Category: Tunisia

Tunisian Blogger Meetup 11

It’s time for another blogger meetup, and this time it was organized by our friend Tom.

The next Tunisian blogger meetup, which will be our eleventh, will be held this coming Sunday 05/03/06 at 4PM in Latina restaurant in Les Berges du Lac.

And drinks are on the house, so yes, they are free 😉 A big thanks to Latina for their hospitable offer 🙂
Adib is also offering free salsa lessons to anyone interested 😛

We’re counting on you all to come and make this an even greater success than the last meetup.

Everyone is welcome, even non-bloggers who just want to know what the hell it’s all about 🙂

Zaghouan Blog Presentation

In our regular blogger meetups, one of the issues that always comes up is what we can do to spread blogging even more in Tunisia.

An idea that we came up with is by giving presentations about blogging in cultural, internet or youth centers.
We also thought it was important that we give such presentations in places outside the capital city where most Tunisian bloggers are from.

Last wednesday, we were able to take the first step in that direction, by holding a presentation about blogging in Zaghouan, a city that lies 55Km outside Tunis.

The presentation was held in the ISET institute in Zaghouan, in the presentation/activity room of one of the dormitories.
Around 50 students showed up, mostly girls, for the presentation, in which we tried to explain the basics of blogging, a bit of it’s history, how to go on about it, …etc.
We also gave a little overview of the Tunisian blogosphere and the community of Tunisian bloggers.

We were four bloggers (Tom, Karim, Marouen and myself) and one non-blogger Moez, who is a friend of Karim’s.

The themes we covered were:
– Introduction, definition and history of blogging: By Me.
– Blogging approaches and objectives: By Tom.
– Blogospheres and the Tunisian blogosphere in specific: By Marouen.
– Simulation of how to create a blog: By Karim.

And Moez kicked in after the presentation with his views of a non-blogger about blogging and his understanding of it all.
After that we held a little Q&A session in which we answered some questions by the students .

We think that the presentation went pretty well and got the message across. We did see a few eyes sparkle and felt some interest stirring in some of the crowd.
Hopefully, some of them will try and explore blogging even further and maybe start a blog.

After the presentation, I had the chance to talk to some of the students and some of them were already thinking of ways to use blogs to help in their studies, which I thought was great.

I would personally like to thank everyone who helped make the presentation a reality, as well as the students who showed up and listened to us, and of course my fellow bloggers who believed in the importance of this presentation and came. Last but not least, a big thanks to Moez who was so generous to drive us to Zaghouan and back and added a valuable non-blogger insight to the presentation.

Hopefully we’ll get to do this again soon in other places around Tunisia.

Tunisian Blogger Needed for World Cup Blog

The WorldCupBlog is looking for a Tunisian blogger to join their team and blog about Tunisia’s World Cup football team.

Of course, it has to be someone who loves soccer and the national team and who would be able to write well in English.

The aim of WorldCupBlog is to be the place to come for insight, news and opinions about all 32 teams in the World Cup.

If you’re interested, you can either leave a comment here or send an email to bob [at] worldcupblog.com and tell him why you would like to be involved.

After the 10th Tunisian Blogger Meetup

We just came home from the 10th Tunisian blogger meetup, which was a big success, in which we broke the record in the number of participants and had to keep adding table after table to accomodate the bloggers who came.

What I think is the greatest thing about this meetup is that we had the biggest number of new faces, all thanks to Infinity who took the time to go around blogs and invite them to the meetup. I think we should do more stuff like that with the next meetups.

So, all in all, we were 23 in this meetup, and only 4 were non bloggers. Mrs Senda Baccar, the editor in chief of Femmes Magazine attended the meetup with us and will be writing an article about blogging in Tunisia soon.

The meetup was held at Biwa, which has emerged as a favourite location for our meetups. It started at 1PM and ended a bit after 7PM.

As usual it was a lot of fun, and it was even greater because of all the new faces who were present. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again in the future meetups and hoping that we’ll have even more people. Maybe in the near future we’ll have to reserve all of Biwa for our meetups 😛

Update: Another thing I liked about this meetup is how it felt a lot like the first meetup all over again because of all the new people who came. Over the past few months, the same faces kept coming, which was great because we became really good friends, but it also meant that we talked less about blogging and more about ourselves and our lives. This time around, with all the new people present we went back to the basics, getting to know each other, talking about our views of blogging, why we do it, …etc.
Plus with a journalist being there with us asking all sorts of questions about blogging, we had to eventually talk about it.

We didn’t come to this meetup with a predefined agenda for what we should talk about and as the number was big, every corner of the table went off in a number of different discussions.
Anyway as usual, the discussions went from talks about blogging to an analysis of the recent weird Egyptian fatwa that says that it is forbidden for a husband and his wife to get naked while making love, just to show you how wide the range is 😛

Hopefully we’ll try to be more organized in the coming meetups with a number of predefined issues of discussion and ideas that we can all debate.

