Touched and Humbled

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I’m touched and humbled by the number of people around the world that care about me and have me in mind. There are literally thousands of them, and many get in touch every day.

There are the people that want to help me improve my love life and also the many people who want to make me thicker (although I am already quite stupid); the people who want to give me money in any number of ways – I am always particularly touched by the Nigerian ladies repatriating money who want to share it with me, but also the former members of US forces in Iraq – war heroes who still have time to spare me a thought in their plans to exfiltrate gold. Then there are the people who want to help me to get cheap meds, I never seem to find the time to thank them but point out that I’m not actually ill right now – it’s nice of them to think of me though.

A lot of people want to make me harder, but I’m too old to start kickboxing lessons. As for those that want to make me stronger and longer, I feel like thanking them but pointing out that I’m quite pleased with my current shape, although I could do with losing a few pounds if I’m totally honest. Sadly, I don’t want a Rolex, although lots of people seem to think it would set me off really nicely. As for the many offers I get that will help me make women moan, I find that forgetting to call my mum works fine, as does keeping a paper tissue in my trousers when I pop them into the wash.

I actually feel a little guilty that so many people care and get in touch to share their thoughts, but I am really bad at getting back to them and saying thanks. Outlook puts many of them in a special folder so I can reply to them all, but I keep deleting it by mistake.

The people I really, really appreciate getting in touch, however, are those lovely chaps and chapesses at Telco Extraordinaire Etisalat. I love when they think of me and offer me things over my telephone. Especially when I get up and cross the room to see who has sent me an urgent message and am delighted, instead, to get a picture message telling me to get an iPhone or call Lanzarote between 4 and 6am for half price every Monday for the next cycle of the moon.

So many people to thank. I only wish I could do it in person...

Gormenghast and the Future of Publishing

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Longer-suffering readers of this silly little blog will know about Harper Collins’ authonomy website and my opinion of it. For those that weren’t around, this post pretty much explains things. The post was something of a bombshell in its time, BTW.

Authonomy was Harper Collins’ attempt to harness the process of change that the Internet is undoubtedly going to bring to publishing in a similar fashion to the change it is bringing the music industry. Although the company scrupulously avoided outlining any strategy, it is my opinion that the overall gameplan was to create a website that would attract authors and encourage them to put their books online (Authonomy), a website for readers (Book Army) and then allow the authors to ‘self publish’ for the readers by using a POD (print on demand) supplier. Today’s POD systems can create high quality single books at near-market prices.

The Authonomy deal was this: if you made it to the top five books each month on Authonomy, a Harper Collins editor would read and critique your manuscript, or MS. Getting an MS in front of a Harper Collins editor is a bit like getting ten minutes with Warren Buffet to chat about your new business proposal – and just as difficult. So it’s no wonder that the site soon attracted something in the region of 6,000 writers. You’d be surprised how many carvers there are living around Castle Gormenghast.

My ‘generation’ on Authonomy (before anyone starts squealing ‘sour grapes’, I made it to the top five and got a ‘gold star’ as well as a crit from an HC editor. You’ll have to read the ‘backstory’ linked above to see what I thought of it) was pretty much the first ‘wave’ of writers to discover the site and consisted of a heck of a lot of really talented people. With all the energy of a group of kids in a huge playground, we invested a huge amount of time and effort on the site, vying to get to the top and using fair means and foul to do so. At the core of it, though, was a sincere belief in quality – the majority of users adhered to a principle that they’d only ‘back’ books that they would genuinely buy in a bookshop. Although there was a huge element of popularity and ‘plugging’ of books, we reasoned that if you could market yourself on Authonomy, it just proved you could market yourself in the real world too, so was fair game as part of the mix that makes a book.

It looked very much as if HC had created a site that was intended to do what the Internet does best – improve access and disintermediate the gatekeepers, in this case the agenting system that means that only books with obvious mass market commercial potential get through to publishers. Now it looked as if readers could actually vote for the type of book they’d like to see in bookshops – and if HC was to add authonomy winners to its lists, there’d be a new and wonderful outbreak of crowdsourced work to choose from. I can honestly say, BTW, that I read more work that I would buy on Authonomy than I have seen in bookshops all year. Really.

Of course, it was not to be. The POD plan lurked and I ‘outed’ HC when they sent a private email to some of us offering us beta list status. I accused the company of being insincere, in offering a clear ‘get published’ carrot when in fact it only ever intended to create a POD site to hedge against the tide of innovation. It is still my humble opinion that this was the case.

But something else has happened as a result of authonomy, something rather wonderful. In fact several things.

One thing is that I have stayed in touch with a relatively close-knit group of writers I admire and respect, and we’re just as much in touch a year after we all wandered away from Authonomy muttering darkly (A huge number of people have left the site, disaffected with the whole game and the way HC has chosen to play it).

A much more important thing is that the disaffection and annoyance at the ‘traditional’ publishing industry and the way it treats writers has resulted in two groups of writers from authonomy creating real, truly important (IMHO) initiatives that I believe are much more about the true future of publishing than Authonomy.

Year Zero Writers

Dan Holloway is a lecturer by day and maverick by night. Actually, he’s probably pretty maverick by day, too, but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

The author of the evocative and hauntingly beautiful Songs From the Other Side of the Wall, Dan founded the Year Zero Writers group as a collective designed to pool resources and talent in a way that would enable writers to reach out to audiences with their books. You can find out more about Year Zero here. Dan’s Year Zero projects include Free-e-day (see the BookBuzzr link below) and (to my knowledge) the first ‘FaceBook book’ (The Man Who Stole Agnieszka’s Shoes was written in weekly instalments on a FaceBook group, taking the input of readers to mould the plot). has seen Year Zero growing in popularity, attracting readers and participants and spawning a vibrant writers’ blog that is attracting readers in a most satisfactory manner.

Four books have been ‘published’ by Year Zero and more are planned - one compilation of short stories (Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair) and three novels. You can go to the Year Zero site, interact with the authors, find out more about their work (it is excellent) and then either download a PDF (free - in other formats here) or order a printed copy (paid for) of those books (the links are to Dan's 'Songs'). Although not the most active member of Year Zero, I am deeply proud to be associated with it.

