November 8, 2001	Thursday	Shaba’an 21, 1422

DOHA, Nov 7: The worldwide scoops of Qatar’s Al Jazeera television channel have launched its Arabic-language website into Internet stardom in the month since the United States unleashed war on Afghanistan.

The www.aljazeera.net went online in January as a window on the satellite station renowned for its impertinence in the staid Arab media market.

It archives reports from the popular channel and offers text and photo stories.

The Sept 11 suicide bombings in New York and Washington brought a surge in page views as they did for many other sites.

But the television’s exclusive coverage from behind Taliban lines in Afghanistan sent traffic soaring.

“We have beaten all records with 14 million visitors a day,” the site’s editor-in-chief Abdul Aziz Al-Mahmud said.

Videotaped messages from the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, and his lieutenants, brought accusations from the West that Al Jazeera was allied to the Taliban.

But they also brought unprecedented audiences for the televsion channel and the website.

“We had to expand the capacity of the site to satisfy demand and we have now managed to have 13,000 people on line at the same time without blocking the site,” Mahmud said.

“Before the site used to block when 6,000 people logged on.”

Mona Amin, head of monitoring at aljazeera.net, said hundreds of people from around the world had sent e-mails asking for English to be used on the site for the benefit of non-Arabic speakers.

The aljazeera.net, like the television station but unlike the rest of the Arab media, does not fight shy of controversy, and publishes invidual comments on leading personalities and events.

With a staff of 60 journalists, technicians and researchers gathered from across the world, the website is broken down into three sections: permanently updated news, an archive of television reports, and dossiers.

“We treat various subjects on aljazeera.net and analyse a series of events such as the (Palestinian) Intifada and the upcoming ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation,” which begins in Doha on Friday,” Mahmud said.

Content comes from online editors working with a mix of news agency copy and the television stories and sources.

“We have total freedom to select news and decide on its importance,” Mahmud said. “We do not have to give the same information as the television channel.”

The aljazeera.net news director Mohammad Daoud noted that fewer people have access to the Internet than to a television set.

“The Internet has two advantages: people can access full texts and stil see the pictures as well,” he said.

The television station celebrated five years of operations on Thursday and chairman Hamad bin Thamer Al-Thani looked to the future.

Simultaneous English translation is the next step to penetrate US and European markets. A photo press agency and a business news channel are also on the cards.—AFP