Today, we are at the Arab Bloggers meeting, the second. It started with a conversation, a dream, or for people who know me, a moan. “Why can’t we have something like this for Arab bloggers?” I told Tunisian Sami ben Gharbia, my colleague at Global Voices, as we Skyped with him from Miami last year.

Thanks to Sami’s relentless efforts, and funding from The Heinrich Böll Foundation and Global Voices Online, with support from HIVOS and the Open Society Institute, we meet in Beirut today: Around 80 bloggers from 19 countries.

Bloggers from Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Mauritania, Somalia, Morocco, Algeria, Oman, Tunisia and Yemen are here – as well as Americans, a Brit, a Dutch, a few Germans and a Bolivian.

We are all gathered here, from December 8 to 12, to discuss all that there is to talk about related to blogging, citizen journalism, new media and how to get people talking to each other and connecting with one another. The event is super friendly, with many of us having met before or connected virtually and it is a big happy party.

There is a lot of work too – as people network and learn from each other, attend one presentation after the other, try to clone themselves to attend as many workshops as they possibly can fit into and continue to have an overwhelming sense of awe and appreciation for all that is happening. Being at such gatherings, meetings that have been put together carefully and where all the participants are genuine, is a humbling experience.

The Internet connection is so so here. The tech people are trying their best. For regular updates, tune into to #ab09 on Twitter, where I tweet as @JustAmira

If there is anything blogging or citizen media related you would like to touch on, please contact me or send me a direct message on Twitter and we will try to accommodate as much of the feedback we get.

Stay tuned, and happy and safe blogging.

Cross-posted from Silly Bahraini Girl

The second day of the Arab Bloggers Workshop kicked off with a presentation about Herdict Web, a site which uses crowdsourcing to gather reports of Internet filtering from users around the world. Qatari workshop participant Muhammad Basheer tweeted a photo from the presentation:

Following the first presentation, Egyptian blogger Manal discussed the world of Arab techies, particularly touching about female techies in Egypt. Lebanese NightS noted the need for more women at #ab09:

After Manal’s informative presentation, the bloggers broke into group workshops, touching on a variety of subjects. One workshop, conducted by hamzoz, focused on blogging from Iraq. Muhammad Basheer attended the presentation and tweeted:

Creative Commons rep Donatella Della Ratta also attended, tweeting:

Bahraini participant Amira Al Hussaini attended a presentation by the lead of the new Rising Voices project in Yemen. She was clearly impressed by the workshop:

The last major presentation of the day was once again perhaps the most captivating. Anas Tawileh, founder of Meedan, presented on the Arabic-English crowd translation project. Iraqi blogger Salam Pax best captured the sentiment in this tweet:

Tawileh opened his presentation with a number of interesting facts about the Internet including one that the number of hours spent on Facebook in a year, translated into volunteer hours, could be spent to build the Giza pyramids in only 9 days. Amira Al Hussaini shared another of Tawileh’s tidbits:

Tweeting about the concept, Moroccan GV author Hisham G. summed up Meedan in a few words:

Lastly, Meedan itself (which has covered the workshop here) noted on Twitter that they’ll be translating tweets from the conference (which can otherwise be found on hashtag #ab09):

Throughout the day, there were several specialized workshops, on everything from circumvention and anonymity (presented by Jacob Applebaum) to citizen journalism (presented by Amira Al Hussaini and Salam Pax) to video-hosting alternatives to YouTube (presented by Slim Amamou and Marcin Gajewski). Of the latter, Lina Ben Mhenni commented:

The presentation that got participants most riled up, however, was one given by Syrian attendee Razan Ghazzawi on the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s study mapping the Arabic blogosphere. Though there were too many reactions to share (which can be found by searching the hashtag #ab09 on Twitter), here are some highlights: Egyptian participant lastoadri wondered on Twitter if participants were fully informed about the study:

Nasser Weddady noted an important point made by Razan:

Finally, Iraqi Salam Pax agreed with Razan on the issue, stating: