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Saturday, July 22, 2006

البلوغرز يشعلون "حرب المدونات" بين اللبنانيين والاسرائيليي

ناشطون ينشرون صورا لانتهاكات إسرائيل عبر الإميل
البلوغرز يشعلون "حرب المدونات" بين اللبنانيين والاسرائيليين




صورة لهدية اطفال اسرائيل الي لبنان التي يتم تداولها على الانترنت

دبي- العربية.نت

قاد البلوغرز معارك كلامية واعلامية على صفحات مدوناتهم في الانترنت لكشف انتهاكات العدوان الاسرائيلي بحق اللبنانيين ، في الوقت نفسه ، بدأ الناشطون على الانترنت في استخدام البريد الالكتروني للتعبير عن مواقفهم، ونشر الصور التي تظهر حجم الدمار الذي لحق بالبشر والحجر في لبنان ، عبر استخدام برنامج البور بوينت.

ونددت المُدوّنة الالكترونية اللبنانية "ليبوب" lebop.blogspot.com بالرد الوحشي الاسرائيلي على عملية "حزب الله"، واعتبر انها انتقمت من الشعب اللبناني بأسره, ولم تأبه للتطلعات الديموقراطية الصاعدة في ذلك البلد. وردت المُدوّنة الاسرائيلية «إسرائيلي بانكر» israelibunker.blogspot.com بالإشارة الى ان صواريخ «حزب الله» وضعت الشعب الاسرائيلي في الملاجئ. بحسب تقرير كتبه الزميل أحمد مغربي في صحيفة الحياة اللندنية الاحد 23-7-2006 .

واستخدمت المُدوّنة الالكترونية "بيروت نوتس" beirutnotes.blogspot.com الصور لتظهر الدمار الذي الحقته اسرائيل بالعاصمة اللبنانية، مع التركيز على صور استهداف المباني السكنية والبنية التحتية المدنية، والتي لا علاقة لها لـ "حزب الله".وأشار تجمع للمدوّنين اللبنانيين في موقع "ليبانيز بلوغرز" في محرك "غوغل" lebanesebloggers.blogspot.com الى الرغبة القوية بالسلام العادل عند الشعب اللبناني. وفي المقابل، أبدى المدوّنون الاسرائيليون نبرة متشددة، كمثل تلك التي تظهر في مدوّنة ontheface.blogware.com، في تأييدهم العدوان الإسرائيلي.

عودة للأعلى

البريد الالكتروني يدخل المعركة

ولم تتردد دلال قيسي, وهي رسامة سعودية تهتم بالفن الرقمي وزوجة لمهندس من مدينة صيدا في جنوب لبنان، في اللجوء الى البريد الالكتروني لكي تساهم، على طريقتها، في التصدي للعدوان الاسرائيلي. وأرسلت رسمين كاريكاتوريين الى القائمة الطويلة الأشخاص التي يكتظ بها دفتر العناوين في بريدها الإلكتروني.

وحمل أحد الرسمين معنى تضامن الشعب اللبناني بفئاته كافة في مواجهة العدو الاسرائيلي. ولم يتردد الثاني في انتقاد تفرّد «حزب الله» بقرار المعركة، أيضا، فقد برز ميل لافت عند الناشطين لاستعمال برنامج "باور بوينت" في عرض الاراء حول الأزمة على الانترنت. والمعلوم ان ذلك البرنامج يمكّن من عرض سلاسل من الصور، مع تعليقات عليها.

وانتشرت عروض "باور بوينت" في رسائل الكترونية حملت عناوين مثل "صور مؤذية" و"صور عدوانية" و"فكّر قبل ان تنظر الى هذه الصور المؤذية"و"لا تفتح هذه الصور ان كنت حساساً تجاه مثل تلك المواد" وغيرها.

عودة للأعلى

تحية من أطفال إسرائيل !

ولفت التداول الكثيف على الانترنت لصور الأطفال الإسرائيليين وهم يكتبون عبارات عدائية على قذائف المدفعية الثقيلة، من نوع «تحية من أطفال اسرائيل الى أطفال لبنان». ودللت تلك الصور على الإساءة للطفولة من الآلة العسكرية الاسرائيلية.

وكذلك سرى بسرعة البرق عرض الـ"باور بوينت" عن مجزرة مروحين، التي استهدف فيها الطيران الاسرائيلي مدنيّين في شاحنة صغيرة. وأظهر صور الجثث المتفحمة والأشلاء الممزقة للمدنيين.

كما تضمن صوراً لغارات على سيارات للإسعاف، التي تفرض قوانين الامم المتحدة عدم التعرض لها حريباً. وذكّرت تلك الصور بما حمله العدوان الاسرائيلي عام 1996 من جرائم ضد الانسانية مثل مذبحة قانا وقصف سيارة الاسعاف المدني في المنصوري.
وأضاف العرض ذاته صوراً عن قصف مبنى لمتطوعي الإسعاف المدني في صور، بما في ذلك صور الناجين والخارجين من تحت ركام القصف الوحشي.

