The Al Gore Rhythm

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I suppose it was my own fault. There was an M&M lying on the table by my new and very orange Lenovo Yoga (slicker than Slick Dick McSlick, the slickest slickster since Slippery Sidney Slickstein) and I fancied a little chocolaty treat as I shopped online. I realised - it would have been in time - that dropping red pill-like things when you're staying in a house inhabited by a teenager is perhaps not the smartest thing to do. but the Brother In Law put a Connemara down, slapped me on the back and said 'This'll put hairs on yer chest!'.

I swallowed involuntarily and the little red sugar-coated morsel went down fast. I chased it with a sip of Connemara. This might have been where things started to unravel.

For a start, the thing I'd been browsing turned into another thing. Apparently people who'd been looking at my thing also bought the other thing. Would I like both things together? If I said yes and accepted a lifetime subscription to Super Wonderful Services I could have both for free as part of a package to access a million different streams of really great content and entertainment designed to make me happy and more fulfilled in life.

The screen started to blur. Voices chanted 'Do it! Do it!' and there was a powerful hypnotic whine coming through the speakers. Maybe I wanted to refine my choices based on the content I'd been accessing? My mouth felt glued together as I tried to scream 'Nooo' and I found myself trying to push the mouse through molasses. My wife's a teacher, we have young nieces and nephews. I don't need Elmer's First Colouring Book to become part of my lifestyle choices, let alone Lady Gaga perfume and, Saints Preserve Us, One Direction albums. Too late, Elmer's there, exhorting me to sign up for my exclusive preview of SWS and enjoy discounted access to films, ebooks, free shipping and more.

Try it and you can have this thing you really want. Click here to find out what it is. I'm trying to stop myself but the CLICK button is throbbing insistently and there's no button for 'NO'. A counter starts 5; 4; 3; 2; I'm trying to find the off switch but it's too late. 1! Congratulations, you now have a subscription to SWS and two extra family members have just been notified their kidneys are subject to donation.

Overwhelmed, I fall backwards off my chair, ripping the cord from the laptop but the screen's still on, downloading movies I'm going to love and pushing books I'll appreciate more than anything else in the world. I black out briefly.

The Niece from Hell is standing over me as my eyes flutter open. 'Why are you being strange again?'

I point my finger at her accusingly. 'You're taking LSD! You left one here on the desktop! A red pill!'

'That?' The contempt is icy. 'That was an M&M. Would you ever stop stealing my chocolate?'

She turns on her heel, leaving me lying on the floor amongst the carnage. The screen is glowing with a comforting blue aura, Elmer mouthing the words 'Great Choice' and coruscating slowly as the hard disk light flickers, content downloading in a stream of algorithmically selected stuff I don't want, need or understand...

How To Drool A Frog - More Weird And Wacky Searches

(Photo credit: thms.nl)

I occasionally dip into Sitemeter, the natty little analytics widget I don't use very much, to see what people have been searching to land themselves on this mouldy sub-corner of the Interwebs. I took such a dip today because I couldn't really get into the swing of writing for a while and decided to play a bit until the fancy once more took me to recommence my story of The Simple Irish Farmer, which is my WIP of choice.

I found that not a few people are clearly concerned about whether or not they put plastic in Subway bread - in fact thousands of them have Googled the topic and found themselves reading my take on the whole thing - their searches for truth leading them here. I find it very odd that a silly little blog like this can not only rank so high in search, but draw so many searchers for both this and the Tim Horton's French Vanilla Coffee is junk post. I am similarly pleased to say I have offered succour to thousands of punters who have been tearing their hair out at Chuck Norris the Trackpad on their Samsung S5 Ultrabooks.

Similarly, Sri Lanka Gems is a popular search term - and to my mild shock, my post about the gem and spice sales scams of Sri Lanka is number six result on Google. In the world. I mean, how mad is that? "Gemstones Sri Lanka" gets the same result, which I guess has Klout running around saying I'm influential about gemstones. A subject about which - I hasten to add - I am pretty much utterly bereft of knowledge let alone authority. A similar mind-boggling search anomaly is to be found in the phrase, "where did Nokia go wrong" which features this post on the first page of search results. And that's bonkers. Truly.

