Hossam el-Hamalawy's Library tagged Arab →  View Popular

Brian resorts to the oldest trick of Western journalists like Jeffrey Goldberg: to cite a token native who voices a racist or judgmental view against all natives

Yes, Brian. Go ahead and believe that if it makes you feel better. Go ahead and believe that Arab parents electrocute the genitals of their children and pull their fingernails, when they misbehave. Go ahead and believe that the father of the family leaves dead bodies of his children hanging from electricity poles. Go ahead and believe that Arab parents starve to death their children. And you believe that the Western family is not "patriarchal and authoritarian"? Brian Whitaker: are you aware how you seem to be channeling Raphael Patai? Also, he seems too inclined to make sweeping unsubstantiated generalizations about the people of the region: "Contrary to popular opinion, most human rights abuses in the Arab countries are perpetrated by society rather than regimes." I mean, did you actually think for a second before writing that sentence? Once second?? You believe that the Arab people themselves have killed as the regimes have killed, and have administered torture as the regimes have? Where do you get those gems from? Not even Octavia Nasr. But Whitaker has hope: in blogger. As a blogger, I have no hope in bloggers.

In the Arab world, there are no accurate numbers to indicate the actual Twitter users in the region, however Carrington said that from his general experience he sees people in UAE being active in Twitter updating their status with ” what they are doing, stories, gossip, ReTweets, links, etc. ” though I saw many Arab users on Twitter who are inactive but I cannot offer an accurate percentage.

According to Carrington, as UAE is has the hightes twitter members in the region, English tweets is more represented on Twitter, because its is full of expats. In my part I add that also many early tech Adaptors in the region know English and feel ok tweeting using it.

Twitter Growth Attributes in the Arab world, are similar to the Attributes for its growth worldwide, however a number of incidents were more specific to the region:

1-War On Gaza: Since the Media were blocked of entering Gaza by the Israely Goverment, Twitter was one of the few sources of news about what is happening in Gaza. That made the media regionally to talk about Twitter for the first time, Aljazeera even launched Crowdsourced Mapping Mashup For The War On Gaza integrated with Twitter.

Moreover, Arab and Muslim bloggers along with their International counter parts used Twitter to mobilize and Tweet to counter the Israeli army twitter robots accounts spams and its claims on Twitter.

2- Celebrities joining twitter Like Queen Rania of Jordan and Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid of Dubai.

3- The Recent Incidents in Iran, this was the major event that led to the media in the Arab world and all over the world to mention Twitter extensively, specially when the U.S. government asked Twitter to reschedule its maintenance. For example Aljazeera’s popular live talk show “Minbar Al AlJazeera” featured an episode about new media and Iran focusing in Twitter.

4-Aljazeera Integrating Twitter to its Minbar Aljazeera talk show.

5- Regional companies doing promotions and give aways on Twitter

Twitter has 37 millions visitors as of June 25, 2009 according to comScore, with around 25 million members and planes to grow to one billion in 2013 according to leaked internal Twitter documents on TechCrunch. In the Arab world, assuming SpotonPR research to be near accurate, it stands at 12,266 users