Dragon International Independent Arts

Diiarts is a small independent imprint founded by writer Sarah Jane Heckscher-Marquis, which on November 14th will ‘conventionally’ publish four books that were hugely popular on authonomy and that represent, along with the three books that Year Zero has announced, some of the first books to have been published as a result of the authonomy project.
SJ has taken the highly unusual step of getting so frustrated at seeing great fiction (and I would personally, having read large amounts of all of them, commend them most highly to you, particularly Paul House’s stunning work, Harbour) mouldering on the slushpile and being overlooked by the Groans that she has put up her own money to publish some of her favourite work from the site. With the avowed intent of creating and maintaining her own small list of high quality fiction, she has had the pick of the best stuff on authonomy and has, I believe, chosen wisely.

As SJ says in the diiarts.com launch press release, “We believe there is a great deal of high quality, distinctive writing out there, which the larger publishers are just not picking up. Not only are readers missing out, but we’re losing something of the richness and diversity of the English language. We’re in danger of losing the spirit of innovation and thoughtfulness that’s been the hallmark of the English novel since we invented it. What we’ve seen is that more and more authors are expected to compromise on their vision, their voice and their artistic values, to cut their work down at whatever cost to fit supermarket display racks. We believe—passionately—that our authors should be in control of their own work. When they are, great books are the result.”

What has me chuckling evilly is the fact that both of these initiatives came about as a result of Authonomy. And, of course, I believe they both represent different facets of the change that will eventually lead to the flooding of Gormenghast - 'e-books' and small, independent publishers who are passionate about books, not shareholders, together will forge what I believe to be the future of publishing.

The Souk

We did something we haven't done for years over the weekend - went for a wander through the Bur Dubai souk, the 'Cosmos Alley' part of it.

I'd forgotten about it, to be honest. Sometimes you just get stuck in your routine and stop appreciating the things around you and this was most definitely our feeling as we wandered, entranced, through the swathes of brightly decorated cloth and windows packed with dummies, displays and stacks of samples. We flapped through entrances covered with thick plastic sheeting into shops filled with the pungent sweet floral smells of dhoop, dodged past people on the narrow pavements and managed to avoid the drips from the AC units lining the streets above us. The other danger is, of course, the pigeons that sit on them (and shit on you).

The only thing that has changed down there is the car parking (Dhs 10 for the 'private' car parks is a tad stiff). Everything else is timeless, immutable. This is the Dubai I first visited back in the '80s, the Dubai of traders and bustling streets, diversity and adventures down the sunny alleys where men push hand-carts stacked with boxes past groups of animated, henna'd women shouting to each other, the air ringing with the calls of shopkeepers trying to entice punters in to view their unparalleled collection of the world's finest cloths. This one from Japan, very good cotton. This one very beautiful, madam. This finest quality and my very best price.

We've got too used to joining in with the shuffling masses grazing the malls, dumbly wandering past those rows of generic, aseptic stores with their sparse piles of globalised brand name clothes and 'lifestyle choices'.

Now the weather's cooling, I think we'll be making an effort to put in more souk-time. It's remarkably good for the soul...

GeekFest 2.0 - The Morning After

W00t!

Thanks, everyone!

Sexy Tweets

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How can you sex up your Tweets?

It can be hard sometimes getting what you want said into 140 characters – particularly when you bear in mind that you’re actually closer to 120 characters if you want to get retweeted and 110 characters if you’re tweeting a link to something (which is the purpose of a great many Tweets). So how can you not only get your point across but also get it across so that people actually take notice of what you're sharing?

Here, in no particular order, are ten sexy Tweet tips.

1) Think like a newspaper – you’re writing a headline, so write in the present tense and in the language of urgency. Take out any waffle and stick to hard fact. Don’t do ‘man assaulted his dog by biting it’ but ‘man bites dog’. Tweets are great for practising headline writing!

2) Where possible and appropriate, use action words rather than passive ones, smashes, punches, kicks, breaks, shoots and that sort of thing.

3) Cut out prepositions (at, by, with, from, etc). You can always write around needing them, usually by re-forming the sentence in a more active way. ‘The Government has signed a big deal with the traffic authority’ becomes ‘Government signs traffic deal’. And so on.

4) Cut out articles, too – the definite (the) and indefinite (a, an) alike. ‘Durban to hold an ice skating championship for the first time’ becomes ‘Durban ice skating championship first’.

5) Adjectives are evil. Even the most awful sub knows that every time you use one in a headline, God kills a kitten. And it’s the same for Tweets, so avoid describing things (broad market, blue pony, ephemeral memory – the first word in each of these describes the thing it refers to and is unnecessary in the punchy language of headline or Tweet writing) unless it’s crucial to the meaning of your Tweet (which is, incidentally, highly unlikely).

6) Think about your followers and what they’re likely to be interested in. If you’re tweeting a link, you’ve already thought ‘the guys’ll be interested in this one’ but prioritise – what’s the over-riding biggie in there? Lead with that, the most colourful and impactful aspect of the link, not with an attempt to provide a deep analysis. The link will give the facts, you’re just looking to make sure people get why the link matters. A little extrapolation can help here – what will this move, fact or conclusion mean down the line, what will it lead to? You can do this by using a question, for instance, ‘MS Signs Bing Twitter Deal: Real Time Search a Reality?’

7) Do you need a hashtag? Hashtags make subjects easy to search and flags your Tweets as part of a conversation around a topic. I’m sure there’s a statistic somewhere for this, but the vast majority of Hashtags never get used beyond a few Tweets. If you do decide you need a hashtag, make it as short and yet unique as possible. One hashtag should do it - if you’re thinking of flagging a Tweet with two or more hashtags, take the hard road and drop the extras.

8) I’ve been interested by the evolution in the way we use emoticons and after a discussion around this with the team at Spot On Towers, I’ve started using emoticons as punctuation, rather than in addition to punctuation. It does rather go against the literary grain, but it cuts down on characters and ‘clutter’ too.

