Blue Chi’s

Boys and girls we are celebrating the Twestival with everyone around the world this Thursday! All users of Twitter (active or not) are welcome to join us on board of one of the ferries of  the National Ferry Company for a 2-hour round trip! Snacks will be served and special performances will be made by a local dance group.

Please register via BOTH of these links if you would like to come:
http://tinyurl.com/yfww2h8
http://twtvite.com/4ariqg

For more info please visit http://muscat.twestival.com/

Just got back from the first digital nation seminar for 2010 and it was nice this time around! Unlike previously there weren’t 5 people on the stage talking about random things and instead we had a speaker who was relevant, fun and engaging! (dude was CEO of a media company in Dubai & spoke about social media).

I really had fun listening to him and had even more fun chatting with other people over dinner afterwards. It’s a really good opportunity for like-minded people to mingle with each other and I hope more fun people cone attend next time! It is totally free and you get to have dinner afterwards!!

We all know that Wikipedia is not really a scientific authority – any person who visits a page on Wikipedia can click on the edit button to change what is written on that page without even having to register. Yet even though there is a great opportunity for abuse, the majority of the users of the web seem to, whether consciously or subconsciously, take information written Wikipedia seriously and blindly rely on it without ever checking if the page has a list of references. Wikipedia should never be taken as an authority by itself for the obvious fact that any person can edit it, but I think that Wikipedia is a clear indication of the opinion of the majority of people on any given topic, because a fact that is not commonly believed to be true would be edited by someone else.

One of the main reasons Wikipedia has become such an authority is the fact that it is highly ranked by Google, meaning that it is very likely that any search made on Google for a topic on Wikipedia would most likely have a Wikipedia page as the first result on Google, this makes it very likely for Wikipedia to be visited by the person making the search.

Unsurprisingly, this had led all those who care about their “image” on the internet to check and update the Wikipedia entry that covers them, this includes governments, companies, celebrities, etc. There is no doubt that Wikipedia can be used to further promote a product as well as inform the public with all the facts about it because it is one of the most visited websites on the internet. However, the majority of people in Oman seem to be oblivious of the power of Wikipedia and there is barely anything written about Oman on it besides the main page on Oman and Muscat. As a country that considers tourism as one of its primarily economic pillars, it is totally unacceptable that many of the major cities and landmarks are nowhere to be seen on Wikipedia. The biggest contributors to Wikipedia worldwide are scholars and university students, but in Oman many universities and colleges do not even have a Wikipedia page on them!

I do not think updating Wikipedia should be a task assigned to a specific person – at the end Wikipedia is an open encyclopedia that is expected to be edited and updated by everyone. I was upset to see that Sohar‘s page, my hometown, had an ugly picture of a factory and mentioned nothing about the city other than the fact that it has a booming industrial sector. I decided to upload a picture I took of Sohar Fort and wrote a little bit about hotels, parks, schools, and shopping centers in Sohar. Now whenever someone makes a search on Google for “Sohar” the content I wrote myself appears on the top of more than 400 thousands other links.

If every person wrote a tiny bit about their hometown, their school, or their favourite park in the country we would contribute in spreading the word about our country to the world even further. You cannot seriously consider yourself to be existing in today’s world if you are not present online, making sure that you are present on Wikipedia (if you satisfy their notability requirements) and that your page is accurate

A UAE newspaper called the National ran a story written by Saleh al Shaibany about media censorship in Oman (link), which to my surprise quotes me a couple of times in a manner that suggests that I was interviewed for this article. I did not know about my mention in this article, I clicked the link on Twitter and was surprised to see my name there.

I was not interviewed for this article and my quotes were taken out of context from a number of posts I have written in the past. Saleh al Shaibany never got in touch with me prior to the publication of this article. I do not agree with or support the opinions mentioned in this article.

In the post from which my second quote was taken I argued that that the government in Oman, unlike neighboring countries, does not in fact censor the internet on political grounds, as it relies instead of legal methods, such as the criminal law or breach of confidence, to prosecute the authors. Controversial websites that criticize government officials and those that leak confidential documents are still open the public. My post made it clear that the problem of censorship in Oman is due to random acts of Omantel and the inefficiency of the company. My other blog was blocked by mistake and not because of its content.

I am very upset about this whole experience. Any reasonable reader would think that I was interviewed for this article and that I am in support of the message behind it. I am very disappointed to see my quotes used out of context without any reference to where they were taken from.

I emailed the editor of The National and the head of the Foreign Desk at the paper. I’m still waiting for the response.

(Photo Credits: CarbonNYC)

Controversial blogger and wannabe political activist Ammar Al Maamari wrote a nice post yesterday on the various problems with Applied Science Colleges in Oman.

There are six Applied Science Colleges (ASCs) in Oman in various cities outside the capital, these colleges were previously Educational Colleges that trained school teachers until the country oversaturated with school teachers with no schools to teach in. These colleges now teach design, communications, information technology, and business administration.

Ammar suggests that these colleges face a number of old problems that existed for Educational Colleges and some new ones that appeared with the quick conversion of these colleges. Such problems include:

• The inadequacy of the teaching staff due to their poor rushed selection process that was pressured by the need to convert these colleges ASAP. The majority of teachers teach subjects that they do not specialize in. Some Omani staff also have no training whatsoever and do not serve any purpose.
• There is a shortage in English language teachers and the ones that currently teach have no experience in teaching. Students have difficulty in understanding them, especially if the teachers are Indian. The English teachers were brought through a training agency that apparently got individuals who have no qualifications or any history in teaching English.
• The English taught in the foundation year is general English and not one specific to any of the majors taught in later years. The majority of the subject teaching materials were brought from New Zealand are their level of English is way higher than that of the students.
• Due to the shortage of teaching staff, some colleges are unable to teach the courses which the students entered with the intention to study. To solve this problem colleges require the students to move to another college in another city to study the course they desire. For example, a student in Salalah would be told, after three years in the course, that he has to move to Ibri in order to acquire a degree in communications. Of course, students were not informed about this when they started college and the majority of them are unable to move to another city, so they end up changing their course into something that their current college offers even if they never intended to study that subject.

Ammar offers a number of suggestions for this problem, the first is to merge all these colleges into a single institution that is located in a single place. This way duplicate costs would be saved and only the best of the work force could be selected to run the university. An alternative solution suggested by Ammar is to abolish ALL these colleges and use the RO 15 million used to run them each year to teach the students at existing private universities in the Sultanate instead. Ammar is aware that this is an exterme measure that could affect the job opportunities taken by the locals and would also require the expansion of private universities to be able to accept the thousands of students currently taught in ASCs.

I personally never really had any idea about what happens in these colleges. If you can read Arabic make sure you read the full post by Ammar here.

(Photo Credits: dailyinvention)

The theme of blogging in Oman this Ramadan is clearly OmanTV – there is even a blogging campaign initiated by marketing blogger Bader Al Hinai on this subject.

For those unaware of the Arabic TV culture, the month of Ramadan has always been the official TV season of the year, all new series and tv shows are released during this month. Channels compete on exclusives and there are literally hundreds of new shows to watch during Ramadan. Unlike the Arab film industry that is dominated by Egyptian movies, the TV industry is not dominated by any single state, there are loads of high quality popular Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Khaleeji (Gulfy) tv shows. In the Gulf, there are some specific Kuwait and Saudi shows, but there are also general Khaleeji shows to which the general Gulf identity is attached and which actors from various Gulf states star.

Oman TV and Omani TV shows are a completely different story. Though there is an serious development in the production quality of the Arab television industry, Oman TV remains almost identical to the way it has been since the 80s. There is a general consensus in Oman that Oman TV sucks and that nobody watches it. Oman TV shows are known for horrible acting, stupid scenario, and low production value. Similar to Saudi and unlike other Gulf states, the Omani population has a wide variety of accents and it almost impossible to see a single a Omani TV series in which members of a single family have a single accent. Actors playing roles of elderly individual use Santa clause like white beards for which the stitching attachments are apparent. Scenes of rich characters driving fancy cars would show that the cars have a “rented” car number plate. And lets not even start with the state of the actual horrible acting and the poor scripts.

