Laith Zraikat

This issue will always haunt us wherever we go on the Internet. It has always existed in chat rooms, discussion boards, instant messaging, ...etc and will only grow with the growth of the social Internet. So are we trying to solve a problem which isn't solvable?

I think there are two groups of people who will keep abusing blogging and any other technology that comes along to help people speak out and communicate:

One group are the flat out imposters who are out to slander someone or some entity or spread rumors in favor of a private agenda or to soothe their sick minds. But since "the truth is out there" and thanks to technologies coming out every day to help you find it, those people will by nature be eliminated from the blogosphere because they won't have any serious readership.

The second group are people with a truly just cause, but hide their identity in fear of persecution by their governments, families, or even employers. Those will continue to write what's on their mind and will develop a significant following.

While I prefer that everyone reveal their identities when they Blog, I understand that there are those in other countries who will be in great danger if they do. Some things if said on the streets of Amman might mean nothing more than an expression of opinion, where in some other Arab country, might warrant an arrest or a prison term.

Last month I wrote about an idea for implementing a web engine which will help Blog readers to determine the quality of a blogger. Validity and reliability being two integral traits of a quality blogger, I think such a universal engine can help in solving "some" of the problems introduced with anonymous blogging.

However, I still believe that the problem will resolve itself by people who are smart enough to recognize a bull**** blog, or at least do some research before taking any piece of information as fact.

The hype is still on. "A.J.A.X." Frameworks are being developed to help programmers develop web applications that do not refresh. There's a lot of talk about doing it, but not enough about why it needs to be done. Do we really want to develop such applications on such a wide scale? Are users actually requesting that?

I personally refuse to believe that users dislike the page refresh nature of the internet and are more interested in seeing applications that don’t refresh between requests.

I believe Internet users care more about innovative applications, page loading speed, ease of use, and an error free experience. Whether the page refreshes after clicking a button or not becomes trivial if the application sucks, or if it takes too long to send back a request, or even worse, if you get an error. One could also argue that Internet users are now so used to seeing the page refresh that it doesn’t bother as many of them as it used to.

As a developer I do advocate the use of asynchronous callbacks (or Remote Scripting) when it is absolutely "needed" in "some" parts of your application, and when it improves the user experience without adding unnecessary confusion for the user or the developer.

Due to the disconnected nature web applications, complexities will arise for developers when this problem is amplified in an environment using remote scripting for the following reasons:

• You can’t easily debug JavaScript. Take it from me, it is a nightmare to develop.
• You can't log errors that occur on the user side without writing separate routines to send back error details to your server "asynchronously".
• Special routines have to be written to enable the application to break down gracefully in case of an error without scaring the user while still informing her of the error.
• Different browser standards for implementing remote scripting.

Finally, take Microsoft for example, they did not use remote scripting in their MSN Web Messenger. It could have used less refreshes, but I guess MS are aware of the complexities involved, and they wanted to keep their application as error free and as compatible with all browsers as possible.

I was having problems with my previous RSS reader which only recognized the titles from Blogger feeds, and not always recognized Jordan Planet feeds. It also did not support auto synchronization. After trying several applications, I came across RSS Sync (http://www.viksoe.dk/code/rsssync.htm)

I found it to be extremely efficient, easy to use, and supports all kinds of feeds. Best of all, it integrates with ActiveSync letting me manage my feeds from the pc rather than the tiny PPC screen. It also automatically synchronizes feeds one the PPC is docked. Oh, and it's FREE!

Now, if you have a Gravatar registered with your email address, it will appear automatically when you post a comment using that e-mail address on any of the thousands of blogs that we host.

For those who don’t know what a Gravatar is; It stands for "Globally Recognized Avatar". It’s a personal Icon that will appear next to your name if you post topics of comments to any Gravatar enabled blog or discussion board. It will be tied to the email address you registered it with, so you'll have to use the same e-mail address on those sites.

To get your Gravatar go to: www.gravatar.com

Last night was Jordan Planet's December meetup which attracted more than 20 people. I got a chance to meet new people, and get to know better those I had met in my first meetup. The meeting was in-formal, everybody just talked about whatever they wanted, but the spirit of blogging was evedident in the air.