Somebody in Pakistan searched the Interwebs for the interesting-sounding "picrs sixi porn salik 17 21" which just led him here, which I am willing to wager a considerable sum was not the result he had in mind. Or even she, come to think of it. Apparently, online onanistic fortune favours the literate. And another rube got here by Googling "marage night fack movie". Were they after a fake movie or a fu... oh, never mind...

Search "online onanistic fortune". It's mine, all mine, precioussss...

Someone else was looking for a cartoon character curry - searching for "tom and jerry masalas", presumably to accompany a nice Daffy Duck Dosa. The searcher, rather worryingly based at Nokia's corporate headquarters over in Finland, got here instead. I say rather worryingly because you'd think they'd have a future to concern themselves about rather than playing about on Google looking for silly curries.

Another person arrived at La Blog by Googling "salmon farming in saudi arabia".

It's Yemen, dunce.

Then there are the surreal. I mean what did you think you'd get when you slammed "www.indianheroinafack blogspat.com" into Google? Blogspat. Love it. Interestingly, the 'perp' works for the Miller Brewing Company in Wisconsin, Milwaukee and was using a crappy old Nokia 5.0 browser. They got this for their troubles...

My favourite of this particular batch was the search term 'How to drool a frog' which really makes the mind boggle just a tad, but led its searcher to this post about HSBC's drooling incompetence. Which wasn't, I'm sure, what they were after. And no thank you, I don't want to know what they were actually looking for...

Any of them, come to think of it.

Groundhog Day

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's been one of those weeks. First we had the tremor from the Qeshm earthquake and then Google's Driverless Car.

The link?

Well, those few weird moments of seeming terrestrial liquefaction having been enjoyed, I then got to watch Gulf News tweeting that it was going to report on the thing I had just experienced as the rest of Twitter shared its rainbow reaction. As if I'm going to put my life on hold to wait for GN's report. The next day, almost 24 hours after I had watched friends and Twitter in general record their reactions to the event, I get to see news stories about the thing I had lived through the day before.

I had sort of moved on, actually. Including a wander around the internet to research a blog post in which I learned more about the incident and the factors behind it than the Gulf News story - that I hadn't been waiting for, funnily enough - eventually told me. Context and analysis? Don't make me laugh, cocky...

And then yesterday opened with news reports about Google's driverless car, a project most of the people I know had been aware of for some months. Things had moved on and Google had released pictures of its prototype 'level four' car - no steering wheel at all for you, matey. The news online had broken the day before, Google's release went out on the 27th May (Tuesday) and most online outlets led with the story yesterday first thing. So listening to the Business Breakfast on Dubai Eye Radio this morning, it was odd to hear some shouty Americans on Bloomberg being played out. A sort of strange, layered iterative experience - the presenters played a recording of Bloomberg playing a recording of an interview with Sergei Brin.

So I get to hear a recording of a recording of a person talking about the news I knew and saw the day before.

This sort of thing is happening so frequently now, I'm losing track of what day it is. I keep looking to the future only to find mainstream media dragging me back to the past.

Odd.

Book Post: McNabb's Law Of Clicks

(Photo credit: MarkyBon)

McNabb's Law of Clicks applies principally to book promotion, but I find it extends equally well to other areas of Internet based activity that require an action.

When I say an action, I mean a real world interaction or transaction of some shape and form. For instance, paying someone some money to buy a thing or perhaps giving someone some money for a cause. It doesn't have to be monetary but it must be a transaction involving some degree of real world effort that goes beyond a 'like' or a 'share'. You know, getting people to actually DO something. Get up and move around. Change a physical thing. Anything beyond an RT and 'Yay for this'.

So here it is. McNabb's Law of Clicks:

100,000 impressions 
= 1,000 clicks 
= 100 opens 
= 10 views 
= 1 sale

I have been testing it these past three years with book promotions of various shapes, forms and sizes, also by tracking reviews (online or in traditional media) and clicks through the blog, Twitter, Facebook and the book websites for Olives - A Violent Romance, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy. 

I now feel I can go public with the research. It's not peer-reviewed but hell, I'll live.

The very inexactitude of the science proves its applicability to our real and so very fractal world. Or in other words, sure, you go ahead and disprove it. Fill yer boots...

