Laith Zraikat: Blogging

"Blog" sometimes stands for Bitch-Log

Sat, 09 Sep 2006 17:48:00 GMT

"Bitch" here is the verb not the noun.

Blogging is one of the most pivotal phenomena to hit the Internet since its inception. When I think about the Internet since it began, I think: Email, Instant messaging, and Blogging. Once we got over "how cool" Email and IM are, we started addressing the problems associated with them. The same applies to Blogging.

When the Blogging hype began, people were too "at-awe" with the whole thing that simply having a blog meant you were "sophisticated, important, worth-while, or have something important to say". Now that everyone's friend's mother knows what a blog is and some are probably thinking of having one, eyes are turning to the more important question; Why should you have a blog? What should you write in it? What value are you adding with your blog?

It is so easy to create a blog, anyone anywhere can have one. Nobody expressed that better than "Lore Sjöberg" in his article "The Ultimate Blog Post":

"Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it."

He also says:

"Blog" itself is short for "weblog," which is short for "we blog because we weren't very popular in high school and we're trying to gain respect and admiration without actually having to be around people."

The most sophisticated blogs are those you read and feel like you have actually expanded your knowledge, or at least gotten some new insight about a topic through someone's "experience"… and I stress on EXPERIENCE.

I like people who write from their educational or professional experience. Even those who simply report news that has already been reported, but add their insight about the matter are actually interesting. I like posts that take one topic and dissect it –given that it is related to their expertise, and not just because they felt like it- even if they do not provide an answer.

What I dislike are bloggers who rant on and on about their problems, their life, how unjust this world is,…etc. Those end up writing "Bitch-Logs" -. For every bitch-post you will find a thousand other posts bitching about the same problem. It is such a waste of time.

To those people I say:

No one is interested in the fact that you dislike this or love that. We don’t want to hear about your problems. Keep them to yourself and deal with them.

If you want to discuss world hunger, tell us how you can help fight it.

If you want to discuss wife beating, then you should have an experience to share, if not, then shut up, because you have no idea what you're talking about.

If you hate the opposite sex because you were abused by an ex-boyfriend / girlfriend who has likely dumped you because you bitch too much, then you're not helping yourself by further bitching about it.

If you hate the opposite sex just because you can't get one, don’t bitch about it, look in the mirror instead. There are millions of couples out there who are happily married. Just because you can't find one doesn’t mean the problem is "them".

Stop complaining and propose solutions. Unless you have at least an idea for a solution, nobody wants to hear about it.

If you don’t have any experience to share, then talk about your hobbies. If you have none, go get one. It might help you solve some of your problems.
Don't give parenting advice is you've never had kids or had to raise kids.
Don't give marriage advice if you've never been married.
Don't give relatioship advice if you've never had one.

I do realize that for those B-loggers*, their B-blog is a kind of therapy and escape from their reality, where they get to talk and feel that someone is listening, which makes them feel important. Well, ok, someone is listening, then what? The person who is listening today actually has a life and will move on once is gets too cluttered with "important" things to worry about. You and your B-blog are just a stop for people who need to rest their minds after reading "sophisticated" blogs .So, in my opinion, this is not a permanent solution.

My proposed solution for those B-loggers is to sit with yourself and list the problems in your life that end up on your B-log. Convince yourself that nobody is interested in how unhappy you are with yourself –because essentially, it is your own fault- and try to solve your problems by seeking professional help .Make a pledge that you will no longer Bitch-log your problems to the world. Then, simply refrain from posting about topics which you have absolutely no experience in, and focus on adding more value to your readers.

As for me, I have a long list of B-logs to delete from my feed reader because they are simply garbage.

*Short for Bitch-loggers

Jeeran and Performancing: Helping Arab Bloggers Succeed

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 12:23:00 GMT

Jeeran has teamed up with Performancing - www.performancing.com - to bring Arabic version of the widely popular blog editor - Performancing for Firefox.

If you're a blogger and are not familiar with Performancing then you should get out more :) Performancing is a group of professional bloggers with a mission "To create a home for professional bloggers. A place where those that want to make money from their blogs can learn, and perfect the art of making a living from weblogging."

Performancing for Firefox provides bloggers with a seamless interface to popular weblog platforms such as Jeeran, WordPress and MovableType. It allows them to post to their blogs from a split screen within the Firefox browser. It also features drag-and-drop functionality for more efficient blogging, enabling bloggers to easily insert text or graphics into their posts, and a “notes” tab that allows bloggers to take notes while building and researching posts.