وكما يشير تقرير صحيفة الحياة ، فقد تداولت الصناديق الإلكترونية رسالة تحمل صلة الى موقع شركة "ستار باكس" الاميركية الشهيرة للقهوة، والتي تحمل تأييد تلك الشركة للجيش الإسرائيلي. ويُذكّر ذلك بالحملات الإلكترونية التي تدعو الى مقاطعة بضائع معينة، ارتباطاً بتطورات سياسية، مثل الدعوة لمقاطعة البضائع الدنماركية التي رافقت الاحتجاجات على نشر الرسوم الكاريكاتورية المسيئة للرسول العربي (صلى الله عليه وسلم).

عودة للأعلى

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers

The ease and appeal of blogging is inspiring a new group of writers and creators to share their voices with the world.

A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology. Blogs, the survey finds, are as individual as the people who keep them. However, most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression – documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family.

View PDF of Report
View PDF of Questionnaire

Friday, July 14, 2006

Greg Goth on Arab Internet Investments in "Mid-Boom"

Arab Internet Investments in "Mid-Boom" (PDF)

pp. 8-10 Abstract Page Download PDF of full text

North African wireless workshop

Workshop information in English

If you…...

  • Are based in a community organization/NGO or work closely with community-focussed projects using networked technologies
  • Have a practical need to develop your skills and knowledge in wireless networking and want to learn with others
  • Are based in North Africa
...you are invited to apply to participate in the above workshop.

THE WORKSHOP AIMS TO

  • Develop technical skills in wireless network planning, design, and management
  • Promote understanding of appropriate wireless technology choices for community networking
  • Lay the foundation for a community of like-minded practitioners to share knowledge, skills and experiences

BACKGROUND

Wireless technologies offer developing countries an important low-cost, versatile alternative to wired infrastructure. They enable communities to extend the reach of cabled internet connectivity and to be in control of the planning, implementation and design of their own networks, making the network into a tool that really serves the needs of the community. Open wireless standards not only bring new technical opportunities at very low cost, but also bring a decentralized internet model to an area which has been restricted to traditional telecommunication operators.

The Association for Progressive Communications is coordinating an initiative, supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Open Society Institute (OSI), to build capacity to implement wireless technologies for community networking in Africa. This workshop is one of a series taking place in Africa during 2005/2006, and the first in Arabic.

WORKSHOP CONTENT

The final workshop agenda will be fine-tuned in line with participants' needs and experience, but is expected to cover

  • Introduction to wireless technologies
  • Basic wireless network topology
  • Windows/Linux client setup
  • Access point setup
  • Antennas
  • Basic radio physics
  • Site survey
  • Link calculation
  • Network security
  • Managing/monitoring the network

LOGISTICAL INFORMATION

  • Workshop dates: 12-16 July 2006
  • Venue: Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane, Morocco
  • Workshop language: the main language of the workshop is Arabic. Selected sessions will be held in French and/or English.
  • Costs: the cost of travel, shared accommodation, meals and workshop attendance will be covered by the organizers. Participants are expected to cover their own visa, travel insurance, health-related costs and single accommodation supplements. No per diem will be given.
  • Pre-workshop preparation: Participants will be required to undertake a small amount of pre-workshop preparation

ELIGIBILITY AND SELECTION CRITERIA

Workshop space is limited and demand for places is high. Evaluation of applications will take into account technical skills, community linkages and motivation for participation. Applications from women are particularly encouraged.

Prerequisite skills

  • At least basic hands-on experience in TCP/IP network administration
  • General arithmetic skills
  • Arabic and French OR English language skills

Organizational/community prerequisites

  • Located in a community organization/NGO or demonstrable ties with a community-focussed networking project.

Motivation

  • Strong indication of intention to apply the skills and knowledge acquired at the workshop for community development.

APPLICATION PROCEDURE

  • Apply by completing the online application form NO LATER THAN 19 MAY 2006 (short-listed applicants may be asked to provide additional information after this date).
  • Applicants will be notified whether they have been successful by 12 June 2006
  • For further information please contact wireless@apc.org

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Welcome to the world of blogging