The disappointment of the Omani audience is more apparent this year on blogs and discussion boards. The public seems to be mostly irritated by two shows which are aired on the local Ramadan “Prime Time” which right after Maghrib and the Ishaa prayers (Most people stay at home during this to break their fast). The first show is Oman’s first 3D animated series, titled “ُEid and Saeed” which was described by an Arabic forum commentator as a show that “explores the struggle of the Omani citizen with household electronics”. The show is basically a silent animated cartoon that is supposed to be “funny” but turned out to be dumb and pointless. While Omanis are used to watch a comic or variety show at this time, the show seems to most to be one aimed as kids, yet as blogger Muscati tweeted earlier this week, even his young kid asked him to change the channel. Commentators on Arabic forum Omania2 find the show offensive as depicts Omani people to be illiterate and stupid. The very few supporters of the show argue that it is not meant to be seriously. The public are not convinced by this and say that such a show should not be aired in prime time on the country’s national television – which is thought by mainly as the channel through which the rest of the Arab world looks at Oman. You can watch an segment of the show on YouTube here.

The other infamous Omani Ramadan show is Darayish. This is the third season of the show which was thought by people on its first as a “revolutionary” series in the Omani media as it seems to be a very brave one for discussion a lot of public issues relating to the government. The show tells a different story each day discussing a social issue in a comic manner. However, many commentators on Arabic forums are starting to call the show a government propaganda platform in which the Omani citizen is shown as the cause of all troubles in society and that the government is doing everything it can to help this citizen. For example, on an episode on health services, the moral of the story was that we have an excellent health care service, but citizens have a misconception that anything done abroad is better and that hospitals abroad will rip them off without providing them with a cure. Bloggers and forum commentators also claim that the show displays Omani people as dishonest, noisy, and annoying people.

It is worth noting that OmanTV is operated by the Ministry of Information and both of these shows are produced by OmanTV.

An old Omani actor called Jumaa Haikal had an interview with Omani newspaper Al Zaman in which he argued that the reason why Oman TV is such a failure is due to the fact that wasta and family connections play a role in selecting the character playing roles. Jumaa Haikal started his own independent production company which intended to use foreign talents to produce Omani TV shows, but according to his interview, his production company and his efforts were crippled by Oman TV and the Ministry of Information. According to conspiracist Ammar Al Maamari the Minister of Information ordered an investigation of what is happening in OmanTV after the publication of that interview.

We discussed the issue on this Twitter and I think that we came to a different conclusion than the majority of the Arabic community. The majority of the Omani population still seem to be waiting for the government to do everything for them. Why do people expect OmanTV to make them the TV shows that they want? At this age and time, anybody with a camere and a computer can make a tv show. You do not need a multi-million budget to make something enjoyable. You can go to YouTube and watch thousands of indie production that are funny, touching, and informative. How come we don’t even have a single Omani YouTube personality? In many aspects, the Omani society is very uncreative and disrespectful of the majority of art forms as they seem to them as either haram, gay, or pro-Jews or Americans (you pick). I personally think that it is an educational problem, schools and universities in Oman do not promote independent thinking or thinking outside the box. Lets not even forget the culture of the “evil eye” and envy, where even if someone made something nice, he would not share it with other people. I’ve heard a story about a famous photographer who locks up his photographers in a cupboard and refuses to post copies of them online.

OmanTV sucks, but I don’t think that Omanis need it in order to start making their own content.

The Arabic Omani blogosphere has gone mad in the last two weeks over a post written by Muawiyah Al Rawahi that suggested that the government should loosen its alcohol regulations to allow local Omanis to also have an alcohol purchase permit, just like expats. For those who don’t know, except for the month of Ramadan, alcohol can be served at licensed restaurants and hotels in Oman legally for all Omani and expat customers. However, licensed liquor stores in Oman can only sell alcohol to “permit” holders. Muawiyah suggested in his blog post that the fact that locals are not allowed to have an alcohol purchase permit pushes them to seek the alcohol black market which is obviously not regulated and can have health and safety issues in addition to the monopolistic activities practiced in such markets.

The Arabic community was outraged by Muawiyah’s public discussion of a social and religious taboo: drinking alcohol. Though previously celebrated in forums and other blogs for his commentary and criticism of public figures and government practices, Muawiyah has been criticised and personally insulted on a number of online discussion boards for his “unislamic and immoral opinions”.  ِA single thread dedicated to criticise and attack Muawiyah on Omania2.net had more than 12 pages of comments AFTER deleting all the ones which were regarded by the staff members as ones that violate the rules of the forum. A Omani member of over a 1000 posts who claims to be currently in Australia asked the administration to ban Muawiyah completely from the forum because of his suggestions to disobey religion.

