Blogging Presentation in Zaghouan, Tunisia · Global Voices
Mohamed Marwen Meddah

In the Tunisian monthly blogger meetups, one of the issues that always comes up is what we can do to spread blogging even more in Tunisia and get more people writing and sharing online.
One of the ideas that we came up with is by giving presentations about blogging in cultural, internet or youth centers. We also thought it was important that we give such presentations in places outside the capital city where most Tunisian bloggers are from.
Last wednesday (22/02/06), we were able to take the first step in that direction, by holding a presentation about blogging in Zaghouan, a city that lies 55Km outside Tunis.
The presentation was held in the ISET institute in Zaghouan, in the presentation/activity room of one of the dormitories.
Around 50 students showed up, mostly girls, for the presentation, in which we tried to explain the basics of blogging, a bit of it's history, how to go on about it, …etc.
We also gave a little overview of the Tunisian blogosphere and the community of Tunisian bloggers.
We were four bloggers (Tom, Karim, Marouen and myself) and one non-blogger Moez, who is a friend of Karim‘s.
The themes we covered were:
Moez kicked in after the presentation with his non-blogger views about blogging and his understanding of it all.
After that we held a little Q&A session in which we answered some questions by the students .
Some of the questions we got were about the credibility and trustworthiness of blogs and bloggers, the difference between blogging and other online publishing and if there were any funny situations that happened with us bloggers.
Some privacy concerns were raised too, especially when it came to the idea of publishing their personal photos online, which we explained wasn't necessary and even unadvisable.
Our goal from the presentation was to introduce blogging to the students and get them interested in exploring it further, maybe even trying to get online and start a blog of their own.
We tried to break it down into simple, interesting ideas and to give them pointers at all the possibilities they could use a blog for.
Overall we think that we were successful in doing that and that we got the message across. A few eyes sparkled and we felt some interest stirring in some of the crowd.
After the presentation, I had the chance to talk further to some of the students and some of them were already thinking of ways to use blogs to help in their studies and projects, which I think is great.
I would personally like to thank everyone who helped make the presentation a reality, as well as the students who showed up and listened to us, and of course my fellow bloggers who believed in the importance of this presentation and came. Last but not least, a big thanks to Moez who was so generous to drive us to Zaghouan and back and added a valuable non-blogger insight to the presentation.
Hopefully we'll get to do this again soon in other places around Tunisia.