How you can help spark east-west dialogue with a delicious tag
If you’ve ever tagged a bookmark on delicious, you can help us. What? Yes, we want you to help us track, aggregate and translate the stories and sources you care about, using a popular bookmarking service on the web. All it takes is a simple tag: for_meedan. How? Imagine you’ve just read a brilliant article about Gaza that you feel needs to be seen more widely. You might share it with your close friends on facebook, or send it to a mailing list. But you can also pretty easily share... Read The Rest →
Meedan supporting real-time crowdsourced Arabic translation of LeWeb Twitter feed
Meedan is taking part in an exciting crowdsourced Twitter translation project today and tomorrow. We’ll be helping to translate a feed of live tweets from a major internet conference called LeWeb. The results can be viewed here: http://livetweeting.com/ Samer Karam will be reporting on the conference from the ground, with a team of translators translating into Arabic using Twitter’s reply function. It means this prestigious conference which brings together leading technologists from all the big web services (Google, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Netvibes etc.) will be accessible to Arabic speakers around... Read The Rest →
& 'slashtags'">Collating better data about sources: schema, networks & 'slashtags'
In today’s Meedan meet-up we’ll be talking Tagging. Under the supervision of our UI lead, Chris Blow, we want to put in place a new community approach to tagging so we can channel the source work we do every day into a more structured data set. In other words, every time a Meedani tags an article on Delicious or Twitter, we want to encourage the use of some structured tags that give key information (location, author, publisher type, outlet). Open for debate is not just the data we should be... Read The Rest →
Translation Etiquette and Digital Media Credibility
Here at Meedan we’ve been recently discussing what an Arabic-English stylebook for digital journalism would look like. We’ve been inspired by an Arabic stylebook published by the Amman-based Abu Mahjoob Creative Productions and the Washington, D.C.-based International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), with the support of USAID’s Jordan Media Strengthening Program. The stylebook was created with the intention of becoming a common reference in Jordan for print, broadcast, photo and digital journalism in the since most media outlets in Jordan lack their own stylebook. In English, we’ve also enjoyed reading... Read The Rest →
10 questions to ask when adding Twitter Streams to your Iran List
If you want to use Twitter to monitor what is going on in Iran today as opposition protesters once again come onto the streets, it’s vital you have tools for knowing who’s worth to listen to. The potential for fake reporters to distribute disinformation is huge. We take this seriously at Meedan. This time around some mainstream outlets appear to be avoiding Twitter as a source altogether. That could mean some hard thinking has gone on inside big media organizations. Reporting false information is as big a no, no as... Read The Rest →
Join our Live Blog: How social media are impacting the Muslim World
We are looking for conversationalists, social media enthusiasts and translators to help us live blog this event at UC Berkeley in Arabic and English. The forum, titled ‘Politics and New Media in the Muslim World’ will bring together a diverse set of perspectives on the issue, including Mohamed Abdel Dayem, Middle East program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists. It kicks off at 5pm today PST. Evan Hill, Liz Kelley and Ed Bice will be live blogging from the venue here. If you can help, respond to this thread... Read The Rest →
What the Arab World Thinks about Obama's Nobel Peace Prize
As you will likely already know, Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace prize. So we have our mission statement for the day: “To provide diverse translated views on Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace prize win from across the Middle East and beyond.” So here’s are the latest links from our thread: If you think you can help us, here’s how you can get involved: 1- Visit Meedan and add your view, post a url to an important blog or op-ed response, or help us translate comments and articles coming in... Read The Rest →
What Google Translate Persian says about the future of the polyglot web
Image via CrunchBase Today was one of the most important days in Meedan‘s history, and for the least expected of reasons. Six days into a electoral crisis of revolutionary proportions in Iran, Google released an alpha version of their Persian MT service. wOOt. Big deal, you may say. An MT service – what has that to do with protests and high politics in the Iranian Islamic Republic. Actually, I think it is enormously significant. It shows that Google feels the time is right for translation on the web. So much... Read The Rest →