Echoes from the Tunisian Blogosphere · Global Voices
Mohamed Marwen Meddah

The first Tunisian blog awards Tunisie Blog Awards 2005 have been launched to promote the Tunisian blogosphere even more, encourage bloggers to work more on their blogs and give credit to the bloggers who are doing a great job.
The process will be going through 3 phases:
Phase 1: Blog submissions for each category (12 – 18 December)
Phase 2: Jury votes for top 5 submitted blogs in each category (19 – 25 December)
Results: Results are announced (26 December)
Tunizika release the seventh episode of their musical podcast, with a mixture of Tunisian Jazz, Electro and HipHop.
Tarek thinks that Tunisian youth have truly messed up our language with imported and disfigured words. He's worried that we are slowly losing our cultural heritage.
Sailor writes about the professors at INSAT (National institute for applied sciences and technology) and how, to him, the issue of them being good or not is being overshadowed by how unjust some of them are with the students, favoring some over others for different reasons like gender, belonging to the same town, …etc. (in French)
Mochekes complains about the situation of IT engineers and programmers in Tunisia, how the salaries are unfair and unrelative to the amount of work being done, how they are somehow treated like low-level workers or even slaves, how the companies aren't well developed yet…etc. (in French)
An article about homosexuality in Tunisia (in French), and how it is viewed by the society and the law, was published in Tunisian magazine Réalités and was picked up by a number of bloggers like Houssein (in French), Hannibal and K-pax (in French), who think that it was a daring and courageous effort to bring up the issue.
Iskander writes about a discussion he had with some older people from his father's and grandfather's generations, who talked about life in Tunisia before independance and how they were somehow nostalgic and thought that it was a better time socially and that there was a greater racial mixture. (in French)
Tarek disagrees and replies that Tunisians were always an open and tolerant people, and that it wasn't a few years of colonization that taught us that. He also thinks that the racial mixture just changed and evolved because of factors like tourism and travel. (in French)
Adib does some research about a weird story that was published in a Tunisian paper about a 2 ton, 8 meter long anaconda that was found on the Tunisian-Libyan borders in November, and finds that it's a hoax, and that the pictures are those of a python that was caught in South Africa sometime ago. He criticizes the writer of the article for publishing such a false story.
The Soccer World Cup draw has put Tunisia in Group H with Spain, Ukraine and Saudi Arabia. Chouchitou thinks that Tunisia has a chance of making it to the second round for the first time in its history. (in French)