Diana And Downfall

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I hadn't realised this, mostly because I'm not really into films to the point where I only ever watch them when I'm flying Emirates, but the new and critically panned film Diana which was premiered last Thursday, was directed by none other than Oliver Hirschbiegel. Here's the trailer.

Oliver Whowhatable? German film director Oliver Hirschbiegel is perhaps best known as the genius who gave us Downfall, the film that spawned the meme that is 'Hitler finds out about...'.

You'll likely remember the meme even if you haven't seen the whole film. Hitler raves at his closest aides, racked by Parkinsons, bitter, furious and clearly already defeated. The gag is that it's in German, so all you have to do is add funny subtitles and you've got a hilarious backdrop for dialogues such as Hitler finds out there's no camera in the iPod Touch or the monumental (over 8 million views) Hitler finds his XBox Live account has been terminated. The meme takes us to Hitler's reaction that Twitter is down and, of course, his reaction to the iPad. There's even the rather chucklesome Hitler is fed up with all the Hitler rants.

Someone somewhere is going to get a thesis, by the way, out of the fact that every single one of these have awful spelling or grammatical errors in the subtitles. The Internet, it would seem is highly amusing but woefully illiterate.

It's perhaps a testament to the power of actor Bruno Gantz's portrayal of Hitler and the realism of this rant scene that the meme has run like this - in fact, the studio tried to stem the tide of parodies with a takedown attempt, but in the end you can't turn back the sea. There are hundreds of the things out there, more still - over three years later - being added every day with each new event that someone, somewhere cares about enough to slap a few subtitles on that little piece of film history. Some of the best, original clips succumbed to the takedown. Many are, of course, merely lame. But they generally still have the power to bring a grin to your face.

Much of the humour comes from the fact this man is the most reviled figure in human history. The idea that he wants to tweet about his dog dying, that the AT&T network's no good or any of this stuff is part of its brilliance. But it's the best thing to do to evil, really: laugh at it, no?

So now Hirschbiegel has created a film about Diana which the critics have queued up to have a pop at. The Guardian's reviewer noted that sixteen years after that car crash, Diana has died a second awful death and the gag, albeit a tad obvious and even mildly obnoxious, neatly sums up London's reaction to the film.

I can't wait, personally. I can't wait for the parodies to start. I wonder if they'll have German subtitles?

Meanwhile, do feel free to share links to any notable 'Hitler rants' in the comments!

Life Of A Stranger...

(Photo credit: ST33VO)

It's been going the rounds the past couple of days, with nearly half a million visits knocked up in about a week or so of its existence: Life Of A Stranger Who Stole My Phone is a tumblr blog put up by a vengeful German tourist after her mobile was nicked during a drunken skinny-dip in Ibiza.

About four months after the incident, she noticed her phone was uploading images to Dropbox - whoever had stolen it hadn't disabled the feature. Worse, someone called Hafid tried to hit on her, accessing her Facebook account from the mobile. The images clearly show Dubai locations - and Hafid's love of selfies and his friends' goonish activities combine nicely with the waspish commentary of a girl wronged. It's compelling stuff - Hafid is such a numb-nut and she's so clearly still angry. Daft picture by daft picture, we all enjoy Hafid's daftness vicariously through his unwitting sharing and her witting barbs. The combination of clownish young Arab men and vengeful Valkyrie is glorious.

I have been enjoying the blog along with so many others, right up to the point where @sudanpessimist wondered during a Twitter conversation, "Probably poor guy brought it from a second hand shop. Doesn't seem to be able to afford Ibiza hols :("

That was an 'oh' moment. Because flicking back over Hafid's piccies with that thought in mind, you get the feeling that maybe my Sudanese friend has a point. Part of what makes Hafid so amusing in the context of the blog is that he is, indeed, pretty - well, basic. And if he does have a point, then something terrible is happening. Because Hafid might just have bought a second hand phone. And over half a million people are laughing at him because he's simple and poor.

I found myself caught in time. I dislike Internet mobs and I'd found myself in one. I stood and let the crowd move on, the burning brand in my hand useless and held limply to my side. The monster in the castle on the hill might not be a monster after all. And we were all so ready to believe in the monster. We always are - remember 'dog poop girl', the Korean student whose life was destroyed by a JPG?

