Isam Bayazidi’s Blog

Since Ahmad first emailed me along with other bloggers announcing what could be called an early test launch of toot, and requesting opinions and feedback, I wanted to write about it, and review it, but soon after, it was taken offline, for further improvements and a couple of days ago, it was up again, but still in “not even alpha” according to the site.I am sure that the site still have a long way to go in terms of features and content, nevertheless, I will have my take on it anyway.

What struck me first, and many of those who I talked to about it, is the very nice interface and design, one could not expect less than that from Syntax which have some of the best graphic and UI designers in town. The other thing, is that the name “toot” is creative, meaningful, and colorful.

Now toot (according to thier About page) is a hand-picked aggregator, where best of posts, from the best of blogs from Arabia is selected. Now “what is best” is very subjective and arguable, but looking at the list of blogs they have, it seems that they did some initial research in the blogosphere hunting for blogs, and they came out with a very interesting initial blog list.

So far, although they have some Arabic blogs, the interface is still in english for some reason, there isn’t much information about the site in Arabic, as well, in the “tootreads” section of the main page, Arabic posts are shown left to right, rather than right to left (there should be some auto-detection code to make sections/posts that have arabic body “rtl” rather than “ltr” even in the english interface).

I wasn’t really able to understand the difference between “What’s tooting” and “tootreads”, is tootreads posts that were tooting before ? I wonder . Another thing, I would really like to see a feed (rss, atom) link for the “what’s tooting” or “tootreads” to be able to follow the blogs they feature from a feed reader/aggregator. As well, I wanted to submit another blog (not mine) and suggest it to toot, but it seems that the submit interface is oriented toward the blogger being the one submitting it, I would like to see a “suggest a blog” form to allow readers, and bloggers to suggest other blogs than theirs.
I am sure that there are still a lot planed for toot, one would expect a tag-oriented interface, as with the growth of the blogosphere, categorization and segmentation of featured blog posts will be a must. If toot continues to be a maintained, updated, and introduce proper arabic interface soon, I think that it will gain more and more exposure and success. With the growth of blogging in the Arab world last year, one could only expect it to grow even further this year. toot could play a role in making quality blogs and posts more exposed and featured.

Blogging, Internet & Technology