As a result of this partnership, Jeeran's bloggers can upgrade their blogging experience through the power of Performancing and the "open-mindedness" of our blogging engine, which enables integration with any external blogging applocation through an open API -http://api.jeeran.com/blogs/rpc/- wich adopts the universal MetaweblogAPI standards.

I encourgae you to download and use this great application. You will find that you wont be able to live without it :)

Read more:

جيران - Performancing: لتجربة تدوينية غنية

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 12:16:00 GMT

لقد قامت جيران بالإشتراك مع Performancing - www.performancing.com - لعمل نسخة عربية من محرر المدونات المشهور Performancing for Firefox.

إذا كنت مدوناً و مع ذلك لم تسمع ب Performancing أو تجربه من قبل، فعليك ان تخرج أكثر . Performancing هي عبارة عن مجموعة من المدونين المحترفين هدفهم هو : "إنشاء مكان للمدونين المحترفين، مكان يمكن للمدونين الراغبين في الحصول على المال من مدوناتهم أن يتعلموا و أن يحترفوا طرق الحصول على المال من خلال مدوناتهم."

Performancing لفايرفوكس يزود المدونين بواجهة واحدة لخدمات التدوين الأكثر شعبية كجيران، وورد بريس، و موفابل تايبز حيث يمكنهم من إضافة المقالات إلى مدوناتهم من نافذة منبثقة في متصفح فايرفوكس. كما يمكن Performancingالمدونين من إضافة الصور و النص ماشرة الى المقال بخاصية drag-and-drop، و يمكنهم أيضاً من حفظ الملاحظات خلال كتابتهم للمقالات.

كنتيجة لهذه الشراكة يمكن لمدوني جيران تطوير تجربتهم التدوينية باستخدام Performancing فايرفوكس و العقلية المنفتحة لمحرك المدونات الخاص بنا؛ الذي يمكن استخدامه مع عدة خدمات تدوينية عن طريق -API -http://api.jeeran.com/blogs/rpc الخاص به و المتطابق مع معايير MetaweblogAPI العالمية.

أدعوكم لتنزيل هذا البرنامج الرائع و استخدامه. ستجدون أنكم لن تستطيعوا الإستغناء عنه.

Help Lebanon

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 10:19:00 GMT

While we can’t fight alongside them for many reasons, this does not mean we should sit and not do anything. BloggersForLebanon.org is an effort by a group of online communities aimed at rallying support across the Arab web for the Lebanese people. The primary objective is to collect in-kind donations which will go to the Jordan River Foundation and from there to the Lebanese people.

Please donate if you can. If you can’t you can still give by helping promote this effort.

Not too long ago in Lebanon, Israel was made to withdraw by force. This is a testimony that "What was taken by force can only be taken back by force", and a testimony to the ability of the Lebanese resistance in driving them out again.

Let us hope we can help ease their suffering and prolong their endurance until they achieve victory over the Zionist state.

Thank you.

Jeeran + Flickr: Have your Cake and Eat it Too

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 13:06:00 GMT

Flickr is the leading photo publishing and sharing service on the web. almost every serious blogger has a Flickr account which makes it essential for them to be able to integrate easily between their image collection and their blog.

This integration is now possible with Jeeran Blogs through our Web Service API. It will also enable any third party application/web site to utilize the power of Jeeran Blogs.

The sun has set on the Arabian web 1.0
Originally uploaded by laithz.

Now, everyone with a Jeeran Blog can setup their Flickr account to enable blogging of their photos directly from Flickr.

To know more about how to set it up, please read: Posting from Flickr to Jeeran

It is also worth mentioning that the Jeeran Blogs API is based on the universal MetaweblogAPI standard, so any application that supports this standard can be setup to use the API.

The Jeeran Blogs XML-RPC API end point is:
http://api.jeeran.com/blogs/rpc.rem

p.s. this was posted through Flickr :)

Jeeran's Manga Ad.

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 22:10:00 GMT

This is a cool ad we created for Jeeran Blogs, which went out to all our members today. Rasha wrote the script, and Tariq Odeh did the sketch… enjoy.

Swicki - An answer to a question

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 18:36:00 GMT

A while back I wrote about the emerging problem of having too much content being produced so quickly, but not organized quickly enough or properly enough. The blogging phenomenon was the answer to the question of content management, but provided little or no answer for knowledge management. Sure, blog search engines such as Technorati, along with blogging communities provided some of the answer.