9) Use a link shortener. TweetDeck and other Twitter clients have automatic link shorteners, but my favourite is TweetBurner’s Twurls because it gives you statistics regarding how many people clicked through your link, when and so on. This means you can tell which Tweets are, in fact, most relevant to your followers – and if you’re Tweeting for work, gives you metrics.

10) Last but by no means least, apply the DIGAFF filter. (Do I Give A Flying) If you care about something you’re sharing, other people will. If you’re just passing something on that might be of interest to someone, it’s probably not worth passing it on. Also take a second to make sure that you’re not the 200th person to share that same fact! If you’re consistently sharing punchy, witty and relevant Tweets that link to cool stuff I, for one, want to follow you!

SEO and Strange Searches

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It's an odd fact of life that Blogger blogs have brilliant 'SEO', which has led to some odd rumples in the space time continuum. Every now and then I like to share a few of the stranger or more interesting searches that have popped people through a wormhole to this dusty little corner of the Web - I've included a few that I think are strange because I don't think I deserve the attention.

SEO, search engine optimisation, is a set of techniques that are used to attract the attention of search engines as they 'crawl' the Web looking for the right content to present to you when you search for something. Vagaries in SEO can mean that search engines put some interesting stuff at the top of the pile sometimes. For instance, to search for the glorious and famous Fakhreddine Restaurant in Amman and get me rambling can be something of a let down.

Strange searches (the phrase itself belongs to the blog - if you Google it, this is what you get) include batty or worrying things - for instance "www.anemal faking wamen", I don't think he meant impersonating, or the perennial "russian girl face slash" which I honestly wish I didn't 'own' as the first search result. Here are a few notes on recent searches that piqued my curiosity, just in case they pique yours!

how to fake incompetence
I'm not sure how to take this one, but a Google search of this phrase takes you straight to your number one incompetence fakery blog! I almost feel I should write a post to at least help those brilliant minds who are trying to disguise their talents under a bumbling, shambolic and useless exterior. Or perhaps just redirect them to HSBC, who are capable of doign a pretty good job of it - although I'm not entirely sure they're faking.

my city my metro
It's baffling, but with all the millions that Dubai's Road and Transport Authority (or RTA as we lovingly call them) has invested on the campaign to let us know that the damn huge HotWheels set on stilts that snakes ubiquitously through our city is 'our' metro, you still get people like me when you search for the slogan they pumped so much money into. As young people today say, 'pwned'.

confidence in media
What's worrying is not just that you get to here by searching for it, but that I have a constant drizzle of searches doing just that!

Fake deoxyribonucleic acid
The more insanely esoteric your post titles, the oddest searches you'll land. Sadly for the international criminal looking to hedge against future DNA tests by faking his DNA, the best thing the internet can offer is me whining about DNA testing in the UAE...

air outpost
It's actually slightly tragic that when you search for the name of one of the most important early documentaries to use the format we recognise today as 'documentary', created by London Films under Alex Korda and featuring a score by respected C20th composer William Allwyn, you get led here. Surely someone more interesting or important has something more interesting or important to say about this little slice of film history?

fake plastic dubai
I have nothing to add.

Mafsoum
The post linked above explains all. I'm delighted to 'own' the Arabic for schizophrenic.

nmkl pjkl ftmch
My favourite of all time. Not only do people actually SEARCH for 'nmkl pjkl ftmch', I now own it. Official. Ha, Sherif Abaza! Ha!

TDS for Aquafina and Fake Pringles
I'm actually quite proud that thousands of consumers from around the world have landed here having googled questions about what's actually in Aquafina and Pringles. It does show how 'consumer voice' can really make a difference to people's choices. I actually feel a bit useful. Have to stop that before I start taking myself seriously...

Flash!

Lemmy Kilmister via last.fm

Since Dubai Police went on their radar rampage, I have taken to using cruise control most of the time and it has undoubtedly saved me thousands of Dirhams. It saved me another few hundred this morning, coming down the Awir road out of the desert and into Dubai and passing the evil, hunchbacked dwarf in a green uniform who’d set up his mobile speed camera behind the big blue road sign.

I’d barely passed him when I saw a Hiace van coming up behind me, parked on my tail and flashing me to pull over. I was travelling at a carefully calibrated 119km/h and the road’s speed limit at that point is 100km/h. It is customary for Dubai Police to set radars at 20km/h above the limit, wot they calls 'the cushion'. So if I was being a tad naughty, my good friend in the Hiace was being unusually naughty.

I hate minivans. I hate that maniacal morons with single digit brain-cell counts and Lemmy’s taste for speed drive them, let alone that they have a high centre of gravity and frequently add to that inherent instability by being packed to the gunwales with workers.

I’d like to see ‘em taken off the roads – they caused 21% of all traffic fatalities in Dubai this year, including the horrific accident in Lahbab, the desert truck stop further out towards Hatta on the very road I was on. At the least I’d like to see ‘em confined to the inside lane.

Meanwhile, matey boy was giving me the full ‘I’m a sheikh, move over’ treatment, literally within a couple of feet of my bumper, his lights pumping.

So I did a bad thing, people. I could see the fixed speed camera looming into sight ahead of us and I graciously pulled over to let Speedy Keen past. He was hunched over the wheel, his tongue out and drooling as he passed me by, his cargo looking down at me as they shot past.

Bam.

I watched his arms fly up in the universal ‘I don’t believe it! Why me? Of all the damn things!’ gesture.

And I was glad. And I did show him I was glad.

Sorry. Two traffic-related posts in one month is the sign of a rogue, but that's how the dice fall sometimes...

The New Media Nightmare

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This is a guest post contributed by online pal and fellow writer of books Robb Grindstaff.

