Reuters has a story on blogging in Saudi Arabia. The story has quotes by Raed al-Saeed, Farooha, and me. The reporter contacted me for this story, but he published it before I was able to reply to him, so he used a part from one of my posts. The story says that the Religious Policeman did not comment on OCSAB, which is not true.

But for me, there are two things that I find interesting: a) OCSAB are seeking financial backing from the government, and b) what al-Saeed said on “that there is some ethics of blogging.” I don’t know how these guys are thinking, but to ask for money from the government? Really? That simply means you are not independent anymore. Who wants to sacrifice his independence and credibility for some riyals? And now to the ethics part, I have only one thing to say here: Seriously? Don’t let me get into that, because these guys are the last people to talk about ethics. Maybe they can use the money they will get from the government to buy some ethics.

UPDATE: Raed al-Saeed reacts to the story, and says the reporter has misquoted him. I wonder why, for some reason, people always fail to undertand these guys. I also wonder what kind of claims he is talking about.

Check out the latest episode of JameedKast. It is not hilarious, but funny enough to waste 20 minutes of your not-so-precious time. I liked it when they were messing with Roba, asking her what she thinks of some footballers and third-class singers, and she had no idea what they were talking about. (Arabic)

To my surprise, Gainan Al Ghamdi, a columnist for Al Watan, has written about the Ameena case. He says this case should not be overlooked due to the fact that Ameena is Shiite, because such cases have a negative effect on our national unity. (Arabic)

Many people in Saudi Arabia have probably heard the story of Ammena Al Maskeen, a Shiite 19-year-old female student at KSU who was attacked by the religious police in an awful incident. If you have not read/heard about this, here is the (short) story…

On April 27, 2006, Ameena was waiting near the gates of the females campus, when two men from the religious police attacked her and forced her into their car. She was taken to a nearby center of the religious police. They held her for several hours, and then sent her to something called the girls’ penitentiary. Later, her family arrived and took her home.

The story above has two different versions; one from Rasid, a Shiite news website, and another one from Al Sahat, an extreme Wahhabi website.

Rasid claims they have contacted the girl, and on their website they are reporting the story by her words. She says what happened to her was set up by a Sunni girl who pretended to be her best friend. That girl was cooperating with the religious police to plot a conspiracy against her, so they could come and take her. While in the car, the two men abused Ameena physically and verbally. She was locked in the bathroom of the religious police center, and she received many fake charges there, and later when she was sent to the the girls’ penitentiary.

Meanwhile, a member of Al Sahat said that Rasid are lying. He says that he called a member of the religious police who told him the following: Ammena has come to the campus with a young man, and when he tried to drop her off, the religious police arrested both of them, and took them to their nearest center. The girl was then sent to the the girls’ penitentiary, and the man to the police station. He added that the girl was treated “like any other girl that gets arrested by the religious police,” which I suppose means she was treated properly.

When I first read this story on Rasid, I did not want to post about it here because I wanted to make sure it was true. But after reading that thread on Al Sahat, I was convinced the story is true. Now, the question is: which version should I believe? Maybe Rasid have some bias against Wahhabis, just like Al Sahat have a bias against almost everybody other than Wahhabis. However, the Rasid version of the story is stronger, and makes much more sense to me. They have reported the full name of the girl and provided many details, while, on the other hand, the Al Sahat thread did not even name the member of the religious police who told the other version of the story.

History is not on the side of the religious police here. The past few years have witnessed many incidents on which the brutality and ruthlessness of their members was unforgettable, and some of these stories has even made it to the local press, breaking a taboo on publishing such stories in the past. Ameena’s story deserves to be on the front pages of newspapers, but I don’t think that would happen, because her story has a sectarian aspect and most newspapers will avoid getting into that area.

Ameena is now back at home and safe with her family in Saihat, a city in Qateef in the eastern province. She has told Rasid she does not want to comeback to Riyadh, even if she had to sacrifice her education.

Two appearances of religious minorities in Saudi Arabia in the American media this week: Shiites in the LA Times, and Sufis in the Washington Post.

As a contributer to Global Voices, I’m subscribed to several mailing lists that keep me updated with the latest news of the GV community, but what’s really good about these mailing lists is that there is many intelligent people on them who make conversations interesting and valuable. One of the recent good discussions started with the title “Technorati sucks,” which is true, imho.

However, Boris Anthony had a good PoV here: “There is no reason (none) why there cannot and should not be a thousand Technorati-like services around the world, all tweaked and tuned for specific niche interests and purposes.”

Now, truth be told, I never thought that building Arabic alternatives to some available services is a good idea. I mean just take a look at this website, which is supposed to be the Arabic alternative to del.icio.us. This was a dumb idea because if the developers have tried to do some research before working on it, they could have found something called de.lirio.us, a social bookmarking service exactly like del.icio.us but with open source that they could modify to work in Arabic.

Nevertheless, I think that Arabic Technorati-like website is a good idea. Some may argue that Toot is there and it’s doing great, but I think Toot is more of a human-edited blogging portal. What I’m talking about here is a service to index Arabic blogs, make them searchable, and provide a pinging server. A website like that would be a very good and useful tool to feel the real pulse of the Arab blogosphere.

Arab female bloggers have dominated the Toot Top Ten list again, and Ahmed Humeid, jokingly and in a squealing male preaching voice, said there is a conspiracy. It is a conspiracy, I say, but not necessarily an illegal one. I guess what going on here is that girls only vote for girls! Yes, it’s sexism the other way around!

From my experience in the Saudi blogosphere, I can tell you that girls tend to comment mostly on other girls’ blogs, while the comments section of male bloggers are always inhabited by dust and silence. In a way, this has something to do with the distribution of gender; the majority of Saudi bloggers are females.

Now I’m not sure if this also applies to the Arab blogosphere, but I guess if female Arab bloggers don’t outnumber their male counterparts, then they are equal in count. Meanwhile, in the West the blogosphere is mainly dominated by males, white males to be more specific. But wait, how about other parts of the world? How about China, or Japan?

Back to Toot: although I like the website very much, and it’s one of the few websites that I visit daily, I think it can improve on some stuff. The current design of Toot is so cool and Web 2.0-ish, but I think the header should be smaller to invest screen real estate into some more important content. For example, the three daily featured posts should include an excerpt from the post, not just the title. This can be put underneath the title of the post, or by using some Ajaxian hack like the one used currently to show other recent posts by the blogger.

The voting system should be reviewed too, because the current one is not exactly user-friendly. I’ve been thinking about something like the method used by Google for AdSense. I mean that when someone clicks on the link to a post, that’s one vote. I know there is no system immune to manipulation, so this method can be manipulated too, but I think it’s easy to discover manipulation by analyzing any unusual trends in the hits, and can be easily solved using IP. Or, maybe they can use the two methods combined together in some way. (To the Toot team: I’m no geek, so if this does not make any sense then just ignore it because I don’t really know what I’m talking about!)

Toot are now in the process of adding more blogs to their rich and delicious choice of blogs, and they are also preparing for a design competition. I’m also looking forward for their ad program, which they announced a while ago. Good luck guys, you are doing a great job! Keep up the good work, and keep on bringing us the finest of the Arab blogosphere.