From 360 East:

HM Queen Rania is surely following up on what’s happening in the Jordanian web scene!

In her recent interview in Jordan Business magazine, she talked, among other issues, about the homegrown development of web sites in Jordan.

At TootCorp, we were delighted to read that Ikbis, and Toot where cited by the Queen as two examples of “homegrown web sites that use their tools to generate innovation, creativity and even job growth”.

And at SYNTAX were thrilled that our friends and clients at Akhtaboot, were also mentioned.

That was a great morale booster on a hectic day :-)

My fellow blogger Kermit the Blog has more coverage of the Jordan Business interview.

The toot team is very flattered! :)

The founding members of toot corp graced the cover of this months issue of Pulp magazine. How awesome is that!

The toot team is extremely happy and excited as we just got back from the Jordan Web Awards where toot grabbed the GOLD shield and toot’s brand new sister site, Ikbis, grabbed the bronze! WOW! What a fantastic way to start the toot year!!

More pictures.

Where can you find a Saudi breakdancer, a Lebanese temptress and a narcoleptic sheik? At Ikbis (”click” in Arabic), a new Web site that lets Arabs join the file-sharing craze. Internet use in the Middle East has increased fourfold in the past six years, with more than 20 million logging on each day. The first Arabic-language service of its kind, Ikbis.com has already struck a chord—more than 1,000 files went up within a week of its November launch, and the site now tops 30,000 page views a day.

Read entire article here.

As the Arab blogosphere continues to grow and evolve, it is gaining more attention from Western journalists and academics. I just found a very interesting, long article, entitled The New Arab Conversation, on Columbia University’s Columbia Journalism Review. It is a comprehensive overview of the Arab blogging trend, from an American perspective.

Toot and Ikbis were mentioned in the article as examples of an “interesting alternative space that is being formed” in the Arab blogosphere.

I need to point out a correction here, as the article assumes that Toot and Ikbis are English language site. Both sites are, in fact, bilingual, even though on Toot the English language blogs outweigh the Arabic ones in number.

Read the article here.

Via 360 East