Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog

My team at Al Jazeera English of course!

hat-tip : morad

We've just flipped the switch on Al Jazeera Blogs (http://blogs.aljazeera.net). This is the first new product I've launched since taking over the Al Jazeera English website, so am reasonably excited about it (just reasonably, since we're fashionably late to the party but the fantastic content will make up for it).

We have always placed a strong emphasis on field journalism and prided ourselves on our extensive network of correspondents who are based across the world. Just browsing through our correspondent blogs will give you a real sense of the breadth of our coverage, while diving into the posts provides real depth and insight into our world.

The narratives are compelling, diverse and I am sure, a welcome additional to the blogosphere.

Of course, while the posts are fantastic we've also deployed a lot of social web goodness. All posts are semantically tagged using OpenCalais, you can leave comments using your Facebook, Twitter or OpenID and in our continuing commitment to Creative Commons, our work is licensed under a CC license.

Please have a poke around, leave a comment and let me know what you think.

(P.S. thanks to everyone who worked on this!)

It's been a month since I've started my new gig as Head of Online at Al Jazeera English (AJE). Which is a fancy way of saying that I'm leading AJE's online operations and serving as website Editor-in-Chief.

When my appointment was announced, the brief was:

• We need to be able to seek out new opportunities to connect and converse with our audiences.
• We need to develop new strategies to reach out to youth and online audiences more effectively.
• We need to build further interactivity and community in our online offering.
• We need to work towards seamless cross production and planning between News, Programmes and the web.
• And we need to put in place technology and infrastructure to sustain a rich user experience

Like most folk in our industry, I've been thinking about what a news website should look like for a long time. In fact, it was exactly a year to date that I kicked off a conversation on Twitter on what the most important elements of a new news offering should be :

My friend Kevin Anderson (who is the blogs editor at the Guardian) curated the answers to this question at Corante - the summary is well worth reading.

Of course, we don't have the luxury of building a news site from the ground up. And therein lies the most challenging aspect of transitioning from being a "scrappy" web entrepreneur type to a news manager type. From being able to think up an idea in the shower, then get into the office and excite a bunch of people to hack out a proof-of-concept before dark, to having to deal with all manner of constraints and risks.

Not that it's a problem - if there was anything I've learnt at KPMG, it was that risks are meant to be managed and constraints can often be useful in defining solutions.

It's just a different game - having spent so long being the new media evangelist in the organisation, trying to innovate at the edges, to moving bang into the centre and having to innovate from within. It's always easier being on the outside shouting slogans, than being inside and having to manage change.

Of course, being on the inside has it's benefits. Not least that I am privileged to have a team of close to 50 talented editors, journalists and translators based across the world who work 24/7 to bring you the news.

Expect much leetness....

My friends at the Harvard Berkman Center have an interesting post on what the Iranian blogosphere looks linke on the eve of the election.

Based on our monitoring of the Iranian blogosphere on election eve, it looks like Mousavi has broader support in the online blog community than Ahmadinejad. (For a broader understanding of the different attentive clusters in Iran check out our new online interactive Iran blogosphere map). The below maps show who is linking to websites associated with the candidates. It’s pretty interesting to see the contrast between Ahmadinejad  emtedadmehr.com), whose links are very concentrated in the Conservative Politics cluster, and Mousavi  mirhussein.com), whose links come from all over the map, not just the reformist politics group.

I met Bruce Etling and John Kelly at a Berkman event in Germany where they presented some fascinating findings on the Arab blogosphere (not least because it reveals that Al Jazeera is one of the most cited sources). After lots of data-mining and human tagging, they're able to produce these amazing visualisations that cluster blogs into similar genres, views and so on.

More on their Internet and Democracy blog.