Congratulations for the Winner of Nokia 5800

mabroooooooook for mr Asim Safarini from Amman. He is the winner of Mobily3araby.com's prize of nokia 5800. We actually called him and he's gonna get it by hand.

More than 650 people from all over arabia participated in the draw and we did it today. Stay tuned with us and more to come soon. We're thinking of a bigger prize for our lovely visitors :)

ARABS VOTE NOW: Mobile Phone of The Year 2009 POLL

Are you Arab?
Do you use mobile phones?

If your answer is YES to the above two questions, VOTE NOW to decide what is the coolest and best mobile phone for the year 2009. VOTE NOW.

The vote will end at 12:00 AM of 01/01/2010

Please Spread the Word.

Arabic Mobile Phones Junkies WANTED (Freelance Jobs)

Exclusive for Arabic Mobile Phone Addicts:

Mobily3araby.com is a popular Arabic blog that provides daily news about the latest in mobile technology for the Arab world. Our motto is Content ... Content ... Content!



Read the ad in arabic here: http://mobily3araby.com/2009/09/blog-post_09.html

We're looking for a freelance Phone Reviewer to write detailed phone reviews and comparisons (in Arabic) about the latest of the mobile phones. Here are the requirements. Typically your job will be writing 5 comprehensive detailed articles/week discussing all aspects of the handset. The handset needs to be in your hand to do that.

- Fluent in Arabic and very good in English.
- Very good writing style in Arabic: concise and straight to the point.
- Enthusiastic about mobile phones technology.
- Like to play with latest mobile gadgets and stress test them.
- Having access to the latest mobile phones is a plus.
- Prepare hands-on video reviews for the latest mobiles.
- Write comparative analysis for two competing handsets. for example iphone .vs. HTC HD2
- HTML, Javascript basic knowledge.
- Provide personal objective opinion about mobile phones.
- Graduate of a scientific discipline (preferable)
- Hate copy and paste (we need original content)

if you're still reading, then you're interested. More details in Arabic here

http://mobily3araby.com/2009/09/blog-post_09.html

3 Photos I took in France

I am no photographer by any measure! I just like these photo i took in Paris last winter:

Champs-Élysées

Notre Dame de Paris

A nice house in Normandie

The Most Expensive Arabic Click I have Ever Seen on Adsense

This is by far the most expensive click i had for an arabic-niched website!

The Inevitable Effect of Eid on Traffic (Extremely graphical)

This what happens during Eid if you have an Arabic speaking website!

My 13 Maxims for Better Adsense Performance

I don't claim to be an Adsense Guru, but for the last year, i did a lot of experimentation with adsense and it resulted eventually to Good result. I am never there! It's an ongoing process.

Here are my 13 advices

1. Write good and useful content. This is a killer.
2. Do search engine optimization, but when writing your content, keep the user in mind, not the search engine. Search engine will reward you for that. More search-driven visitors means more money in your pocket. More direct visitors means less money; they are less likely to click.
   
3. Never mislead your visitors, don't try to obfuscate the ad. The ad should say "I am an ad"
4. Think simple! the best performing ads are the most visible ones.
5. Use big fonts (you can do that from ads setup), see advise #2
6. Generally, using a mix of "image and text " ads performs better. But there are exceptions, and i don't know what they are.
   
7. Ask non-savvy friends on what they think about the ads placement and take what they say seriously
8. Don't get frustrated if you have low eCPM for one day during a week!, look globally!
9. One way i managed to optimize RSS CTR is by using "briefed" RSS rather than "Full". it's logical
10. RSS visitors clicking trends are different. they are mostly recurrent visitors. Meaning less CTR
11. Be patient! Don't keep changing the layout everyday. Create channels and study the performance for months, then modify accordingly.
    
12. Never be shy of monetizing your blog/website.
13. Experiment ... Experiment ... Experiment (this is my favorite :)
    

Do you have any to add? I am sure you do!

Do Arabs Prefer Sleeky Design Over Content?

