Qatar Martial Arts Actor

Aukment is a film starring Qatar martial arts actor, Ahmad Al-Suilaiti. I didn't actually know there was a Qatar martial arts actor, but I followed the link from Mr Q's blog post on Celebrity Qataris.

The film is actually based on Ahmad's own story. According to an interview on Qatar Happening, Ahmad ran away to Thailand to become a proffessional fighter and, as in the story, ended up joining a martial arts camp.

We're fascinated, and will try to find out more. In the meantime, enjoy the trailer below...

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film

Paper Publications in Qatar: The (very) beginning of the end?

A Qatar tourist guide today decided to shut down its paper publication, and to concentrate instead on its website.

It's not a huge or frequent publication (Qatar Explorer only updates its book every two years) but it is significant in that it is the first sign of a global trend coming to Qatar.

Across the world newspapers are going bankrupt. Faced with new competition from community news sites and from aggregate news sites like Google and with competition only ever just a click way, online brand loyalty has disappeared and online revenue is increasingly unable to support bloated newspaper and magazine outfits.

Yet despite the explosion of online web content - and traffic - in Qatar (we have seen our own website go from a few hundred visitors a month to over 70,000 in just two years) newspapers and magazines seem to have continued on oblivious.

Half hearted attempts at websites often break multiple web standards and SEO guidelines, and high prices are charged for advertising - often many multiples of what companies can pay for equivalent online exposure.

Qatar media has been warned - very directly. At an ICT media conference the founder of Now Public, who had jettisoned the traditional new business to form a participatory news service fuelled by a mixture of traditional journalism and crowd reported, urged Qatar newspapers to get their online act together.

That's not to say that every organistion in Qatar is behind the times. In addition to Qatar Living, Al Jazeera, the Qatar based Arab News Network, has been groundbreaking in its use of the Internet. Not only has it leveraged social media sites such as You Tube and Flickr to reach an audience previously unavailable (and in some cases consciously blocked by US censorship), it has also enabled citizen journalists to report directly from areas such as Gaza. But Al Jazeera is not a newspaper threatened by falling print sales!

The real effect of the Internet in Qatar may be concealed by the huge population explosion, which has seen Qatar almost triple its population in the last four to five years. With a steady flow of new customers the effect of the Internet revolution on newspapers in Qatar could be hidden.

However, with one newspaper editor telling me she got more response to a classified in Qatar Living than in an ad in her newspapers, the days of print publication may well be numbered!

Also see: Qatar Newspapers

Al Jazeera Hits the News

We have long been a fan of Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera has annoyed the Americans and the Brits in the past, so much so that it was rumoured that the two allies were thinking of bombing their strongest Arab allies' news channel.

However, the fact that Al Jazeera has been thrown out of almost every country in the Gulf (Israel, surprisingly, is one of the few that has not expelled them at some point or other,) and that they have received threatening mail from Al Qaeda suggests that they have annoyed almost everyone at some point or other.

Which is what a good news channel should do.

Al Jazeera does something that has not been done by a news channel before. It gives the Arab people a voice. And recently it has hit the news itself for its reporting of the harrowing conflict in Gaza, with feature articles in the International Herald Tribune amongst others.

It has done so not only for its reporting of the news, but for the way it is reporting it.

One of Al Jazeera's problems is not getting the news - it has 6 reporters in Gaza, and is the only major network represented there - but getting it out to an international English audience.

For while their Arabic audience is huge, in America their audience is tiny - and at times deliberately blocked.

As a result the channel has turned to social networking to get their results across.

Internet users can follow Al Jazeera's updates on Twitter, and their You Tube channel has received over two and a half million views.

Their viral efforts may have been helped by the fact that they have a Qatar blogger, Mohammed Nanabhay, co-leading a digital leap team.

It may well take a blogger to understand the communicative and viral potential of the internet.

And with six out of ten youngsters in America now getting their news from the internet, that potential is huge.

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Al Jazeera