Mind Soup

Inspiring People from the Lebanese Online Community David Munir Nabti works to support high impact innovation & entrepreneurship, and youth/alternative media. He is Co-founder and CEO (Chief Entrepreneur & Organizer) of AltCity.me, a new media/tech/social impact collaboration space and startup accelerator/support space in Beirut. AltCity includes a newsroom/media café, business support services, co-working spaces, offices, meeting rooms, and more, and is designed to be the ideal place for startups and freelancers to work. He is also co-founder of DevIneMedia/Hibr, a youth-powered alternative media outlet in Lebanon. He grew up between California and Beirut, studied at UC Berkeley (political economy), worked at the UN-FAO in Syria, Stanford University (Communication Dept., Journalism Program), UC Berkeley (Education Dept, Service-Learning Research & Development Center), and Google, as a freelance journalist, and interned at Cisco Systems HQ and KQED (SF public media...

Celebrities Should Not Trust their Social Media Accounts with Agencies or Employees. Paula Yacoubian is an established Lebanese journalist who currently hosts a prime-time political and social talk show on Future Television, Inter-Views. She previously hosted another show on Al Hurra TV and was part of the morning talk show Nharkom Said on LBC. Additionally, Paula is a media trainer and a political strategist. She has interviewed high-profile figures throughout her career, including George W. Bush when he was in office back in 2005. I sat down with Paula to discuss her social media presence. Personally, I believe that she is doing a great job on her social media accounts and is among the best Lebanese journalists online. Very few use social media effectively, consistently and continuously. You can follow Paula on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram on PaulaYacoubian . What motivated you to start using social media as a media professional? I think that I started ver...

Thanks Wael for the photo! Last week, I spoke at the Lebanon Opportunities' "Economic Sustainability During Crisis" Conference on February 19-20, 2014 at Phoenicia Hotel. I was on a panel with Darine Sabbagh  – Marketing Collaborator of Online Collaborative, Luciana Younis – Social Media Strategist at Medco, Marie José Abed – Regional Communication Manager at HST (GS) and Ziad Kamel – Owner, Couqley and moderated by Maya Karanouh – Founder of TagBrands. The topic of the panel was:  Online Community Management. Description:  What do community managers do and why should you care and invest in this emerging and fast growing profession. What should you know about if you are in charge of a brand? How has this new job description started and what issues does it face. What are the pros and cons of having an agency or in-house community manager? How does the community manager engage the consumer? What tools and third party services do they use? Does ...

During their second anniversary ceremony, Lebanese Memes honored some Lebanese people who they believe are contributing positively towards a change in Lebanon. The honor list also included: Late Actress Amalia Abi Saleh, Comedian Nemr Abou Nassar, Movie Director Sam Andraos, Crepaway's Mario Thoumy, Virgin Radio's Naji Cherabieh, Women in Front's Joelle Rezkallah and For Lebanon's Najy Sfeir. I would like to thank Lebanese Memes for this great honor and to everyone who has supported me and my work for Online Collaborative , The Social Media Awards and Cloud 961 .

We have, beyond a doubt, dawned on a new era: the era of online stalking. Whenever anyone wants to know more about you, you can bet your life they turn to Google. For people searches, Linkedin profiles tend to show up higher in search engines results when compared to other websites. This is why you should be taking this opportunity to create and maintain a professional presence on Linkedin to leave a great impression on anyone (especially potential employers) who might be lurking around your profile. THE EMAIL ADDRESS The first step to a professional Linkedin presence is a professional e-mail address. It is advisable not to use your work e-mail because you might not have access to it indefinitely and it might be monitored by your employer- not a great idea if you’re looking for another job. DO Create a professional email address using your first name and last name or first initial and last name. DON’T Email addresses like sexybeast69@aol.com or puppy_loveXOXO@msn...

When Google pulled the plug on its RSS aggregator Google Reader last year, we lost the most powerful tool that we used to monitor what’s going on in the blogosphere. For the Lebanese, however, there is a resource that can provide us with the latest posts from the Lebanese blogosphere. This resource is Lebanese Blogs by Mustapha Hamaoui (also famous for his political blog Beirut Spring). It is by far the most interactive and dynamic blog aggregator dedicated to the Lebanese online community especially after its new release, as others prove to be very stiff and outdated. When asked for the reason for creating this site, Mustapha said “blog readers shouldn't waste their time searching for cool new Lebanese blogs and digging around for new posts. At the same time, bloggers shouldn't feel pressured to post everyday so that readers visit their blogs. This website hopes to solve both these problems and create a space for blog readers to visit every day to find cool posts.”...

Bassam Jalgha: Lebanon is still a fresh market for innovation and Entrepreneurship take a lot of time to pay off. Inspirational People from the Lebanese Online Community In an attempt to promote inspiring stories about people from the Lebanese Online Community, we, at Cloud961, have decided to dedicate a monthly column to interview an inspiring figure that has left a mark in the Lebanese online sphere. For your suggestions for this column, feel free to email me on mhijazi@cloud961.com . Bassam Jalgha was born and raised in Beirut. Got his BE in Mechanical Engineering from the American University of Beirut and continued his Masters in the same field with a concentration in Mechatronics. His graduate research topic was in robotics, specifically in fall avoidance of embedded humanoid robots. Previously he worked as an instructor at AUB teaching Mechatronics and Control systems labs. Bassam also has a personal devotion to music. He studied Oud instrumental music at the Lebanes...

As cliché as it may sound, it is very true. You will have to learn it the hard way to believe it. No matter if you are nice to everyone or employ democratic techniques to try to balance all the sides, you can never please everyone at the same time. It is something that you have to live with and get accustomed to. The only way you can avoid this is do nothing with your life (and even then, you will be getting comments about how lazy you are). This is more evident online. Individuals and brands get criticized and bashed all the time. It is easier to criticize because most people don’t realize that at the other side of the screen, there is a living breathing human being that will be affected by their words. If it were an offline conversation, most people will tend to consider the consequences of their words more and try to be diplomatic in order not to hurt the individual they are criticizing. Possibly the most negative aspect of social media is that it eliminates the human aspec...