Tag: Blogging

Wikeez, A New Social Entertainment Platform

MMM 12 Comments

WikeezWikeez, is a new Lebanon-based startup, focusing on user generated content around entertainment topics, which was founded by Kuv Capital with a seed investment of US$250,000.

Wikeez aims to allow people to publish and exchange on their favorite subjects centered on entertainment topics (tv shows, movies, celebrities, music and sports).

Each topic is fragmented into 3 tiers:

  • Top Stories: Information on the subject; latest news, Bio,…
  • Blog Stories: content produced by Wikeez members
  • Micro Stories: reactions shared by Wikeez members

Wikeez will also enable people to create their own blogs, fan clubs, get the latest news centered on their passions, as well as socialize with other fans.

Wikeez

The site is still in alpha, with a beta version coming pretty soon.

The company is currently looking to recruit in Lebanon; You can check out their open job vacancies on the StartUpArabia Job Board.

Update: Wikeez is offering invites to their alpha version to all StartUpArabia readers; if you’re interested, just send an email to: invite@wikeez.com.

# Wikeez

Berberus, The Semantic Maghreb Blog Aggregator

MMM 2 Comments

BerberusBerberus is a new blog aggregator that was recently launched to cover blogs from the Maghreb region. The name is an obvious reference to the region and its roots. The site also says it references the existence of a form of berberism (free man) in every blogger who aspires to express themselves freely.

Over the past years, a number of blog aggregators have sprung up in the Maghreb region, mainly covering each country on its own, and there even was a blog called Maghreblog which grouped authors from all Maghreb states who blogged and re-blogged stories from the region, but none of the previous efforts have grouped as many Maghreb blogs in one place.

Berberus currently indexes 1255 blogs from the five Arab Maghreb states (Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania), and aggregates posts and comments from all these blogs. It also provides an analysis of the activity going through these blogs, giving information about the posts and comments activity throughout the region, which the most active blogs and most commented blogs are, and even which posts are the ones getting the most commenting action.

Berberus screenshot

An advanced search engine is provided to search for blogs, posts or comments on certain topics, or by certain people, throughout the region or in a specific country, and in a certain period of time.

Another plus for Berberus is the semantic side of it all, as the tags in the aggregated posts are extracted, and their content analyzed to provide users an easy way to find posts that talk about topics of interest to them; by surfing through the latest tags and checking out the hottest and most talked about issues and topics.

A podcast directory is also included, indexing podcasts from around the region, and offering a central interface to watch or listen to them.

The interface tries to pack all the mentioned functionalities in a way that keeps it pretty easy to use and uncluttered, and it’s rather successful at it. The site is in English only for the time being.

# Berberus

Hyde Park, Group Blog With Social Networking Features

MMM 1 Comment

Hyde ParkHyde Park is a new interesting Arabic project, currently under development, and which has been wrapped in a veil of secrecy up to now. We at StartUpArabia have been able to get our hands on some information about the project that we’d like to share with you.

Hyde Park is a group blog with integrated social networking features, enabling bloggers to publish freely and as easily as possible.

The main goals behind Hyde Park are to simplify the process of blogging as much as possible and to create more and more connections and interaction between bloggers by bringing them together on one collective blog where they can write about a range of common topics.

With Hyde Park there won’t be any complicated or obligatory steps to blog; a blogger can just enter his name and a password to create an account and start blogging right away, using a simple and clear visual interface. Every blogger has a personal dashboard to publish their blog posts from, get in touch with other blogges, follow comments, …etc.

All blog posts can be voted on (both positively and negatively), with the possibility of showing the blog’s content in the same way used on social bookmarking services.
Content on the blog will be categorized using tags and channels, and can be displayed according to this categorization, date of publishing, or number of votes. Comments on posts can also be followed on an independent page. 

Hyde Park screenshot

As for the social networking side of things; every blogger will get their own personal page to share their personal details and list their blog psots; this page can be totally personalized and redesigned according to the blogger’s taste. Other users can comment on the blogger’s page, much like they can do on a person’s wall on Facebook and other social networks. Bloggers can also build up their list of friends on the site.

A public beta version of the service will be released on October 1st, as a number of standard features continue to be added and completed, before the official launch of the site.
The service will be available in Arabic only at the beginning, with the possibility of more languages in the future.

Hyde Park is a project that was launched by well known blogger Mohammed Said Hjiouij from Morocco.

# Hyde Park

IDSC Releases New Report About Egyptian Blogs

MMM 1 Comment

The Egyptian Cabinet’s Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC), the research arm of the Egyptian government, just released a report titled ‘Egyptian Blogs: New social space‘, detailing the status of Egyptian and Arabic blogs in general, their importance and content.

