Blue Chi’s

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.

Got this from Amjad, a professor in Sohar College of Applied Sciences is doing a research on blogging and is collecting some info on bloggers. If have the time please fill the survey and email it to her (the email is included in the file). It did not take me 2 minutes to complete. You can download the file from here.

(Photo credits: Miskan)

I would like to start by saying that I really hate the Omani Internet, I cannot think of a single website to visit when I’m bored and just feel like browsing something weird, funny, or entertaining. If it weren’t for blogs there would be no such thing as Omani internet… well, you can still argue that it does not exist, but that’s beside the point.

I usually look down all Arabic literature because it is irrelevant and out of the touch with the rest of the world. We do not have a literature industry similar to that found in the English speaking world, people generally do not read anything other than newspapers and magazines, and 90% of the books found in the horrible annual book exhibition are religious books.

Recently I discovered a number of Omani Arabic blogs which changed my opinion in Omani Arabic literature, they made me fall in love with Arabic all over again. The content of these blogs is topical and local, yet it is written in awesomely classy Arabic full of figures of speech. I just love their style and how they write in formal Arabic yet integrate local Omani dialect terms to explain a ‘cultural’ concept the same way you would use a French term in an English piece to describe something sophisiticated.

I would like to highlight this article by Blogger Muawiyah describing Omani stereotypes. This post is not comical or even really critical, but merely descriptive of the of the aspirations and beliefs of Omani people. It is a relatively long post, but I really enjoyed it.

Another nice Omani Arabic blog is written by Hamed Al Ghaithi, I loved his post on “Daily Visions” in which he describes several unconnected scenes he was in recently. Most of them are completely random, but yet very personal and vulnerable. It was amazing how the post ended in a new paragraph simply saying “regardless of all the let downs and the failures, life is still fun and delicious” [my emphasis].

I’m so in love with Arabic blogs, I’ve been wanting to start blogging in Arabic for a while. I hate the fact that I am not confident in my Arabic anymore for the lack of practice, it is shameful and stupid. ARABIC IS MY FREAKING FIRST LANGUAGE. Maybe I should start blogging in Arabic to regain my confidence.

Just read about this on TechCrunch, Google has announced an upgrade to Google Analytics, the free online service for tracking your website traffic. 

The new updates include AdSense tracking, API, custom reports, and motion graphs – and those are the most awesome thing I’ve seen in a long time. I can’t wait to use these motion graphs. Check out the video below to learn what it’s all about.

Read more about this on TechCrunch.

As some of you might remember, I moved my blog to WordPress exactly one month ago. It was previously hosted by blogger on blogspot.com. When I moved the blog to my own server on WordPress all my link were broken as all the posts had new URLs. So it was normal for my traffic to drop because all the inks to specific posts no longer worked and because the pagerank for all the pages restarted to zero I lost the majority of search engine driven traffic. The daily traffic to my blog is now less than half what it used to be when I was on blogspot.

This is usually not a big deal because Google will eventually index the blog all over again and people will be able to find it on Google, but for some reason, when searching for stuff I wrote before I moved the blog Google still shows up blogspot.com links and does not seem to recognize that the content can also be found on this blog. Google usually punishes those who publish ‘duplicate content’ as they are usually spam websites and does not show them on search results.

I’m surely that if I was in fact penalized, it must’ve been because of blogspot’s horrible caching. My new content shows up, but my old does not.

The solution to this sort of problem is to generate links to the old content, so that (1) Google knows they exist, and (2) the pagerank of these pages increase and they will have higher chances of showing up high on the search results.

It is pretty hard to get other people to link to your old content, so the easiest way for you to do this is to link to your content yourself. There is a higher opportunity to get higher ranking by receiving external links, but internal links actually also count, and they can have a significant impact if your website already has a high pagerank.

Most of the time I think that I’m doing the right thing by not blogging anonymously, blogging is a great way for staying in touch with people you know in real life. Professionally blogging can be a great way for precisly creating the image you want to be perceived in by blogging about the topics you choose and the way your write your posts.

However, there are certain times when I really miss the fact that I’m not anonymous, simply because I cannot talk about about shared experienced with other people (or experiences ABOUT certain people) because these people might be offended and some might not like to have personal aspects of their life broadcasted online.

I miss this feeling that you get when you write everything you feel about things and people and life, which you can only write when you know that nobody knows who you are. And I just can’t do that. Urgh!

You just never know who might be reading this, it could be anyone from Qaboos bin Saeed to family members and from people you work with to your friends in-laws.  It is insane.

So, bloggers and bloggerettes, are you anonymous or not, and are you happy about it?