Fouad al Farhan released

The Saudi blogger Fouad al Farhan has been released, and is now at his home, according to a message that was sent to members of the Free Fouad facebook group:

Fouad Al-Farhan is free now after released from jail and he is at home with his family.

تم اليوم إطلاق سراح فؤاد الفرحان وهو الآن في بيته مع أهله

Fouad was arrested on December 10th and his been in custody for 138 days.

Overall it´s been quite a good week for bloggers in the Arab World this week, in Egypt, Muhammed al Sharqawi was released from al Marg prison, although before he was released he was questioned in another case regarding his publishisng house Malameh , and the publication of the graphic novel, Metro, written by Magdi al Shafi.
Nadia Mabrouk and Esra Abd al Fattah was also released from al Qanater´s women´s prison. In Esra´s case after she had been ordered released, something totaly ignored by the interior ministry , whom stopped the release and issued orders for her to remain in jail according to the Emergency laws. Only after her mother pleaded to President Hosni Mubarak, the First Lady and Minister of Interior Habib al Adly in the press ,she was released.

In a related matter, Cairo University student Bilal Diab was held by the university security for some hours, after he asked Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif to release Esra, while Nazif was holding a speech at the University.

While i´m happy truly happy by the above mentioned releases, let´s not forget those who are still not freed , like Kareem al Beheiri and Ahmed Badawi for instance, as well as others.

This post will cross-posted at Fustat.
More later

The National, a brand new broadsheet

At the beginning of this year i happend to read Tom Gara´s blog, and learned that he was leaving Cairo and was moving to Abu Dhabi to start working with a new project. It´s not everyday a major english-language newpaper launch is done in the Middle East so it caught my eye, especially because it was done with much hype and secrecy, even the name was a secret.

So i was happy to know that the former Daily Telegraph editor Martin Newland and his staff of 175 journalists launched the National yesterday. It happens in a very dynamic region, where expressions like ¨only the sky is the limit¨ is reality and the soundtrack defining the attitude, spirit and klondykeness of the place would be ¨Aint no Mountain high enough¨. The National will have the second largest circulation in the U.A.E with an 80 000 copies edition. Only the established Gulf News have more readers.

It´s owned by state-run Abu Dhabi Media Co, a fact that dosen´t bother Editor-in-Chief Martin Newland:

``Being owned by the government is not problematic''

I hope he´s right!

But then again i thought this part of a Bloomberg story on the National interesting:

Emirati leaders limit demands for greater representation and public debate through state handouts, said Rochdi Younsi, Middle East analyst for New York-based Eurasia Group. The average male Emirati receives benefits worth about 204,000 dirhams ($55,500) a year, according to research by Zayed University in Dubai.

``In return for distributing the wealth, the government ensures long-term popular allegiance,'' Younsi said. ``That's the basic social contract.''

It´s a very prosperous society, but not equally so for everybody, for istance approximately 500 000 construction workers who comes mainly from South Asia have an average salary of 175 USD/month compared to the average per capita income in the UAE of $2,106/month according to the Human Rights Watch report:Building Towers, Cheating Workers - Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the
United Arab Emirates. This is of course just part of the plight of these workers - and one could argue that most of them are better of than they would have been, if they would have stayed in their respective home countries.

As Martin Newland so eloquently puts it in the about us section of the National:

"The role of The National is to reflect society, help that society evolve and, perhaps most importantly, promote the bedrock traditions and virtues that must be preserved even in times of change.”

I hope Mr Newland has the will, vision and editorial courage to make justice to his words on reflecting society as it is with it´s different shades, spots and cracks to discover the true face of the United Arab Emirates behind the facade, sweet and sour.

I like what i´ve seen so far, and like to wish Tom an Mr Newland and the rest of the staff the very best of luck, and finally i would like to point to two interesting articles the first one on Abu Dhabi - building a creative city and the second on five-star quality food for prisoners in Abu Dhabi.

New study on the Iranian blogosphere

I have treated my Diwan as The Ugly Duckling for far too long. Having tried to revive it on numerous occasions.

So when the opportunity presents itself in the form of a very interesting and brand new study on the 60 000 or so blogs that constitutes one of the most dynamic and diverse blogospheres in the world, i simply can´t resist telling my patient audience about it.

The Iranian bloghosphere have intrigued me for quite some time now, even longer than my love story with blogging. It brings me great pleasure to present a 68 page long study from the same institution that gave us Global Voices, which to me is like my second home and family in a way. The study is the third in a series made by the Internet & Democracy Project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harward Law School

The study is called, Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere and is written by John Kelly and Bruce Etling. It can be found here(PDF).

So Diwan of Democracy is officially back in business!

UPDATE: Mapping Iran´s Online Public is now available in Persian as well, it can be found here.

UPDATE II: In February of this year an updated map was released, and Yesterday that was supplemented with an Interactive blogosphere map.

The way the study was conducted has been subject to critique by Will Ward:

Like most people who saw John Kelly and Bruce Etling’s recent paper on mapping the Iranian blogosphere, my jaw dropped at the sheer coolness of the project and the types of connections it was making. But, given my experience with qualitative blog analysis, I was a bit skeptical of the project’s enduring value for social science researchers because it represented just a snapshot in time (i.e. the paper and data set was a one off affair that could not give an idea of trends and changes in the blogosphere) and also because in addition to mapping the connections between bloggers themselves, the researchers were mapping their own subjective descriptors and categories (labels like “secular/ expat” or Twelver Shi‘a) onto the blogosphere. There was no way for outside researchers to dispute the Kelly and Etling team’s labeling of a given blog, review or challenge the global labeling schema, nor to suggest new, potentially interesting or valuable alternative ones.

Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere

On June 17th, The Internet and Democracy project at he Berkman Center for Internet and Society will present their long awaited study(at least by me)on the Arabic Blogosphere at the United States Institute for Peace in Washington D.C together with a discussion on Obama´s Cairo speech were bloggers from the Middle East will take part online. For those not in Washington, like myself, there will be a possibility to follow the event via a live webcast.