Tag: blogs

IDSC Releases New Report About Egyptian Blogs

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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)

Analysis: Dwwen Blog Aggregator Almost Shut Down

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DwwenA few days ago, Arab blog aggregator service Dwwen announced they would be shutting down on June 15th this year due to financial and resource burdens.

The announcement came on the blog of Tareq Abu Zeid, the founder of Dwwen, where he said that the lack of financial backing for the service doomed it and made shutting it down inevitable.

After the announcement, a number of comments flowed in, with some people proposing that Dwwen start a donations campaign to raise money to keep going on, while some others offered to help in any way possible, and others asked how much they needed, showing readiness to help financially.

Yesterday, only a couple of days after the initial announcement, a little announcement was put up on the Dwwen homepage telling users that the service wouldn’t be shutting down and that further details would be communicated later.

It’s great news that Dwwen managed to find the backing or means to keep going on, they’ve built a really good service since they launched, and have managed to gain many an Arab blogger’s respect.

But now that things have worked out for the best, I think we should take a step back to study and analyse their case a little bit, because I think it more or less gives us some insight into the rather short life cycles of Arab startups of this kind, and how they end up having to take the decision to shut down.

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Jmami, Online Community For Moroccans Around The World

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jmami logoJmami, is a Moroccan service that uses the phrase “Moroccans of the world” as its tagline, and just that mainly explains what the website’s goal is, to create a central community place for Moroccans from all over the world to connect with old friends, make new ones, as well as write and share content with each other.

The service has all the major social networking features we can expect; enabling users to invite their old friends, search for and make new friends, establish connections with them, message them through an internal messaging system, and create private or public groups around their shared interests, where they can launch different discussions.

Jmami also provides a light integrated blog platform giving its users the possibility to publish their thoughts and news, share and start discussions around them.

Another feature is the event agenda, where users can post and promote events that might be of interest to Moroccans around the world.

jmami screenshot

The service is available in 3 languages: Arabic (Moroccan accent), French and English.

The website is mainly targeted at Moroccan youth inside and outside of Morocco, and the fresh design shows this clearly, even though it’s not limited to just them, and registration and use of the service should be just as easy and simple for older generations.

# Jmami

TN-Emploi: A Resource For IT Jobs In Tunisia

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TN-Emploi, a.k.a La Tunisienne pour l’emploi, is a new project that was recently launched in Tunisia by Mahmoud Gourar, and that attempts to use a simple blog format to bring job offers and opportunities to Tunisian job seekers, with a focus on IT-related jobs.

Job opportunities are posted daily, organized by category, and tagged with keywords, to make it easier for job seekers to find the jobs that match their goals and skillsets better.

It being a blog, people can access these offers directly through the blog, through the RSS feed or by subscribing to the email feed.

Recruiters and companies can post their offers simply and for free by sending them to a provided email address.

The blog is in French only, and is quite an interesting resource for Tunisian programmers, web developers, database administrators and so forth who need a place where they can find focused job offers for their respective IT fields.

Even though most posted job offers are for opportunities in Tunisia, some others are posted for opportunities in France or the rest of Europe, for those who might be interested in working abroad.

# TN-Emploi.com

Is It Important For Startups To Have Blogs? [Poll Results]

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In the first poll on StartUpArabia, the question to the readers was:
Do you think it’s important for startups to have blogs?

The result of reader voting came out as follows:

– 85% of readers thought it is definitely important for startups to have blogs.
– 15% of the readers thought that it wasn’t really necessary.

Personally, I share the opinion of the 85% who think it is important: At the very beginning of a startup’s life, it’s very important for the project team to be in touch with users, to communicate on what’s going on, and what new features they’ll be rolling out; creating buzz around their project, offering a transparency that garners users’ trust and builds a sense of community around it; getting as much feedback as possible from the people who are using their service/product daily; keeping their ears as wide open as possible, being flexible to integrate any interesting new ideas into their original plans and having discussions with people on what they really need and how the product can better serve them.

A blog is certainly one of the best ways out there to do all the above, and build a direct connection with your userbase, helping you to develop the best-suited solution for their needs, which would clearly translate into happier clients, good word-of-mouth marketing, which also means more clients, and therefore more success for your business.

iBlog… iMedia, Arab Consumer Generated Media Conference

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casualPR, a leading PR agency that focuses on blogs and online media, just announced they’re organizing the first conference on consumer generated media in the Middle East in Amman Jordan on Sunday June 1st 2008.

This first edition of what they plan to make an Annual Consumer Generated Media Conference will be held under the theme “iBlog… iMedia”, aiming to highlight the role that blogs and social media is playing in changing the face of media.

The exact details on the program and who will be speaking at the event haven’t been announced yet, but according to the agenda, the conference will tackle the issues of new dialogue and the challenges it faces, social media: its realities, its relationship with the corporate world and its situation in the Arab world; incorporating a media and marketing perspective, with a focus on potentials and risks that brands and traditional media are facing with this growing medium.

“iBlog… iMedia aims to bring media and marketing professionals closer to Blogs, and to highlight the role that bloggers are playing in changing the face of the media” said Samer Marzouq, CEO of erabia, the mother company of casualPR.

The event is free for bloggers to attend, and requires a $100 registration fee for non-bloggers, which I think is a cool touch, even though I’m sure many people will start blogs just to get in free.
People interested in attending can already register online now.

# More: iBlog… iMedia, casualPR