Mohamed Nanabhay's 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...

The realisation of a project I've been working on for a long time. Head over to Al Jazeera's Creative Commons Repository.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Doha Qatar – January 13, 2009: Al Jazeera Network today announced the world's first repository of broadcast quality video footage released under the ‘Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution’ license. Select Al Jazeera video footage – at this time footage of the War on Gaza - will be available for free to be downloaded, shared, remixed, subtitled and eventually rebroadcasted by users and TV stations across the world with acknowledgement to Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera will release its exclusive Arabic and English coverage produced by the Network’s correspondents and crews in the Gaza Strip online at http://cc.aljazeera.net. The ongoing war and crisis in Gaza, together with the scarcity of news footage available, make the repository a key resource for anyone producing content on the current situation.

This the first time that video footage produced by a news broadcaster is released under the ‘Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution’ license which allows for commercial and non-commercial use.

Mohamed Nanabhay who headed New Media at Al Jazeera and launched the project stated, “As one of the only international broadcasters in Gaza, our coverage of the war has been unsurpassed. The launch of Al Jazeera’s Creative Commons Repository means that our Gaza footage will be made available under the most permissive Creative Commons license (CC-BY). With the flexibility of the license we expect to introduce our outstanding coverage to an even wider audience across the world. This means that news outlets, filmmakers and bloggers will be able to easily share, remix and reuse our footage.”

Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons organization and Professor of Law at Stanford University, stated, "Al Jazeera is teaching an important lesson about how free speech gets built and supported. By providing a free resource for the world, the network is encouraging wider debate, and a richer understanding".

Joichi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons and a world renowned Web 2.0 entrepreneur, added, "Video news footage is an essential part of modern journalism. Providing material under a Creative Commons license to allow commercial and amateur use is an enormous contribution to the global dialog around important events. Al Jazeera has set the example and the standard that we hope others will follow".

As a pioneer in news and media Al Jazeera is always looking for ways to make its unique content accessible to audiences across the world and the launch of Al Jazeera’s Creative Commons Repository is another concrete step in this direction.