As a contributer to Global Voices, I’m subscribed to several mailing lists that keep me updated with the latest news of the GV community, but what’s really good about these mailing lists is that there is many intelligent people on them who make conversations interesting and valuable. One of the recent good discussions started with the title “Technorati sucks,” which is true, imho.

However, Boris Anthony had a good PoV here: “There is no reason (none) why there cannot and should not be a thousand Technorati-like services around the world, all tweaked and tuned for specific niche interests and purposes.”

Now, truth be told, I never thought that building Arabic alternatives to some available services is a good idea. I mean just take a look at this website, which is supposed to be the Arabic alternative to del.icio.us. This was a dumb idea because if the developers have tried to do some research before working on it, they could have found something called de.lirio.us, a social bookmarking service exactly like del.icio.us but with open source that they could modify to work in Arabic.

Nevertheless, I think that Arabic Technorati-like website is a good idea. Some may argue that Toot is there and it’s doing great, but I think Toot is more of a human-edited blogging portal. What I’m talking about here is a service to index Arabic blogs, make them searchable, and provide a pinging server. A website like that would be a very good and useful tool to feel the real pulse of the Arab blogosphere.