An edited video of the event can be seen below:

You can learn more about the Omani bloggers campaign against H1N1 by visiting the Omani Bloggers Wall.

Oman had its first Twitter gathering last night at Al Masa Mall. The main organizer of the event was blogger Sangeetha at Digital Oman who coordinated the process and planned the program. More than 25 users of Twitter attended, including male and female, locals and expats. A raffle was held at the beginning of the event and goodie bags were awarded to the attendees.

Blogger [R] at Dear Raed posted about the event saying:

overall 3ashra 3alla 3ashra (10/10)… next time i think it needs to be less formal and more relaxed so people can get a chance to talk more and get to know each other .. this can become a start to what can eventually become an official Omani On-Line community.. or maybe not ..

Blogger Muawiyah described the event in Arabic:

On Twitter, Maithams tweeted that he expects to feel more comfortable using Twitter now that he knows the identity of other people online.

Muscati tweeted that he would like to have more similar gatherings:

All Twitter updates relating to this event were tagged by by #MuscatTwestival including picture updates.

The recent initiative taken by Omani bloggers to help raise awareness about the spreading swine flu in the country managed to attract media attention and raise money to help take the initiative further. The campaign that was started as an online idea and then as a gathering in a local market was covered by the Arab new channel Al Arabia, and was later supported financially by a local securities company.

On Friday of this week bloggers have arranged for a public awareness event in which bloggers will again inform the visitors of a shopping mall about protection methods and will distribute masks and sanitizers. The event will include a street dancing session by a local freestyle dance group and will be sponsored by some local companies and newspapers.

Bloggers have also announced a new poster design competition to raise awareness about the flu. The first place winner of the competition will be awarded a Wacom Bamboo drawing tablet and the top submissions will be published in The Week and Muscat Daily newspapers.

Bloggers organising this campaign have started a new dedicated website to cover the latest updates happening in the Omani blogosphere and to publish the latest events for swine flu campaign.

Oman celebrated the first day of Eid al Fitr yesterday, a day after most of its neighboring Gulf states. The celebration, which culminates the end of Ramadan - the month of fasting, is determined after the sighting of the new moon, and not all countries, or sects for that matter, celebrate it on the same day.

The outbreak of swine flu in the Sultanate was also supposed to put a damper on Eid. The Government ran TV and newspaper campaigns urging people to take precautionary measures - such as avoiding giving hugs, kisses, or even shaking hands if possible during this event. The Ministry of Interior Affairs also ordered the Mayors of towns not to hold any public receptions for Eid. On the first day of Eid, unlike most other Eids, Oman TV did not broadcast Sultan Qaboos bin Saeed attending an Eid prayer.

However, the scare of Swine flu did not seem to take from the joy of people celebrating the first day of Eid. Instead of having mass public prayers areas, some places performed the morning Eid prayer in regular mosques which accommodated a smaller number of people than larger places.

Omani tweeps were making updates throughout the first day of Eid. Omanizer_muscat tweeted that even though OmanTV ran all these awareness messages, this was the Eid in which she had the most kisses ever!

The majority of people seemed to be going out and socializing without any fear of the flu as Alucard187 tweeted on the night of the first day of Eid that all the tables in restaurants in the capital Muscat seem to be fully taken. Otheroman also tweeted that the traditional Souq of Matrah seemed to have thousands of people hanging out around the corniche.

Makorani kept updating us with funny quotes she heard during Eid. Fatmanoor posted pictures of her homemade version of the traditional Omani Eid meat dish “Shiwa”, while alucard187 showed us pictures of the real thing getting dug up from the ground and unwrapped, and then ready to be eaten. Whole villages take part in the cooking of Shiwa, which consists of a whole cow or goat roasted for up to three days in an special oven prepared in a pit dug in the ground.

Eid al Fitr in Oman is celebrated over a period of three days after the end of the month of Ramadan.

Omani bloggers have started their Swine Flu Awareness Campaign yesterday by going through Souq Matrah to spread the message and educate people. The campaign which was originally initiated by Hamed Al Ghaithi, and then was taken to its next step by the cooperative effort of Bader Al Hinai, Ammar Al Mamari, Waleed Al Nabhani, Hashr Al Manthari, and Muawiyah Al Rawahi. These bloggers distributed sanitizers to restaurants and coffee shops and guided their staff on the proper method of cleaning the tables after the customers. The restaurants and coffee shops were very receptive of the advice and seemed to take it seriously, probably as some of them thought the bloggers were an official delegation from the Ministry of Health.

The bloggers then moved to taxi drivers to inform them about the benefits of using alcohol hand sanitizers and face masks for reducing the risk of infection. The majority of the taxi drivers had no idea what the sanitizers were and thought that these are liquid soup that required using water to wash it off.

The final state of the program was walking around the souq to inform visitors about the benefits of using alcohol hand sanitizers.

Blogger Muawiyah wrote a detailed post with pictures on how the event went and the varied reactions they received from the visitors of the souq.

Another event in the campaign against the Swine Flu is supposedly scheduled during the Eid break, but no specific details about the event can be found online yet.