If our young German friend decides to come to the UAE for her next holiday, she could be in for a surprise. Because of course in UAE law she has defamed Hafid by posting his private images online. Sure, you could argue it was using her private phone and her private Dropbox and the act of theft preceded his use but I suspect even if he were the thief the law would stand. But if he wasn't the thief he actually has been thoroughly defamed and the UAE's law would actually be serving justice in a way any European sensibility would recognise as fair.

Which is pretty wacky, if you ask me. And all part of defining the new moral landscape that is the Web...

Postscript. Now the Daily Mail's picked up the story. Reading it on an iPad, I realised I recognised the mosque in the pictures posted up on the blog - it's the big 'Sheikh Mohammed' mosque outside the Sharjah Radisson Blu. And the beach in shot is down along from our house.

That Was The ArabNet That Was

(Photo credit: carrierdetect)

It's been a hectic week, hence the lack of posts. The ArabNet Dubai Digital Summit sucked down more time than I'd ever have thought it was going to - but what a time it's been. The week's flown by in a whirlwind of panels, chatting, eager startups and blethering about all things online.

Not even HSBC's decision to mount an insane war against their SME customers, reported upon excellently by the Al Arabiya English website, tempted me to post. Truth be told, there just wasn't the time and anyway, what could be possibly said that would make any sort of sense of a bank unilaterally shutting down business accounts in the United Arab Emirates with just 60 days' notice - just before the summer and Ramadan coincide to ensure 60 days' notice is insufficient?

Even HSBC's assertion that it 'remains committed to the SME market' wasn't enough to break the ArabNet spell. Although now looking back on the story that comment still provokes wide-eyed astonishment. We've wiped out the Marsh Arabs but remain committed to all indigenous peoples. Right.

I got to have a little gentle fun with banks myself at the ArabNet banking solutions panel, when Graham from Radical outlined some of the cool stuff his company had been doing with banks internationally and the very brave Pedtro from Emirates NBD took to the stage to speak for the Middle East's own banks. Perhaps starting the panel with the assertion that all Middle East banks are rubbish wasn't terribly PC of me (I realised my introduction to the topic had turned into a spittle-flecked rant only when the audience started to turn into a mob hefting burning brands and demanding to march on the monster), but I thought if we could all agree that basic principle, we could then move on and not spend an hour throwing custard tarts at Pedro.

And that's the way it worked out, generally - but I came away from the session with the feeling that people like Pedro are fighting against legacy systems and legacy-minded management, while banks in other parts of the world - leaner, meaner and generally more competitive - are providing some really smart digital services. You wonder what's holding us back and then something like HSBC vs SME happens and you realise that yes, it is pretty nigh hopeless.

I enjoyed many of the talks and panels I attended at ArabNet, there were few 'duffers' in the mix which was a blessing - and with three tracks on the go, rare was the moment when something interesting wasn't happening somewhere. Skills marketplace Nabbesh was raising money on startup crowd investing platform Eureeca, Wally got Dhs 1.5 million funding for its blisteringly smart expenses tracking app (it scans receipts and lets you track locations, venues, expenditures and the like), Restronaut took everyone out for dinner (the latest brain-child of Make Business Hub founder Leith Matthews) and private car booking service Careem offered everyone a free ride. There was a lot of stuff going on, I can tell you.

I had the dubious honour of being the last speaker at ArabNet Dubai and so was surprised to find a packed room in front of me - that's a testament to the engagement and commitment of the audience at the event. There were a few grumbles of 'three days is too long' but I'm not so sure, myself. It wasn't a stretched out agenda by any means. Anyway, I spent fifteen minutes gibbering and railing at the audience in tongues, the usual shamanistic display of erratic behaviour. And then I got to lead a panel on women's content and branded content. 

With one client and three publishers on the panel, it was always going to be hard to get a good challenging debate moving - and the publishers were determined not to have the fight I was so keen to goad them into, so the panel was a tad tamer than I'm used to. Tragically, we didn't have the Twitterfall displayed on the stage monitors, so couldn't see the howls of outrage taking place on the projected screen behind us. As the panelists talked about why marketing managers didn't understand women in the region and why women's content was Chanel and handbags, a furious cry rose from the significant female element in the audience who felt women were, well, worth more than that. I couldn't see it and so the opportunity to square the circle between audience and panel was lost.

