Isam Bayazidi’s Blog

Now as Jordan Planet had been growing, a good number of visitors are reaching Jordan Planet from Search Engines. Now, the server running Jordan Planet allows me to know about the top search terms that people made to reach Jordan Planet, and here is a selection of the search terms followed about the percentage of its use:
April, 2005

• haifa wahbe : 18%
• issam smeir: 2.6%
• woodstock festival : 2.5%
• cockroach: 1.5%
• laith majali: 1.5%
• jordanian beautiful women: 1%

March, 2005

• raed al-banna: 5%
• salma ghazali : 3%
• hajaj: 1.5%
• natasha tynes: 1.5%
• bashiti hardware: 1.2%
• haifa wahbe: 1%

As you can clearly see, in April visitors came from search engines with less interest in raed al-banna, and much higher interest in Haifa Wahbe, and jordanian beautiful women. I wonder what that means :)

Internet & Technology, Jordan

Thanks to Lina who told us about the Jordan Short Film Fest., I alerted a couple of my friends, and went to see it tonight.. And it was good.. Read more…

Arts & So, Jordan, Movies & Entertainment

I had been following this interesting piece of news since yesterday. 34 deputies would withhold confidence on the government just because it didn’t have any ministers from the south. Now I read that yesterday and thought to myself “If our deputies think like that, then we are in a hole that we are not going to be out from soon”. What made things even more interesting today, is that the Prime minister today said that he “May” make a reformation for the gov to have an “extra” 2 ministers “that the gov don’t need” just to satisfy the geographical considerations.

Now I think this is sad… There are no 2 in jordan that can doubt or even question the qualifications, and devotion ministers and prime ministers from southern Jordan had offered accress the years, but my understanding as well is that when AbdelSalam Al-Majali, Fayez El-Tarawneh, or even Sameer Habashneh agreed to take the government position they did it to serve Jordan, not Karak ! and this is what they actually did. I don’t really understand what are those 34 deputies complaining about, is it that they won’t be able to ask a Minister from Irbid, or Nabuls, or Jarash to get a kid who got 70 in the Tawjihi to Engineering school :) give me a break ! every minister in the Gov is supposed to serve all Jordan, if he is not, kick him out .. but don’t get extra ministers thinking it will make things better, because it won’t, it will be worse.

Jordan, News & Politics

I had been using ScrapBook, a Firefox extention, for some time, and I just love it. Now many of us like to keep notes while they are browsing the internet: Save addresses, Links, quotes, extracts, full articles, pages, pictures, and so .. and this is where ScrapBook comes handy. All you have to do is a drag and drop. Bloggers will be the first people to love it, as well all those who research and try to keep notes. What’s nice about it that it keeps the layout of the original page, as well store information about the source URL (Address) and the date it was added. It allows organizing content in folders, and an easy way to jump to the source page of any scrapnote. I highly advise giving it a try.

Internet & Technology, OSS & Linux

Now I know that I had been On and Off in Arabic Wikipedia and Wikimedia in general, but I can’t just quit, it somehow runs in my blood. As soon as I heard about Wikimania 2005, The First International Wikimedia Conference, I rushed in, and registered in it. Now putting aside all the great things about this conference, the name my itself GREAT :) Wikimania, sure I got it to some degree.

Now for those of you who are not familiar with what Wikimedia/Wikipedia/Wiki is allow me to explain for a second. Wikimedia is basically a project that sponsors and encourages the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content.. Sounds Scary, right :) well it is not, as the the method it uses for the development and growth of the content, which is called Wiki, allows anyone to edit anything. Now first thing that comes to the evil minds of ours is that this means vandalists and “Bad” people can make a mess, put lies, and “do bad”. Well, as “anyone” can edit, it means that “anyone” can correct and rollback any vadalists. This basically relies on the fact that the good people in this world are larger than the “bad” people .. so far this fact had proved right, and all Wiki project had more overwhelming growth than initially expected.

Now Wikimedia have many projects under it’s umbrella, most significantly Wikipedia the free encyclopedia with over 500,000 article for English version, and 1 million over all languages, as well there is Wiktionary, a multilingual dictionary; Wikibooks, a collection of free content textbooks; Wikiquote, a rich repository of famous quotes (including those of Homer Simpson, Ghandi, and Kramer of Seinfeld :). As well there is the new project of Wikinews, which is a free news source; and Wikisource, a repository for primary source material; and last but not least Wikimedia Commons, a repository for images and sound data.

What really made me love all this is the fact that you “CAN” and probably “SHOULD” make a difference. Many Wikipedian (Wikipedia editors) can tell you stories about how one small couple of lines that he edited or made ended up as a rich and comprehensive articles. I guess that the Wikipedia could be the most successful attempt so far to document the human knowledge.

If you hadn’t already tried it, give it a shot, make a fix, and help make a difference.

Internet & Technology, OSS & Linux