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Arabic Blog Aggregators
A collegue at work pointed me to دوّن - بلا حدود this morning. It's an Arabic Blog (and photo) aggregator that has gained a big following recently. It is currently aggregating about 400 blogs and there are over 500 blogs currently in the queue to get in.
Another regional blog aggregator is toot who I have been visiting on and off ever since they launched in late 2005. Of course, the father of Arab blog aggregation has to be Haitham Sabbah who ran the now defunct ArabReBlog which was around way back in 1994 2004.
With so many blogs around, discovery is becoming more and more of a problem and aggregation is one of the ways to help. I've never really been convinced of regional blog aggregation. Unless you're dealing with a really small geographical locality the subject matter covered is just too wide, the quality of writing is too varied and topics covered are probably mostly irrelevant.
Of course, judging by the popularity of both دوّن - بلا حدود and toot it seems that many people do find this sort of aggregation relevant. Perhaps these sites are acting as a focal point for the growing army of bloggers in the Arab world. I would venture that they are more useful for "community building" amongst Arab bloggers than as a destination that the "average blog reader" would visit.
UPDATE: Muhammad Basheer also pointed me to another Arabic aggregator تدوين which has this brilliant Arabic favicon
nice review but I think you need to check your information about Arablog at least because blogging wasn't there in 1994 :-)
Ooops...that's what happens when you start blogging again after a year :)
Thanks!
Good review Muhammad.
I want to add this site Arabic Aggregator sites تدوين
I think also that is سردال is one of the first bloggers wrote in arabic and he started translating wordpress to Arabic :)
Sabbah the god father for u only nanabhay, there is many bloggers better than this god..
anti Blog,
If you read the post all I said was that Haitham was the first that I know of to aggregate Arabic blogs. Regardless of what you think of him, that's something notable.
Remember, before blogging became popular in this region ArabReBlog was already doing aggregation. It helped me discovered a number of interesting regional blogs.
I'm sure you have an ax to grind with Haitham. I suggest you visit sabbah.biz to grind it!
Hey Mohamed,
Yes, Arablog reBlog was put to rest because the number of Arab blogs increased dramatically between 2003 and 2006 that I could no more handle under one personal blog. The project needed more time, effort and hands to handle than a one man can do. Luckily, many local projects started around different countries, which also offered better and customized services.
Having said that, I now run an aggregator for Palestine Blogs: http://palestineblogs.org. Again, when this started, Palestinian blogs where few, now the ones I know about ONLY are in hundreds. On average I have two new Palestine Blogs added daily, which is awesome!
I've to say that I would prefer something like GlobalVoices or some well moderated aggregator than things like BlogAfrica which list every post from participating blogs. So if I post something about Iraq it will be posted on BlogAfrica ... not exactly an "African Aggregator", is it?
The problem with moderated aggregator though is that it'll be done by people who'll surely have their own political, religious and ethnic biases.
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