I've decided to have a night off and leave you to your own devices for a while. I don't want you to be too downhearted though, so I've found you a couple of things to read whilst I'm kipping.

• The first is a piece from the Washington Post - "When a child dies, faith is no defence" by Jonathan Turley - if you are not appalled by this then you damn well should be.
• The second is from TechCrunch by Paul Carr "NSFW: ‘Tis Pity She’s A Success – Belle de Jour and the Impossibility of Anonymous Blogging" - been following some of the rather excitable press coverage of this one over the last 48 hours - Anonymity: The Bloggers' Conundrum

Pay attention though, I'll be asking questions later...

It's been an odd kind of a day in the Blogosphere, all kinds of unexpected pieces of news that have rippled throughout the Twitterverse. Hints, claims, denials, counter-claims, accusations, I told you so's, and records set in alignment - it's all happening out there you know. Despite the length of time I've had this blog (though you'd be hard pressed to know it, it's been here for three and a half years now), I'd not really got too much of an insight or engaged in some of the things that go on out there. I'm starting to travel outside my own little Izdihar shaped sphere these days and you begin after a very short time, realising who links to who, who is commenting on who (and vice versa). I'm late on all this and I know it, but at least it's giving me plenty to read. All I need now is my anonymity back, a gift for the salacious, a book deal and I can go full steam ahead and get myself outed properly - I've always said everyone should have an aim in life...

PS. Congratulations to Ellie and The Man on their impending move to Madrid - Duvet Fluffing Spawns Big Idea

For a long time now, I've always gone by the adage that one should use your mouth and ears in the proportion that they are provided. Generally speaking this seems to have served me well, I get to learn things, I don't purposely put my foot in it by saying the wrong thing, I don't have a love affair with the sound of my own voice. It does though have some disadvantages, people do perhaps think I'm too quiet and as a result, I have a sneaking suspicion that opportunities that should perhaps arise for me, arise for other people instead (I have also discovered that smoking does you no harm in the career stakes either, but that's a whole other issue).

In an idle moment this evening, I also wondered whether this principle translates into internet use also. To anyone who visits here regularly, it will be readily apparent that I don't post all that often on here - kind of odd when I could reasonably be described as something of an internet addict - I do though read avidly, but probably not as widely as I should. As I look around though there are plenty of people who, it would seem, cannot shut up (metaphorically speaking). It's not as if I can't write or understand the tools available, I just feel somehow inhibited by some inner working that says "keep your thoughts to yourself". It may be some form of self-protection mechanism, after all, there are rather a lot of people I know in both a work and social setting, who are perfectly well aware of this domain, who owns it and in a good few cases how I came to acquire it (nothing dodgy in that though). Given that blogging forms no natural adjunct to me making a living, what then do I write that allows me to express myself in a way that isn't in some way misinterpreted or viewed with suspicion?

The answer currently appears to be very little of any significance, save numerous references to my assorted hobbies, the occasional travelogue and generally inadequately informed comments on world affairs as and when my gaze is attracted to them. Whether anyone learns a great deal about the inner workings of 'Planet Me' in the process is likely to be purely coincidental and you may be wondering (and to misquote the late great Douglas Adams) "This Chris of Arabia... ...what is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?"

Now I'm not likely to answer that question in its literal sense, but using a more general interpretation, then the answer is a very firm "yes". There is a place on Planet Me for the usual panoply of human emotion and experience that goes beyond what you will have divined so far, or at least from these pages. What makes me tick though, and what I should report here remains an open question. Let's for the moment say that there are sufficient matters orbiting 'Me' that would, I'm sure, make interesting reading to those who inhabit a different cultural enclave. Maybe one day, these will be something I will feel more readily disposed towards sharing.

For now then...

[EDIT] Fundamental flaw in the title and early part of this post corrected...

If I were to look back a few posts on here, I'd eventually find that this blog got set up a good couple of years ago, since when traffic has been somewhat tricky to come by. I don't know much about SEO, in fact I know virtually nothing. I post something, I get a few views, there's a cross link here and there at flickr and on some of the forums I partake of, but nothing too serious. That said, Izdihar.com does come up as the fourth ranked link if I search for "Izdihar", but who does that other than me?

Now I've never really played around with too many of the social networking sites, to be honest their point was eluding me. I have a Facebook account but I turned that off around 18 months back, as I was getting a little jaded with being asked to take part in the dumb games and inane quizzes it plays host to. In a moment of weakness a couple of weeks back, I decided to re-awaken the account because I'd noticed one of my favourite flickr contacts was on there. Before I know it, I've ended up tracking down a bunch of work colleagues past and present, as well as family members, some of whom I've not seen in 20 years. I add the blog link to my Facebook profile and maybe I get one or two views showing up in the stats that suggest a small connection has been made somewhere, but I'm not exactly being inundated.