Among the report’s findings are the following:

  • The Arabic language doesn’t come up in the top 10 blogging languages in the world.
  • The total number of Arabic blogs is estimated at 490.000 blogs, representing only 0.7% of the total number of blogs in the world.
  • Egyptian blogs form 30.7% of all Arabic blogs with an estimated number of 160,000 blogs.
  • 76.8 % of the Egyptian blogs use the Arabic language, 9.6% are written in English, and 20.8% are mixed.
  • 53.1% of the Egyptian bloggers are between 20 – 30 years old; 18.8% between 30-40; 17% under 20 and 11.1% over 40.
  • 73% of the Egyptian bloggers are males, and 27% are females.
  • Jeeran has the largest collection of Egyptian blogs with around 116.192 blogs forming 72.6% of the total number of Egyptian blogs. Followed by BlogSpot with 16.29%, and then Maktoob with 6.5%.

The full report can be viewed in Arabic here: Egyptian Blogs: New social space (PDF)

iBlog… iMedia Conference Postponed Due To Financial Issues

MMM

iblog... imediaLast month, the iBlog… iMedia conference on consumer generated media was announced, organized by casualPR, a leading PR agency that focuses on blogs and online media.

The event was supposed to take place in Amman, Jordan on Sunday June 1st 2008; But has been canceled due to financial issues and lack of funding and support by Sponsors, even thought the event succeeded in getting a lot of media attention, approximately 100 delegates without any promotions or ads, and a great group of speakers from different countries; including Hervé Cuviliez (Managing Director of DDB France), Alexander McNabb (Spot On PR Dubai), Samih Toukan (CEO of Maktoob Group), Adam Flinter (Online Editor of Gulf News), Ziad Barouni (Founder of Waleg.com) and others.

Some important sponsors did express their interest in supporting next year’s edition; but for this year Samer Marzouq, CEO of erabia, the mother company of casualPR, is trying to reschedule a scaled down version of the conference.

Anyone interested in lending a hand or sponsoring the event can contact him directly at: samer@jazarah.net

The idea of the event is a very interesting one, as it aims to play a role in bringing media and marketing professionals closer to Blogs, highlighting the role that bloggers are playing in changing the face of the media.

Hopefully, the event will still take place, even if on a slightly smaller scale, and that it opens the door to more and bigger editions in future years.

Arabized WordPress 2.5 Released

MMM

The Arabized version of WordPress 2.5 was finally released a few days ago on the official site for Arabic WordPress.

This release brings all the new changes and features of WordPress 2.5 to the Arab blogger community, from the completely overhauled admin area and dashboard, to the new media gallery, automatic plugin download & update, multi-file upload, tag management, and the better visual editor, to the more technical additions and enhancements under the hood.

Upgrading from earlier versions should be quite straightforward using the upgrade script. Still, it is recommended to backup before beginning the upgrade.

This version can be downloaded from the official Arabic WordPress site.

Watwet, Social Networking And Mini-Blogging Platform

MMM 12 Comments

Watwet is a new Arab social networking and mini-blogging platform, quite similar to Twitter, that was launched in December 2007 by the TootCorp team, who brought us services like the photo and video sharing site Ikbis and blog aggregator Toot in the past.

The concept is very simple: Using watwet you can post short messages (watwets) updating your status, through which you can stay in touch with your friends. These watwets can be posted from the web or by sending SMS to Watwet. These updates are then shown to your friends on the Watwet website, as well as sent to them by email and SMS.
You can also send your friend direct private messages too or whispers (Washwishes) as they call them.

Watwet doesn’t stop at short text messages though, it goes even further supporting photos, that can also be uploaded through the web interface or sent by MMS.

The website is well designed, pretty straight-forward and easy to use, and work is currently underway on an AIR based desktop client. The only two points I found a bit inconvenient are that users’ timelines, their lists of updates, are only accessible to registered users even if they choose for them to be public in their privacy settings; and the public timeline (updates from all users) can only be seen if you logout.

The service is available in both English and Arabic, and is open to users from all over the world, although the SMS service is only available in Jordan for Zain subscribers now. Not sure when they’ll be expanding to other operators around the Arab world.

Something I think Watwet should do though is open up their system a bit, either through an API or through modules they develop themselves to enable users both to pull information from Watwet onto their own blogs/websites/services and push updates from other services to Watwet automatically.

For more on how to use Watwet, you can take the Watwet tour.

# Watwet