"BIRZEIT, PALESTINE AND THE WORLD WIDE WEB" MAILING LIST
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3 January 1998, Vol.2, Issue 1
Happy New Year and Ramadan Kareem! Our webserver, www.birzeit.edu, was under the weather for the last couple of days, but recovered to full health this morning.
The new, improved Complete Guide to Palestine's Websites is relaunched today, with new categories, new reviews, around 30 new websites and some useful new features including "Palestine's Websites at a Glance" (all on one page), "Key Peace Process Links", and a list of local Palestinian mailing lists from which you can receive information about events in the country.
Hope you like the new design, which will get a few minor tweaks in the next two weeks. In the rush to get it out quickly, there were several websites that didn't get listed, a task which will be completed by mid-January, at which point the results of the 1998 Golden Olive Awards will be announced along with January's site of the month.
The good news is that Palnet, the leading Palestinian ISP, and us at Birzeit will be teaming up to offer a new Palestinian website search service. We will continue to provide an index and searchable reviews of Palestinian websites (a Yahoo-type service), while Palnet will offer a searchable index of the text all of Palestine's websites (an AltaVista-type service).
We are both excited about this new idea and plan to make an interface for both options available in both resources.
In addition, Birzeit will become the clearing house of all local Palestinian URLs, passing them on to Palnet for indexing. This makes it very important to alert us of new URLs of sites based in Palestine.
The Complete Guide will also now offer links to recommended external websites related to Palestine from the same subject categories as local sites.
Please note that if you are based in Palestine you are guaranteed of a listing. If you are outside Palestine, however, we only aim to list the best resources.
Send us sites we overlook, let us know your feedback, and if you are a business, consider advertising on the Complete Guide. Every banner advert that runs for a year buys Birzeit a new computer to expand our work on the Web.
Help us promote this resource for local Palestinian information. Download the title gif from the homepage and display it on your website. Smaller gifs are in the process of construction. If you want to make one, please do.
Palestine Economic Forum: http://www.palecon.org/ - The Palestine Economic Forum seeks to "promote prosperity and the peace process by bringing in the economic dimension on a broad set of issues that are at the cutting edge of Palestinian economic development."
In the process it "hopes to encourage civil society deliberations; improve coordination among the donors, Palestinian Diaspora, private investors, and public stakeholders; and ultimately, improve the quality of public policy in the West Bank and Gaza."
On the website, you will find extensive information on the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS), publications including the excellent Palestine Economic Pulse, West Bank and Gaza Update, Peace Economics, articles and papers, and a discussion forum, which includes topics such as Public Sector Finances and Administration, International Trade, Investment, and Capital Flows, Private Sector Development, Human Resources, and Permanent Settlement Issues.
Palestine Development InfoNet: http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/MEPP /PDIN/pdfront.html - The Palestinian Development InfoNet disseminates information on development assistance and reconstruction in the West Bank and Gaza for use by NGOs, the private sector, policy makers, and scholarly researchers.
The PDIN website is maintained by the Interuniversity Consortium for Arab Studies (Montréal), with the support of the Arts Computer Network, McGill University, and the World Bank. A great source of information.
Visit now!
The section of the Birzeit website called "Birzeit, Palestine and the World Wide Web" at http://www.birzeit.edu/web/ will be redesigned and updated after work on the Complete Guide to Palestine's Websites is finished in mid-January.
Following this, the Ramallah Online Travel Guide, at http://www.birzeit.edu/ramallah/ is due for an update, with the intention of also redesigning the guide, adding new information, and updating what is already there.
During the same period, much effort will be put into promoting the Complete Guide: through increased registration with a wider variety of search engines; petitioning media who report on Palestine to offer links to the Guide; the construction of animated gifs to work as link adverts on friendly webpages; and a serious attempt to increase advertising revenue to benefit the university.
Stabilising the Web Project office equipment and organisation is also a priority, in order to take advantage of new video capture and editing hardware/software and RealMedia delivery. Expect more sounds and images to be available on the Birzeit website in the coming months, particularly on Birzeit News, at http://www.birzeit.edu/bzunews/.
Thank you for your continued support.
Nigel Parry
Birzeit Webmaster
Page by Birzeit Webmaster, webmaster@birzeit.edu.