A few days back, I decided to set up a Twitter account, mainly because a man in the office suggested it's worth registering yourself on all these things, just to protect your identity and prevent someone else passing themselves off as you - seems a reasonable suggestion. Now I mentioned a while back in these parts that I'd had a Pownce account which lasted right up until Six Apart pulled the plug on it - thank you Messrs Rose, Burka & Ms. Culver :no:. I used to quite enjoy it, I liked the idea that it was smaller than Twitter and I could get my head around what was going on.

Anyway the new account is created, but I know (as in have actually met or spoken to) no one on there, so what's the point? Who have I heard of then that's on there? Well I knew that Photoshop Creative had something going, there was an article on doing Twitter backgrounds for your profile page in the latest issue, let's add them then. So far so good, I'm now seeing a whole bunch of links I can look up, vast quantities of which seem to be using the bit.ly thing - no idea what that is, but make mental note to investigate when I remember. Who else then? Well I noticed that Ms. Margolis had a link listed across at 'The Girl' - that could be interesting, let's follow that one then and in the process I added SandieQ who'd listed Twitter as her homepage in a comment on one of Zoe's blog posts. So that's three then - not very many but enough to try and work out what's going on - and there's that bit.ly thing popping up again...

So a few days pass, I start adding some random thoughts of my own (they are very random I assure you) and once in a while, I'll see a comment from either Zoe or SandieQ and perhaps I'll add my own thought to theirs. So far so good, but I don't see any fireworks going off in this, it's just good clean, low level fun with a small 'f'.

So a day or two passes and Monday (today) arrives in the calendar - no real reason why it should be any different. The weather here in Riyadh has been crap the last couple of days, no real sign of the sun due to the dust hanging in the lower atmosphere, looks like it's going to rain, the sky is brown, but it's still 45C out there. A few more posts get made of no great import and the working day draws to a close. Then Ms. M makes a post about a book she's contributed a piece to - it's called "The Atheists Guide to Christmas" (snappy title), exactly what you need in June, and there's that bit.ly thing again. 'bout time I found out what that was...

It turns out that bit.ly is a URL shortener much like TinyURL, but unlike that one, it's not blocked by the KACST, or at least not yet. In itself, URL shortening is nothing new, but it really comes in its own where Twitter is concerned, because of the 140 character limit that it imposes. But the real benefit comes from a couple of clever little tricks that have been included there: One is that you can create an account, use it to create your shortened URL and post it directly into Twitter; secondly it will give you stats based on the traffic that passes through that short URL. Now that is interesting, time to do some tests...

Newly armed with a bit.ly logon, I notice that my flickr photostream has just ticked over the 11,000 views mark, 11,001 to be precise - let's try Twittering the stat from bit.ly. By the time bit.ly has managed to refresh the screen, it's showing that the short URL has been clicked on 3 times. Now bearing in mind I've only got 11 people following me on Twitter, 4 of whom I've blocked, this comes as surprise. By the time I get flickr refreshed, it's had 11,011 views. OK, let's try that on the blog and see what occurs. One Tweet later and I can see the stats in the blog back office collect another 10 referrals.

Now out in the serious world of SEO, the figures in of themselves are quite pathetic and not worth a mention, but considering I have a largely ignored blog, a flickr account that gets maybe 40 views a day and a Twitter following that ranks barely above single figures, the ease with which I've driven traffic from one to the other (in minutes) is something of a revelation to me. I've now converted some of my forum links into bit.ly URLs, more because I want to see what the stats do, what's more I can see where to clicks are coming from.

This could be worth watching, in fact for my next trick, I'm going to turn the permalink for this post into a short URL and Twitter it - if you've read this far, you may well have just become a statistic...

Not an obvious title for most I grant you, but he has cropped up in my browsing twice in the last two days, before which I'd never heard of him. Sisyphus was cursed to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again, for all eternity as a punishment from the gods. My first encounter was as a comment on a photograph by Joannablu over at flickr yesterday. The second was at a blog post called Commuters Exchange Interaction. Now in and of themselves, neither on their would have raised an eyebrow - it would have just been something new I'd learned. The unusual thing is that both of the ladies who raised this mythological individual are listed in my blogroll here. Admittedly, it's only very recently that The Daily Smoke has been added to the list, but it was before Sisyphus ever got mentioned.

It got me thinking about the kind of connections that blogging makes and I finally think I twigged why so many people do it - it is those coincidental and unexpected links between people that join us to the rest of the world - it should be stated here that I'm referring to personal rather than business related blogs. Where the pace of life and the promotion of the individual over the collective have given us the disintegrated society we witness today, blogging somehow recreates the connections and sense of community that have been lost in most of our daily lives, albeit a community linked electronically rather than geographically. Now I'm no student of social anthropology and can offer no evidence to back up this supposition, but it seems to me to be one of those ideas that just makes sense. Does this explain the rush to follow a cause and support fellows individuals perhaps in BlogWorld? I don't know, but it could happen.

Wonder whether Sisyphus knew what he was starting...