10th Tunisian Blogger Meetup

So, it seems more people are ok with Sunday than those who aren’t, so the 10th Tunisian Blogger Meetup will be held this Sunday, January 29th at 1PM in Biwa.

The bloggers will be getting together for a nice lunch and for the usual fun.

A special guest who will be attending this meetup is Mrs. Senda Baccar, editor in chief of Tunisian women magazine “Femmes”, that’s published by R

Tunisian Blogger Meetup 10, When?

So, the 10th Tunisian blogger meetup will be this week, but when is not clear yet.

The two dates that have come up are as follows:

– Friday 27th, 7PM at Biwa in Les Berges du Lac
– Sunday 29th, Early afternoon at Biwa in Les Berges du Lac.

Personally, I’m more for having it on Friday. But it seems we have people who can’t come on Friday, just like there are some other people who can’t come on Sunday. So I guess we’ll have to put this up for a little vote.

So, Friday or Sunday?

Organizing Tunisian Blogger Meetup 10

It’s nearly a month since we had our last Tunisian blogger meetup, so that means that it’s about time for us to have another one, which will actually be our 10th meetup.

So if you have any suggestions for the date, time and place. Please leave a comment here.

I hope we’ll have more new faces in this meetup.

My personal suggestion is to have it on a Friday afternoon after work, so maybe Friday 27th at 7PM, in a nice caf

BioDiesel in Tunisia

The prices of fuel keep on rising all over the world, and no one is winning except the big oil companies.
The consumer is losing more and more money on fuel for transport and other uses, and the environment continues to be suffocated by our fuel emissions. It’s just those big oil companies that happily sit on very fat wallets while the whole world goes to hell.

Us Tunisians are luckier than others because the government subsidizes a percentage of the fuel price to keep it lower for us, but the country won’t be able to go on doing that forever, as prices soar even higher and demand continues to grow.
That’s why, just like the rest of the world, we should be looking for alternative fuel and energy options.

There are many directions that companies and governments around the world are pursuing to get rid of the human dependency on petroleum based fuels, ranging from the simple to the really sophisticated.

An option that I find really accessible for a country like Tunisia, that can’t afford to invest a lot of money in hydrogen-powered fuel cells for example, is BioDiesel.

Biodiesel is fuel made from renewable materials such as vegetable oils or animal fats, or even recycled fryer oil. It is biodegradable and non-toxic, and has significantly fewer emissions than petroleum-based diesel when burned. It also functions in current diesel engines and reduces engine wear by as much as one half.

Biodiesel is made through a process called transesterification whereby the glycerine is separated from the vegetable oil. The process leaves behind two products – biodiesel (Mono-alkyl ester) and glycerine (a valuable by-product used in soaps and other products).

I really wish the government or some private companies would explore this option and maybe other ones too that could help reduce our dependency on environment-unfriendly foreign fuel and keep the fuel prices low.

Eid El Adha Mubarak

Eid El Adha, or the big Eid, as we Tunisians call it, is tomorrow.
The big Eid comes with the end of the Hajj, and is the day in which muslims worldwide sacrifice sheep in commemoration of the prophet Abraham’s story with his son.
It’s also a day of sharing, as people are supposed to give away some of the sheep meat to the poor.

Prices for sheep have sky-rocketed this year, even more than previous years, it’s as if they run on oil or something. Yet that hasn’t stood in the way of Tunisians obsessively competing to buy their sheep.

As usual, we’ll be going to my parent’s place for lunch, then visiting some close relatives.

Eid Mubarak to everyone.
May it be a happy and blessed Eid for you all.

And hey, take it easy on your stomachs…

Wishes for Tunisian Blogosphere in 2006

The year 2005 was a very important year for the Tunisian blogosphere, with the number of bloggers growing amazingly and quickly.
A Tunisian blog directory and aggregator were launched, we started having our regular monthly meetups, a Tunisian blog service was created; and the first building blocks of a vibrant blogger community were put in place.

Towards the end of 2005 and the beginning of this year, the number of blogs is still rising, with an even quicker pace. And it looks like 2006 is shaping up to be the year of the Tunisian blogosphere.

Karim has put up a list of the things he hopes to see happening in the Tunisian blogosphere this year; I thought that was a great idea, and I thought I’d share my vision and hopes for this year too.

I hope:

– to get to spread blogging even more between Tunisians.
– to get more Tunisian bloggers from outside the capital.
– to see some new bloggers outside the average age fork (20s, 30s).
– all bloggers actively try to spread blogging between the people they know.
– we see the creation of more professional theme specific blogs.
– some public or famous Tunisian figures take up blogging.
– we see more diversity and more different profiles among new Tunisian bloggers.
– some more creative blog-centric projects start popping up in Tunisia.
– to see more coverage about local stories and events in blogs.
– more photos are taken and some photologs are created.
– to see Tunisian bloggers becoming more active in the international blogging scene.

That’s what came to mind right now. I’m sure I can come up with a lot more if I think more about it.
I wish that all our hopes for the Tunisian blogosphere start coming true this year.