I very much believe in the web motto "content is a killer!". Not only for the web, but for almost all sources of human knowledge. My favorite book was a dusty one that i found in our dirty basement 10 years ago! I grabbed the book, dusted it off and couldn't let go until i finished. I never cared about design (though i don't mind having it)!

Now what does this have to do with the Arabic web and where it's going?

For the past 12 months, i have been following the Arabic web evolving to the better in terms of content quality. The content of the Arabic web is blossoming rapidly. Now this is changing my daily web navigation habits; I am relying more and more on Arabic websites for news and sometimes scientific and technical knowledge, but i know we're still far from achieving our goal of having 5% of the entire web content. We're still at a shy 1%.

It's an observation that i have about the Arabic web that there's an attention to what i describe as aesthetic and cosmetic rather than pivotal. I have been receiving complaint from many Arabic webmasters complaining about what they describe as "poor and low visual quality" design of some of my web projects. For a project, I am using a simple blogger template that i tweak occasionally, and i am sure that this template is designed by very smart people at Google that care about the ease of use and friendliness.

I am not saying i hate design and coherent colors and flashy animations! I think Arabs should now focus more on providing useful and rich content. Then we can move the the design and to what i call dispensable accessories! This is a feature oriented approach that stems from the most wiedely used software process called SCRUM. It's all about prioritizing! And I think design and visual appearance falls in the bottom of the list (provided you're not using a dangerously ugly design with disgusting colors)


I am trying to research the reasons behind this phenomenon: Is it because it's easier to "design" rather than provide content? Is it because that we're not taught early at our schools that a good can have dirty black cover? Is it because we're shallow and superficial by default? And how can we be become content oriented? How can Arabs provide web content that will really make a difference?

I still don't know the answer! What do you think?

Google Plans to Jail all UI Designers

Google is patenting the unpatentable!


Now this is too much from Google ok?! It's obvious that those guys know someone influential in the US patent office who managed to pull this off. Google has just patented the simple design of a giant search box and two buttons below it. Are you guys kidding me?

As far as i know, in order to patent something in the US, it has to meet three conditions:

1. "Useful" - The term "useful" means that the subject matter has a useful purpose. It also requires that the item is operable, since a machine that can not perform its intended purpose cannot be considered useful in the ordinary sense of the word.
   
   
2. "Novelty" - "Novelty" is strictly defined by patent law. An invention cannot be patented if:
   
   The invention was known or used by others in the United States before the patent applicant invented it.
   
   The invention was patented or described in any printed publication, before the patent applicant invented it.
   
   The invention was patented or described in a printed publication in any country more than one year prior to the inventor's U.S. patent application.
   
   The invention was in public use or on sale in the United States more than one year prior to the inventor's U.S. patent application.
   
   These rules do not prevent a person from patenting an improvement to another invention, however. For example, tire makers have long known the formulas for making tire rubber. But what if an inventor found a way to make tire rubber twice as long-lasting by slightly changing the chemical composition? This could well be a patentable improvement as long as the difference was not obvious.
   
   
3. "Nonobviousness" - Even if a new invention differs in one or more ways from another patented invention, a patent may still be refused if the differences would be obvious. Nonobviousness is defined as a sufficient difference from what has been used or described before that a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention would not find it obvious to make the change. For example, sodium chloride (table salt) and potassium chloride (a chemically similar salt) can often be used interchangeably. A chemist working to improve road salt would consider it obvious to substitute potassium chloride for sodium chloride, so a formula that simply made this substitution in an already patented road salt formula would not be patentable.
   

I don't know about you, but it's clear to me that this patent fails point 2 and 3. And i really find this move extremely "Evil" from such a company that claims to be a supporter of free and innovative thinking. What do think?


via [gawker] and [findlaw]

Sakhr Computers Kicks Google's Ass but this time in Arabic :)

This technology is unlike anything i have ever seen. Now i guess we all know where the Arabic language is going. And since I tend to scrutinize everything in this blog, I need to try to stress test this thing with my uttering of twisted Arabic :)

I love Arabic language

[intomobile]