Community

A nice quote from Kevin Anderson on the difference between news stories and blogs :

"News stories should answer questions and tie up loose ends. Blogs should pose questions and leave some ends dangling to encourage debate."

via Richard Sambrook.

(on a side note, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy seeing the Director of Global News at the BBC blogging panel discussions)

Ethan Zuckerman posted about a the rise of African blog aggregators a few weeks ago. I had previously written about a couple of different Arab blog aggregators so it was interesting to see how my comrades back South were sizing up.

I've been signed up for both Afrigator and the Mail and Guardian's Amatomu for about 3 weeks now and have been pleasantly suprised. Amatomu has already managed to galvanise the South African blogosphere - I've personally found myself spending more time bouncing around South African blogs linked off Amatomu.

Afrigator has the potential to do the same for the wider continent - it's still early days and it still has to gain critical mass. One of the old-school ways they are trying to gain visibility (and some link love) is by giving away an iPod (and some t-shirts) to people who help sign up bloggers. Vincent Maher (from Amatomu) has setup a Buzz Graph to track the impact of the Afrigator campaign - which is very cool - using one aggregator to track the growth of another!

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