Gulf News deputy web editor Florence Pia G. Yu plunges headlong into the blogosphere to find out what bloggers from the Middle East and beyond have on their minds.
Arab bloggers: where is the great exchange?
With the Arab blogosphere growing as rapidly as it is, it’s really tough enough keeping up-to-date with the new blogs that come out in Jordan, let alone follow blogs happening outside our own borders. And this premise is in itself strange.
The internet is meant to be borderless. The geography and politics and distortion that has kept the Arab street divided for so long, should theoretically be absent in the online world. Yet, it isn’t.
How many people follow other Arab blogs? From Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, to Palestine, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Egypt has one of the biggest blogospheres yet, for the life of me, I can’t count more than five Egyptian blogs that I frequently read.
http://www.black-iris.com
Can Queen Rania’s YouTube clip make a difference?
I have just checked out Queen Rania’s message on YouTube. The clip has received over 81,000 views already and has also attracted hundreds of comments. Reading through some of them proves the queen’s point. The stereotypes are sometimes shocking.
We live in a very bad time. Security checks at mall entrances and airports. Alarmist reports about this or that cultural phenomena. Flag burnings of this or that nation. Mindless stirring of religious sensitivities. Civil wars of fire and words. Fears and more fears.
Queen Rania cannot be expected to single-handedly change geopolitics with a YouTube clip. But at least she is doing something to create a bridge of understanding. And she’s using the right medium to do it.
http://www.360east.com
Delirious
Rem Koolhaas has been plying this idea for quite a few years now. In the ’80s and ’90s, it took the form of “early Modernism”. Then came “Bigness,” followed by the “Generic City,” and let us not forget “Shopping.”
Now comes his big Dubai proposal, which amounts to transplanting a chunk of the Manhattan he celebrated for its “culture of congestion”, 30 years ago, in Delirious New York, onto an artificial, offshore extension of the city of Dubai.
Maybe Koolhaas doesn’t believe that Dubai is the place for a forward-looking vision. Or maybe he believes, true to his post-Modernist roots, that the past offers the best model for the future, if it is leavened with irony, and garnished with a dash of the surreal.
Or maybe he simply doesn’t have a vision for the future. Who knows? We should care, however, because the world’s attention is focused on Dubai, and on Koolhaas and other architecture stars, and because — like it or not — what they do is taken as a model for the future, even when it is, how shall I say, not nearly good enough.
http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com
Joy for world’s first camel and llama cross
Rama, the world’s first “cama”, finally has some friends to play with.
The hybrid animal, the product of breeding a llama and a camel, has been the only creature of this kind since her birth in 1995. But now, thanks to better breeding techniques, there are three more camas roaming the Arabian desert.
The births of the new camas is a dream come true for Dr Lulu Skidmore and her team at Dubai’s Camel Reproduction Centre.
She said: “When we started the project, we were not sure if it would even be possible to breed them. Now we have four thriving animals.”
http://arbroath.blogspot.com
Swatch
Nothing to do with watches. I mean like colour swatch. I would like to propose a new colour for the world’s paint makers. Dubai beige.
Dubai beige is the colour of Emirates’ uniforms — of shopping malls, hotels, residences and logos. It is the colour of the taxis and souqs, embassies and free zones.
C5 M35 Y65. Dubai beige.
http://fakeplasticsouks.blogspot.com
Visiting Dubai
Dubai has inspired me for many years, and it has turned out to be different from what I imagined. I had thought of it as having erratic back streets, full of souks, with camels everywhere and baking hot. In other words, that Dubai would be quite old fashioned. And so I got a major surprise when I got there.
I was amazed at how Westernised the airport is. I found it fairly strange to see a man in traditional Arab dress climb into a Mercedes, and ladies covered from head to foot, suddenly uncovering a mobile phone and speaking to it.
If you have never seen literally dozens and dozens of gold shops lining both sides of a street, all apparently selling identical wares, rings, necklaces and bracelets with no prices shown, it all comes as a bit of a shock.
Prices are utterly dependent on weight, the current price of gold and your ability to bargain. Just don’t accept the first price whatever you do.
http://blog.thai-z.com/jessywallaceblog
