Two years ago, when Arab bloggers appeared for the first time on the web, most of their weblogs — if not all — were written in English. Not a long time after that, some new Arab bloggers decided to start writing their weblogs in Arabic. There were some technical difficulties at the beginning, but eventually all the difficulties were solved.

However, the great growth of the Arab blogosphere seemed to move in two parallel lines. As a reader, and a blogger, I have noticed that English-writing Arab bloggers are living in their own world, and the Arabic-writing Arab bloggers are living in another world. Now to make things easier, let’s call the first group A, and the second group B.

The great divide can be shown clearly by the variation of the qualities in every group. For example, most members of group A are liberals who look to West with admire, and tend to criticize the situation in their countries harshly. They have little or no HTML knowledge, and they like to start blogging using a free service such as Blogger.

In the other hand, most members of group B are expert programmers who look to West in suspicious, and write their blogs with Islamic sense. Of course, there are some exceptions in both sides, but I can’t study every individual case in this article.

Such differences, and therefore such divide, is not a big a problem by itself, as long as A and B are communicating with each other properly. The big problem is coming next.

From my observations, I have noticed that A and B are living in two separate worlds. Every group seems isolated and enclosed with itself. Just take a look at Sabbah‘s blogroll, and then look at al-Mohareb‘s blogroll. You may refer this to personal preferences, but I think it reflects a deeper problem. Because other than the blogrolls, A members do not link to B members and vice versa. Furthermore, there are even smaller groups inside A and B, which looks so obvious in the case of the Kuwaiti blogs and the Egyptian blogs, where the two communities are very self-centered.

I think this is a serious problem because as most of you know “links are the building blocks of the web” and therefore the blogosphere. I can’t emphasize on this enough, but links are really important. And if the Arab blogosphere is to be built upon ignorance and denial, it will be a weak destructed world. This is unhealthy, and it cannot be good for our little beautiful world.

Calling all geeks out there. I need a way to keep track of comments on my blog. I need something that notify me every time anyone posts a comment on any post on the blog, old or new.

A bit oldie, but still goodie: Why your computer still crashes?

I think most of Firefox users know about the general keyboard shortcuts provided in the menu list of the browser, however, there are some secret useful shortcuts. For example, the Firefox Edit menu will provide CTRL+F as a shortcut for search, while you can easily activate the same function by pressing ” / ” (Yep, the slash key only!). And if you want to search for links that contains a specific word, click the ” ‘ ” and then enter the word you are looking for.

This is a tribute to those great bloggers, who I like, admire and cannot get enough of reading their blogs.

– Zaydoun: The author of Kuwait Unplugged (formerly known as Live from Kuwait) is by all means a celebrity Arab blogger. His start was as a warblogger during the American invasion of Iraq, and that gained a him an interview by The Guardian The Daily Telegraph. When the war ended, the sarcastic “failed writer” took a break and then decided to change the interest of his blog, by focusing more on local Kuwaiti issues. His blog inspired many Kuwaitis to start blogging, helping in shaping one of the most active blogging communities of the Arab blogosphere. Recently, he began to post in Arabic every once in a while.

– Mahmood: The favorite Bahraini blogger of all times. Using the not-so-well-known Xaraya content management system, Mahmood’s Den is much more than a weblog. The website attracted a nice community around it, and Mahmood’s initiative was always a remarkable landmark in the Arab blogosphere.

– Serdal: This cool man from the UAE was behind the rise of the Arabic language blogs. He has launched various Wiki projects, and his blog is a must read for all Arab programmers and developers.

– Haitham: A Jordanian, works for MTC-Vodafone Bahrain. Sabbah’s blog is my favorite place to read interesting stories on politics of the Middle East, and the Palestinian conflict in particular. Plus, cartoons of his choice are irresistible to me. He has launched the Bahrain Blogger Meetup, and he co-hosted the first BABA awards. Little secret: he tried several times to convince Mahmood to change to Movable Type, but Mahmood is still insisting on Xaraya.

– Subzero Blue: The Tunisian man with the initials MMM was the only Arab blogger to be nominated for the Bloggies 2005 awards for the category “Best African or Middle East Blog” and because he is based in Jordan, I think he fits perfectly for this award. The only drawback with his blog, imho, is that most of the link open in a new window, which is really disturbing to me. And btw, Sabbah’s blog have the same thing.

I really enjoy reading Omra al-Arabi. He is on hiatus now, but two weeks ago, he posted some interesting posts regarding a document that Sunnah reference to on treating non-Muslims.

Subzero Blue and Natasha have written some good posts on the launch of MBC4, but I wonder if they can answer the question I asked on the same subject earlier.