Robb and I originally encountered each other on Harper Collins' authonomy peer-review writer's site thingy and we've been, along with a group of like-minded peeps, keeping in touch and bouncing stuff around ever since. By day, Robb's a newspaper editor in the US and, as he mentions in the post, we've been talking a lot about the future of writing, both in terms of fiction and daily news media. This is his take:

A conversation started recently among a group of writer friends with this article, which discusses the new distribution methods for music and books and the effects on the content producers (musicians and writers). The conversation then segued into this article about the Associated Press and News Corp telling Google and Yahoo! it’s time to pay up for the news content they aggregate and distribute.

From the news media perspective, particularly the newspapers where I’ve worked for my entire career, online distribution has become the death knell for newspapers when it should have been the saving grace that eliminated the high costs of 'traditional' printing and distribution.

In the olden days (say, the 1700s up to 1989), journalists held the power. Newspaper publishers were the kings of the hill in their cities, making or breaking politicians and business/industry tycoons with the power of the pen. They sold the newspaper for a nickel, or a quarter or a dollar, everyone read it, most cities had two or three major competing newspapers and many people read more than one newspaper. The newspaper owned/controlled the content and content producers (journalists), the publishing (printing presses), and distribution (paper boys and newsstands). To this great mass market of readers, advertisers flocked and paid lots of money to get their ads in these newspapers that were delivered and read each day by virtually everyone.

There are books that could be written (and have been written) on the in-between parts, how we got from then to now, but today it’s looking like this:

• Journalists are unemployed in the thousands.

• Aggregators of news, such as Google and Yahoo, are the new distributors.

• Aggregators don't employ or pay a single journalist. They take content from everyone else. They have virtually no overhead in comparison to media. Their overhead is primarily computers servers which reach hundreds of millions for cents. They don't have to print and deliver a newspaper to every doorstep every day, pay reporters or camera crews or videographers or producers.

• Readers are wired and the Internet provides instant news rather than waiting for tomorrow morning's newspaper. Readers can find newspaper depth to stories (as opposed to the typically thinner reporting prominent on TV), but delivered instantly 24 hrs a day (the advantage of TV). Even better as it's delivered on demand. You don't even have to make sure you turn on the TV at a certain time to catch a certain newscast or news story.

• As readers have moved online, so advertisers have migrated to Google/Yahoo/etc., because that’s where the eyeballs are also aggregated.

• In the meantime, newspapers are going broke, bankrupt, closing, and laying off thousands of journalists as they've lost advertisers to online. Even though newspapers also operate their own Websites, they are by definition mostly local (other than the New York Times and a small handful of others), and the Internet is global. Readers don't feel a need to make sure they get their news from their local newspaper or local TV news. World and national news has become a commodity, and readers expect it for free, at their fingertips.

This worldwide access to information should be a boon to freedom and democracy.

But what will the aggregators aggregate, what will the distributors distribute, and what will consumers consume when all the journalists are gone? And when the level of competent journalism has declined to a certain point, who will be the watchdog over the government and major institutions on behalf of citizens and taxpayers?

That’s the thought keeps me up at night as the new world of media figures out a business model.

GeekTalks

One of the 'new features' we've introduced to GeekFest, the offline social for online people, is 'GeekTalks'. It seemed like a good way to use uber-funky hangout The Shelter's smart private screening room, giving people the chance to share user feedback, information, innovation or other stuff of note.

Here's what we've got in mind for GeekFest 2.0, which takes place at The Shelter on the 22nd October 2009.

Catalin Marin
HDR photography, what it is and how to do it.
An often controversial technique, HDR, or High Dynamic Range, photography makes use of a number of images of a subject that are taken at varying exposures and combined to create often stunning images of startling depth and richness. Catalin, who's the man behind popular photoblog Momentary Awe, will be sharing how you can do it for yourself without having to spend gazillions on specialist software.

James Piecowye and Giorgio Ungania
TEDx Dubai Update. Now the dust has settled, a review of TEDx.
Dubai's TEDx confounded sceptics and delighted its audience by delivering a day of inspirational and challenging talks from people who had something special to share. James and co-organiser Giorgio invested an amazing amount of time and effort into the event and will be organising TEDx Dubai 2010 as well - they're going to share how they felt the day went, what they got right, what they got wrong and even an idea of where they're going to go with next year's event.

Narain Jashanmal
The Internet, social media and the future of publishing
Narain Jashanmal heads the Jashanmals magazine, book and periodical distribution business and he's been working on where the future leads for the industry - we're seeing thousands of journalists laid off around the US and Europe, magazines closing down and advertising revenue moving, along with readers' eyes, online. So what's Narain's view of what the future holds for publishing - and how is he preparing for doomsday?

Tom Gara
The National’s ‘Project X’
The last GeekTalker of the night will be the enigmatic Tom Gara, formerly technology editor at Abu Dhabi-based UAE newspaper The National and founder of its technology blog, BeepBeep. He's working in a laboratory fifteen hundred metres below sea level in a lead-lined complex containing myriad racks of impressive machinery - together with a team of white-coated scientists whom he will kill before emerging with 'Project x' under his arm and bringing it to GeekFest to share.

The GeekTalks will start at around 8.00pm and are planned to last no more than 15 minutes each. The speakers are responsible for starting on time and finishing on time and bringing their own audience - we're not herding anyone anywhere or putting anyone under pressure to attend. The speakers can co-ordinate things between themselves if they like because we're not getting involved in all that heartache.

This will either be a glorious triumph or a shambolic mess. Either way, it'll be worth coming along to GeekFest and seeing what's going down!

By the way, we had a silly Twitter thing going on the other day to find the name for GeekFest 3.0 (and we haven't even worked out when we're going to do that yet!) and we'll be voting for the winner at GeekFest. You can take a peek at the #GeekFestSequelTitles hashtag on Twitter if you're curious (and many of the participants were definitely curious).

If you want to get updates and stuff, you can follow @GeekFestDubai on Twitter and there's a GeekFest FaceBook group too, for no particularly good reason. You can also email either myself or Saadia Zahid at the addresses given on the GeekFest Twitter page.

Do UAE Driving Test Reform Ideas Miss The Mark?

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The National's position on the doorstep of the Federal Government has allowed the newspaper to quickly carve a leadership position in the UAE's news scene - it's been consistently breaking stories that other papers aren't within a mile of, frequently scooping them on important moves being made or studied.

