Jihad al-Khazen on blogs

Jihad al-Khazen, long-time editor of the leading Arab daily al-Hayat, has just completed a seven part series on "blogs and bloggers."  It hits most of the usual points about the American blog scene, mentioning the big dogs like Kos, Atrios, Sullivan, Reynolds, Marshall, and so on, as well as the usual catalog of "events" like Rather-gate and Gannon-gate and Lott-gate (he uses those words... oh, what have we inflicted on the world's vocabulary?).   Part four is about "War Blogs", while the last two parts are mainly about Arab bloggers - our friend Mohammed "From Cairo" gets a couple of mentions.   And he has some thoughts about how blogs might challenge Arab governmental control over information, and mentions the "Spirit of America" campaign to support Arab blogging.

I hadn't noticed the series until today, so I was only able to get hold of parts 4-7.  I'm self-absorbed enough to be a bit bummed that al-Khazen didn't mention Abu Aardvark in any of the parts I read.  But he didn't mention Juan Cole either, so now I'm wondering if one of the first three parts was about "Middle East politics blogs" and contained long, rapturous paragraphs about Aardvarks.   If anyone out there has links to the first three parts, could you send them to me or post them in comments?  Thanks.

Comments

[simsim]

here are the links for the 1st, 2nd , 3rd articles in Arabic .

First

http://www.daralhayat.com/opinion/editorials/06-2005/Item-20050616-8638f4b2-c0a8-10ed-00d4-1f05f77f0d09/story.html

Second

http://www.daralhayat.com/opinion/editorials/06-2005/Item-20050617-8b7b3717-c0a8-10ed-00d4-1f05e741af69/story.html

Third

http://www.daralhayat.com/opinion/editorials/06-2005/Item-20050618-90584a59-c0a8-10ed-00d4-1f0511a0835e/story.html

[Tom Scudder]

Quickie summary - first article - what are blogs? Namecheck on Drudge, mention of Iranian bloggers and Salam Pax, then Hugh Hewitt (and his book - wonder if that's where he based his research on?).

Article 2: word "blogger", blog, etc. is now entering English dictionaries ... rapidly becoming a "fifth estate" in America - will Europe follow a decade behind, and the Arab world a further decade, as it has turned out with television and TV news? And why the Arab world lags in technology etc. Only 14 million Internet users in the Arab world. SOmething.. (amount spent on infrastructure???) doesn't exceed .05% of, um, something. Sorry, Arabic breakdown here. Ooh, problems of governments dealing with the fact that people say things on blogs from third countries where the things they say are "not a crime". - governments have responded with filtering, and banning(?) service providers, and finally prison. The majority of sites in Arabic ("especially from the Gulf") are concentrated on Islam and Islamic education in various forms, passing on fatwas &c. from sheikhs.

Third article: People have lost jobs for blogging, eg. Joe Gordon at Waterstone's. Also, your friends and family might be reading... (subject change) there are many blogs addressing issues in the Arab world...

On the one hand, there's Iraq the Model. On the other, there's Riverbend. They fight.

The most famous blog from Iraq is Salam Pax. Quotes Salam bitching about how Al Jazeera is only interested in violence and explosions & also making some sort of joke about al-Zarqawi and watching crime movies that is not surviving my feeble Arabic skills.

So, no Juan Cole, no Aardvark. Poor Aardvark! He's Not Allowed, he's only an ungulate!

Apologies for sketchiness, and for any egregious misunderstandings I might have committed.