Wednesday, May 05, 2004

A stupid question

The blogosphere can be divided in infinite ways, but there are several identifiable and self-identifying groupings. For instance, the Catholic section is St. Blog's, the Jewish section is jBlog, and the Mormon section is the bloggernacle.

This phenomenon is not just limited to religious blog groupings. Bloggers affiliated with the US military are Milbloggers. (Actually, I don't know that this is limited to Americans, but it seems that way to me, ignoramus that I am. Maybe it's just that most bloggers period are American. Anyone who wishes to better inform me is more than welcome.) There are probably other examples that my imaginary readers can point to.

So what do I call the Middle Eastern bloggers? Is there a name? I note that Soundfury has recently started doing a roundup called the carnival of the liberated, but that name was specifically chosen for the Iraqi blogs.

Even defining the boundaries of this hypothetical blog grouping is tough. Most are Arabs, but there are also surely Persians, Kurds, Turks, etc. So the Arab Blogosphere is out. Similarly, I do not know that they are all Muslim, although I suppose that most are. So I don't want to refer to the Blog Umma and leave out Zoroastrians, Druzes, Christians, Sufists, Baha'i, etc. And then of course there is the question of including Israeli Jews in the list.

Leaving aside these problems for the moment, let us consider only the Arab Muslim blogs. What should we call them? Anyone have an idea? Has a name been chosen already?

--REDBEARD

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