Only a few days after the world's media began releasing the diplomatic cables revealed by WikiLeaks, one popular Egyptian Twitterer posed this question to his followers: “So, how much longer do you think the WikiLeaks Cablegate will keep the world entertained? I give it until Monday.” That was on December 2nd. Three weeks and a few thousand headlines later, WikiLeaks continues to dominate nearly every front page of every big newspaper worldwide on a daily basis. So apparently, people are still being entertained. Yet as the Arab press struggled to cover (or cover up) all the saucy cables relating to their leaders and enemies, blogs have sprung up to try and put all the information overload into Arabic. Hence, Arabicleaks.com, 7iber.com, ammannet.net and wikileaks-a.blogspot.com, among others, have been launched over the past two weeks with the stated aim of pooling together in Arabic all the region-specific cables. Eissa Faye, the founder of one of these blogs, called WikiLeaks Belaraby, (or WikiLeaks in Arabic) told Ahram Online via email that he and his team had noticed a selection process within much of the Arab press over how the leaks were covered. “We aimed to avoid that selectivity in our blog,” he said, “…so that all the information related to the Arab world was kept together and not lost in the midst of the daily publications.” The blog, one of the better laid out sites, primarily relies on gathering relevant leaks from the world press while citing their sources. In some cases volunteers offer to translate the leaks and Faye says that anyone is welcome to email translations that may then be posted on the blog. In just under two weeks, WikiLeaks Belaraby has had over 150,000 visitors with almost 800,000 page views. At this pace, it seems at least Arabic readers may well continue to be “entertained” as the exposures keep coming.
