Hey Emel, what have you done to my avatar?
Back in late 2008, I got contacted by Emel magazine, a British Muslim lifestyle magazine, for a feature on Muslim bloggers. The process of getting the material over there took months, and I dealt...
Category: Media
London Independent ‘gone by Christmas’
UPDATE 1-O’Brien sees London’s Independent closed by Dec | Industries | Technology, Media & Telecommunications | Reuters Denis O’Brien, the second largest shareholder in the Independent News and Media group, has said that the...
Standpoint runs front page Islam bash
Turning a Blind Eye to Misogyny | Standpoint Standpoint magazine, a right-leaning commentary magazine published by the Social Affairs Unit, has ran with a front-page feature on how the western left supposedly turns a...
Mehdi Hasan on the BBC’s ‘liberal’ bias
New Statesman – Bias and the Beeb Mehdi Hasan, the NS’s senior politics editor, on how the recurrent claim that the BBC has some sort of liberal bias does not stack up when you...
Murdoch plans to charge for online content
The Guardian today reported that Rupert Murdoch is planning to make the websites for his Times and Sun newspapers, and no doubt his foreign titles as well, a paid-for resource rather than a free...
Sterilisation: it wasn’t just the Nazis
Recently the papers and talk shows have been abuzz about a woman in her thirties who has had thirteen babies, all of whom have been taken away from her — most of them at...
“Comedy”: the new nasty
The Guardian has dedicated its G2 supplement today to comedy, and the lead feature is about the new tendency towards offensiveness in comedy. This includes jokes about Muslims (we're all queer), Chinese people, Gypsies,...
What’s the use of Twitter?
Last Wednesday, the Guardian had a feature from “inside Twitter HQ” based on interviews with the founders of the service. The article gave potted histories of the founders, two of whom were formerly involved...
Ungrateful bloggers! (And credit where it’s due)
Is WordPress A Thankless Community? | Weblog Tools Collection Are you using third-party WordPress plugins and themes without having sent the author a thank-you note or donated money? I have to say that, in...
Don’t tell me what to write
Zaid Shakir recently wrote a reply to some guy who had ridiculed him by calling him a “Muslim rock star” for writing about the death of Michael Jackson when, supposedly, Cynthia McKinney was being...
Terrorists getting easy ride from media and law
New Statesman – Know your enemy Mehdi Hasan, the New Statesman’s senior politics editor, on a man stopped in his tracks while preparing to use tennis balls as bombs, whose case hardly got any...
Divan 2.0 (featuring moi) is up
Divan 2.0 | Multimedia | The Radical Middle Way This is the video of the Divan 2.0 meeting of Muslim bloggers at the London School of Economics, organised by Radical Middle Way, on 7th...
The price of bigotry (and it’s for real this time)
A few months ago I blogged a piece called something like "The Price of Vilification", regarding incidents of attacks against Muslims in the USA, one of which turned out to be a hoax and...
Alcohol and rape story was distorted
PR and prejudice: why rape story erred (from the Guardian) Ben Goldacre writes a regular column, Bad Science, which is often dedicated to debunking stupid newspaper stories based on distortions of statistics and science....
How real is this hustle?
I was just watching a BBC programme called The Real Hustle, in which the TV people play supposedly real cons on unsuspecting members of the public, and then reunite them with their money or...
MySpace cuts jobs as it loses out to Facebook
MySpace is forced to slash workforce as social network users flock to Facebook | Technology | The Guardian So, why is MySpace losing out? Has anyone been on any MySpace sites lately? The inconsistent...
Anonymous netizens should clean up their act
Letters: Time for moderation in the blogosphere | Technology | The Guardian A letter from yesterday’s Guardian in response to the scandal over the unmasking of the “Night Jack” police blogger by the Times...
What are the shibboleths of ignorance about Islam?
I've been getting a lot of tweets lately about talk of a ban on the so-called burqa in France, the latest chapter in the long saga of the French obsession with what Muslim women...
Meet the Daily Mail’s new guest editor
Back in the 1990s, I was a big fan of the Liverpool-based TV soap Brookside (I got into it just as the body-under-the-patio story was hotting up and got out after the storylines got...
The frustrations of switching content management systems
Recently, I have been hearing over Twitter that one of my contacts has been thinking of moving one of his websites off WordPress onto Expression Engine, a proprietary content management system. I have never...