Isam Bayazidi’s Blog

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

First I thought I was the only one obsessed with Jordan Planet, and check the site from his mobile while away from a PC. Then I learned that Jameed tries to check it from his mobile during his long hours in the lab, and last week, Laith told me that he checks RSS feeds from his mobile. So, it was the time for Jordan Planet to be mobile friendly.

For the last hour or more, Iyas and I had been working on http://wap.jordanplanet.net (Well I did most of the work, he did the testing and feedback). We are now proud to present “JP2Go | Jordanian wisdom on the go“. The mobile version is designed to have titles only in the main page, with author names, as well, you will be able to read those posts in Jordan Planet without even the need to have their blogs support mobiles.

Now, As Iyas would like to put it “It is part of 2006 JP Surprises” .. I hope that more people than just me, Iyas, and Laith will get to use it :)

Blogging, Internet & Technology, Jordan Planet, Mobile & Handhelds

The Arabic Wikipedia had reached few days ago, which is a pretty significant event as Arabic wikipedia now joins another 35 wikipedias in different languages that are over 10,000 article in size. Now the Arabic Wikipedia had gone a long way since it started less than 2 years ago, and still have a much longer way to go. The current active contributors in the Arabic wikipedia are the ones behind it’s success. Namely Chaos, Oxydo, Uwe a , Jak, Tarawneh, and Al-Tayeb. They, as well 10s others had been the real heroes in this success.

Now, Although the arabic wikipedia could be considered rich and accurate in some fields, I think it is still far from being considered a resource. The effort needed in enriching and increasing the quality of the articles will be taking most of next year as well.

Now Arabic holds the ranking of 35 between all wikipedias when it comes to article count. I predict that by the end of 2006, it will have the rank of 25, with around 25k articles. Don’t ask me were did I get that feeling from, but this is where I see Arabic Wikipedia heading.

Internet & Technology, Wikimedia

For those of us who are using a US or Arabic keyboard, you will notice the letters QWERTY in the top row of letters in your keyboard. That makes your keyboard called QWERTY keyboard. Now there are attempts to introduce a a new keyboard system that arranges the keys ABCD instead of QWERTY.

Now here is the funny part, is why was the keyboard arranged this way? Well it goes back to the days of typewriters, where keys that could run after each other are seperated so that the “typebars” or “hammers” that press the key won’t stuck or collapse with each other. As well, it was meant to alternate keys between hands to make you type faster (although there are many single handed words such as “monopoly” and “stewardesses”.

That made me wonder what we would call the arabic keyboard ? would it be ضصثقفغ ?

Internet & Technology

I started a thread in Jordan Planet forum (click to follow) about the predictions of 2006 for Jordan Planet, please share your thoughts if you have any.

Blogging, Internet & Technology, Jordan Planet

Jordan will be hosting the second edition of the World Culture Forum next week, from 4th-7th of December. The event’s program and speakers list is extraordinary, which attracted me to the event since I knew about it, and so I registered to attend it. The speaker list is so full of key and known speakers, some of which are bloggers by the way.

Speaking of blogging, Lina initiated contact sometime few weeks ago with Shannon Riley from MECCAD and talked about the presence of Jordanian Bloggers in the event. Last night, Shannon talked to me about it, and it was proposed to have an Event Blog, where speakers, participants and organizers could blog about their views and recordings of the international event. It was offered to have Jordan Planet hosting and managing such blog, and so it happened.

Few hours later, World Culture Forum Blog was created, with the blessing and support of the MECCAD, and sponsorship, maintenance, and support of Jordan Planet. We hope that the event attendants will register and post on this blog during the forum, and that those who didn’t blog before, will find it as a chance to get into blogging.

This event blog, could be considered the first of a kind for events in Jordan. It serves double goals of promoting the event, and reflecting the opinions of it’s attendants. As well, it is to furtherly promote blogging in Jordan, and introduce the Jordanian bloggers community to the world.

Your feedback and input on the blog are very welcomed (you can use Contact Us form for that as well)

Blogging, Internet & Technology, Jordan

I wasn’t able to blog or access the internet much while I was in Tunis, so I will start in the next days blogging about the event, and the last days.