I mentioned that an answer to this problem can come in the form of "… smaller and more specialized sites/engines which cover a specific topic, organizing and presenting relevant information in a way that is geared towards a specific audience."

In comes Swicki, A new idea that is exactly about that- Providing dedicated search engines for people to build and train around topics that are relevant to their sites/communities- is gradually picking up pace.

"A swicki is a natural extension of personal publishing on the web. Just as you can create a webpage, blog, or podcast, now you can publish a community powered search engine, tailored to produce only the targeted search results that you and your community want!
A swicki shows a buzz cloud of what is hot in your community and makes it easy to find the best content, news and info on the web."

Not only that, but Eurekster is also planning to introduce a revenu making model for Swicki users. An innovative tool AND a revenue model for the company and it's users. how great is that?!

It's interesting to see how large companies always miss coming up with these small innovations. And the larger they get the less innovative and risk taking they become. I see this as an opportunity missed by Google. It is so obvious that such a service should have been provided by them, just as they provided dedicated site search for millions of sites.

It really makes sense to assume that the giant search engines will never be able to cover the web's entire wealth of information, not even Google. And even if they do cover it, they will never be able to organize it all the way people want. Swikis might just be the answer to that problem.

However, I think the real test is to see if such small search engines will ever survive on their own or will they always have to be coupled with a web site, being it a blog, a blog network or a blogging community that focuses on one or several specific topics?

Jeeran Imports Blogger.com

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 22:10:00 GMT

I am so thrilled to announce that "Jeeran Blogs" is officially out of beta phase.
A lot of enhancements have been put in, including a prettier UI. The most significant feature in this update is the Blogger Importer. If you want to move from Blogger.com to Jeeran Blogs, you can now take all you posts and comments along. Nothing is left behind ?, and with no hassle at all. All you have to do is submit a request to our support team and they will do the rest.

Among the people who moved to Jeeran during the testing phase and who we want to thank are:

Sabri Hakim:
previously (sabrihakim.blogspot.com), now (http://www.sabrihakim.com/)
Talasim:
previously (zeidkoudsi.blogspot.com), moved in with (http://www.talasim.com/)
Proactivity Group:
previously(proactivitygroup.blogspot.com),now (proactivitygroup.jeeran.com)

Read more about our Blogger Importer.

Another major enhancement is the ability to further customize the look of your Blog. We have given you full control over your template's CSS code, which means that you can change almost any element in your Blog.

Thanks goes to the entire Jeeran team on a job well done; Developers, writers, designers, testers and most importantly our customer support for helping our members and keeping then happy ? And to our partners who continue to help and support us in our mission to change the world.

More amazing things to come from Jeeran, so stay tuned. This is just the beginning.

Amazon Associate Books Rotator for your Blog using AJAJ

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 21:24:00 GMT

Last week I wanted to list some of the books that I've read and/or recommend. So I thought I'd also make some money while I'm at it. I created an Amazon reseller account and stared creating affiliate links.

Since Amazon does not have an automated way to generate code that will rotate several books, I decided to create one using JavaScript Asynchronous Callback and JSON.

This small solution consists of 2 files:
1. books.txt: contains the list if ISBN's for the books
2. books_json.js: JavaScript file that contains the code which will retrieve the list of ISBN's through xmlHTTPRequest, and then pick a random book and displays it.

This is how the code looks:

Book.txt:

{"Book":
[
{"Code": "0393058581"},
{"Code": "1590595009"},
{"Code": "1590593898"},
{"Code": "0385483821"},
{"Code": "0684855542"},
{"Code": "0375727205"}
]
}

Books_json.js:

// Settings you can modify
var affiliateID = "numbersixteen-20";// Your amazon associate ID
var Width = "120px"; // Box Width
var Height = "240px";// Box Height
var fcl = "000000";// Text Color
var lcl = "0000ff"; // Link Color
var bcl = "000000";// Frame (border) color
var bgl = "ffffff"; // Background color

//Ony modify if you know what youre doing
var dataURL = "/books.txt";

//Create the XMLHTTPRequest object
var requester;
try
{
requester = new XMLHttpRequest();
}
catch (error)
{
try
{
requester = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
}
catch (error)
{
requester = null;
}
}

// Open the XMLHTTPRequest, set the method to GET, give it the URL to fetch and set (Asynch = true) so the rest of the page can still download while the data is downloaded

requester.open("GET", dataURL, true);
requester.send(null);

