Wael, what happened to your idea of running a design contest?

This week there has been lots of talk about Microsoft’s new product dubbed origami. Origami as you all know is the art of folding paper. Now toot has done its own origami exercise in an Indian restaurant run by cool Egyptians in Amman.

You can check the movie on youtube, but the quality sucks. If you can support 3gpp format on your computer, then I recommend downloading the movie from here (right click and save) as the quality is much better. Real Player and Quicktime support this format.

Every time I pause, step out of the picture, and study the Arab blogosphere, I find myself amused at how quickly and dynamically it is changing and growing. It is even more amusing to scratch the surface and look at it a little deeper- you can clearly see distinctive borders of the different Arab countries sketched on the internet, with their respective mentalities, interests, and correlations.

Most of the countries have formed their own little blogging communities, and perhaps even built walls around these regional communities. To my knowledge, toot will be the first attempt to bridge the Arab blogosphere as whole, beyond traditional formats and the shackles of time and space; bridging a community of Arabs with a passion for sharing.

Needless to say, I’m really excited at the prospects.

To make things even more exciting, although I’ve met all the toot team on random occasions before, today was my first “full-toot-team” event. Even Mazen all the way in London made an appearance(as you can see on Karim’s laptop screen)!

This week has been amazing. Things have come together in a really good way. I have not been as excited about a project in the past few years as I’ve been this week. What is great is that with a small of really good people, we have been able to build this site from scratch in a relatively short time. What started as a little prelaunch experiment has evolved into something which we feel is promising.

We still have to go through a proper selection of sites that we want to feature. What we have now is by no means the final list. But just the thought of being able to bring together the posts of diverse, interesting and engaged bloggers from ‘Arabia and beyond’ on toot is very exciting. Add to that that toot visitors will be able to give votes to bloggers they like, is adding to the site a democratic aspect that we find fitting.

Tonight, most of the toot team, Karim, George, Wael, Jad and myslef, was in the office. A big thank you to Jad, who over the past two days (and over the past few weeks in general) worked hard to pull our ‘pre-alpha’ site together. And another thank you goes to Wael, for translating our ideas and initial prototypes into this good looking design (at least we think so :).

I think we reached a milestone today.. Let the harvest begin!

What’s wrong with those guys? They are wrecking the office: