Last year when I first heard about iToot, I think i have submitted my blog. It was my curiosity I think, not me !! But hey, this is very fast, one year later an email jumped in my inbox :
Dear Blogger,
Thank you for your submitting your blog to toot, we really appreciate all the effort you put into it and the fact that you choose to submit it to toot. We will be reviewing your blog each time we add more blogs to toot, so please be patient with us.
Before we get into the details, we need to apologize for not getting back to you about your submission earlier, but the toot team is still a very small team and we have had a very busy year getting our newest product, Ikbis, the Arab world’s first photo and video sharing site, rolling into the world. Please check Ikbis out, registration is very simple and it is just another way of sharing with us what you have. We would really appreciate your feedback on it!
Many have been asking about the criteria for which toot blogs are chosen, and mainly, when choosing blogs, we aim to represent the mosaic of views, opinions, and demographics of the Arab world. We seek diversity; blogs that add to the mixture of our selection, from several perspectives, such opinions, topics, and the levels of seriousness/silliness. We also try to maintain an evenhanded male-female ratio, as well as a balanced geographic location ratio. The other important criterion for us when choosing blogs is each blogs lifespan; we seek blogs that have been around for a while and that have a loyal audience and good or promising amount of traffic.
That said, there really is no “scientific” way to choose what goes on toot, and perhaps some of our biases as a team sometimes affect our selection, but after all, in the end, we are not a general Arab blog aggregator or a “Technorati replacement”. We are also a very small team, and with toot’s hand-picking policy, toot is built on the idea of having a small number of blogs, so although we like a lot of the blogs that are sent to us, we cannot add everyone as it becomes impossible to do the handpicking.
We hope to add more blogs to toot soon, and we would love it if you keep us updated with what’s happening on your blog, such as upgrades, design changes, or new ideas. Happy blogging, and don’t forget that we would always love to hear any feedback you have for us.
Blog on,
The toot Team
My Apologies, your network is great, I didn’t visit it again since last year, and not interested anymore to take part in it. And please excuse my curiosity, see you next year !
I’ll just keep an eye on hostphp.org server in case anything wrong happened, I have putty installed on my N80 for quick access.