One such story today is the report on reforms being considered to the UAE's driving test regulations. Possible changes being suggested by consultants include requiring Brits, Canadians and Australians to pass a local theoretical and practical test before they can drive here, requiring taxi drivers to have two years' experience of driving in the UAE before they can drive a taxi and also allowing people to learn to drive, if they wish, with an unlicensed but experienced driver rather than being forced to go to a driving school.

Two of these reforms I totally agree with. The third is ridiculous and unworkable.

The moves are being bandied about by UK based consultancy Transport Research Laboratory, which is advising the Ministry of Interior. TRL, previously a UK government entity, was privatised in 1996 and offers counsel and services based around transport and logistics.

The reform idea that tickled me enormously was bringing in the UK practice of allowing people to learn to drive without being forced to go to a licensed instruction. In the UK, it's quite common for people to learn to drive with a family member, perhaps having a couple of 'top up' lessons with an instructor before sitting the test. These days, newly qualified drivers have to wear a green 'L' plate for a year after they qualify, as well, which I do think is a good idea.

The driving schools are obviously up in arms about that one, because they'd lose their easy source of revenue from giving a million (or whatever the mandatory number is this week) lessons to hapless learners. The standard of instruction (Sarah took some top-up lessons here and was horrified) here is often cited as being impossibly low and close to useless. I have certainly seen learner cars driven with incredible incompetence both with one and two occupants.

So I think that one would be interesting - and probably see the pass rate increase exponentially.

The Brits need a license idea, I support purely on the basis of fairness. It's not fair that we don't have to take a test while other nationalities do. If we are as superior and wonderful as we all think we are as drivers, we should breeze it. An alternative would be to widen the 'no license' requirement to any country that had professional standards of driving qualification and a similar road sign system to the UAE, but maybe that's just me being silly.

However, while I have no problem with British nationals being required to take a theoretical and practical test in the UAE, I cannot fathom the reasons that TRL's Britta Lang gave to The National - “The knowledge of local road safety requirements is quite incompetent. Many people don’t know the road signs and are not aware of the safety requirements.”

That's an unsustainable assertion (unless it's based on extensive research of the knowledge of local traffic signs among those newly awarded with their first residence visa, which I doubt) and an odd one, to boot. The traffic signs in the UAE are based on British signs, using the same colour coding and shapes for mandatory, advisory and cautionary signs. I can think of no traffic sign (please do prove me wrong) in use here that wouldn't be instantly recognisable to any Western driver, except perhaps the 'mind the camels' sign, which would require at least a passing knowledge of the shape of a one-humped ungulate.

In fact, in order to comply with local safety requirements, I have had to learn a number of new skills, including pulling over when the Nissan Patrol up my arse flashes and beeps at me, watching out for blind maniacs with a death wish crossing six lanes of motorway without signalling, predicting when taxis are about to stop on a sixpence with no warning because they've spotted a fare and the principle that swapping lanes puts you instantly in the wrong no matter what circumstances cause the collision, including willfully driving into you because 'it's my lane'.

In order to survive as a driver in the Middle East over the past 20 years, I have had to unlearn pretty much every rule of driving taught to me in my home country. I have no problem sitting a test here. I have a huge problem being told it's necessary because I don' t understand the traffic signs and safety requirements.

But the daftest proposal, and one that showed how outside consultants with no experience of the local environment can go impossibly wide of the mark, was that of insisting that taxi drivers should have two years' experience of driving in the UAE before they're taken on.

It's surely obvious to the most idiotic, drooling incompetent that only employing taxi drivers with 24 months' experience of driving in the UAE is a completely unworkable proposal and should never have made it past the unwise contribution the lippy intern made to the first working group discussion. And why you would propose safety legislation for taxi drivers when every misbegotten escapee from Tora Bora, Helmand and Swat is currently bombing around the UAE in bald-tyred, battered deathtraps hefting tons of rock, shit and cement, passes me by entirely.

In fact, the most sensible proposal in the whole article was made by a driving school owner, who presumably hadn't been consulted by the consultants. Ehad Esbaita, general manager of Emirates Driving Compan, suggested that professional drivers should have to undergo a more rigorous course of instruction and certification and that this would have an instant effect on road safety in the UAE.

I thought that one idea alone was worth everything the consultants had to say and more.

Dubai DOA?

Image via Wikipedia

Remember this post back in 2007 about Paramount having bought a script for a film called Dubai from 'tyro writer' Adam Cozad? The film was to be produced by, and star, Eric Bana, according to breathless reports in our local media and an almost unreadable Variety story, written in Variety's own strange 'Hollywoodese' dialect.

Having landed a regular search or two every now and then for Adam Cozad Dubai since I posted it, I idly followed one of the backlinks to find this oldish but still fascinating post on ScriptShadow, a blog that reviews Hollywood scripts.

That post, in turn, links to this. It's the PDF of the script that Paramount bought from The William Morris Agency.

What amazes me is not that a respected literary and theatrical agency bought this awful crap, or that a respected actor backed it as producer. I am also resolutely un-amazed that Paramount signed up to produce the film.

No. What amazes me is that all this happened to a script whose author was widely reported as never actually having visited Dubai when he wrote it. And boy, does it show when you read the script itself. I do commend a read of it - if it doesn't make you angry, you're not human. You won't finish it, you'll close the window in disgust within a few pages. Betcha.

We are introduced to our hero in a shot where he is playing his regular game of tennis with his gorgeous wife. The camera pulls back to reveal that the game is taking place on the helipad of the Burj Al Arab. The whole thing goes downhill from that low point with such pace that it's like being on a theme park 'drop' ride.

It's got everything - lots of greedy Arabs, a drop dead gorgeous wife who walks out on our hero because he's been busy at the office for 10 days and thought so little of her as to forget their anniversary and then buy her a Tiffany necklace to say sorry. It's got rich, powerful sheikhs who are arrogant (the ruler of Dubai is called Massaud for some odd reason) but who our hero shows up because he's just, somehow, smarter than they are. It's got shopping malls and grinning Sikh crane drivers ('Over 60% of the world's skycranes are there'), chase scenes through malls and undersea hotels, palms and the dizzying islands of the world. It's got an evil Iranian terrorist and a plot to manipulate financial markets through terrorism. It's even got a car chase with a dumper truck for some reason.

It's a reminder of everything I have hated about the Lalaland phenomenon, everything that made Dubai a cliché and then provided such a convenient downturn target for the vicious schadenfreude of the British press. It's also an example of everything dumb and hateful in mainstream Hollywood's over-simplistic and wilfully racist view of the Middle East.

Two years after the news of the sale of the script, there hasn't been another word about the project, which was supposed to have started filming in September 2007. I do hope to God that means it will never be made and that 'Dubai' is truly DOA.

Did the recession mean the project no longer had that 'edge' to it? That Paramount assumed that DoBuy had all reverted to sand and black goat-hair tents and so there'd be no use filming perfect blondes shopping in its marble-paved megamalls??

If so, it's an ill wind that blows no good...

Good News

Great news today thanks to the eagle-eyed team of uber-hacks at The National, which reports that the National ID card mess was, in fact, a waste of time.

Yes! From next year, the Labour Card and Residency Permit will be merged with the National ID Card to provide a single card and a single process for applying for it.

So all that going online and mucking about with the application application, wrestling with unusable websites and making appointments months ahead was about quite what? As bloggers and others have been pointing out for some time, on a 3-year visa cycle, integrating the National ID and residency processes would have meant the whole thing could have been implemented without the confusion, fuss and mess.

In fact, The National report has this telling quote from the acting director of EIDA, Dr. Ali al Khouri: “I will admit that we did not market the card properly at the outset. So now we are wanting to market it in such a way that shows how beneficial it is for people to have.”

Anyway, let's not be negative. The good news is that we'll have a single card and a single transaction platform for almost all our dealings with government. And, for those of us that actually bothered in the end to do the ID card thing, the process of migrating to the new, integrated, card will be seamless, apparently. We 'have to do nothing'...

We shall see...

GeekFest Update

GeekFest 2.0 is to be held at The Shelter on the 22nd October, which is next Thursday. Putting 2.0 after the name makes it so very cool, but the next time it'll be even cooler because we haven't even got to Web 3.0 yet.

Isn't this all so terribly exciting?

As you may remember, we put GeekFest 2.0 back to give Twestival Dubai some space (a deep apology to Mr and Mrs Goat, who didn't get the Twitter heads-up that we'd changed the date).

Now it's full steam ahead for the 22nd and we've got some treats for you.

GeekFest is intended to be an offline social for online people and would be interesting for anyone who's involved in the online world and in using technology to create, educate, entertain, inform or just play around.

The event remains resolutely un-organised. We're suggesting a 7pm start, but you can please yourselves when you turn up. We have added a couple of aspects to the event, mainly to cater to the feedback that while everyone loved GeekFest 1.0, they thought some things to give it more, well, purpose might be in order. Your wish is our command...

TechnoCases
We have, as previously reported, brought in two technology companies to mount technology showcases at the event. Both Nokia and Lenovo will be there showing off their snazzy new gadgets. Both have promised not to hassle the geeks - the idea is that they're there for you to talk to if you want to - no aggressive marketing, shouting or anything. If this works, we'll do more of these next time.

GeekTalks
After 8 o'clock, we'll have a number of speaking slots for people to share interesting technologies, projects, thoughts, ideas, practical things or disgusting personal habits. Each slot will be 15 minutes long maximum and it will be up to the speaker to invite his/her audience, start on time and end on time. This will either work perfectly because of the collective will for it to do so, or will descend into absolute chaos. Either way, we're not taking responsibility.

We'll be posting a schedule at the start of next week, but there are a couple of slots still free if anyone fancies having a go. I shouldn't have to say this, but the law obviously states absolutely no sales pitches - this is intended to be user generated.

Windows 7 Launch Party
As you may or may not know, Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system launches around the world on October 22nd and Microsoft has earnestly been soliciting participants for a number of launch parties around the world. You can find out more from this gloriously inept video.

Sadly, our plans to host a Windows 7 Launch Party have had to be cancelled following a viciously outraged reaction to the idea from the Macintosh community. You haven't heard the last of this, Mac Freaks.

Eats
The Shelter, as you probably are aware, has many enviable features - including its very own More Café. Food and drink at GeekFest will be, thanks to a sneaky commercial arrangement with the TechnoCase chaps, freely available at no cost to attendees. And excellent, too!

Location
The Shelter is in Dubai's Al Qouz industrial area. Here's a map!

Registration
Are you kidding? Just turn up...


If you want to get updates and stuff, you can follow @GeekFestDubai on Twitter and there's a GeekFest FaceBook group too, for no particularly good reason. You can also email either myself or Saadia Zahid at the addresses given on the GeekFest Twitter page.

Corbis Blocked

Image via CrunchBase

Etisalat has blocked Corbis, the photo library owned by one William Gates III Jnr.

A major site used by millions of creatives around the world, the Corbis picture library is an important resource. Blocking it sets a worrying precedent - does this now mean that other picture libraries are going to be subject to blocking? And what does that mean for the UAE's creative industries?

Creativity comes with freedom of expression, they're old (ahem) bedfellows. Where there is creativity you find people pushing the envelope.

I think you need to take a position - make an evaluation of the cultural value of a site vs a couple of things you don't like. Not just smash in a block the second your software catches sight of a naughty bit.

This random blocking is helping nobody - I've posted about it before. Flikr is bad enough, social networks are bad enough.

But a major internationally renowned image library?

They've got to be kidding...

BTW, Du has not blocked Corbis. So we may yet see this potty decision reversed.

Magic? Not really, no...

Image by netzkobold via Flickr

UAE telco Etisalat yesterday unveiled the new 'HTC Magic' smartphone, a device based on Google's Android operating system. There's no sign from today's newspapers that anyone at yesterday's press conference chose to press the telco that likes to say 'ugh' on the massive network outages that have taken place over the last few days. We're all 'on message' today.

