In Amman, seaching for the elusive dotcom pixie dust

I'm in Amman all this week, taking a closer look at the IT industry here, and particularly at what seems to be a quite promising little ecosystem of internet startups.

Jordan's national focus on technology has been a big deal for a decade or more, and like pretty much every government in the region, it has paid extensive lip-service to the importance of developing a knowledge economy backed by solid technical infrastructure and education.

It is tricky to measure exactly how effective these government directives and programs actually are, but there is no doubt that Amman is now home to some of the Arab world's best internet companies - from the big guys like Maktoob and Jeeran, to some fairly interesting startups like Watwet (an Arabic Twitter) and Talasim (online photos / social networking).

The government has thrown quite a lot of resources at the sector, but so has every government, and you don't see Amman-style web coolness in Cairo or Dubai. So what I want to know is, what are the other ingredients that have made this happen? Can they be replicated, or is it some kind of unique magical pixie dust that appears and disappears basically independent of public policy or corporate strategy?

Anyhow, I'll be speaking with as many venture capitalists, startups and talking heads as possible here over the next week - watch this space for what comes out of it. If anybody out there has any thoughts on this, I'd love to see them in the comments.