<i>Another great guest post from The National's media maven, Keach Hagey:</i> <span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Arabic is the fastest-growing language on the internet. By a lot. From 2000 to 2008, the growth rate in Arabic-speaking internet users was 2064 per cent, more than three times the rate of grown of Chinese. <br/></span> <span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This fact was probably the cheeriest to emerge from the Arab Knowledge Report, co-produced by the Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation and the United Nations Development Programme, released yesterday to great fanfare in Dubai (<a href="http://www.mbrfoundation.ae/English/Pages/AKR2009.aspx">click here to download the report</a>).<br/><br/>The report had all sorts of grim things to say about the state of the region's education, which leaves <a href="http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091029/NATIONAL/710289816/1010">one third of the population unable to read and write, as Nour Samaha covered in today's paper</a>. That grimness is thoroughly backed up by a <a href="http://www.economist.com/world/middleeast-africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14660446">seriously unhappy article on Arab education systems recently published in The Economist</a>. <br/><br/>The Arab Knowledge Report ends with an unvarnished conclusion that "as a whole, the Arab states have made no tangible progress with respect to freedom of though and of expression."</span> <span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But ICT was a rare point of light amidst the gloom. <br/><br/></span> <span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For one thing, they're investing. In 2008, Arab countries recorded levels of development in technological performance exceeding those observed in all other regions of the world, according to the World Bank Report on Knowledge Assessment Methodology. Four Arab countries -- UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait -- have been listed among the top 50 countries most ready to use ICT, according to the World Economic Forum in 2008.</span> <span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But the potential is very uneven. Only in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait is personal computer ownership higher than the global average. And bandwidth in the region is still pretty appalling -- less than half of the global average of bits of bandwidth per person even even the two most networked countries, Qatar and the UAE. As an example, the report notes that internet users in the US, Canada, the UK, Singapore and Japan enjoy speeds faster than one billion kilobits per second; in most Arab countries, the connection speeds range from 128kb to 102kh. So if this page seemed to take a long time to load, it's not in your head.</span> <span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But of course the real guts of the beast, and the purpose of the report, is content, content, content. And in this realm, despite the rapid uptake of internet use among Arabic speakers, is still dismal. According to a 2007 study by Madar, the Digital Economy Research Centre in Dubai, out of forty million of the forty billion web pages it looked at were Arabic-only -- or one thousandth of the total. </span>