This is the third device that the telco has announced it will support and sell in a reversal of the decision, taken back in the early '90s, to liberalise the UAE's terminal equipment market. Etisalat also sells RIM's BlackBerry (the source of the great spyware scandal) and Apple's iPhone. That decision, formalised in comments to media yesterday, is a tectonic shift in the market and deserved more coverage than it got. But perhaps its importance wasn't blindingly obvious enough for it to be picked up.

Gulf News' slightly breathless coverage is eclipsed by Emirates Business 24|7 (which is now, of course, only published five days a week, making it Emirates Business 24|5, but we'll let that go), which trumpets 'Etisalat to launch own branded mobile phone'!

The Emirates Business story on the HTC Magic mixes it up confusingly with the news that Etisalat is going to go back into the 'own brand' terminal market, with a new 'phone being brought to market under the 'Etisalat' brand.

Gulf News' story provides a great deal more clarity, information and depth on the HTC touch, which is a nice surprise. It also points out that the phone will ship with 'Goggle' applications such as mail, search, maps and Google Talk.

Goggle. Nice one, GN subs.

The telephone's 'connectivity technologies' include HSDPA 7Mpbs and HSUPA 2Mbps, reports Gulf News with a charming and complete lack of context.

HSPA is the 'next generation' of telecom protocols, at times referred to as 'beyond 3G', High Speed Packet Access. it comes in two flavours Downlink (HSDPA) and Uplink (HSUPA) and supports hyper-fast mobile data rates - today's HSPA networks can pump over 20Mbps down to a mobile, while HSPA evolution is going to more than double that. So we're talking about hyper-fast network access, streaming video, rich content downloads and all that good stuff. Except, of course, at Etisalat's rates, the whole proposition is utterly ruinous.

At 7 Mbps, you would eat through 1Gig of data in a little over two and a half minutes, taking 25 minutes to munch through the 10Gigabyte package that will be bundled with the HTC Magic contract (reports, uniquely, The National).

Worse, you'll be paying a smidgen under Dhs75 per second for data access when you're roaming.

Yup - at Etisalat's ridiculous roaming fees of Dhs2.5 per 30 Kbytes of data, you'll certainly be loving that old high speed download Magic!

(If this post seems unusually grumpy, it's probably because my lowly 384kbit 3G Nokia has been cut off by said telco because my bill is over Dhs1,000. Or two seconds' worth of Magic!)

The Hungriness of Women

Why do I do this? Why don’t I learn?

Last time around was AdWomen, the event at Dubai's JamJar where I got torn to shreds by smart women with long, gouging fingernails while that craven ratfink of a journalist Austyn Allison looked on in vicarious glee and took photos. Did I learn? Did I hell!

Yesterday I gave a talk to the inaugural business lunch event of the Abu Dhabi International Businesswomen’s Group. And, like a fool, I let The National’s Jen Gerson see what was going on. I should have told her she couldn’t come, but she was insistent. Now I know why. Because she wanted to crow as I fell to a cannibalistic feeding frenzy.

The room was small, cosy. About 50 businesswomen, smart, educated, empowered. The same sort of bunch as AdWomen - just as pleasant and friendly and triggering the same gut-churning dread. Why didn’t I learn my damn lesson? Gerson is delighted as the room fills with ladies in smart outfits and suits, chatting to each other animatedly. She’s giggling insanely like a blonde Beavis and Butthead, darting glances at me as sweat breaks out on my brow.

“They’re gonna eat you!” she whinnies, licking her lips with sick anticipation. “Eat you! Hur! Hur!”

I try to ignore her vicious journalist’s jibes and prepare myself mentally for the talk. The projector’s bust and the Rotana people bring a new one. My palms are damp and I'm alternately freezing and sweating as the guests take their seats. They start to stand and introduce themselves to the new members who’ve turned up. This one runs a small business, that one's a lawyer. More than one lawyer. Too many lawyers. Dammit, they're going to eat me, then sue? Gerson’s standing by the door (just like Allison, I noticed, damn journalists always position themselves with a clear route to the exit) and leering at me. I can hear her gleeful whickers over the chatter in the room.

And then we’re off. IBWG committee member Pam introduces me and I walk up to the podium. Gerson’s words are ringing in my ears, “They’re gonna eat you!”. As I start talking, some fifty pairs of eyes are on me. The starter’s been served, but they’re not touching it and I’m suddenly keenly aware of the fact that I’m slightly overweight. They’d get a little over a kilo and a half each. I watch one lick her lips as I try to keep the flow of the talk going, showing them that image of the first Arpanet diagram, explaining how Caxton disintermediated the Catholic Church and the Internet disintermediated millions, talking about collaboration and the overnight movement of x-rays around the world. It’s disjointed, a tumble of thoughts and concepts and I just keep talking, suddenly aware that I’m in no danger as long as I stay up there, out of reach.

Gerson’s on her Blackberry, its lime green cover dancing as she thumbs profanities out to Twitter, lifting the damn thing to take photographs. She’ll be there as they tear my flesh and start feeding. I hit the last slide and we’re into Q&A. The questions are smart, businesslike. But I hear the rasp of indrawn breath through teeth in little sussurations, “Fff Fff Fff Fff Fff.”

One of the ladies smiles at me and I realise her canines are unusually developed.

Q&A is halted by the arrival of the main course and as I sit down I realise to my horror that Gerson’s legged it. When it’s so bad the journalists leave, you know things are going to get sadistically twisted fast. I’m still talking, trying to distract them. Pam and Karen are delightful company but I can feel the pressure around me. They’re just pretending to be interested so that they can move in when I’m relaxed. You don’t want the prey to be tensed up, ruins the meat.

And then it happens, the miracle arrives. The Beach Rotana’s chocolate covered chocolate mousse on a bed of chocolate and biscuit, drizzled with chocolate sauce and decorated with a long white chocolate twist. It’s an incredible dessert and I realise then that it’s distracted them – all eyes are on the plates and I have a window of escape. I babble thanks at them, but they’re not seeing me, forks rising and falling and little gasps of delight echoing around the room.

