The Jordanian blogosphere is full of surprises. Following a link from my friend Haitham Sabbah’s blog, I found myself exploring Toot, a great new site that’s designed to feature blogs in English and Arabic from the Middle East. It’s clearly got some overlap in terms of mission with Global Voices, but is taking a very different technical strategy, letting people vote on which posts and bloggers they think are most exciting.
A number of the people behind Toot are fantastic Jordanian bloggers who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting in person, including Jad, Ahmad and Roba, who also writes for Global Voices.
On the “So what is toot?” page, the authors explain:
Across Arabia and all around the world, intelligent, passionate, interesting, funny, knowledgeable and courageous people are using the web to make their voices heard. It started with a few, then a few hundred. Now, thousands of them are taking to their keyboards and starting to write blogs, share their knowledge, pictures, opinions, emotions and life. This is big!
This is, indeed, really, really big. The opportunity to understand what people in other parts of the world are doing, thinking and feeling is critical to understanding how our interconnected world works. Congratulations to my friends and the other founders of Toot for putting together a great new tool that helps those of us outside Arabia understand what’s going on there, and lets people in the Arab world make connections across national borders. I wish you great success!
(PS: if you want to know how Toot works, check out Jad’s blog, where he’s gradually revealing some of the secrets of the site… Jad, who did the cartoon in your header? – that’s a great likeness of you!)
Ethan,
Thanks for this flattering review and for your encouragement. It means a lot to us.
I will not be be revealing a secret if I tell you that Global Voices was one of the things that inspired us to start toot with its current functionality. I can also ‘reveal’ here that one of the moments when things started to click in my mind was during your last visit to Amman for the open source conference. So consider yourself one of the instigators of this project :)
One main difference between toot and Global Voices (apart from the difference in geographic focus, size, technical direction etc) is that toot is a company. Our challenge will be the balance of financial well being with delivering something that is culturally meaningful. Wish us success on both fronts :)
Indeed, thank you for this flattering review Ethan.
It’s cool cartoon (isn’t it?) by my colleagues Wael.
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