I went to the meeting with Khalidah, and we decided to go a bit early in case we got lost on the way. Fortunately the directions to Canvas –the meeting place- were very easy to follow, and we were the first to arrive. This gave me a chance to look around the place, as I don’t usually get to do that when I got to places for the first time. The interesting thing about it is that It did not feel like I was in a restaurant, but rather in my home dining room. The place felt very cozy, especially with the rain pouring outside the windows. Ten minutes after we arrived came Roba, Lina and Rami. Three very interesting people. We got a chance to get to know each other until more people arrived.

Rami is a Jordanian journalist living and studying in Sweden, and currently on what you would consider a business trip to Jordan. He is doing some research for his university about blogging in Jordan and the impact it will have on law makers and the press association in the country. He also wrote a very nice piece titled "the Internet as a Communication Medium for Development" in which he argues that developing nations are quickly gaining pace as producers of information and knowledge, the same way that the traditional Information producer-consumer relationship is shifting because of the Internet.

Lina is working on her graduation project at the University of Jordan (my uni!) and wishes she could have 30-hour days so she can go to uni, work on her project and blog! Roba… Well, Roba is very interesting because it seemed like every single person in the meeting recognized her right away. That’s in addition to the fact that she is the first "Roba" I met who spells her name with an "O".

Next to arrive -I think- was Mariam. Mariam has her own NGO in London. And among the things she does is organize youth exchange programs for people aged 18-26 (I'm 27, does that mean I'm not a youth anymore??!)

After that everyone else started arriving, Issam and Abeer, Nader and Mira, Laith Majali, Ahmad Humeid, Jad Madi, Naseem Tamimi, Ammar Ibrahim, Tamer Al-Nasser….. forgive me if I can't remember the rest.

The meeting took off with everyone introducing themselves. The interesting part was when each had to say why they got into blogging. We had all kinds of reasons, some to express themselves, some just to experiment, but for Ammar, it was plain jealousy of Ahmad Humeid's blog. The meeting was also given a special taste because it brought together representatives from Arab blogging services.

Why did I tell this long story? To let you get into the atmosphere of a Jordan Planet meetup, and to help you understand how I think of Jordan Planet.

What is Jordan Planet?... I see it as a phenomenon the like of which was only witnessed back in the early days of NETS Online, where meetings starting online were carried into the real world in similar meetups. There were more than 20 people last night, and It's very hard to think that without Jordan Planet, a lot of them would have never met.

There is more than enough talk these days about blogging, but not nearly enough about communities like Jordan Planet, what it has done for many many people, and the impact it will have on the lives of more to come. In my opinion, this last meetup was a testimony to the successful mission that the founders of Jordan Planet have carried out. You should be proud guys.

I took some pictures in the meeting, but I'd like to keep it simple and post the best one:

We love what Google has done with it's Blog Search. We love Technorati because it doesn’t just randomly index our blogs, but rather enables blogs and their content to be tagged by people and ranked based on how popular it was (traffic). We simply love the way all the search engines are optimized for searching blogs –one way or another. But amidst all of this, and with the growing popularity of blogging, there is a need that has gone un-answered; The need to find good quality bloggers.

I really can't remember the last time I used Google Blog search or Technorati to find a good Blog. The way I usually find the high quality blogs is through word of mouth, other good blogs, or through blogging communities like Jordan Planet.

Take this scenario; I read a good blogger who reads several other bloggers, so I end up catching one or two of them, who turn out to be really good as well. This is how I was introduced to a large percentage of the blogs I read.

So in addition to all the lightning fast search engines and the neatly tagged directories that are popping up here and there, we need an engine to rank bloggers based on human recommendation.

The base for such an engine would be the OPML (or Blog roll) feed which is currently used for sharing RSS feeds between bloggers. This is because OPML is already being used in a sense for recommending other blogs to readers, and because there is not one good reason why not to use it.

The engine would start with a group of hand-picked blogs which will act as the seeds, or supreme court which will kick-start the recommendation process, resulting in more blogs being added to this (seed group). Seed blogs can recommend other blogs by adding them in their Blog roll, which is picked up by the engine and recorded. Based on these recommendations, any Blog will have the chance to become a seed Blog and play a part in recommending other blogs.

Assuming that the first seed of bloggers are top notch, covering a wide variety of topics, then this engine would hold the largest variety of hand-picked content which is worth reading, anywhere on the web.

I think this would make a nice idea for an open-source project.