The Age of the Liveblog: A Guardian Case Study, and a Solution to a Problem

A report published this week by researchers Neil Thurman and Anna Walters from City University (London) has shed some much needed light on the increasing prevalence of live blogs as a publishing format for leading news outlets, answering important questions on why outlets use the format, why readers prefer to consume news via live blog, and how readers interact with live blogs. Based on a case study of live blogs at The Guardian — an outlet that seems to have mastered the art of live blogging and who have used... Read The Rest →

Okki Dokki – Checkdesk Partner Meeting Dokki, Cairo

Once again typing away from the regular environs of the winged metallic tube – to be exact, these words come to you from seat 31A here on the Lufthansa brand transport experience, headed westward, my home direction. The past two weeks have been very good for Meedan. Most significantly and to the point of this post, we held our first partners meeting for Phase 2 of the Checkdesk project. From October 16-18, we brought the entire Meedan team (less Aaron, Andy, and Zainab it must be noted) together with an... Read The Rest →

On the Meedan Radar – July 2012

This post is going to be a monthly round up of projects we’ve been talking about at the Meedan watercooler, research that is guiding our work, and links that have us hitting “share” - BBC publishes major report on Arab Spring coverage (http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/arabspring_impartiality/arab_spring.pdf ) What is generally apparent is that the BBC are doing good things with UGC verification, but lack policy and structure to handle this issue of “caveat” in a consistent and methodical way. At the same time, though much of the process has been written in blog... Read The Rest →

Translating Tweets from the Arab Spring: Towards a Translation Workbench for Twitter

Think about the Arab Spring and you probably think about citizen media.  Syrians, Egyptians, Libyans, Bahrainis, Tunisians have not just been taking to the streets over the past year, but documenting their experiences in text, image and video – even building whole new social movements with a digital dimension. Has there ever been a historic moment of this scale unfold before our eyes through new media publishing tools? Surely this is inspiring to the rest of us who are not in the Middle East.  More than ever before, an American... Read The Rest →

Rethinking how @Meedan tweets

Meedan loves Twitter. Since 2008 Meedanis from around the world have been logging on every day to our organizational account and tweeting and retweeting on news, tech, translation and social media every day. As Meedan grows, and as we approach out 7,000th tweet, we’ve decided to rethink some of our strategies for how we use Twitter both as a means to engage our community, and as a way of discovering and sharing top content in Arabic and English. In the coming weeks followers of @Meedan will notice a few changes... Read The Rest →

Are you an innovator in citizen media? Win funding and support!

هل أنت مبتكر في مجال إعلام المواطن؟ اربح التمويل والدعم! If you’re as interested in improving access to media and helping drive social change as we are here at Meedan, here’s an opportunity that will be right up your street: إن كنت مهتماً بتحسين الوصول إلى الإعلام وبالمساعدة على دفع التغيير الإجتماعي إلى الأفضل مثلنا نحن في ميدان، فلديك فرصة مواتية ومناسبة تماماً: Ashoka Changemakers, with support from Google, has launched a global competition to discover ground-breaking solutions that boost media access and participation around the world. The competition is looking for... Read The Rest →

Meedan at the Oxford Internet Institute: Understanding the role of the internet in Egypt's revolution

The role that social media played in the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions is one question among many in understanding these profoundly important social events.  But perhaps it is a particularly important one for Meedan – after all we are strategically wedded to the idea that the web makes possible a more networked world in which information and ideas can be exchanged more freely.  That this debate has gathered such steam through the Arab revolutions is in part a feature of the newness of social media, but also the extent to... Read The Rest →

How you can help translate #Jan25

If you have a Twitter account, can read and understand a little Arabic, and can write English (or any other language), then you can help translate tweets from and about the anti-government protests taking place in Egypt. Doing this, you can help the people who speak your language gain a better insight into what is going on and the discussion taking place on #Jan25. UPDATE 16/2/2011: You can now curate and translate Libya #Feb17 here: http://www.curated.by/meedan/libya-feb17-protests and #Bahrain #Feb14 here: http://www.curated.by/meedan/bahrain-feb14-protests/ We have 9 easy steps to translating tweets: 1.... Read The Rest →

Community translation of Egypt protests

Since protesters took to the streets of Egypt yesterday, the Meedan community has been focusing translation efforts on the media and social media coming from Egypt, and finding ways to help any interested web user share news and comment about #Jan25 between Arabic and English. To do this we’ve adopted a distributed approach to our curation and translation, working in 4 main places: 1) Our news.Meedan.net event, where you can post media, comments, or links for translation OR help translate those posted by others. With Facebook and Twitter blocked within... Read The Rest →

Potholes not Politics?

At a USIP event back in July, Jordanian blogger Naseem Tarawneh spoke eloquently about the way youth in the Middle East is using social media not to overthrow regimes, but as a tool to support social improvement. Last week, in the auspicious settings of the magnificent Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a group of young people were gathered who have pioneered this application of social media as a vehicle for social entrepreneurship within their communities across the Middle East. As participants in the 2010 Young Leaders Visitors Program, organized by the Swedish Institute,... Read The Rest →

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