Blogs

A blog can be most simply described as a personal website; the following elaborates some distinctions. The term blog, a blending of the two words “web” and “log”, was coined by Peter Mehrholz in 1999.⁷³ Blogs are commonly used to disseminate text or other media.

This is also true for forums, but aesthetically blogs differ from forums by offering more scope for visual expression because there are more opportunities to adjust layout and graphics. Also, users of blogs appear to use a variety of media applications much more often than users of forums do. Blogs are distributed in reverse chronology, i.e. the newest blog post is shown first. “Blog post” means the individually published content. Blogs can allow a commentary function and/or provide links to other websites, depending on the bloggers' preferences. Often, bloggers provide an “about” page for the visitor that tells something either about the purpose of the blog or about the producer. The infrastructure of a blog is commonly provided by a blog host, who offers basic tools and ready-made solutions to set up and individualize a personal blog in just a few clicks. A blog need not contain only a single genre of text, but can include a variety of genres. Blogs can be personal, political, corporate, literary or any of many other categories. The space that unites bloggers and blogs is called the “blogosphere”. The blogosphere is the virtual space that hosts blogs. Most often, the only thing these blogs have in common is their choice of the Web 2.0 application, which also applies to a personal website or Tumblr. Within blogospheres, discussions can

73 Peter Mehrholz, Play With Your Words, May 17, 2002. http://www.peterme.com/archives/00000205.html, last accessed December 30, 2011.

be conducted by commentary on the same blog or through “trackbacks” or “backlinks” to blogs that discuss the original post.⁷⁴

In the Gulf, many blogs are written in Modern Standard Arabic, but since there are potentially an infinite number of blogs, all kinds of language distinctions are present.

The Gulf hosts various kinds of literary blogs, whether professional or more private, depending on the audience they cater to. Some authors do not use blogs to present literary texts, but rather host their works on personal websites. An additional reason to choose a variety of blogs and bloggers is to obtain a wide selection of writers from different Gulf countries. The following examples will be examined in upcoming chapters. The blog http://www.muawiyah.com/ is run by a male Omani who has been blogging since 2008 and has 134 blogger- followers. He also writes for print media. Alzain blogs since 2007 on http://al-zain.blogspot.com. The blogspot profile states that the writer’s gender is female.

Her occupati⁷⁵on is given as “admiring clouds” and her location is marked as “The space between my breath and his breath.” As interests she lists “Everything that is connected to beauty”.⁷⁶ t716 is a blogger from Kuwait who blogs on http://t7l6m.com/ since 2011. 7osen describes himself as a Kuwiti male and blogs on http://7osen-man.blogspot.com since 2007.

Salat Maiwa blogs since more than two years and has just recently changed her blog into private mode on http://www.salatmaiwa.com. Other blogs analysed are Nada from Saudi Arabia http://ymam.wordpress.com (who has now switched to privacy settings), and http://othersandme.blogspot.com/, a female blogger who has been blogging since 2006.

I began gathering material by looking at about 100 Arabic blogs from various Gulf countries. These were selected on the basis of a variety of criteria. Either I found links to these blogs on metablogs⁷⁷ that link to blogs written by authors from one specific country, or I found links on the website of the Arab E-Writers Union.⁷⁸ Then I began a long process of reading through many blogs on different subjects. To select blogs relevant for my studies, I searched the blogrolls⁷⁹ of literary blogs that I found worth studying, thereby

74 A simple explanation of what a backlink is can be found in the article "What is a backlink?"

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-backlink.htm, last accessed December 30, 2011.

75 These are registered useres of blogger.com that subscribe to his blog.

76 Information taken from the "about" page, http://www.blogger.com/profile/12556657322197441433, last accessed December 26, 2011.

77 A metablog is a blog that gathers blog posts from a variety of blogs on either the same subject or from the same region.

78 The Arab E-Writers Union is an organization that enables Arab online writers to connect. Additionally, it organizes events and distributes webspace for distribution. www.arab-ewriters.com/, last accessed December 30, 2011.

79 A blogroll is usually organized in a side bar or separate website on a blog that links to other blogs that the blogger finds worth linking to.

finding literary blogs. I also looked through the comment sections of popular blogs that seemed interesting. This enabled me to find an even wider range of blogs. After taking these initial steps, I selected blogs that I find representative and particular. One criteria for a selection of a blog was popularity, which was measured by comments of readers.

Additionally, blogs were selected because writing style, layout, or content of stories were interesting or appeared to be representative for a wider selection of blogs.

The selection of text variety was also important. As it is often the case that not only literary texts are distributed but a variety of texts on different subjects. I consider my selection of blogs representative because they appear to have much in common with other blogs from the same countries that also distribute literary texts. Common features can be seen in the use of media that includes visitor counters, audio files and pictures. Blogs that were dropped from my source selection either did not offer enough material that was literary, did not appear to have a visible audience or were not representative for of the aspects that often reappear in other literary blog posts, and hence did not mention subjects that I wanted to examine as particular for online literature.

This selection is clearly subjective and leads to result and conclusions that will differ from an analysis of other blogs. Literary texts published on blogs are often not actual short stories but rather prose poems or short expressions on subjects that run through the author’s mind. Unlike texts published in forums, blogs are often written in Modern Standard Arabic. Still, authors are relatively free in their creative choices, because bloggers are the producers, editors and publishers in addition to being writers (more on this in Participatory Culture, Chapter Two). The texts analysed in this thesis were chosen in order to have representative material providing a round picture of the phenomenon of blogging in the Gulf; I thus examined blogs from the Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. There are likely to be interesting and valuable contributions of bloggers from the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain but the examples discussed in my thesis are composed by writers of the above mentioned countries. The analysed blogs were of differing literary style and written by authors with a variety of backgrounds. Some of the blogs focussed solely on literary texts, while others chose to post a variety of texts on different subjects, for example religion or politics. I measure a blog’s popularity by the number of links from and to blogs, as well as by the number of comments individual posts receive.