If it wasn’t for earthquakes, humans wouldn’t have innovated architecture
They wouldn’t have looked into new ways of building homes, but the problem is that we got good at it – good to the points our homes won’t be destroyed frequently enough aka they won’t evolute frequently.

If you look around you, there is very few free space -  and in those spots you find big centers being eradicated everyday – safe and resistant enough – specially to earthquakes – what on earth will take down those inefficient dumb primitive beton monsters and make room for better buildings in the future ?

So the problem behind this is the ever expanding gap between technology and architecture : our homes will always be behind technology/progress – they will be always less optimal.

I can only imagine how better the earth will be if our houses were “smart” or modern enough – it is not science fiction – the way we build stuff is very retarded to say the least when it comes to the material used, energy saving, what a home can “do” and it is just not possible “business wise” to say : ok, let us destroy and rebuild.

Before, nature took care of this, slowly and “less painfully”

As little earthquakes happened, our primitive cities got “devastated”, we rebuilt them in a better way but the costs were small.
We kept gradually improving till our cities became resistant to medium/high earthquakes.

We reached this point of the graph where things slow down, become stable – it is cool not to have the tragedy and misery of earthquakes, but on the other hand there is the hidden and expensive cost of stability and non-progress. It is invisible and super slow but as devastating in its effect as that 2 minutes tragedy called earthquake

Our homes are costing the earth dearly and suffocating it – we need earthquakes to give engineers another better large-scale chance/try.

Before I start sounding too embarrassingly enthusiastic about earthquakes and destruction, here is a link on list of earthquakes – it has

1. Main lists of earthquakes
   • Historical earthquakes (before 1901)
   • List of 20th century earthquakes (1901–2000)
   • List of 21st century earthquakes (2001–present)
2. Lists of earthquakes by country
3. Largest earthquakes by magnitude
4. Deadliest earthquakes on record

Enjoy the read !

In Blog Action Day 2010 fellow lebanese bloggers are doing a great and creative job raising awareness about water.

I am not gonna repeat everything that has been said about importance of water and such and i am not the most arty person that can create “images worth a thousand word”.

Instead I am gonna share with you an idea i’ve always wanted to do that will help in water issue in lebanon.

The thing is – closing the sink, taker shorter showers, showering together or not showering at all can help – but those are tiny scale solutions.

Large scale solutions like demanding from our govt. to build huge factories to recycle water are great – but well … let us get real and stop daydreaming !

So we have to digg around ideas that are medium size, can be executed by individuals yet their effect can be really really relevant.

With this mindset here is my pitch for water blog action day.

1 – using rain gutters:

Basically a rain gutter is like a pipe system, it will stop water falling from the roofs into the roads- instead this water is channeled or stored in reservoirs or just a hole, it can also be re-used immediately in different ways (toilets – cleaning roads … )

If you calculate the spaces that roofs occupy, specially in the cities – that is quite a huge space – so all you have to do is do some math on rain precipitation and calculate the amount of water that can be saved.

Using water for heating :

This idea might seem a bit weird, but water can generate steam – steam can be used in heating (chauffage) – instead of paying for fuel (mazout) to run the heating system, what you can do, is digg a vertical hole in the ground – as you go, the temperature of the earth becomes hotter and water will vaporize – when water is vaporized it will then under its pressure go back up.

So what you basically need to do is invest once in digging one tiny vertical hole with two pipes, the “IN” pipe will have the rain gutter feeding it – the out pipe will be ur heating source. As long as there is rain and cold you can generate your free heating.

It may sound a bit unfamiliar, but i am sure 100% that it works, I think this is already implemented in other countries already.

If someone is interested I can do an extended research, like how much you should digg and give references and why not try to execute it – it would be fun :)

So those 2 ideas are totally eco-friendly, relatively easy to do , can be done by individuals, cheap, can  store water for summer for your gardens, cars, toilets, get heat in winter and lower the amount of floods in the roads .

