• “Dear God” – A nondenominational website where desperate or struggling people could post often disturbing ‘letters to God’ with a prayer and a description of their travails. Readers offer words of hope and encouragement. “Dear God” was put up for sale just before Thanksgiving.

• “Hal786″ – A blog by a Muslim girl, one of several Muslim children bloggers mentioned on the site. ‘Hal’ most recently blogged about her hopes for the Copenhagen climate change conference. “I can’t wait to see what’s going to be done by the world leaders to help save our planet!”

• “malekat_el7oriya” – A blog by a Muslim teen girl who was most recently blogging about racial profiling of men wearing the ghutra and agal (the red and white scarf that men wear on their head and the black band that holds it on).

• “Mahaguru58″ – Zainol Abideen is writing about his own made-up word: ‘Blogodementia.’ “Isn’t it quite absurd to see some of our fellow bloggers resort to abusing the blogosphere…to spread slander and ill will through their blogs and websites on an almost daily basis?”

Mr. Abideen, the ‘pro-tem president’ of the Muslim Bloggers Alliance in Malaysia, first came to attention for “abusing the blogosphere” with his racist rantings against the Royhinga and for his odd takfiring of poor Muslims. He has never retracted his comments nor apologized.

• “The Arabist” – A blogger who proudly wears the title ‘State Department Arabist,’ a term used derisively and that became widespread in Washington DC when the neocons took over under the administration of George W Bush.

The implication is that anyone who takes such interest in the region is inherently suspicious and must have “gone native.”

He also defends the word from leftists who try to conflate it with Orientalism. The Arabist drew attention for his review of the book, “What’s Really Wrong With The Middle East.”

More blog updates later…

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Various websites have taken up the task of chronicling the exploits and breaking down the hate of the anti-Muslim blogosphere. There is Islamophobia-Watch, Islamophobia.org, and a few others though none seem to be as organized, or updated as their opponents. However, LoonWatch, a site that I have been following since I learned about it over 3 months ago and which I have featured as an editor of the Islam page on Topix is one site that gives the anti-Muslims a run for their money.

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This is a commendable effort on their part if it’s indeed intended to honor outstanding Syrian blogs, encourage and support a blogging culture and expose the role of blogs in the making and shaping of a civil society in Syria. However, if you read the 5th and last condition for blogs to be accepted in the competition, this is what you’ll find (translated word by word): the contents of which [the submitted blog] must not dissent from the accepted mores and morals (i.e. sex through videos or photos, hostility to religions, cussing, swearing and bad taste). Do I take it that it is acceptable for a blog to attack trans-dressers but not Sheikhs and priests? Or, for the sake of argument, is a photo of a random cloud in the sky in the shape of an eye and a comment underneath that this is the eye of God acceptable but not another photo of a woman’s perfect behind with the apt remark that this butt is an elegant example of the splendor of creation (if we’re so inclined to believe)?

Eventually, the offending condition was removed.

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Tikum Olam is a well-travelled bookmark on my computer, as Richard has always been a voice of clarity and understanding in the too-often distorted relations of Muslims and Jews. Congratulations Richard!

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Barry Diller’s perspective on blogging typifies the response of many a complacent media executive to the rise of blogging, according to Scott Rosenberg.

“Self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting,” he told The Economist in 2006. “Talent is the new limited resource.” At a technology conference that year, he declared, “There’s just not that much talent in the world, and talent almost always outs.”

Diller’s view echoes that of avowedly elitist polemics like Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur.” According to this perspective, talent is a resource of fixed supply. The existing institutions of the publishing and broadcast world are already doing an efficient and thorough job of finding all that talent and giving it a platform. And all this other stuff that’s spewing forth from the Web’s profusion of blogs and podcasts and videos? It’s just dross that obscures the real talent’s output.

Real Nietzschian supermen in the fields of journalism and political and social commentary don’t float to the top while maintaining a presence in the blogosphere, so if you’re ambitious you better get out of this guy’s cone of condescension and ditch the blogging.

In related news, Dan Froomkin, recently fired columnist for the Washington Post has been hired to be the Huffington Post’s Washington bureau chief.

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Norms and practices. Bloggers have undermined the blogosphere. Bloggers do not link to each other as much as they used to. It’s a lot of work to look for good posts elsewhere, and most bloggers have become burnt out. Drezner and Farrell had a theory that even small potato bloggers would have their day in the sun, if they wrote something so great that it garnered the attention of the big guys. But the big guys are too burnt out to find the hidden gems. So, good stuff is being written all the time, and it isn’t bubbling to the top.

Many have stopped using blogrolls, which means less love spread around the blogosphere. The politics of who should be on a blogroll was too much of a pain, so bloggers just deleted the whole thing.

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There were not that many bloggers just a few years ago. Today, their number is estimated at about 30,000 to 40,000 bloggers according to Moroccan blogger Larbi. All topics are covered from politics to arts, to daily life and fashion, music and sports.

The Moroccan blogosphere also has its own name – the Blogoma, which is a contraction between Blogosphere and Marocaine (Moroccan)

Many languages are used in the Moroccan blogs. If French was the most significant one used, there are now more blogs written in Arabic and in English. Indeed, some blogs are capitalizing on the lack of Moroccan Arabic-speaking blogs and have declared that their purpose is to promote the use of Arabic while blogging.

Here’s an Arabic blog Bla faransiyya (“without French”).

Two new multi-author blogs for the Maghreb region written in English are the Maghreb Politics Review and the Maghreb blog.

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