As soon as I was in the ICT4ALL Exhibition, I started to look for the societies and people I know. I met Ethan who introduced me to Hivos people in the event. As well I met Hossein Darakshan, and Isaac Mao whom I met in the Wikimania last August.

There I knew about a session that will take place on the 17th-18th Nov, titled “Expression under Repression”. It was a joint effort between Hivos and Global Voices. The seminar had some very interesting panel speakers, and discussions about freedom of expression and censorship on the internet.

Cases from Zimbabwe, China, Iran and Malaysia were introduced, giving a picture of the status of freedom and censorship in those countries as an example. There was supposed to be a blogger from one of the Arab countries present as well, but certain “censorship” efforts made it impossible. Read more in Ethan’s blog.

As well, Internet filtering and censorship was introduced, explaining the methods, technologies, and giving examples of sites censored in different arab and non-arab countries. After the session I tried to get more information about Internet censorship in Jordan, and basically they are aware of only one site that is censored from Jordan, which is a US-based e-newspaper that is almost censored in all arab countries, as it’s editor is known to be attacking all rulers and governments of the Arab world.

For me, attending this session was worth going to Tunis, I am glad that light is being shed on Freedom of expression in the internet, specially for bloggers.

Pictures:

Next: Wikimedia in WSIS

Blogging, Internet & Technology, Jordan, WSIS

Now as I expected earlier this year, many companies started introducing blogs as part of their service offering, as well I heard of many companies and efforts that is having blogs, and blog-related services part of their start up plans.

Shortly after Fastlink started their blog service for fastlink subscribers (which I am not one of), Al Bawaba Blog service started in beta as well. Read more…

Internet & Technology, Jordan

As part of my routine everyday, I woke up a couple of days ago, started to read the newspaper, to find a very unexpected feature of Jordan Planet in Al-Ghad newspaper. It was in my preferred bi-monthly Technology supplement, in the “Your Internet Guide” pages. JP was the first of a list of 6 internet sites that are featured in the supplement. I’d like to thank Ghassan Hozayen, editor of those pages, and Al-Ghad for featuring Jordan Planet. I am glad that media is playing a major role in promoting such projects.

Internet & Technology, Jordan Planet

Since I first realized that Jordan Planet will be more than an automated self-run aggregation site (translation?), I was sure that I don’t want it to me a one man show. I have an experience with myself when it comes to such things. I could just suddenly loose interest, without a warning, and start to pull out. Although I can’t see this happening with Jordan Planet, I wanted to make sure that it won’t effect JP even if it happens.

Natasha had been helping and acting as a partner with me on Jordan planet for the last 10 months. And the more success JP had, the more people stepped up, and volunteered time and effort into this project. Roba and Iyas had a major role in the site redesign last august, and along with Mariam and Lina, they all are taking care of important content in the site, and providing valuable feedback and initiatives for the project.

And so, without really knowing or planing, a “Team” of volunteers is now taking care of the project’s direction and well being. Iyas, Lina, Natasha, Mariam, Roba and myself are what you could call “Jordan Planet Staff”. I’m really glad and happy for their involvement, and I have to promise them that Jordan planet will stay a non-profit project, with the aim of opening a window to Jordan through blogs, and promoting blogs and bloggers from Jordan.

I ofcourse can’t forget the efforts and help that many other bloggers had been, and continue to provide for Jordan Planet. Linda who provided great help in processing applications to join Jordan Planet, Ammar who gives a hand and an opinion when he is not busy being late on JP meetings :p, and ofcourse Ahmad who’s expert opinion had and will always be of great effect in Jordan Planet.

<rude>PS. Please, no more comments saying “you are doing great isam” or “Thank You”. You can help by giving suggestions or feedback</rude>

Internet & Technology, Jordan Planet

A very interesting post by Khalaf pointed out that the National Agenda Committee will post the Agenda document online for feedback, now that’s a first, and something that I would salute. It basically means that the committee (government) thinks that the internet is a good medium to collect feedback about the document. Now I am not sure that I will read the full document, or post my feedback on it, but I am really happy for such move. I wonder who’s really behind it, and the reasons for it.

