It is difficult for developers and web experts in the Arab World to be on the brink of what’s happening in web 2.0 domain, like many other things!

So it is always great to follow up on the action whenever it is possible. Ten days ago, Carson Workshops published the podcasts of speakers who participated in a one-day conference about web apps and its future. Head to the their page!

So, I took a quick tour to the websites of some of the Arab satellite TV stations, radio and newspapers to know who is using RSS to push their news. Here are the findings!

RSS enabled:
Alarabiya
BBC Arabic: They have RSS for each section of the website.
Al Manar
Riyadh Newspaper

Big players who are not RSS enabled!

Aljazeera.net
mbc.net
Radio Monte Carlo
Al Quds Newspaper
Alghad Newspaper
Al Quds Al Arabi
Al Sharq Al Awsat
Al Hayyat
Al Nahar
L’orient le jour
Al Safir
Al Khaleej
Al Watan
Okaz

An article on Wired caught my attention today, “Silicon Valley is roaring back to life, as startups mint millionaires and Web dreams take flight. But, no, this is not another bubble. Here’s why.”

An interesting snippet, “A boom perhaps, but not (phew!) a bubble. There’s a difference. Bubbles are inflated with hot air and speculation. They end with a wet pop, leaving behind messy splatters. Booms, on the other hand, tend to have strong foundations and gentle conclusions….. But if there is such a thing as a healthy boom, we’re living it now. Google may be trading above $400, but the Nasdaq as a whole has hardly budged in five years. Companies are once again minting millionaires, but venture capitalists are investing less than a fifth of what they were at the 2000 peak. About 50 technology companies went public last year, but more than 300 went public in 1999.”

Read whole article here.

Mindmap summing up the memes of web2.0 with example sites and services attached. It was created by Markus Angermeier on November 11, 2005.

Web 2.0.

A term I have come to really love. A term that signals change. A term we hear often these days.

But, what exactly is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is a place where people realize that network effects should come from communities and user contributions- keyword being “participation”. It is oriented toward interaction and social networks rather than a traditional website. Thus, due to participation and interaction, an essential part of Web 2.0 is connecting intelligence, turning the web into a kind of giant global brain.

To put it more solidly, let me give you examples; , Britannica Online is Web 1.0 while Wikipedia is Web 2.0, Ofoto is Web 1.0 while Flickr is Web 2.0, personal websites are Web 1.0 while blogs are Web 2.0.

Blogging, podcasting, and dynamic photosharing are a huge part of Web 2.0. The syndication and messaging capabilities of the new web have created a tightly-woven social fabric among individuals. Sites like del.icio.us and Flickr have established a concept that some people call “folksonomy” (in contrast to taxonomy), a style of collaborative categorization of sites using freely chosen keywords, referred to as tags. Simply, the democratization of the web!

One of the things that has made a difference is a technology called RSS, which allows someone to subscribe to a page, with notification every time that page changes, sort of like a “live web”. This technology is now being used to push notices of new blog entries, stock quotes, weather data, news briefs, etc.

The technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 is also different from that of Web 1.0. For example, a new dynamic technology called AJAX which increases richness and responsiveness of web applications is a key component of Web 2.0 applications such as Flickr, 37signals, and Gmail. Other such dynamic technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python, and PHP are also finding their place in Web 2.0.

All in all, the Web 2.0 is a social phenomenon where a change in approach in creating and distributing Web content- say hello to open communication, decentralization of authority, and freedom to share and re-use.

One of the parts that I find most fascinating part about Web 2.0 though is the fact that it is right at this moment: a widespread awakening to the fact that the game has changed.

Without going into the detail of what happened, something in toot’s code was broken. Now, I’m no programmer, but maybe a can, sometimes, sort of, think like one. The only programming language I ‘mastered’ was BASIC, and that was around, what? 1985..

Of course, over the past 10 years I got interested in stuff like php, and Javascript.. But I never really learned any of those languages. No time, man!

Anyway. Yesterday, this code problem was driving us all mad. Deep down inside I felt there must be a simple solution to it. But it was a nightmarish feeling: knowing that you can reach somewhere but feeling unable to move to that point. In this case it was my lack of actual coding knowledge. I went home in a depressed state.

But I did not give up. Sitting alone after everyone went to sleep, I started browsing the net looking for Javascripts and some info. I found a number of scripts, some large and complex, some really simple (which even I could understand). I took the simplest script, then started playing around with some scripts that come with Dreamweaver. I started hacking the scripts. I combined some stuff. Trial and error. Little steps. Reload. Reload. Reload.

Then at around 1 am it finally clicked. A solution for part of our problem was there.

But with the deadline for the launch looming, what i ‘created’ still was not THE solution. So today I was anxious to talk to Jad about what I created. In the evening we were on the phone, me at home and him at the office. He was about to try out something totally new to solve that damn problem. But I convinced him to try something.

Over the next 10 or 15 minutes we started hacking together my solution with part of what we had already.. Reload. And BOOM it worked. It felt GREAT.

In the larger context of things, what we did was not something major. We did not invent a rocket. It might still turn out that the ’solution’ needs a lot of refinement. But I felt satisfied to have followed my gut feeling and arriving at exactly the soultion I had in my mind. The moral of the story: simplify, hack, test, retry, reload!