Welcome to the world of blogging
By Fouad Al-ObaidStaff WriterDo you feel you have something to say? Do you feel the need to be heard? Do you have a message you want to spread? If that is the case, then blog. For those of you who haven't heard the term before, I assure you it is not a disease; at least not a harmful one! It seems though that it could be contagious. Beware; you might become addicted. A blog is a concept; it can be anything from a diary, a virtual book, even a private newswire about one's own street! A blog is whatever you want it to be, with the added advantage of being anonymous, thus liberating you from any social pressures. Thanks to blogs, you can communicate without having your identity disclosed. You can end up creating a new personality, opening up your own little cyber fantasy world! It is no secret that Arab society, especially in the Gulf, is conservative. Culturally, as well as traditionally, our society has emerged as closed, with taboos rarely disclosed or touched upon, at least not in public, and certainly not in commercial publications. Issues dealing with sexuality, personal preferences, politics, democracy, human rights, teen issues, dating - you name it, are virtually out of bounds. This has led to the emergence of blogs in the Middle East. Blogs are the ideal forum where people can freely express their ideas and thoughts.Sadly, not all countries are lenient with what they consider 'thought' crimes. Some countries block their citizens' blogs. Egypt and Bahrain have both arrested and imprisoned people for what they've written in their blogs. Saudi has blocked several blogs too. The local blogging scene grows by the day, and though many erupt, it is true that some fade and die with time. There is a semi-official blogging site that lists most blogs in Kuwait (http://www.kuwaitblogs.com/), a site that offers many blog options with a variety of names that are both interesting and intriguing; Can you handle the Truth?; A Kuwaiti Online; Desert Girl on Kuwait; Jabriya Za7ma; Kuwait N Islam. This is only a sample of the couple of hundred odd blogs available. As their titles suggest, they all have their own distinct personalities. Some bloggers have become cyber celebrities, receiving hundreds of thousands of hits, whereas others are read only by the few people that know them. Now that you have been introduced, you may join the cyber world an enjoy an entertaining experience. But, be warned, blogging is addictive! For your thoughts and comments fouad@kuwaittimes.net

Monday, July 03, 2006

Social scientists create maps of online interactions

If the Internet is a new kind of social space, what does it look like?

That's a question of particular interest to social scientists eager to see what cyberspace might reveal about the nature of human behavior.

Researchers, after all, have long sought to map social groupings and interactions in the physical world. Now, with so much activity on computer networks, scientists can collect vast amounts of hard data on human behavior. Each blog points to other blogs in ways that reveal patterns of influence. Online chats can be tallied and parsed. Even the act of clicking on links can leave trails of activity like footprints in the sand.

"We're entering the golden age of social science," says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "We know more than we ever did about what's on people's minds."

While all that data could seem overwhelming, researchers are refining ways to visualize Internet activity. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a visualization may well be worth 10,000 data points.

At a conference this month at the University of Pennsylvania called "The Hyperlinked Society," a panel of academic and industry experts showed off their Internet maps and talked about the challenges of painting meaningful pictures of cyberspace.

Politics and Links

Political bloggers are colorful, opinionated online voices. And many people have noted that most liberal blogs, not surprisingly, generally point readers to other liberal viewpoints, while conservative bloggers keep to themselves as well.

Lada Adamic, an assistant professor in the school of information at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, helped create a map that shows exactly what those connections looked like just before the 2004 U.S. presidential election.

By sampling more than 1,000 political blogs, she and other researchers developed a map of the ties among them, noting, in particular, when conservatives or liberals reached across the aisle to point to a blogger from an opposing viewpoint. Naturally, the left-leaning blogs are shown as blue dots, and the right-leaning blogs are colored red. Orange lines between blogs indicate links from liberal to conservative blogs, and the purple lines are from conservative to liberal. When two liberal blogs link to each other, the line is shown in blue, just as mutually connected conservative blogs are connected with red lines.

Even the placement of each dot is meaningful, representing degrees of interlinking. "Imagine that all the blogs that link to one another have springs, so they want to be close together," says Ms. Adamic. In a similar way, her mapping algorithm "will bring the ones that are linking to each other close" and leave others further out from the center.

The researchers were curious to see if blogging activity confirmed preconceived notions of how liberals and conservatives behave offline.

"We wanted to see whether conservatives were more interlinked than liberals," she says. "That was true to some extent, but it wasn't like, wow, they're so much more interlinked. We found things to be surprisingly balanced."

As for which side blogged the most, she found things were about as close as the presidential-election results: "It was like dead even."

Ms. Adamic speculates that the large amount of interlinking and activity by conservative bloggers at the moment her data were gathered might have been caused by the excitement over a CBS News report on George W. Bush's military service that turned out to have been based on forged documents. That discovery of the forgeries was made by a blogger.

The colorful map was created using free software called Guess, originally developed by researchers from HP Labs. Other tools for data mapping are readily available as well, she says, adding that attempts to create maps of Internet activity are "definitely growing."

'Core of the Blogosphere'

Matthew Hurst, director of science and innovation for Nielsen BuzzMetrics, a company that analyzes Internet trends for businesses, has created a map of more than a thousand of the most popular blogs, essentially showing what he calls "the core of the blogosphere."

