MOCI’s stupid law is ready

MOCI are done working on their new law for regulating news websites. A spokesman for the ministry said the new law will also apply to websites of print newspapers, but the ministry does not plan to pre-approve their editors like they do with the dead tree news organisations. If the websites break the regulations, he added, they will be blocked. I guess that’s what this is all about. Making it easier for MOCI to block websites that they don’t like. The kind of enthusiasm and energy MOCI has put into this dumb idea is amazing. I only wish they would put this amazing effort into something more useful. But hey, that would be expecting way too much of them.

Today’s Links

This is awful: after Michael reposted the abaya pictures, he received death threats via his BlackBerry. The phone calls did not shake him, but later he later received an email with a link to an extremist website that had his images. He had to take the pictures down, again. That’s a real shame, but I can’t blame him. I recently received some hate mail as well after my post on al-Barrak’s fatwa.
As I said before, Maureen Dowd was here. I don’t know what to say about her column. Today I don’t feel particularly optimistic. Hell, I don’t feel optimistic at all, actually. It seems that Dowd met only the fancy people. Also, what’s up with this: “He has encouraged housing developments with architecture that allows families, and boys and girls within families, to communicate more freely.”?

Today’s Links

Note to Arab News: my last name is al-Omran, not al-Omranm. The way you misspelled my name makes it unpronounceable. Another thing: I don’t blog for Saudi Jeans. Saudi Jeans doesn’t pay me any money. Saudi Jeans is my blog. It’s the website where I blog. Also, don’t rephrase what I said and then put it in quote marks. Kthxbai.
Fellow blogger Najla Barasain is about to leave KSA soon heading to the US in order to continue her education. She is understandably worried.

Pump It

Do you need further evidence that there is way too many Saudi students in the US?

Though the commercial is not offending — not to me, anyway — I don’t think Saudis should be thrilled about it. The TV ad simply reinforces some of the most negative stereotypes about us.

UPDATE: There are two more commercials of the same campaign that you can find here.

Hillary Clinton was in Saudi Arabia. There was lobster and lamb with the King. She was received like a rock star in Jeddah, where she signed autographs but did not talk about women’s rights. Also, more sanctions against Iran, which she said was on its way to becoming a military dictatorship. Madam Secretary did not, however, comment on the flourishing democracies in the Gulf, because, you know, she is so cool!
Today’s picture: female volunteers at JEF.
According to the latest report from the Ministry of Civil Service, the government employed 31,000 persons in 2008. 63 percent of those were women, most of them in education.

Arab News Redesigns

Finally, and after many long years of stagnation, Arab News gave their website a redesign. Nothing groundbreaking, but certainly an improvement over their old one which looked like a website from the mid 90’s.

True to its nickname, the Green Truth, the new design features the green color heavily, using it for all headlines and links. Although I have to say that the green .com next to the newspaper name is pretty lame and it looks rather outdated. The website also uses more pictures in a much nicer way than the old one. But more importantly, they finally introduce RSS, but the feeds are not full so you will have to visit the website to read the articles.

They also decided to open all articles to comments by readers, so that’s something as well. The very first comment on the new AN was about the Grand Mufti’s call for monitoring of massage centers, and it reads: “That’s all this blind man cares about?! I expected him to encourage MOH to care for the poor patients who lose thier (sic) lives due to mistakes and recklessness. I guess massage pose a greater danger!!!”

I guess it will be interesting to watch their policy when it comes to comments. Is it going to be like al-Arabyia’s ‘everything goes’ policy, or something like al-Watan’s which its editor Jamal Khashoggi recently bragged that he employs ten girls whose their sole job is to monitor comments.

But back to the redesign itself, it will be inevitable to compare it to the other English daily in the country, Saudi Gazette, which has also gone through a redesign last year.

While Saudi Gazette uses a solution developed by the local company SmartInfo, which Fouad al-Farhan recently sold, Arab News uses Escenic, a CMS developed by a Norwegian company that was also used for the website of al-Majalla. However, when compared to other regional and international newspapers, both remain pretty barebones. Nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing that really stands out.

It is very obvious that newspapers here are still approaching the web with their old mentality. Except for al-Riyadh, which has a very good team of local smart developers, none of these newspapers think of their websites as an important part of their service. None of them has an ‘online newsroom,’ and none of them think of their websites as a new medium where they can build a community where they can engage their readers in ways print cannot do.

I believe that the local internet scene is still lacking on many levels, and there are many opportunities to create excellent Saudi content especially in Arabic. The attempts that we have seen so far in this field are very weak and leave much to be desired. I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and I have some ideas that I’m working on, so if you are interested please get in touch.

Smile. Whether you celebrate Valentine’s Day today or not. Just smile. Check out this video that Asmaa and her colleagues made:
It’s been more three years since we first heard about MOCI’s plan to allow new radio stations to broadcast in the country. Last month a media company owned by Prince Khaled al-Faisal won the first FM radio license for a reported price tag of SR75m. I was surprised. Is an FM radio license in Saudi Arabia really worth such costly price? Or is this simply a tactic by MOCI to put a high barrier to entry so they would only give the license to certain people? Yesterday the second license was sold for SR66m. Winners of the remaining three licenses will be announced over the next six weeks.
Saudi Valentine’s FUUUUUUUUUUUUUU! (via rt)