Floating across the news on Techcrunch let me see that Blogger is now available in Arabic. That news has wound up on Blogger.com's homepage too. Odd that they now say they're available in Arabic, Hebrew and Persian. I was pretty sure the language was called Farsi.
The article does cite that people blog at their own risk since some countries restrict the freedom of speech. I kinda figure that it's all breaking down now. Yeah, you'll have people who are thrown in jail for people typing article that rail against the state but if you take a look at China, I think we're already at a place where the genie is out of the bottle and you can never fully stop people from expressing what they want.
China still jails more journalists than any other country in the world put together, however, each arrest garners more support for free speech and reflects negatively on their international reputation. I have no reason to think that the same wouldn't happen to any of the other countries in the middle east. The young people will want to be more liberalised and express themselves online like all the other rich countries are doing. Even in KSA, they can see what people in Dubai are doing and they'll want to blog and express themselves too. It may take a while, but I'm pretty sure it's all inevitable as these countries keep increasing their level of affluence.
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