Oman had a relatively big swine flu outbreak. With the number of fatalities in the country reaching 16, it is the largest announced number in the Gulf. Schools and universities were supposed to start by September, but were postponed to the mid of October. The biggest festival in the country due in January has already been canceled in fear of the flu.

Most Omani bloggers do not seem to be happy by the coverage provided by the local media and believe that more awareness activities should be carried out, especially as the disease could further spread during the celebrations of Eid ul Fitr, which begins tomorrow. Blogger Hamed Al Ghaithi started a bloggers' swine flu awareness campaign in which he suggests:

• Urging Omani media to transform into crisis mode that educates people about best practices, personal hygiene, and the recommendation not to shake hands, cheek kiss, or group prayers.
• Urging the government to impose restrictions for attending shopping malls and large social and religious events such as weddings and Eid celebrations.
• Canceling the whole of the first semester of the current academic year, and if the crisis is not mitigated by February, canceling the whole year.
• Launching a campaign for sanitizing public service institutions such as public markets ans schools.
• Monitoring the health status of arriving expatriate employees and putting them in quarantine if they are found to be infected.

Not all of these suggestions can be logically carried out, for example canceling a whole academic year, but it is still nice seeing Omani bloggers brainstorming ideas and spreading the message for taking precautionary measures to minimize the risks of infection.

Blogger Bader Al Hinai reported that the first offline activity in the bloggers campaign against swine flu was to be started today  in which some bloggers were supposed to go to a local market to educate people on the proper use of sterilization products. No updates can be found online on how the event went. According to Bader, future events to be held after the holidays are expected to be published soon.

There are blogs and forums that explicitly publish leaked government documents and shame high government officials, yet the government in most cases uses legal methods to prosecute such authors if they are residents in the country by relying on the criminal law legislation and the controversial Omani telecommunication law. Though rarely ever tested, Oman does guarantee the right for freedom of expression after all. Websites such as YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter were never blocked in Oman.

In Oman, we have a different problem with censorship. The issue of censorship is taken care of by a public company called Omantel that occasionally, due to human or machine errors - we don't know - blocks out random websites. Though initially it sounds like a silly problem, due to the blackbox nature of the censorship department, once a website is blocked, it is a nightmare to get it unblocked.

Two months ago, I discovered that a blog I keep on IT law in Oman got blocked while I was abroad. It took me a whole month to get it unblocked where I had to make an official complaint to the Telecommunication Regulation Authority to have my website unblocked.

While the blocking of my website might have only caused me to lose a whole month of traffic and have a whole month of hosting fees wasted, having a number of services by Google such as Gmail, Blogger, and Scholar blocked for more than a day by mistake has a serious impact on the lives of people.

Currently, it seems that does not seem to be any method to hold Omantel accountable to its various censorship mishaps, other than complaining to the Oman's Telecom Regulation Authority, which will order Oman to unblock a website, but is very unlikely to issue any other sanctions. The future of the situation and control of the censorship department is unknown as the second fixed line internet service provider starts its operations. Hopefully something will change.

Meanwhile, it is worth noting that Global Voice's own Bangla portal is now blocked in Oman.. probably by mistake. I already wrote to Omantel to have it unblocked, but I have no idea how long it will take, if ever, to have it unblocked.

The notorious Muscat Confidential blogger recently posted a blog post about how to have sex in Muscat. His blog seems to get hits through searches for sex-related keywords, and I quote:

You know, I get a lot of hits from guys (I'm assuming here) in Oman searching for Filipino girls, Muscat girls, how to get girls in muscat, muscat sex, sex omani girls, prostitutes muscat, gay sex muscat, etc etc etc. Sex is clearly, like the rest of the world, on the mind of a lot of people in Muscat. Oh yes.

Expat wife Angry in Oman does not like her colleagues at work, does not like the people on the road, and surely is not happy about staying Oman. Some tell her it is a transition period and she will eventually like it here, but until that happens, the suffering continues. Here is the starting paragraph of her latest misadventures:

It always happens that when I think things can't get any worse, they of course do.

I now have a toothache to the point the whole right side of my face hurts and my bosses wife's driver came round to the office last night and took the keys away.

I told #3 yesterday that I NEED to get my check cashed today and that I will be late coming into the office. He was fine about it and when I got here I told him that I made a dentist appointment for Thursday.

Leo Americanus thinks that there is something seriously wrong with the perception of women in the Arab culture. He is surprised by the statements made by the family of the recently murdered Lebanese singer Suzanne Tamim:

While female singers have been taken advantage of by rich men the world 'round, I cannot help but feel that there is a special misogyny that surrounds men of power in the Middle East. Alaa al-Aswani's novel “The Yacoubian Building” paints a pretty damning picture of this kind of man in Egypt. The sad thing is that there is a line of thinking that perpetuates such acts.

Popular female blogger Suburban observes the state of hypermarket Lulu (she prefers to call it ‘Zoo-Lu') during the Ramadan. She generally likes it because it is very cheap, but there are a few things that are starting to drive her crazy, here is one of them:

Wonky shopping carts. I am telling you, I have never had a shopping cart there that rolled straight. I am a small girl, and by the time the thing is full, I look like some sort of comic superhero in blue jeans, feet sliding on the lino floors, body inclined to 45 degrees, frantically attempting to navigate the corner of the dairy isle.