Category Blogging

Beirut, Again

I did not enjoy Beirut as much as I wanted when I went there for the first time last December. The schedule was tight, the weather was cold, and the political situation was tense. But now it’s summer, and I hope it will be different this time. I will be flying to Beirut tomorrow to participate at the Arab Bloggers Meeting, an informal gathering for online activists in the region organized by Heinrich Boell Stiftung Middle East. It should be interesting.

P.S. I want to thank Prof. Abdul-Rahman al-Obaid and Dr. Ashraf Mahmoud for their understanding and support.

Hadeel Prize

Ever since blogger Hadeel al-Hodaif passed away earlier this year, friends and fellow bloggers have been thinking about different initiatives to honor and commemorate the young women who defended free speech and believed in a new era of citizen journalism. One of the first ideas that came to the minds of her friends is to establish a prize in her name to recognize the increasing efforts in the Arab world to start a freer media on the web.

This idea has finally materialized as fellow blogger Sami Omar announced today the launch of Hadeel International Prize for New Media (HIPNM), an international award that aims at discovering, encouraging and highlighting Arab talents in the new media arena. The prize will kick off next year in five categories: blogging, specialized blogging, personal blogging, podcasting and videoblogging. For more information, please contact Mohammed al-Saleh: media@hadeelprize.org / +966504877334

The Six Quirks Tag

I have been tagged by fellow Kuwaiti blogger The Stallion.

These are the rules:

  1. Link the person(s) who tagged you.
  2. Mention the rules on your blog.
  3. Tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours.
  4. Tag 6 following bloggers by linking them.
  5. Leave a comment on each of the tagged bloggers’ blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged.

My Six Quirks:

  1. I am paranoid about time. I hate to be late to the point that I usually show up too early for my appointments. Of course that’s not healthy in this part of the world where people have no respect for time.
  2. Sometime I will do/say something unpredictable just because I enjoy surprising others. I am always amused by how people react when they are caught off-guard.
  3. I have something for bags, pens and notebooks. Bags are not quite popular among young men here, but I have always liked them and I keep buying more of them even though I end up not using them that much. Same goes for pens and notebooks: I do most of my writing now on a computer, yet I can’t seem to stop myself from buying more pens and more notebooks.
  4. I am no longer able to read printed newspapers. I read all my news online. Something about following news on the web has made the papers rather unusable to me.
  5. If the person talking to me is lame, I tend to expect what he is going to say and almost say it before he does. It has taken a lot of practice to stop myself from finishing stupid people’s sentences.
  6. At least for two hours after I wake up in the morning, I’m usually not in the mood to talk to anyone. However, I like to get things done early in the morning and find myself more productive at these hours than any other time in the day. You think I’m a morning person or the opposite?

I tag:

  1. Entropy
  2. Medical Practitioner
  3. Aysha
  4. Sami Omar
  5. Murtadha
  6. Eman

International Knowledge Forum in Madinah

Knowledge Economic City (KEC) in Madinah is one of many megaproject launched by the government in recent years to diversify the country’s economy and decrease dependence on oil.

The Economic Cities concept include five other projects, three of them have been launched in Rabigh, Hail and Jazan, and two more are expected to be launched later this year in Tabuk and the Eastern Province. It is still not known where exactly in the EP they plan to build the economic city, but I hope they choose either Qatif or Ahssa as both regions has not received the development they deserve in the past.

Building huge projects like these is a big challenge, and making them work efficiently is a bigger challenge. SAGIA, the government’s arm that oversees these projects, have a vision for the economic cities contribute between a quarter and a third of the aspired national growth rate, to create over a million jobs, and to become home to 4-5 million residents by 2020.

KEC, with a total investment worth US$ 7bn, is particularly interesting because it will focus on knowledge based industries, tourism and services. As part of their effort to raise awareness and create excitement around the project, SAGIA are organizing the first ever Islamic Conference for Science & Knowledge (Noor). The event will take place later this month in Madinah.

I hope that some bloggers from the Western region would register to attend the event as it will tackle some topics of importance to them such as healthcare and information communications technology. I would like to attend but I won’t be done with my finals until the 23rd, and on the 25th I will leave the Kingdom to attend the GV Summit 08 in Budapest, Hungary.

Fouad in Riyadh

I was in Jeddah when Fouad was released, but unfortunately I could not meet him then because I had to leave the next day. Last night he paid a visit to Riyadh, and fellow blogger Sami Omar hosted a dinner in his honor in Shurfa Restaurant. We were also joined by Jihad, Herbaz, Medical Practitioner and Mohammed al-Saleh. Needless to say, we had a great time. It was really good to see him after this long time and I hope we will have a chance to get together again soon inshallah. There is only so much you can say in five hours :-)