I grab my laptop bag and run, bursting through the door to freedom and the light of the lobby, chocolate still smeared across my cheek. My heart doesn’t stop hammering until I’m in the car and tearing up the blacktop to Dubai.

One day I’m going to get even with Gerson. One day.

The Arab Media Awards Changes

Image by sebFlyte via Flickr

Changes have been announced to The Arab Media Awards, a move that at least partly explains the stream of decidedly odd tweets emanating from the Dubai Press Club Twitter handle yesterday.

According to reports today, the awards are going to change to take more account of online media and young professionals. The inclusion of young journalists has been accomplished by adding a new award for, wait for it, 'Young Arab Journalist'.

As for online, the new focus for the awards, recognising the tectonic shifts that are shaking the world of print media around the world, has been accomplished by removing the word 'print' from the name of the awards.

If the story is complete, then there's no new award or category of awards for online journalism. Just the removal of the word 'print'...

So that's it. That's the evidence that these awards now recognise online journalism and which justifies Gulf News' headline, "Revamped award to cover all aspects of journalism".

Fail

Image via Wikipedia

One of my favourite ever legal precedents is something of a media joke. If you want to tell someone to eff off without actually saying it, it is common to refer them to Arkell vs Pressdram. Pressdram is the publishing company responsible for the British satirical magazine Private Eye (not welcome, sadly, in the Emirates where it remains 'not on sale').

Arkell threatened the Eye with legal action in the correspondence, which has been reported as going something like this:

Arkell v. Pressdram (1971) [unreported]

Solicitor (Goodman Derrick & Co.):
We act for Mr Arkell who is Retail Credit Manager of Granada TV Rental Ltd. His attention has been drawn to an article appearing in the issue of Private Eye dated 9th April 1971 on page 4. The statements made about Mr Arkell are entirely untrue and clearly highly defamatory. We are therefore instructed to require from you immediately your proposals for dealing with the matter. Mr Arkell's first concern is that there should be a full retraction at the earliest possible date in Private Eye and he will also want his costs paid. His attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply.

Private Eye:
We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off.

That was the end of the correspondence but the start of a timeless reputation for Mr. Arkell, who remains, over 30 years later, a joke.

Anyway, I thought I’d just share this rather marvellous example of what happens when organisations do choose to ‘do an Arkell’ with online communities and commentators. Guinness fired off a ‘cease and desist’ at the chucklesome (and classic, you’ll thank me if you didn’t already have this one in your reader) Fail Blog.

Guinness was asking for a logo to be removed from a screen grab used on the Fail Blog - it qualified for a 'fail' entry for having a Guinness Book of Records record for 'most people killed in a terrorist attack'.

The blog modified the offending material and then posted up its opinion of Guinness and its pompous letter for its significant readership to enjoy. It also posts a link which it says is its full legal response to Guinness.

The link is a ‘Rick Roll’ – the modern Arkell vs Pressdram?

A Beautiful Failure

Image via Wikipedia

My post earlier this week about the days of makeup and SprayMount drew a couple of starry-eyed comments from fellow ancients who could remember the smell of galley being pasted down onto board, which was lovely. But a link I got from Nieman Labs yesterday night really made me stop and think about these things. Bear with me, this might just be relevant somehow, in some way.

Digital design agency Information Architects took part in a pitch to redesign Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger and lost the pitch in what they describe, rightly IMHO, as a ‘beautiful failure’. They had applied ‘new world’ design thinking to a newspaper. And golly, what an interesting set of ideas they presented. Their piece on it is linked here and I do recommend a read.

Newspaper design has long been predicated on the need to control the readers’ eyes, big bold headlines scream important story, type is arranged to give the reader a progression through the page, elements are balanced so that readers’ eyes find information in a logical, flowing way. Typography is used to denote importance – a bold cap in white space draws attention, an italic caption under a picture is an element we recognise and expect. In fact, if the text floating immediately under a picture weren’t a caption, we’d be wrong-footed by the discontinuity.

But Information Architects did a brilliant thing. They designed their newspaper as a paper for a digital age reader, recognising the fact that our habits, our expectations of the format of content, have changed.

The first thing that really got me going was that they had put important text keywords in blue. I thought that was amazing. Although, obviously, paper doesn’t hyperlink, we now know what blue means – it means a keyword. Together with their decision to go for a big body text with big leading, this meant their proposed body copy didn’t look like a newspaper. But IA had already realised that: they took the conscious decision to throw out ‘conventional’ newspaper design – the idea that a newspaper should somehow follow rules that made it look like a newspaper.

They did a lot of other cool stuff, too – mixing column formats and using infographics, big pictures and left to right, top to bottom prioritisation of stories, much of which was informed by using a ‘web-centric’ approach to design. But it’s the blue keywords that would have been a ‘beautiful’ revolution.

While you obviously can’t click on the blue words in the paper, IA’s idea was that by scanning these keywords, you should be able to read the basic, core, news on the page in 10 seconds. The paper’s website would mirror these keywords with a link to a series of sub-links arranged chronologically. That’s a huge decision, meaning that the journalist, or in this unfair world the sub-editor, would have to pick out the keywords for the reader – a new skill in itself. And then the web team would have to work with those words to provide depth and context behind them (something you could see a technology like Zemanta taking a role in). It’s an exhilarating idea that links print to web and challenges the way that information is presented, managed and prioritised by the ‘traditional’ medium because it recognises the way we have changed in the way we browse, consume and identify information.

(Zemanta is a cool plug-in I use to provide me with contextual information related to blog posts - it selects copyright-free images for me to use and provides 'autolinks' for posts. I don't usually use the links but I did in this post both to 'blueify' it and also to show how a technology like Zemanta could be used to help automate the production of links for a project like Information Architects' newspaper. Okay, okay I'll be a good boy and get back to the snarky, goofy stuff next week, promise.)