The outrage in the Arabic community is bizarre to some extent, mainly because the sale of alcohol is legal in Oman. Yet it remains socially unacceptable for most people, and it is of course prohibited by religion. The majority of commentators in Arabic forums cannot seem digest the idea that alcohol has always been legal in Oman. This reminds me of how I always tried to explain to my classmates earlier this year about different social norms in Oman, and how things could be legal, yet socially and religiously unacceptable (e.g. drinking alcohol), or legal and religiously permitted, yet socially no longer acceptable (e.g. having four wives).

It is interesting to see how ‘freedom of expression’ became a really popular proposition in the online Omani community with all the expose´campaigns and criticism of the government earlier this year, yet the community is not willing to allow a blogger to have an “opinion” on a legal topic that is not socially acceptable. However, just the same way the authority can no longer control what people want to say, the people themselves will not be able to control what anybody wants to say either.

The Ministry of National Economy issues a monthly statistics bulletin that covers a variety of development topics. One of the really interesting stuff on it is the report on the private sector. You can view the contents of the latest issue here. (It is bilingual)

The private sector  numbers shown in the report are of all the employees who are registered at the Public Authority for Social Insurance.

The statistics at the end of May are as follows:

• 151,341 Omani employees are registered. (male 81%, female 19%)
• 829,298 expatriate employees are registered. (male 90%, female 10%)
• 45% of Omani employees registered receive a salary of RO 140 or less.
• 1.7% of all Omani employees registered receive a salary of RO 1000 or more.
• 91,000 expats are employed as housemaids.
• 120,00 expats work in wholesale, retail sake, and car repairs.
• 319,000 expats work in construction.

For some reason the salary stats of expats are not mentioned, neither the industry details for locals. The report doesn’t say if these salaries are basic salaries or actually paid salaries.

The salaries are just way too shockingly little!

Blogger Ahmed Al Mueini published a news article stating that the Cultural Club announced a national program to support the publication of new books in the country in hope of publishing a 100 new books a year. The program will be funded by the Cultural Club and other private and public bodies. It will be headed by a committee made up of representatives from the Cultural Club, SQU, Scientific Research Council, the Authors Association, and others.

The initiative is a result of one of the recommendations made during the period national discussion meeting of the Cultural Club. Other recommendations include:

• Requesting the Ministry of Information to update the Publication Law, which is according to the news report, a barrier for the proliferation of book publication in the country.
• Requesting the authorities to establish and support  more public libraries.
• Requesting the authorities to support publications houses by assigning more publication works to them (How else was the government publishing its books? Duh.)
• Preparing a nation report on “book problems”.  The preparation of this report will be carried over three phases is aimed to conclude with solutions for short and long term goals.

The meeting concluded that Omani authors are faced with many obstacles such as the lack of financing, the strictness of the old Publications Law, the lack of decent publication houses, and distributions and marketing difficulties.

A more “interesting obstacle” stated by the Club is the lack of “appreciation, criticism and reward” for authors in Oman. 

The press release made mentions in what is almost a footnote, the ‘emergence’ of a problem in ‘readership’  - as reading is not a daily activity for people in the Arab world and has become sort of an “activity for the affluent”.

———–

I guess it is nice that Omani authors will have some support to write and publish their books. Not sure if this will have any impact on readership though, publishing books (which have no contraversial content) is a relatively easy process in Oman, it is relatively very cheap to independently publish small books and novels, but distributing them is very difficult.

Making money from your book is even much much more harder, especially due to the low price at which Arabic books sell.You can buy an Arabic novel for something as low as 700 baisa (About $2) with expensive novels going for Ro1.5 (Less than $4). 

Due to the very small demand for books, the dominating publishers in the local market are stationers who sell books as a secondary product to their “papers and pens”. A book author who manages to convince this sort of  ”publisher” to publish his work will provide the script and the publisher takes care of printing and distributing on a share of profit basis – which usually goes on at 50-50. Usually 500 prints are made in each release, this number could go up to a 1000 copies in certain circumstances. The most oft hese copies are sold at the annual book exhibition.

This means if an author manages to sell every single copy (1000) of his book that costs RO 1.5, he would make: RO 750. This number is subject to reduction relating to printing costs, design costs, registrations costs, and just everything else that has to be done through the process, from writing and typing, to driving up and down to get your book out.

You can add to this the lack of respect for copyright by people, including school teachers and university lecturers, which could mean that your book will be copied like hell without you being able to do anything about it. 

The business of writing in Arabic for a living is just not a viable business in Oman.