As far as i know, such systems are not popular in lebanon – so i am hoping by sharing the idea that someone does this either personally or maybe as a business idea.

Those were my quick 2cents for the blog action day – now back to work

I’ve been in love with infographics for a long while now, it is the least to expect from someone who works mostly with databases and data all the time.

Thanks god, I get to see lot of interesting data, query it, build graphs, still call it work and get paid for it!

Viewing and building infographs became an addiction, that’s why i’ve been planning to create a weekly section on this blog where i collect data, build infographics and share.

The cool thing about using online forms to gather data is that they can be more honest and tackle challenging questions – people don’t feel pushed to fill the data and there is no need to lie – since identity remains anonymous.

So, It is not only fun to do, but also interesting, useful, challenging and can reach so many people at almost zero cost :)

So without further blablabla here is the first survey aiming at getting some numbers on love, first kisses and sexuality. I will try to spot differences/trends according to age and sex.

So help me spread the word, the more people who take the survey, the better our results turn to be.

[polldaddy survey="C6FB83CD9989902D" type="button" title="Take Our Survey!" style="inline" text_color="000000"]

If you are interested in receiving the data like i do, all you need to do is leave a comment stating so – after entering your name in the comment, enter a valid email address – this address won’t be published – so no fear of spammers getting hold of your email.

Well, I guess it is time for some updates on the lebanese blogs custom search thingy. aka AbaadBlogs.com

First, I am really happy you guys found this useful and thanks for the great support and feedback. Hope I will keep hearing more of your suggestions and ideas.

Second, here is a roll up of the changes and features that were built so far :

I changed the quick draft page i put last time into something i believe is more decent. Now you have the following menus :

1. Home : where the custom search is
2. Advertise :
   1. Bloggers are free to advertise their blogs, all you have to do is fill up the form in the page.
   2. Companies/businesses will have to get in touch via email ( i am currently still collecting data on the site usage to be able to create some reasonable pricing strategy – so no “packages for companies are ready yet”) – We are not charging one million dollar per ad spot yet :P so trust me, prices will be very reasonable. There are also other advertising methods that can be discussed that involve the bloggers themselves – so it is better to have conversation with companies/businesses at this point than a fixed package.
3. Contact : a general purpose contact form where you can just say hi, tell us something, suggest or spam us :P
4. Doodles :
   • Contributing a doodle : See the main logo on the page ? you can submit one and take full credit for it + link + hugs + beer + cookies + bragging rights … . Usually it can be to highlight something in lebanon, an event, a cause or just something fun – if i think it looks nice, it will go up-there :) so your contributions are most welcomed and can make this website as lebneneh as possible.
   • Google logo usage : I already asked on discussion group and the ppl on twitter who manage googlecse about how legal it is to mod the google logo – so far no answer is given yet. In case this remains the case, I guess it will be fine ;) otherwise will have to do a whole new identity thing.
   • History of doodle : all doodles will be kept on the “doodles” page for your viewing pleasures :)
5. Submit blogs : Submitting blogs/website is totally free and the more the merrier as they say because it will help keep the search results more interesting and diversified. The only criteria is that the blog should be done by a lebanese or should be about lebanon
6. Lebanon aggregator / +961 link round up / blogger face-off :  Those are external links to what i believe are initiatives related to blogging in lebanon – if you have an initiative that i am not aware of, please link me.
7. Embed in your site : You can put the search engine in your site/ blog / pages – the users will be able to search without leaving your website. You don’t even have to put link back to abaadblogs.com , but it would be nice if you do so :P .  All you have to do is copy/paste the code in your pages. If you are facing trouble, let me know, would be glad to help get it working.
8. FAQ : Frequently asked question sections, so i don’t have to repeat over and over again :P
9. My blog : shameless link to my blog instead of an about us page – this will definetly be updated some time later.