Like Ms. Adamic's map of political blogs, Mr. Hurst's distributes blogs in visual space based on how much they link to each other. "If things are very close to each other, it means they talk to each other a lot," he says. "When you do this analysis, you inevitably end up with a large percentage of blogs that are just floating around by themselves because they don't have a lot of in or out links."

The size of the circles on Mr. Hurst's map indicates the numbers of links to the blogs. The colors of the circles show the type of blog software used or on what kind of server the sites are hosted, telling technology-oriented researchers the more popular servers and software.

The map indicates that the most linked-to blogs focus on technology and social-political commentary.

Mr. Hurst says that Internet maps help the company make recommendations about how to harness the Internet. "If we understand how influence works in the blogosphere," he says, "it allows us to make more qualified assertions of what's going on to our customers."

Following the Patterns

Likewise, Microsoft is using data maps to better understand the dynamics of online communities.

"The future of computing is social computing," said Marc A. Smith, leader of the Community Technologies group at Microsoft Research, at the conference here. "The question is how do you harness the swarm."

He has been working on a project called Netscan, which analyzes behavior on Usenet, a text-only online discussion forum that has been around since before the invention of the World Wide Web. Though Usenet is far less popular than blogging these days, Mr. Smith says the forum can yield important lessons that can be transferred to newer online discussion spaces that use so-called "threaded messages," where conversations are organized by topic.

"What we're trying to do is show patterns of contribution to threaded conversation communities," Mr. Smith says.

The project generates plenty of raw data tables ripe for analysis. But Mr. Smith says the visual representations of data are far more powerful for spotting patterns. "Like a lot of people, I'm not that numerate, and the pictures speak to me in a way that tables of numbers do not," says Mr. Smith.

In fact, Mr. Smith and his colleagues have developed a way to determine what kind of user a person is by looking at data maps of their posting behavior rather than examining the content of their messages. Among the type of users: the "answer person," who is quick to provide advice to strangers; the "flame warrior," who enters discussions hoping to win arguments by trashing other participants; the "discussion person," who is willing to talk on just about any topic; and "the questioner," who seeks advice but is not a frequent participant and is not looking for conversation.

Several weeks' worth of activity by a single user can be shown on one visualization, where each new discussion thread the user participated in is shown as a bubble, and the size of the bubble represents the number of times the user posted on that topic.

"Our intent has been to make visible the latent but invisible patterns in conversational data sets," said Mr. Smith and several colleagues in a report on the research.

Mapping the Future

Academics at the conference here argued that the "killer map," or most powerful way of representing online interactions, has yet to emerge.

"We're still waiting for the Mercator map to emerge" for cyberspace, said Martin Dodge, a lecturer in human geography at the University of Manchester, in England. The Mercator projection method for mapping Earth, developed in the 1560s, was a breakthrough in translating the round earth to a flat map.

Of course, measuring cyberspace is far more complex than mapping physical space.

Some researchers at the conference pointed out that analyzing the number of links to Web sites does not give any sense of whether the linker was positively recommending a site or pointing in disgust.

Mr. Hurst says that, unlike in the physical world, the Internet has no objective space to measure, so any map will inevitably be more subjective, highlighting certain traits and excluding others.

"In the physical world, it's a matter of taking the three-dimensional world and making it two-dimensional," said Mr. Dodge. But on the Internet, he said, there are more dimensions to consider.

Sunday, July 02, 2006

Newspapers woo bloggers with mixed results

Blogs written by so-called citizen journalists are increasingly challenging newspapers for readers. According to a recent study by Forrester Research, blogs and newspaper Web sites now have the same audience share--about 17 percent--among Internet users between the ages of 18 and 24.

"Newspapers still have a larger overall audience," says Charlene Li, a Forrester analyst. "But blogs are catching up quickly."

Political blogger hired by Clinton campaign




WASHINGTON--Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign has hired Peter Daou, one of the most prominent political bloggers in the nation, to help disseminate her message in a forum that has not always been that hospitable to her.

The move underscores the degree to which bloggers--the authors of Web logs, or blogs--have begun to transform American politics. In many cases, candidates have even set up their own blogs, with staffers answering questions, presenting policy proposals and posting campaign literature and videos.




What's the common thread between these seemingly unrelated acts? They're all early April entries on three different video blogs, and together they illustrate the diversity emerging from the flourishing world of video blogging, which will take center stage this weekend in San Francisco at the Vloggercon conference.

Brainstorm blogger roundup



Despite a somewhat spotty wireless signal, the blogosphere is thriving here at Brainstorm. (Says blog pioneer Dan Gillmor, "The next conference I go to that has a consistent WiFi signal will be my first.") For your convenience, we offer a roundup of the blog activity, in no particular order:

Who are we missing? Please advise.
My Google Profile