// When the request is done, we call stateHandler which will perform the the needed actions IF we actualyl got a response.
requester.onreadystatechange = stateHandler;

function stateHandler()
{

// The XMLHttpRequest has finished requesting the data
if (requester.readyState == 4) {

// The data was receieved successfully
if (requester.status == 200)
{
// There no need ot do anything if no text was received.
if (requester.responseText != "")
{
// Get the JSON list of book ISBN's and compile it
var Books = eval( '(' + requester.responseText + ')' );
// Generate a random index from the Books Object
var whichBook=Math.floor(Math.random()*(Books.Book.length));
// Get the Book ISBN
var Book = Books.Book[whichBook].Code;
requester = null;
// Build the HTML code to place in the page
var amazonCode = "<iframe src='http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t="+ affiliateID +"&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins="+Book+"&fc1=" + fcl + "&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&lc1=" + lcl + "&bc1=" + bcl + "&bg1=" + bgl + "&f=ifr' style='width:"+Width+";height:"+Height+";' scrolling='no' marginwidth='0' marginheight='0' frameborder='0'></iframe>";
// Dump the HTML code on the page
document.getElementById('bookList').innerHTML = amazonCode;
}
}
else
{
requester = null;
}
}
return true;
}

Installation on your blog:
1. Upload the JavaScript and Data files into the root folder of your web site
2. Add the following in your HTML where you want the books to appear:

Download the source code and example:
books_json.zip

In case you want a version that uses XML, here it is:
books_xml.zip

After blogs. From content management to knowledge management

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 22:46:00 GMT

Although many complex CMS's have been developed over the years- each applying its own methodology for creating content- none has been powerful and easy enough at the same time. This gap has finally been filled by the concept of Weblogs.

The power of the Weblogs stems from the sheer simplicity it provides, opening the door to millions of people to create content and publish online. Finally, blogs have become an essential part of any web site, and in most cases are themselves standalone web sites. Soon, saying "web site" will almost always mean "Blog". And having a web site will be like having an email address.

The fact that we have made it easy for people to throw more and more content online, a gap has naturally formed between the traditional search engines with their smart bots probing the web and their ability to keep up with the new content being created every second. Not only in terms of quantity, but in terms of making sense of all that content.

In the old days, a smart bot if given an random 100 web pages to comprehend, and has a success rate of 50% will be deemed very successful because in those days, the 50% that is comprehensible by the bot is the actual important content, while the other 50% most likely includes more garbage and un-important material.

Why? In those days, only corporates, businesses, institutions, and web savvy individuals were able to create and publish content. Publishing content was part of an organized development process, which made sure the content was properly formatted and optimized for search engine indexing, and -in a lot of cases- was actively being submitted to more than one major search engine.

Nowadays however, my little cousin –all my little brothers have grown up- can have a web site up and running in 5 minutes. And with all the little cousins in the world doing the same, I can only imagine the look on search engine engineers.

Online publishing has been spreading with free hosting services like Jeeran, Geocities, Tripod, AngelFire... providing easy-to-use tools for people to build websites. But with blogs, an explosion occurred in the number of new web sites being created every day. The question: Now what? Blogs have answered the question of content management. We now need to answer the question of knowledge management.

Managing knowledge is very different from managing content, simply because content management (the production and management of raw text and other media) is one element of knowledge management (the organization and presentation of content based on understanding and verifying it).

The answer to some parts of the puzzle has come in the form of tagging, which has changed the way we organize content in two ways: The first is by replacing the concept of categorization which has been a limiting factor in almost all content management systems, because no one topic is limited to one or two or even ten categories. The second is by being a purely human activity, which meant better accuracy in determining the full scope of topics and meanings addressed by any piece of content. So we can safely say that after being tagged, content can start to be called "knowledge".

Other parts of the puzzle are still waiting to be answered, like the issue of quality and validity; What determines if this or that content is useful and of good quality? Of course you Google the topic first, then skim through a few articles and decide. But this is an opportunity for the extremely competitive multi-billion dollar search engine industry that will not be left unaddressed.

I believe we will see more and more innovations that will greatly enhance the presentation of content and our ability to consume and make use of it. This will open the door for smaller and more specialized sites/engines which cover a specific topic, organizing and presenting relevant information in a way that is geared towards a specific audience. If you look closely, this is already happening.