Archive

Archive for January, 2006

Amman Sightseeing

January 25th, 2006

Since I learned about Google Local now covering in Amman, I started to look and check places. It is very semilar to Google Earth, except that I didn’t really get to use Google Earth since there is no Linux version of it. Anyhow I compiled a list of buildings, sights, and places in Amman, with links to them in Google Maps. I will continue working on it when I have time, if you have places that you suggest, please leave them in a comment. Enjoy

Link: http://isam.bayazidi.net/amman-on-google-local/

Internet & Technology, Jordan

Amman now on Google Local

January 25th, 2006

As soon as I read the recent google post about their Local service, I rushed to try it. with so much ease, I found Amman fully covered in detail, while it did not before. Google had updated their Google Local service with the most recent images, and detail level, as the application Google Earth. Now this is major for us in Amman, as the older version (until a couple fo days ago) did not cover Amman in detail. Now we can lead people to places in Amman by the image. So maybe the next announcement of a JP meeting at Wild Jordan will come with a Google Local Link to it.

Internet & Technology, Jordan

To Kamal Rida

January 21st, 2006

Last time I met him was in Riyadh where we spend some really good time, he took me around the city, I had mansaf with him, and so on. Weeks before it he came to Dammam, where he showed me around the city that I was new to. I didn’t see him since then. A couple of days ago, my friend Shadi called me around 9pm, to tell that Kamal passed away in a car accident in Jeddah. It took me a couple of hours, or in fact until I was in his house the next day, and saw his father and brother, to really understand what had happened.

I was lucky to stay in the same school, Al-Bayan, for 14 years, where I had some of my best friends. Maybe when we were in 5th or 6th grade, when I got my first 386 PC, then I started to get closer to Kamal, who was in my class for years, because he got a 486 PC as well. We used to exchange tips, games, and programs. He told me and took me to Al-7amra in Jabal Al-Hussein were we got many of the programs and games that we enjoyed (along with the colorful floppy disks that was on sale there). I first saw Windows 95 in his PC, he first saw Linux in mine. Although Kamal left in the 11th grade to go to Itihad School (where he got a scholarship) we stayed intouch in semi-weekly basis as I was either in his house, or he in mine. When we reached university, he ended up with exactly what he wanted, Engineering in Jordan University. Soon after he graduated, he got an offer he couldn’t refuse, and went to work in KSA.

Although he had been in KSA for 4 years, it was this year that he decided that he should go to Hajj for his first time, and so he did. And one week after it, he died in a car accident. I didn’t know what to say then, or now. Although we didn’t meet often in the last couple of years, you were always part of what I grow up to, as I hope I was for you. الله يرحمه ويصبر أهله.

About Me

Google talk start talking to others

January 18th, 2006

This piece of news made me really happy. Google Talk have “Open federation” now with the XMPP open standard. This means, that Gmail users will be able to talk to millions of people on Jabber servers all over the world. Jabber protocol is used by many to provide Instant messenging service for small groups, companies, and universities. What is special about jabber, is that users have a server name in their usernames. For example using my account isamb@myjabber.net, which as you see looks like an email, I can talk to users connecting using the instant messenger with users on other servers (including gmail) from my myjabber.net account.

I was waiting for this since Google Talk was announced. Way to go.

Internet & Technology

What are JP Bloggers talking about?

January 15th, 2006

First, Visit this. Now this had been around for some time, some of you may had seen it. Problem is that a number of JP bloggers use software or service that does not support categorization (Yes, I am talking about Blogger). Some of the tags you see in that page are only used by one blogger, while others are shared. If you are unfamiliar with Tag Clouds, and Flickr, the larger the fontsize, the more posts are under it. Enjoy…

Blogging, Jordan Planet

Structure Blog This

January 14th, 2006

Structured Blogging

Category: Tool / service

Overall rating: 5 out of 5

I was introduced to Structured Blogging by a blog post by my friend Basem a couple of days ago. First I didn’t really realize what it is. But when I installed the WordPress Plugin and listened to 2 wonderful interviews with Salim Ismail of PubSub (Interview1, Interview2) I realized that it is the next big thing.

Now, we see all kinds of posts in the blogging world.. People use blogs to talk about their day, their opinion or review movies, books, websites and so, to announce events, jobs, or things to sell, give lists, provide audio or video files and so on. Problem is that such information is getting harder to find. One should be a regular blog reader to know about things when they happen. For example, last year I bought a Digital Camera, and a Linksys router through an announcement in Natasha’s blog, and I only knew about it because I read her blog.