Internet & Technology, Jordan, News & Politics

I was reading about Google’s Latest Blog Search., and I am in love with it :) just because of the fact that when I search for “Jordan” it gives Jordan Planet as the First in the “Related Blogs” not some Michael Jordan or other female star fan site. As well when I searched for “Amman” one of the first results was Ahmad’s Post about GPSing Amman. Now this is a search that can give real relative results.

What’s cooler is that it provides a feed (RSS/ATOM) for the search results, making it possible to track posts about certains terms of interst to you. Although this is not the first blog searching service around, as there us Technorati, Feedster but both fail my exam of searching for “Jordan” as none of the results are related to any blogger in Jordan. So I guess that Google are doing a better job although they came late into blog searching game.

Internet & Technology, Jordan

Yesterday I got a Google Alert about a report presented to the World Bank by 13 nations, including Jordan. The news said that officials from those 13 nations met in February in Silicon Valley to discuss technology standards and economic development, and come up with the 33 pages report.

2 things strike me in this piece of news:
First, The piece of news which was in New York Times (and republished in Herald Tribune and Media Channel) said that

government officials from China, India, Thailand, Denmark, Jordan, Brazil and elsewhere gathered to discuss technology standards and economic development.

For some reason, Jordan was mentioned with countries like China and India, and was not dropped in the “Elsewhere” category. I am not sure if this really have any significance.

Second, is that those Jordanian officials seems to be detached from the on-ground IT infrastructure of the Jordanian Government and Education. The government has a strategic partnership with Microsoft, which is obviously one of the major forces against Open Standards and Technologies. Students in the schools and universities of Jordan are being taught to use Microsoft Products (Windows, Office, Visual Basic, etc..) as part of their curriculum. Teachers are required to take a Microsoft-Centric ICDL exam in order to get promoted, and more than 13 ministries are connected to a centralized Microsoft Exchange Server for email and groupware.. all this tells me that there is something wrong in the picture. Is it that we want to be everywhere in the same time ? ahead with Microsoft adoption, and ahead with Open technology standards embracement ? well this doesn’t work I am afraid.

Jordan didn’t have an Official stand for or against Open Source and Open Technology Standards, and it was thanks to “foreign power” that Jordan had it’s Open Source Workshops in 2002 and 2005 organized by INTAJ. As I was attendant in both events, it seemed to me that Open Source and Open Standards is being used for bargaining by the government and it’s agencies, rather than a real understanding of the benefits of it. This could be clear by having a look in the daily computer/IT related bids announcements in the newspaper, where it is specifically required to use certain closed source applications or systems, although there are alternative open source ones which could have a great advantage when it comes to security and cost (hint. Apache vs. IIS)

Although it aches me to see how things are going when it comes to IT in Jordan, I have high hopes that eyes will open soon to the benefits of Open Source and Open Standards embracement in a developing country like Jordan.

Internet & Technology, Jordan, OSS & Linux

Today marks 1 year since Jordan Planet started. In 18th August 2004 I registered the domain jordanplanet.net. And 2 days later, I got FREE hosting from EasyHTTP that Jad own. And in August 21st, the site was up with only a couple of bloggers.
Read more…

Internet & Technology, Jordan Planet

Well, Wikimania is over.. It was all just perfect, everything was great about it in a way that I didn’t expect. In an hour I will be starting a tour in Germany with my new friend Isaac Mao to the southern part of Germany. First we are heading to Baden-Baden where we plan to enjoy the Black Forest which I wanted to see for a long time. Then we are going to Fussen rest a little, and visit the great castle of Neuschwanstein. It will definitly be a looong day. And tomorrow I am leaving early morning to to Berlin, where I will be spending 2 nights.
The great thing about all this is that all this was planned on the spot, and was never part of my plans when I came here.. but for sure I will not miss it.
Another thing.. I used my Flickr account for the first time yesterday :) You can check some of the pictures I had taken at my page in flickr.

About Me, Internet & Technology, Wikimedia