Middle East: Arabisk, Blog Competition and Debate · Global Voices
Tarek Amr

Arabisk is an annual competition to select the best Arabic blogs. And by Arabic here, they mean blogs in the Arab region that are written in Arabic language as well. The contest is being organized by Kalima Press and its owner Mohammad El Sahli, who desceibes himself as the first Arab full-time blogger.
The competition focuses in its first year on specialized blogs, that is, blogs that focus on a certain subject or related subjects. And hence there will be prizes for the specialized blogs and one prize for the best general or personal blog.
The competition has two main rules. The first one is that the content has to be authentic and not copied or extracted from somewhere else even if the blog owner is licensed to use it. The second rule is that the content has to be compliant with the Islamic rules and the society's traditions.
Ahmed Shokeir, at Late Night Stories, wrote about the absence of such kind of competitions in the Arab world and his first impressions on Arabisk:
Mohammad El Sahli, who is also known as Mohammad Said  Hjouij, wrote more details about the competition rules and selection criteria:
But this competition was subject to a huge debate. And bloggers from all over the Arab world had their own comments on its rules and selections.
Aljded believes that some of the selected blogs are in fact non compliant with the competitions second rule.
And Egyptian Wael Abbas wrote:
Egyptian Nora Younis on the other hand made fun of the competition's voting system design, especially that the blog design, has got a big weight in the competition evaluation criteria:
And so did Ahmed Shokeir, who also doesn't like the competition rating criteria and the inclusion of blogs design in the evaluation:
Shokeir also wrote…
The voting system, which is the second stage of evaluation after the top 10 blogs are selected by the competition judges, was subject to a huge debate. Arabisk voting system, which is similar to that of sites like digg and reddit, gives the users the ability to give either positive or negative votes to the blogs.
But it came out later on, that some users abused the system by giving negative votes to the competing blogs.
And it was obvious that the negative voting was a huge mistake.
And competition organizers have realized that, and decided to remove and reset the negative votes.
The Egyptian bloggers were all upset from the competition nominations because almost all of the nominated blogs were non-Egyptians, while the Egyptians form about one third of the Arabic blogosphere.
Shokeir also wrote on his blog:
Also Wael Abbas, was really upset and attacked the competition.
This comment made Abo Shams reply in order to defend Arabisk saying:
Also Mohammad El Sahli, the competition organizer, wrote a seperate post on his own blog in order to defend himself and his competition:
And finally, some other blogger, like Al-Fagih,  just didn't accept the fact that their blogs weren't selected, simply because they are pretty sure that their blogs are the best.
The winners will be announced on October 1.