Structured Blogging comes in part to solve this problem using microcontent. What does it offer, is the possibility for you to have your blog post, in a nice readable way, while providing information in machine readable format, that allow applications or other services to know “What” is this post about. For example, if you had watched the movie “Transporter 2″ and wanted to say that it sucked, you can give it a rating of 2 stars out of 5, and it will appear in a nice way in your blog (same way the Overall Rating above says that this site is 5 stars). And at the same time, an XML tag for your post, will tell that you gave the rating 2 stars for the movie, and there is another Tag that tells which movie are we exactly talking about, with even an automatic movie poster grabbing, and auto-filling of information from IMDB.

Now the fun part is how this information can be used. You could use a service or an application to search for movie reviews that gave the movie 3 stars or less, to see what was it that people didn’t like about the movie. Or could have an overall rating of the movie from the “Aggregated” ratings of the movie. What could be done is only limited by imagination from now on, as once “what is this blog post about” is clear, programs and services could be build to do whatever. You can know what are the events in Amman between 1-25 Jan, see what is the food rating of Wild Jordan, and so on.

Currently there are plugins for WordPress and Movable Type, those plugins are made as a prove of concept. What is hoped for, is for blog service providers and software vendors to embrace the concept to allow for a more usable web.

PS. This post was made using the Structured Blogging plugin for WordPress.

Blogging

A New Entry in my Wishlist: Apple MacBook Pro

January 11th, 2006

Apple just announced the MacBook Pro Laptop. It is built with the Intel Dual Core processor. Noe regardless of what’s inside, no one can make a laptop that is as sexy as this one. Now I need to read more about it, to know what’s really the deal with it. To know if existing Mac OS X applications will work on it or not.. now Rosetta is supposed to do the trick, but I need to read more.

About Me, Apple, Internet & Technology

Arab Blog Services: Jeeran and Maktoob

January 8th, 2006

Since my last review of the Arabic blog services 2 months ago, a number of changes happened in those services, as well, Maktoob introduced their MaktoobBlog service. I wanted to revisit the the blog services, and take a look at maktoob’s offering. I will start with Jeeran and Maktoobblogs, as for Albawaba Blogs, I know that a lot of changes, updates and surprises are being cooked, so I will review it once it is released.

When I did my last review, Jeeran Blogs service was still very fresh, at that time they had some 9 available themes, now they provide 18 nice themes, as well it is now possible to change from the Hijri to the Gregorian calender with ease. A major feature that I noticed is the ability to add HTML code to the header, sidebar, or footer of your blog. Things that one could add include advertisements, image links to other sites, and so on.

Another feature, that I learned about, is that it is possible to have your own domain name for your own Jeeran blog. As Jeeran is a hosting service afterall, it is possible to have your blog under your own domain name (www.yourname.com). Since my last review, Jeeran introduced post categorization, even going further with providing feed per category. One downside is that a post must me in only one category, no more. So if you want to post about “Jordan” and “Technology” you have to select one of them, or create a new category “Jordan Technology”. Another thing that one could hope to see is the ability to make the theme or template unique, through changing colors, fonts, or maybe theme images. It is worth mentioning that Jeeran have proper and complete documentation, as well add to that,dedicated blogs in Arabic and English about blogging, and reporting latest updates of their service.

Now to the new visitor on the block, MaktoobBlog. Now Maktoob is no stranger for Arab internet users. They provided the first Webmail service with proper Arabic support back when using Arabic in emails was only a dream. As well, they are behind a number of innovative services such as CashU and Souq.com, today it is considered the largest Arab community site. Nevertheless, their entrance to the blogging field was a disappointing one for me. Maybe I had a much higher hope from a company like Maktoob.

I first learned about their service by a post from a post by Ahmad Humeid about Yaser AbuHilaleh‘s blog in maktoob new service. Visiting AbuHilaleh’s blog, I noticed that it doesn’t look like a blog. To start with, the main page shows only one post, while it should show me the last N posts, or posts from the last N days. Looking on the sidebar, I saw checkboxes for categories, with a button under it for multiple selection. This is considered very much unlike blogs to say the least, one would expect either normal links, or at least a javascript that loads the page when one select a category. As well, testing it at that time, XML feed of the site seemed broken. I tried to move beyond the initial disappointment, and created an account, and looked deeply into the service.