I apologize in advance to those subscribed to my blog and who do not understand Arabic. I am very frustrated by what I read on Arabic blogs and I owe the community a post in Arabic. This post is basically about the running case against a moderator of the Omania2.net. I have written about this here and Muscati wrote about it as well.

انا في شدة الاستغراب من المدونين العمانيين وتوقعهم بأن الانترنت هو عالم من الفوضى يحرم فرض الرقابة عليه. انه من الطبيعي ان يتحمل اصحاب المواقع مسؤولية ما ينشر فيها وهذه النظرية لم يتم اختراعها في دول العالم الثالث. في المملكة المتحدة لا تنحصر المسؤولية فقط على صاحب الموقع أو المشرف عليه، بل يمكن تحميل المسؤولية لشركة الاستضافة ومزود الخدمة حتى ولو لم يكونوا هم من قام بكتابة المقال المخالف.

معظم مواقع الأنترنت تدار لاهداف ربحية: سبلة عمان تنشر اعلانات جوجل وقد قامت في السابق بنشر اعلانات بنك مسقط مقابل مبلغ مادي، من الطبيعي ان يتحمل صاحب الموقع مسؤولية ما ينشر في موقعه، فهو يمتلك سيطرة مباشرة على كل موضوع أو رد ينشر، نظام المنتديات المستخدم من قبل المواقع العمانية يحتوي على العديد من خصائص المراقبة ومن الممكن لفريق المشرفين ان يتوثقوا من جميع الردود اذا كانت العملية منظمة، وذلك ما يحصل في الواقع، فمن الصعب على شخص ان ينشر ردا يحتوي على كلمات بذيئة من دون ان يتم حذف رده في خلال ساعات معدودة، إما من خلال اكتشاف المشرف لذلك الرد مباشرة أو من خلال بلاغ قام بارساله احد الأعضاء. الخلاصة أنه من الممكن للمشرفين مراقبة كل موضوع ورد في المنتدى، اذا لم يستطع عمل ذلك فعليه تعيين المزيد من المشرفين.

وجود قانون يحاسب اصحاب المواقع يحمي كل افراد المجتمع وليس فقط كبار المسؤولين في الشركات. تخيل انك فتاة تم التقاط صورتها من دون علمها وتم نشر تلك الصورة في احد المواقع. طبعا من الصعب معرفة الشخص الذي قام بنشر الصورة، وبدلا من ان يحذف المشرف الموضوع فور علمه به يقوم بالتعليق عليه طالبا من باقي الأعضاء “المساعدة” في معرفة شخصية الفتاة. هل هنالك اي شخص لا يعتقد أن صاحب الموقع يجب أن يتحمل المسؤولية في هذا الموقف؟

في رأيي قضية علي الزويدي مطابقة لتلك القصة، كان من الواضح ان الرد المنشور اتهم الوهيبي بالكثير من دون اية ادلة، الزويدي رأى الموضوع وبدلا من ان يحذف ما كان من الواضح اقوال قذف وتشهير، طلب من باقي الأعضاء المساعدة في ترجمة المقالة إلى العربية ليتمكن المزيد من الأعضاء من قراءة الموضوع. الزويدي ايجابياً وافق على نشر الموضوع بعد علمه بمحتواه وفي رأيي يجب ان يتحمل مسؤولية محتوى ذلك الموضوع.

أنا لا أعتقد أن القانون العماني خالي من العيوب، وأعتقد أن قانون الإتصالات سيكون أكثر عدالة إذا وفر لأصحاب المواقع طرقاً لتجنب المسؤولية، إما عن طريق فرض ارسال اخطار من المشتكي لصاحب الموقع لإزالة المحتوى المخالف، كما هو الحال في القانون الأمريكي في مجال مسئولية المخالفات المتعلقة بالحقوق الفكرية، أو من خلال تمكين أصحاب المواقع بإخلاء مسؤليتهم عن طريق اتخاذتهم لخطوات معقولة لتحقق من عدم وجود اية مخالفات – كما هو الحال في قانون التشهير البريطاني.

ولكن في جميع الأحوال من الطبيعي والمفروض ان يتحمل أصحاب المواقع مسؤولية ما ينشر في مواقعهم لحمايتنا نحن كأفراد، فلا يوجد قانون في العالم يسمح لحرية التعبير بأن تتجاوز حقوق وحريات باقي افراد المجتمع.