Other stuff  :

1. The search engine has now the following refinements or categories :
   • Blogs
   • Newspapers ( 82 lebanese newspapers found and added so far )
   • Government (oh the lameness of those websites – adding is still in progress, so your help is appreciated
2. From now on, automatic forwarding setup between the search engine and Lebanonaggregator.com aka on the submit form, i added @funkyozzi’s email and i believe she is currently building her form as well and setting up the forwarding. Hopefully this will make the life of lebanese bloggers easier :)
3. Current statistics in the last 2 – 3 days are :  distinct queries: 643, total queries: 648 – top keywords : wordpress and hariri
4. There will be tons of infographics and useful stuff coming out of this so stay tuned
5. There is a facebook ad circulating around about this website :) if you spot it, let me know :P
6. I will be doing re-indexing of the blogs/websites + update of new ones everyday to keep results new and alive as much as possible.

That would be it for now – My time budget for this is already wayyyyy over – there is no actual free time , but this seemed to me something that needs doing, and hopefully with ppl submitting their blogs and doodles, we can keep this search engine alive, fun and useful.

You comments, suggestion, collaboration is most welcomed, please share away your thoughts, i do actually listen and take them into consideration and wow, that was such a long post :)

After the quick info-graphics I published on the Lebanese and their blogsphere, I noticed that many people were excited and interested in digging stuff from the lebanese blogs.

Many asked if there is a way they could do queries to build the info graphs themselves – I couldn’t provide access for a simple reason : the hosting provider is angry with me because i am doing a full syndication and pulling updates from tons of blogs every hour or so to keep the results live and by angry i mean real angry with a warning and a phone call.

So a simple alternative and a more effective way is to use the oh-so-powerful google and build a custom search engine that feeds from the Lebanese blogs.

Custom search engines provide many other positive sides as well like : Refinements, promotions, synonyms, auto-completion, collaboration options, transliteration and way more – in other words, it is the power of google at your fingertip ( <– oh boy that was a cheesy line )

So I am glad to share with you a Lebanese Blogsphere Search Engine Version 0.0000001

So, anyhow – what does all this mean :

1. You can search the lebanese blogs in one click and get a different perspective on what we are talking about
2. It is the easier and more optimized way to do research, find local content , articles, news, happenings without “noise” from other non-lebanese stuff and by using the relatively “fair” and smart google algorithm ( lebanon is a name of a place in the US btw )
3. Interesting options :
   • Refinement : a Blog can be categorized into one or  many “categories” – the user can narrow down their search according to the area of their interest.
   • Promotions : Click here and you will know what I am talking about ;) – Funny, informative or business promotions can help you get some targeted exposure – Buying me a beer will totally work to get your promotion spot up-there or kindly asking :P
   • Synonyms : There are variant of each terms – you won’t have to google each – synonyms can help you do a smart googling.
   • Auto-completion : the new – popular auto-complete from google.
   • Collaboration : You can submit your blog – website – your friend’s – your mom’s and dog’s blog and if you are interested in collaborating on the maintenance of the list of blogs/websites – google has built in collaboration tool.
   • Transliteration : Translating keywords from one language to another and searching for them
4. Lebanese doodles : You can show off your artistic side, highlight a Lebanese event , raise awareness, express yourself or just joke around by submitting a doodle – if it is nice, i will publish it with a link to your blog/site and you also win a free promotion and some optimization – it is a nice way to keep the search engine “lebneneh”

This is all so exciting and nice and cute and of course the next step would be to include not just Lebanese Blogs but also sites, newspapers, university websites – But if i want to wait till I have time to finish all the options I have in mind , i will end up sharing this somehow in the afterlife :P

So google away, submit your blog, share and enjoy! Stay tuned for more updates – I kinda put this in a hurry before I loose my excitement about this idea :) – I hope you gave this a test run :) – I am still indexing the blogs – it takes some time for google to do so that is why search results may not be optimal and some features are not all set like auto-completion.