After the 10th Tunisian Blogger Meetup

We just came home from the 10th Tunisian blogger meetup, which was a big success, in which we broke the record in the number of participants and had to keep adding table after table to accomodate the bloggers who came.

What I think is the greatest thing about this meetup is that we had the biggest number of new faces, all thanks to Infinity who took the time to go around blogs and invite them to the meetup. I think we should do more stuff like that with the next meetups.

So, all in all, we were 23 in this meetup, and only 4 were non bloggers. Mrs Senda Baccar, the editor in chief of Femmes Magazine attended the meetup with us and will be writing an article about blogging in Tunisia soon.

The meetup was held at Biwa, which has emerged as a favourite location for our meetups. It started at 1PM and ended a bit after 7PM.

As usual it was a lot of fun, and it was even greater because of all the new faces who were present. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again in the future meetups and hoping that we’ll have even more people. Maybe in the near future we’ll have to reserve all of Biwa for our meetups ๐Ÿ˜›

Update: Another thing I liked about this meetup is how it felt a lot like the first meetup all over again because of all the new people who came. Over the past few months, the same faces kept coming, which was great because we became really good friends, but it also meant that we talked less about blogging and more about ourselves and our lives. This time around, with all the new people present we went back to the basics, getting to know each other, talking about our views of blogging, why we do it, …etc.
Plus with a journalist being there with us asking all sorts of questions about blogging, we had to eventually talk about it.

We didn’t come to this meetup with a predefined agenda for what we should talk about and as the number was big, every corner of the table went off in a number of different discussions.
Anyway as usual, the discussions went from talks about blogging to an analysis of the recent weird Egyptian fatwa that says that it is forbidden for a husband and his wife to get naked while making love, just to show you how wide the range is ๐Ÿ˜›

Hopefully we’ll try to be more organized in the coming meetups with a number of predefined issues of discussion and ideas that we can all debate.

After the 9th Tunisian Blogger Meetup

Last night we had the 9th Tunisian blogger meetup, which was a lot of fun, as usual.

We had 4 new faces with us last night, one blogger, two bloggers-to-be and a TV presenter who has a show about the uses of the internet on national TV.

So, who were the bloggers there last night?
Toon-C, Adib, Mouse Hunter, Infinity, Evil Drako, Blogeuse, Tom, Troubadour, Mraihi and Subzero Blue.

The meetup started at 4PM at Caf

After the 8th Tunisian Blogger Meetup

Last night we had the 8th Tunisian blogger meetup at Biwa in Les Berges du Lac, and as usual it was a lot of fun.

What made this meetup even more special is that we had some international guests with us, which was really great and such a pleasure for us all.
Our international guests were: Rebecca MacKinnon, Jeff Ooi from Malaysia, Mite Nishio from the Dominican Republic and Isam Bayazidi from Jordan.

The other blogs represented in this meetup were: Adib, Mouse Hunter, Infinity, Evil Drako, Blogeuse, Jaz in the city, Tom, AquaCool and Subzero Blue.
We also had some non-bloggers with us who we’re working on pushing into blogging ๐Ÿ˜‰

I would like to send a special and big thanks, in behalf of myself and all the bloggers, to my new good friend from the Dominican Republic Mite Nishio for the very nice gifts he brought with him to the meetup.

The meetup started at 8PM and went on until 1AM. We had a nice dinner together and talked about so many things; from blogging and stories surrounding blogging, to ideas for Arab blog-related projects, to Merengue and music from the Dominican republic, to the Tunisian and Arab blogosphere, to places to visit in Tunisia, to capital punishment, to so so much more.

As usual it’s always great to meet bloggers offline and to connect with them on a personal level and just enjoy some quality time together, forget about blogs a bit, have a good laugh, discuss different issues…etc.
I personally extremely enjoy these meetups which are getting better one by one.

Last night, we also talked about the next blogger meetup that will be held next month, and that will be a really cool one. We’ll be posting the details about it soon.