If there is a nerve center to the Egyptian blogosphere, manalaa.net is it. This is not because it is widely read (although it is), but because its publishers have done more than anyone else to create a sense of community among Egyptian bloggers. Alaa Abdel Fattah and Manal Bahei Eddin, a couple in their early twenties, used their experience running one of the oldest Egyptian blogs to create the Egyptian bloggers’ ring (www.egybloggers.com), a site that monitors a list of all Egyptian blogs in three languages. They have also created the first aggregator dedicated to Egyptian blogs (www.manalaa.net/egblogs), a clever piece of software that gathers new posts from Egyptian blogs and centralizes them in chronological order on a single page. You can virtually watch the Egyptian blogosphere form as it is being written.

Although some of manalaa.net’s coverage is dedicated to technology issues—Abdel Fattah is an IT specialist and a leading advocate of open-source software, notably as co-founder of the Egyptian Linux Users Group (EGLUG)—it is also highly political. Abdel Fattah and Bahei Eddin were part of the small group of “bloggers for change” that emerged last summer and organized several protests (alongside other movements) in Cairo’s popular neighborhoods. They can still often be seen on the sidelines of Kifaya protests, although they fiercely defend their independence from the movement.

It’s no wonder that an ethic of political activism and public service is prominent on manalaa.net. Its founders, after all, are the scions of two militant dynasties: Abdel Fattah is the son of Ahmed Seif Al Islam, a veteran leftist rights activist who heads the Hisham Mubarak Center, while Bahei Eddin is the daughter of Bahieddin Hassan, director of the Cairo Center for Human Rights.