Maktoobblogs provide a Blog Directory, which is a great way to navigate and discover new blogs to read. As well, a very interesting service, is notification. One could “subscribe” to any number of categories, and even type in keywords, and as soon as there is a blog or a post that matches the criteria, a user will be notified by email. This is a very interesting feature for the on-regular readers of the blogs, and want to be notified only when there is something that may be interesting to them. As well, looking now, XML feeds seems to work fine (Except that the Category Tag is very misplaced, their should be category tag per item, not a list of category tags for the feed as it is now.)

Looking from the Admin side of Maktoob blogs, I was disappointed to see that the post editor (WYSIWYG) doesn’t work with Firefox, this was a disappointment, specially that I know Maktoob was one of the first Arab companies to use Linux and Open Source. They provided some 15 nice themes for the blogs, as well, it is possible (from that I saw) to have blogs with multiple authors. Making it a great choice for groups who want to have blogs (classes, friends, family, etc..).

It is worth mentioning that MaktoobBlog successfuly attracted some known writers and journalist in the Arab world, which added a great value, and will gain exposure to blogging in the Arab world. It was a pleasure to see names like Umaimah Ahmad from BBC in Algeria, Ziad Abu Ghanemeh from Jordan, Yaser AbuHilaleh from Al-Jazeera Jordan, Ibrahim Gharaibeh and more in Maktoob Blogs, and I think that they will continue to attract more journalists, my hope is that they will fixup the service so that they won’t be driven away.
As well, that both services are having constant updates, so it is very likely that those problems and shortcomings mentioned here to be fixed very soon, then I guess I will raise the bars, and talk about other once considered advanced features that are getting to be more basic.

Blogging

Your Next Web 2.0 Idea

January 5th, 2006

In this site you can get a company name and idea for your next Web 2.o business. All you have to do is to refresh the page if you don’t like what it gave you (Refresh!! how Web 1.0 is this !). What is scary is that most of those terms and ideas made sense to me, I need to detach myself a little from all this. Enjoy :)

Internet & Technology

My take on toot

January 3rd, 2006

Since Ahmad first emailed me along with other bloggers announcing what could be called an early test launch of toot, and requesting opinions and feedback, I wanted to write about it, and review it, but soon after, it was taken offline, for further improvements and a couple of days ago, it was up again, but still in “not even alpha” according to the site.I am sure that the site still have a long way to go in terms of features and content, nevertheless, I will have my take on it anyway.

What struck me first, and many of those who I talked to about it, is the very nice interface and design, one could not expect less than that from Syntax which have some of the best graphic and UI designers in town. The other thing, is that the name “toot” is creative, meaningful, and colorful.

Now toot (according to thier About page) is a hand-picked aggregator, where best of posts, from the best of blogs from Arabia is selected. Now “what is best” is very subjective and arguable, but looking at the list of blogs they have, it seems that they did some initial research in the blogosphere hunting for blogs, and they came out with a very interesting initial blog list.

So far, although they have some Arabic blogs, the interface is still in english for some reason, there isn’t much information about the site in Arabic, as well, in the “tootreads” section of the main page, Arabic posts are shown left to right, rather than right to left (there should be some auto-detection code to make sections/posts that have arabic body “rtl” rather than “ltr” even in the english interface).

I wasn’t really able to understand the difference between “What’s tooting” and “tootreads”, is tootreads posts that were tooting before ? I wonder . Another thing, I would really like to see a feed (rss, atom) link for the “what’s tooting” or “tootreads” to be able to follow the blogs they feature from a feed reader/aggregator. As well, I wanted to submit another blog (not mine) and suggest it to toot, but it seems that the submit interface is oriented toward the blogger being the one submitting it, I would like to see a “suggest a blog” form to allow readers, and bloggers to suggest other blogs than theirs.
I am sure that there are still a lot planed for toot, one would expect a tag-oriented interface, as with the growth of the blogosphere, categorization and segmentation of featured blog posts will be a must. If toot continues to be a maintained, updated, and introduce proper arabic interface soon, I think that it will gain more and more exposure and success. With the growth of blogging in the Arab world last year, one could only expect it to grow even further this year. toot could play a role in making quality blogs and posts more exposed and featured.

Blogging, Internet & Technology