Al Jazeera Forum underway in Doha

I'm in Doha at the moment for the fourth Al Jazeera Forum - an invitation-only meeting of academics, journalists and observers from the Middle East and around the world. Delegates here from the US, UK, Malaysia, a raft of North African countries and a good many other places.

Wadah Khanfar has opened the event, and the keynote speaker was Seymour Hersh. Should be an interesting couple of days - more follows!

In the meantime, I thought I'd pass on a Blackberry tip - if you use your Crackberry for web browsing, ditch the bundled browser and download Opera Mini. I did this while my BA flight to Doha was on the ground in Bahrain and have been using it ever since. I have to say it's a revelation with pages rendered far more rapidly and far easier navigation. Just one grumble - for some reason I can't get the "update" button on Twitter to work when using Opera Mini, although Blackberry's own browser carries out this function OK. Strange...

Edinburgh lacking some internationalism

I travelled to the Media Guardian Edinburgh International TV Festival this past weekend. The AIB had offered to promote the event to its worldwide readership with a print advert in 'The Channel' and online banners on the main AIB website and in the electronic news letter.

The event has been running for 30-plus years, and brings together many of the top names in UK television - both channels and production houses - for three days of debate and networking. This year was, apparently, a record one for the number of delegates, and there were international attendees from Scandinvia, Germany, Qatar and North America. But the debate was very UK-centric, with only a couple of sessions that looked outside the UK's TV industry.

I was impressed by Clay Shirky of NYU who talked about the future of TV and convergence, sharing ideas and helping to start conversations. Wadah Khanfar, DG of Al Jazeera Network, gave his views on international news. But those were really the only sessions that looked at the rest of the world. Perhaps next year there will be more of an international flavour and sharing of ideas across borders. The AIB's ready to help with this.