Albawaba.com
Cairo
Nearly a week after www.bayt.com's most recent scheduled launch date, the website looked much the same as it did three months earlier. "Launching soon, the next evolution in online communities for the Middle East," proclaimed the banner at the top of the homepage.
As of last night, the yellow "bayt-wire" strip near the bottom of the screen continued to spit out single-sentence news briefs on current events in the Middle East. Otherwise, there was little sign of life at the site.
Three weeks ago, Bayt's vice president of strategic alliances, Tarek Demerji, promised a partial launch of the Arab-oriented Internet portal in September
The intention was to continue adding new elements until the site became fully operational by about mid-October.
"I think Bayt on the first iteration will probably not be that different from the other sites that are out there," Demerji is quoted as saying in the September issue of the local English-language magazine Business Monthly.
Bayt was supposed eventually to become a "comprehensive site that will fulfill all of people's online needs," he said. Bayt, which has been in preparation for about a year, had first announced plans to launch in April and then in July. After those earlier, abortive attempts, Bayt's founders "retooled" their original plan and scrapped the idea of using original content.
"Frankly, we had a very wide scope in the beginning," Demerji said. But skilled writers were not easy to find, and producing original content -- whether written by staff members or freelancers -- would have been simply too expensive, he said.
Since early this year, Demerji and some of his colleagues have been telephoning and dropping by the offices of Cairo's English-language press, trying to persuade a range of printed publications to provide story selections for use on the Bayt website.
Bayt offered advertisement on its site as well as links to the respective publications' own sites as part of the deal. But most editors balked at what they saw as giving away their articles for free. "I'd be reluctant to give up the control they're talking about," said the former editor of one Cairo-based magazine which had been approached by Bayt.
The publisher of another local magazine suggested the Bayt people were being rather presumptuous in promising to increase his publication's exposure. "It is we who are the established ones here -- not them," he said.
Meanwhile, another Cairo-based portal site run by a group called Nomad International is gearing up for its own partial launch on September 15th.
Nomad, with a staff of 55, will start by launching only its sports section.
The site, www.minhina.com, will feature original content in both Arabic and English, Nomad staffers said.
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
