Updated.

Few days ago Smashing Magazine, the popular design and web development website with over 4 million visits per month has acquired the popular Egyptian blog Noupe which  also specializes in website design and  development.

Noupe was founded in Egypt 2007 by Noura Yehia, and has grown significantly with great posts tutorials and how-to tailored to designers, web developers and bloggers.

The blog is popular with the Digg community as many of its posts hits Digg homepage quite often. It has an active community who comments and retweet heavily too. The blog has 34,913 RSS subscribers, and I believe the monthly visits are in the hundreds of thousands.

The price of the deal was not announced, but it has great implications. The same way Yahoo’s acquisition of Maktoob will affect the IT industry in the Arab region. According to my sources the amount of Yahoo Maktoob deal was 200 million dollars.

Congratulations to Noura, to all the Arab bloggers and the tech industry in the region. This proves again that professional blogging is not a waste of time; and that you can make it here in the region even if you did not get millions of dollars in funding; bootstrapping is the way to go.

Update: This news is also important since Noupe is a global blog in English which means that it is a global idea not a regional clone.

Noura said in a blog post announcing the deal that she will spend some time in her other blog DevSnippets a public gallery where readers can submit the best code and design posts. In addition, she is planning to launch a new project in 2010.

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