Tweets from Beirut: Day Two of the Arab Bloggers Workshop · Global Voices
Jillian C. York

The second day of the Arab Bloggers Workshop kicked off with a presentation about Herdict Web, a site which uses crowdsourcing to gather reports of Internet filtering from users around the world.  Qatari workshop participant Muhammad Basheer tweeted a photo from the presentation:
Muhammad Basheer tweets about Herdict
Following the first presentation, Egyptian blogger Manal discussed the world of Arab techies, particularly touching about female techies in Egypt.  Lebanese NightS noted the need for more women at #ab09:
NightS calls for more female techies
After Manal's informative presentation, the bloggers broke into group workshops, touching on a variety of subjects.  One workshop, conducted by hamzoz, focused on blogging from Iraq.  Muhammad Basheer attended the presentation and tweeted:
Muhammad Basheer attended @hamzoz's presentation
Creative Commons rep Donatella Della Ratta also attended, tweeting:
Donatella tweets about @hamzoz's presentation
Bahraini participant Amira Al Hussaini attended a presentation by the lead of the new Rising Voices project in Yemen.  She was clearly impressed by the workshop:
Amira Al Hussaini is impressed by the number of Yemeni bloggers
The last major presentation of the day was once again perhaps the most captivating.  Anas Tawileh, founder of Meedan, presented on the Arabic-English crowd translation project.  Iraqi blogger Salam Pax best captured the sentiment in this tweet:
Salam Pax was captivated by the Meedan presentation
Tawileh opened his presentation with a number of interesting facts about the Internet including one that the number of hours spent on Facebook in a year, translated into volunteer hours, could be spent to build the Giza pyramids in only 9 days.  Amira Al Hussaini shared another of Tawileh's tidbits:
Amira Al Hussaini tweets a fun fact
Tweeting about the concept, Moroccan GV author Hisham G. summed up Meedan in a few words:
Hisham G. talks about the concept of a "translingual web"
Lastly, Meedan itself (which has covered the workshop here) noted on Twitter that they'll be translating tweets from the conference (which can otherwise be found on hashtag #ab09):
Meedan will be translating tweets from the workshop