Tag: maghreb

Jeeran Launches French Version Targeting Maghreb

MMM 7 Comments

Jeeran

Jeeran, one of the Arab world’s leading user-generated content portals, have just launched a new French version of their portal.

This move aims to make Jeeran’s services more accessible for users in the Arab Maghreb region, where the French language is widely used offline and online, in an attempt to widen their reach and grow their target market.

This is most probably a first step from Jeeran to build more traffic and heighten their visibility in the region, with hopes to find ways to start generating some revenue from online advertising in the region.

Jeeran

A number of online businesses from the Middle East face the frustration of not being able to monetize all the traffic they’re getting from around the Arab world, especially from the North African countries, and they end up with their focus mainly being the more lucrative Gulf market. Several of these companies are trying to draw up strategies to enter the Maghreb market where they see a lot of opportunity and growth potential.

You can check out the new French version of Jeeran here: Jeeran en Français.

Berberus, The Semantic Maghreb Blog Aggregator

MMM 2 Comments

BerberusBerberus is a new blog aggregator that was recently launched to cover blogs from the Maghreb region. The name is an obvious reference to the region and its roots. The site also says it references the existence of a form of berberism (free man) in every blogger who aspires to express themselves freely.

Over the past years, a number of blog aggregators have sprung up in the Maghreb region, mainly covering each country on its own, and there even was a blog called Maghreblog which grouped authors from all Maghreb states who blogged and re-blogged stories from the region, but none of the previous efforts have grouped as many Maghreb blogs in one place.

Berberus currently indexes 1255 blogs from the five Arab Maghreb states (Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania), and aggregates posts and comments from all these blogs. It also provides an analysis of the activity going through these blogs, giving information about the posts and comments activity throughout the region, which the most active blogs and most commented blogs are, and even which posts are the ones getting the most commenting action.

Berberus screenshot

An advanced search engine is provided to search for blogs, posts or comments on certain topics, or by certain people, throughout the region or in a specific country, and in a certain period of time.

Another plus for Berberus is the semantic side of it all, as the tags in the aggregated posts are extracted, and their content analyzed to provide users an easy way to find posts that talk about topics of interest to them; by surfing through the latest tags and checking out the hottest and most talked about issues and topics.

A podcast directory is also included, indexing podcasts from around the region, and offering a central interface to watch or listen to them.

The interface tries to pack all the mentioned functionalities in a way that keeps it pretty easy to use and uncluttered, and it’s rather successful at it. The site is in English only for the time being.

# Berberus

Microsoft And LINKdotNET Launch New MSN Maghreb Portal

MMM 5 Comments

Microsoft has launched a new French-language portal for its MSN service, called MSN Maghreb, geared towards the Arab Maghreb region which will provide the latest news and entertainment for users in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria.

The project is a joint venture with LINKdotNET, a subsidiary of Orascom, with which they already launched MSN Arabia in the past, and who currently operate that portal and will operate this new one too.

MSN Arabia, which was launched back in October 2001, attracts around two million page views a day and 2.7 million Hotmail subscribers; and with MSN Maghreb, Microsoft and LINKdotNET are hoping to tap into the rest of the Arab population from the mainly Francophone North African Maghreb region, and of course by doing that, consequently get into local advertisers’ pockets.

The announcement was made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Orascom board member Khaled Bichara at a press conference in Skhirat, Morocco, earlier today.

The new portal is accessible at www.maghreb.msn.com