Meedan blog goes cross-language
We’ve recently installed the Worldwide Lexicon plugin for WordPress on the Meedan blog, and you should too. It allows readers of other languages to access your content in their own language. In our case, that means Arabic speakers who have Arabic as their default browser language can read our English language posts in translation. WWL automatically offers a Machine Translation, or – where available – a human translation. Any reader can edit the translations on the page and improve them, much as we do on Meedan using the IBM Transbrowser.... Read The Rest →
Meedan at the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Think Tank on Global Education
Image via Wikipedia What happens when the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Business School get together 150 people for 2.5 days to listen to 53 presentations from the folks who are working to reinvent global education in the context of ’Preparing Children and Youth for an Interdependent World’? The product of this high quality idea churn might take a few years to come down the pike, but the near term result of two days in conversation with this group has me feeling inspired, awed, and…well…educated. I was... Read The Rest →
Lessons from ArabNet conference boost Middle East web startups
Nina Curley– The ArabNet conference in Beirut, Lebanon just wrapped up after a whirlwind two days, and Meedan was there to witness it all. Bigwigs gave newbies advice on startups and developing the right entrepreneurial mindset. Young bloggers tweeted cheeky comments and shifted the direction of on-stage conversation with their questions. Women represented in the crowd, even if not as much on the panels, and stood up for their voice. Palestinians were honored for their great entrepreneurial ideas despite being absent due to visa issues. The amazing Maya Zankoul produced fantastic... Read The Rest →
How to Get Started with Your Cross-Language Conversation
We’ve produced some simple one-minute videos to explain how to get started on Meedan. Enjoy! On Meedan our community tracks and discusses major Middle East news stories by bringing together translated commentary and news from a wide range of Arabic and English sources. See how we do this in this video or at http://News.Meedan.net. Meedan is a cross-cultural forum for discussing the news across Arabic and English. On Meedan you can interact with people outside your language community by commenting on current events we’re discussing through our translation and dialogue... Read The Rest →
5 Great Feature Improvements with the New Look Meedan
There’s been a lot of great discussion about Meedan this week since our Monday release which has helped get our message and our product out and about. But for users of Meedan who’ve known the project for some time, what’s different from the beta version? The great news is that we’ve taken account of user experiences to improve this product. What you see is the result of a sustained effort to understand what our users need and how we will encourage uptake of a pretty unusual idea. After all, it’s... Read The Rest →