A government official told Arab News that the reason for not allowing women to participate in the next elections is that the government did not have enough time to arrange for it!! The official said the law does not prevent women from participating in the election.

Good to know. How long do you need to arrange for that? A century?

The web usability guru Jakob Nielsen wrote this good article four years ago. However, I think some of the questions this article sparkled still alive. I liked the comment of Evan Williams who defended the blog format. What about you?

1. Do you think most people are poor writers?

2. Do you think the blog format is the best format for people to create content for the internet?

3. Do you think new services like Flickr would be a Geocities for photography?

I finished reading We’ve Got Blog. It is basically a collection of essays by some of the blogsphere superstars, plus some relatively unknown geeks and journalists. The likes of Rebecca Blood, Dan Gillmor and Dave Winer try to have a peek at how blogs are changing our culture and the ways we are using to get the news.

This book helped me to have a better understanding on how all this blogging phenomenon started, and how it kept on evolving to become a major part of the internet today.

A good read for both bloggers and non-bloggers, and the variety of voices gives it a special value. My rating: 3.5/5.

Evan Williams, the co-founder of Pyra, the company behind Blogger, decided to leave his baby in order to see the world and maybe try something new.

Can I say this was expected? I don’t know, but it seems that every acquisition (Google acquired Pyra last year) must be followed by the leaving of some key people.

I’m really looking forward to Ev‘s next project. He created Blogger with his friends just to have fun. Now let’s see what he will make next to play with, and maybe share his toy with us!

Thank you Ev for such a great contribution to our lives. Blogger changer my world and I’m sure many people out there are just like me. Thanks.

Earlier this year, STC started a huge promotional campaign to force their customers (almost everybody as STC were the exclusive provider of mobile service) to add an extra “zero” to their mobile phones numbers which start with “05”. STC added the “zero” after the “5” to make the numbers start with “050” and the announced goal was to expand the network capacity.

STC, well known for their bad customer service and their greedy nature, did not ask the customers at the first place if they were OK with adding a “zero” or not. If people were asked to add anything, they would definitely go with “5” instead of “0”, however, STC did not pay enough attention and added an f**cking “zero” to every f**cking mobile number.

Now, after STC finally discovered people wanted “5” instead of “0”, they are shamelessly asking the customers to pay SR 25 (around $7) to change the numbers from “0” to “5”, or you can stick to your ugly “zero-ed” number. Yes, we pay money to correct a mistake STC made when they changed our numbers without our will (they could run SMS-based poll before taking such idiot decisions!).

It seems that STC will try to suck every possible riyal from people’s wallets before the entry of the new telecommunications provider after six months. The new company, called Etisalat Union (who made up this crappy name?), is owned by UAE’s Etisalat and some Saudi investors, and it will be the first competitor to STC in the Saudi fast growing market.

A Saudi sociologist told Asharq Al-Awsat that Saudis are wasting $192m every year on foreign chauffeurs they bring to drive the cars of their women. “This is a huge loss to our national economy,” She added.

It is a huge bill that extremists may consider when they yell everyday that they’ll never ever let women drive their own cars.

A French Muslim female student has protested against the stupid French law to prevent the religious symbols in schools by shaving her hair. The student told the press that she respects the law but the law does not respect her.

I called this French law “stupid” because I don’t think of hijab as a religious symbol. A crescent is a religious symbol; hijab is just a piece of clothes. Millions of Muslim women out there do not wear hijab; does that make them non-Muslims? I think deciding what someone wants to wear is a personal matter, so why the French government interferes in such a personal choice?