E-Media Tidbits

iToot.net Looking for Middle Eastern voices? Toot is a leading aggregator of blogs "from across Arabia and around the world."

Gal Beckerman has an extensive and detailed story in Columbia Journalism Review about how Middle Eastern bloggers may be cracking open the closed doors of the sealed societies in Arab countries. The story also rambles over to the fact that some Arab and Israeli bloggers are actually talking to one another, not shouting at one another.

A major gripe, though: no links at all in the story, when she quotes several interesting bloggers we would consider looking up. The story, it seems, is just shovelware from the print CJR.

Meanwhile, a recent Haaretz story focused on Iranian expatriate blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who spoke at a conference at Ben-Gurion University in Israel last week.

Also, last summer I wrote about how from Day One of the Second Lebanon War (as it is now being called in Israel) Lebanese bloggers were providing a blow-by-blow account of the war -- literally. I have prepared an entire research paper on this matter, which I delivered as a lecture at several U.S. universities last fall. I will make it available to anyone who e-mails me and asks for it.