are becoming really better [than newspapers] because they report the news, without speculation, and they do not use this future undefined tense," he says.
And this is even easier to see from abroad, he adds. "When I’m in the country, like for a holiday, I get sucked in. It’s like a swamp, you can’t get out."

From the outside
Markovski, who currently lives in the US where he works as an independent business consultant, started as a system administrator for the first Sofia-based FidoNet bulletin-board system in 1990.

In 1993, Markovski and Dimitar Ganchev started Bulgaria’s second Internet Service Provider (ISP) Bol.bg, a company Markovski headed for several years. In 1995, Markovski co-founded the Bulgarian Internet Society.

"It was the sixth internet society that was founded in the world, now there are more than 80. In the beginning it was mostly explaining what the internet was. Nobody knew. At the time there were probably 2000 users in the whole country," he says.

The Bulgarian Internet Society became known both locally and internationally, when it successfully fought a government plan to introduce a licensing scheme for ISPs. Currently, the non-profit organisation participates in European projects for free and open source software. It was the Bulgarian Internet Society to introduce the Bulgarian version of the Creative Commons licenses, with adaptations to local law.

"So many websites now offer their content using creative commons licenses that Google and Yahoo offer specific search options to only search within that content. Even in Bulgaria, the President’s site and the Foreign Affairs Ministry are published under Creative Commons licenses," Markovski says.

"This is what we put a lot of effort into; explaining to people that there is nothing wrong in publishing your content for free. It is really ridiculous to see a copyright sign on government.bg. They can’t get copyright by the Council of Ministers, because they don’t produce anything that can be copyrighted," Markovski says.

As an example, he points to a website Prime Minister Boiko Borissov recently opened, which contains all the stenographs of the Parliament’s sessions. The content of the site is copyrighted, which, Markovksi says, would mean that newspapers would have to ask permission any time they want to quote from the content.

"We don’t have a working system in this country. If you compare it to Western Europe or the US, where it doesn’t really matter who is your king or who is your president, the society works. Here, if you have an idiot for a prime minister, then the whole system stops working. People always wait for some command from above; they never take initiative.
If I were a system administrator at one of the ministries, I would have changed the copyright notice a long time ago. No one would have noticed that it was not copyrighted," Markovski says.