Harvard Cyber Law department has published a very serious and interesting study (Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture, and Dissent) about the traits observed in the Arabic blogosphere. It has very interesting remarks that are common but this is the first time they are documented.
It is very interesting to see that the National interest is stronger than the Islamic feeling for the young bloggers. Although the political Islam is present in the affiliation of bloggers whether for or against.
It is not weird that Egyptians have the largest network on the sphere but what it is very interesting and deserve further research is that half of bloggers are females. This might be due to the fact that a lot of females are at home or because females need a higher level of cyber freedom to compensate for the real life limited freedom they have. I tend to agree with the former reason and disagree with the later.
Another interesting study and maybe more significant is to study the behavior of Arabic forum contributers because forums are still more important in the Arabic world and more descriptive. There are some Arabic forums that are way more important that the most important blog on this blogosphere. It is harder to code forums because of the many contributors and the naming tricks in Arabic though.
I have been running a forum for the past 9 years and contributing to several others and I notice that people still opt to write in forums to get more serious readers and start a longer term dialog.
