Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog

My friends at the Harvard Berkman Center have an interesting post on what the Iranian blogosphere looks linke on the eve of the election.

Based on our monitoring of the Iranian blogosphere on election eve, it looks like Mousavi has broader support in the online blog community than Ahmadinejad. (For a broader understanding of the different attentive clusters in Iran check out our new online interactive Iran blogosphere map). The below maps show who is linking to websites associated with the candidates. It’s pretty interesting to see the contrast between Ahmadinejad  emtedadmehr.com), whose links are very concentrated in the Conservative Politics cluster, and Mousavi  mirhussein.com), whose links come from all over the map, not just the reformist politics group.

I met Bruce Etling and John Kelly at a Berkman event in Germany where they presented some fascinating findings on the Arab blogosphere (not least because it reveals that Al Jazeera is one of the most cited sources). After lots of data-mining and human tagging, they're able to produce these amazing visualisations that cluster blogs into similar genres, views and so on.

More on their Internet and Democracy blog.

The Al Jazeera logo is a calligraphic rendering of the Arabic word Al Jazeere (which means the "The Peninsula").

posted a great animation to Wikipedia that deconstructs how the logo into the source letters:

More information on Arabic calligraphy here.

The Freedom Charter was the basis of the struggle for equality in modern South Africa.

Apparently the World Wide Web (www) turned twenty on Friday. It was very much a non-event for most people using the web (including myself and everyone around me). Non the less I got a call late Friday from a friend who said "It's the 20th anniversary of the internet and we're doing a story - could you do an interview on it?". To which I replied who the heck told you that? The internet is not twenty years old...after a few seconds it registered that perhaps they meant the web (it took a while to make the connection since I had placed the start of the web around '93 or so). A quick check on Wikipedia revealed that Sir Tim Berners Lee had written the paper that would lay the basis for what would become the www in March 1989.

I then spent the next day and half explaining to everyone involved with the clip and interview that the internet and the www were not the same thing. Do you know how hard that is? It's not as if you can say "the web is just another service ontop of the internet - like IRC, FTP, SSH or whatever" since most people have never used any other service. Finally I settled on "the internet is like a road and the www is type of car. There are other types of cars travelling on the road as well...". The metaphor worked well since I then went on to use it to explain net neutrality to the interview producer as being one the big issues facing the internet going forward.

The irony? After singing that the internet and interwebs were different I went on to use them interchangebly during my interview.... ;-)

Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending some time with Robert Fisk and at the end of our conversation I whipped out two of his books to have him sign. I started apologising for the battered and tattered condition of my over a decade old copy of "Pity the Nation : Lebanon at War" when he said

"I'd take a shabby book that had been read over a pristine one that had never been...".

Pity the Nation was such an important book for me in so many ways. Anyone who has read it immediately recalls the story of the refugees keys :

...the grandmother stood up and shuffled into a little hut-like concrete alcove, her bedroom, and emerged carrying something in a handkerchief. 'It is from our home in Haifa,' she said, unwrapping the cloth. And there was her key, its gun-metal grey shaft rusted brown but the handle still gleaming.

Fisk explains that

...one of the more subtle cruelties of Middle East history, the papers and the keys were to prove the most symbolic and the most worthless of possessions to the Palestinians. They acquired a significance that grew ever more painful as weeks and then months away from home turned into years.... For the keys - often made of a thick grey iron, sometimes with decorated handles - were in a sense a promise of return, a promise that history inevitably broke. The new owners of those homes forbade any return and then changed the locks.

After repeatedly being shown land deeds and keys to homes by these refugees, Fisk decided to go to Israel to find the same homes and knock on those doors, to answer the question 'Who would open them?' His chapter on 'The Keys of Palestine' describes his journey - I'll leave you to find a grubby copy of the book to see what he found...

Now I just need to get round to finishing his epic The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. It would be a shame to leave it in the pristine condition that it's in...