Blue Chi’s

The decision of the Omania.net سبلة العرب case has finally been announced, Said Al Rashdi has been found not guilty of all the charges made against him for the defamation of the four claimants that sued him in November last year.

The court held that Said was not to be held liable for the writings of other members. The question of how they got this principle or why they found him not guilty is something that I do not know. No media coverage was provided for this case, the only publication that seems to acknowledge the existence of Sablat Al Arab is Al Shabeeba newspaper, which followed up the progress of the case with some little pieces every now and then, but again did not write anything yet on the decision of the case that was made yesterday but I could not get my hands on the hard copy of today’s paper. All the information that you read here comes from what I read on random Arabic Omani discussion boards.

The court ordered that compensation is to be awarded to the defamed claimant. The damages varied from RO300 to RO500. (One the claimants, a female school teacher, originally asked for HALF A MILLION. Talk about crazy people.) A known author on Omani.net named Mohammed Al Harthy, was given a one month prison sentence for defaming the Wali of Ibra.

I could not understand who is going to be paying those damages or how they are going to identify the actual members that made the defamatory posts.

I do not know how the decision was found on this case, I believe that a website owner is responsible for all the content published on his website, whether he posted or not, the question on whether he should be liable for what other people write should be decided on the basis of whether or not he has taken all reasonable actions required to remove any offensive material from his website. Having a disclaimer at the footer of a web page does not limit the liability of the owner in anyway, we can all say and write stuff, but that does not mean it will have any legal effect.

It is not reasonable for a web owner to read every single post made on his forum, especially if it was one with thousands of daily posts, BUT it is reasonable for the administration to review and edit any reported posts or threads, it is reasonable to establish an approval procedure for threads made in sensitive and critical subforums such as the political and the economic subforums. There are many methods for regulating content on online discussion boards, there are loads of software features that come with these forums that could be used to facilitate the proper management of a discussion board.

When deciding a case for the liability of the owner of a forum for content that he has not made himself, the court should examine all the possible actions that he could have taken to remove or minimise the damage of that offensive material, once they are satisfied that he has done everything reasonable for him to do, he should not be found guilty and it should not matter who was offended or how much damage was caused by that offensive material. If you ask me if I think that the administration of Sabla has taken all reasonable action to minimise the impact of offensive material on Sablat Al Arab or not, my answer would be ‘no’. I think that there was so much to do which was not done.

Anyway, I hope that more people now realise that they can sue when they read something about themselves on Omani discussion boards, they can get compensated, and they can get those offenders fined or even imprisoned.

Freedom of expression does not mean infringing the rights of other people, it does not give people the right to insult others or start rumours.

I’ve written an article on the monetization of web content for the Digital Oman magazine which got published today. Digital Oman is a quarterly bilingual magazine on technology that now gets published as a supplement to the Arabic Oman newspaper. Make sure you check it out today if you read Oman newspaper.

This club banger by the unexpected due leaked a while ago, but I heard about it today, it’s going to be on the upcoming albums of both Nicole Scherzinger and Rihanna. Look for the song on this page - there is an audio player somewhere in the middle of it. The name of the song is Winning Women, it is expected to be officially released in May.

Nicole used to be a member of the girl band Pussycat Dolls and is expected to release her debut album ‘Her Name is Nicole” next June.

Yeah, I don’t know what’s happening, but I’ve been going to all those events lately. Yesterday I attended the first seminar of the Oman Manufacturing Group (OMG) seminar series. This is an event organised by the Public Establishment for Industrial Estates (PEIE) (which Knowledge Oasis Muscat (KOM) is part of), it is the first year for PEIE to run this event and it felt like the geek-free version of Digital Nation. The four seminars of the series will span over a period of a year so that one seminar is held every three months.

After attending the first seminar and reading the description of the upcoming ones, I think that the title of the series is misleading, it is not about manufacturing, or to say the least, it is not about the manufacturing aspect of a manufacturing business as it indicates, but the business side of it, which is nicer. In the first seminar, which was titled “New Product Development”, only one out of the six panelists was from the traditional manufacturing industry, and the discussion focused on R&D and the innovative aspect of product and service design, identifying the customer needs and/or creating that need, success short stories, and other similar quick topics which were applicable to any sort of business.

Upcoming seminars will cover developing a manufacturing strategy, branding, and value stream mapping. Just like this one, attendance is free to everyone, all you have to do is email omg@peie.om to tell them that you’ll be coming.

I can’t wait for the branding seminar, but it’s going to take place by the end of OCTOBER, urgh!

PS. PEIE is also holding the Smart Manufacturing 2007 conference on the 15th and 16th of next month, learn more about it here.

Though written by Drucker in 1966, the essentials illustrated and explained in the Effective Executive are still very much valid and relevant to the lifestyle and work attitude of any knowledge worker- any person whose actions and decisions are meant to contribute to the performance capacity of his organization. The book discusses several issues including time management, delegation, picking team members, and decision taking. The book is quite short, but is saturated. The very few chapters had an instant significant impact on how I carry out many of the projects that I am undertaking. A must-read book for anybody into management.

I attended last night KOM’s first seminar from its Digital Nation seminar series, this one was titled “Your Mobile: The Next Frontier”. The hour and a half seminar was presented by six experts from various industries and fields, (marketing, developing, manufacturing, etc), and talked about their different perspectives on the possibilities of how the mobile industry is going to expand.

It was a very interesting topic, did not take drag on at all, I though that the number of people on the panel was a little bit too large for the time set of this seminar, there was not enough time to dig into a significant amount of detail on the topics discussed, but I guess that this was not the intention of the organizers anyway.

After attending some very horrible events at some other places, I really now appreciate how organised KOM’s events are, they are very well presented (the place, the leaflets, etc), they’re usually on time, the people they get know what they’re talking about, the panel moderator was good, and all the members of the panel stayed in topic. I don’t think that it could’ve been better.

Details of the upcoming episodes are on KOM’s website, they have one every three months. I find the second and third ones most interesting, they’re on the internet and web content. Attendance of all those seminars are free of charge, so anybody interested could check them out, however, prior seat registration is required.