Are Jordanian Blogs Not So Great?

I did a little survey on my blog where visitors voted on the overall quality of Jordanian bloggers. This survey is by no means a scientific and the results may be skewed. Besides, those who voted are actually people who visited my blog. Obviously it's people who read blogs so the results might actually be a little better than what they actually reflect.

Worldwide, most blogs are awful. Most blogs are created by people for no obvious reason and they stop existing a few weeks to few months after nobody really reads them. A lot of them are copy+past+youtube blogs and those are doomed to fail. In the US at least I've been through a lot of "mommy blogs" where a mother, usually a housewife with a kid or two posts stories and pictures of her husband and kids. Those are nor awful blogs, but are extremely boring for anyone who doesn't know the person. Finally there are blogs where you feel the person is trying to say something but you can't understand what are they trying to say, or they write in a bad style or very large or very small fonts or whatever reason there might be to keep one away from reading them.


For that reason I'm not very concerned that a lot of Jordanian blogs active right now will disappear. Mine might be among them sooner than I expect. However I am concerned that we have not had any good blogs in a while. It feels to me like many blogs were created over a period of 2-3 years and some of them were great. They discussed many controversial issues, they used a language many journalists in the mainstream media never used, they had pictures and videos of things we encounter in a typical Jordanian daily life. With time a lot of them faded away, and nothing special came by to replace that vacuum. Besides, most blogs were in English and most Jordanians prefer to read and comment in Arabic. A well-written blog like the black iris is written in English and despite the fact that it's well-written not a lot of Jordanians are able to access its content. Mab3oos is clearly a very clever and humorous guy who often crosses many political red lines in his blog but again, he's writing in English and his blog's name is mab3oos and this is a very major obstacle for people to access his blog. A few other bloggers have very interesting articles and I depend on them in knowing about what's going on in Jordan, but again there are many basic issues that we are afraid to discuss. We're afraid to write something that we'll regret writing later on, or from a random comment an anonymous commentator might drop.

Finally, and I don't have the statistics to support this but it sounds like the case, when it comes to reading news or opinions, Jordanians would rather read a newspaper or watch TV than read something online. We are still not a very internet-friendly society especially when it comes to the not-so-young.

Overall, I don't think Jordanian blogs are terrible, but we have plenty of room for improvement. I'm hoping for stronger, more challenging, more controversial and well-written blogs especially in Arabic to start appearing on the internet. As for myself, Hareega isn't going to get any better, medical school has irreversibly damaged all of my brain cells and 70% of my hair.