And then, in a trice, it was over. The developers' awards saw Lebanon taking the trophy and a couple of hours later, the Atlantis conference centre was back to being a vast expanse of strange nautical primary colours and Dubai was filled with little pockets of partying geeks and, no doubt, a very relieved and exhausted ArabNet team.

See you there next year!

Confession: Spot On was an ArabNet partner

ArabNet - The Dubai Digital Summit

It starts tomorrow - ArabNet's Dubai Digital Summit - three days of conference, workshop, developer competition, roundtable and other information sharing stuff. It's a pretty packed agenda - there are over 120 speakers (including li'l ole me) and there are expected to be upwards of 800 attendees gathering at the aesthetically interesting Atlantis Hotel on the Palm.

The three-day conference is at the core of a number of other activities, including ArabNet's 'Digital Showcase'. This excellent initiative gathers over thirty young digital companies from around the region and provides them with a platform to show their wares at ArabNet - and includes brokered meetings with media buyers, banks, telcos and other business enablers. There's also the final of ArabNet's developer competition which will bring together winners from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Jordan in a final face-off to crown the best developer in the Middle East. My money's on the Jordanians...

The actual conference consists of three tracks - a Forum Track and a Workshop Track - then on day one a Startup Track and day two an Industry Track, which splits into verticals and is more 'solutions' oriented and day three a Roundtable Track. Someone with a highly advanced sense of humour has put me moderating the banking panel on the industry day, which should provide a few laughs if nothing else...

There are four industry round tables taking place in the Roundtable Track, which will tackle key issues in the development and expansion of the Middle East's digital industry. I'm chairing the one on advertising, "Growing digital adspend", which should be interesting as the invited attendees for what is intended to be a productive brainstorming session represent all sorts of interests - mainly vested! - in the way this important sector is developing in the region.

As anyone who's been to ArabNet in Beirut will attest, there's a 'vibe' to the event that is truly infectious, a coming together of smart people who share a passion for something that is at the heart of exhilarating and often breakneck change and transformation. There's a grin-inducing cocktail of dynamism and innovation in the air.

So all in all it promises to be a busy, intense and fascinating week - and if you are interested in mobile, online, digital, social or anything touching the online and digital industry in the Middle East, you would be mad not to be there*.

Oh, and you can catch my presentation on addressing the 'content crisis' at 5pm on Wednesday and see quite how neatly I manage to wave in the inevitable plug for Beirut - An Explosive Thriller.

* Disclosure - Spot On is the PR partner for ArabNet but as you'll all know by now, this blog has never represented my day job. I'm bigging up ArabNet because I'm a fan, not because I'm shilling for them.

ArabNet's Coming To Dubai!

It's not often you find me parroting one of Spot On's announcements on the blog, but that's just what I'm about to do. The ArabNet Digital Summit, the regional digital conference forum event thingy, is coming to Dubai. The Beirut-based event has already spawned offshoots in Cairo and Riyadh, as well as a number of roadshows and other regional events. Now organiser Omar Christidis has decided to split ArabNet, recognising the diverse roles played by different parts of the region - Dubai, pretty much by default the Middle East's shop front for all things digital and media, is to host the conference component of ArabNet. The event will take place on the 24th-26th June if you want to mark your calendar.

That's a pretty smart move in my humble opinion*. It's long been a great truth that while the Levant is the cradle of IP creation and innovation, the GCC is the big market prize and the UAE, Dubai in particular, is where the sales operations belong - and, of course, where pretty much every regional ICT company is headquartered. Not only that, but Dubai is also home to many of the publishers and broadcasters who make up our regional media.

The event will be a three-day summit, with days devoted to start-ups, vertical industry content and developers respectively. Given that ArabNet Beirut has grown over the past three years to become easily the preeminent digital event in the region - and yes, I admit to having been originally surprised that an event of such quality took place in Beirut - putting the same thinking, strong content and agenda and organisational skills into a Dubai based event should result in something pretty special.

I have always been a strident ArabNet fan and the company wot I works for, the stellar digital communications agency Spot On Public Communications, is the event's PR partner - just so's you know and don't think I'm shilling you or anything sneaky like that...

Cartoon courtesy, of course, the ever so talented Maya Zankoul.

*BinMugahid nagged about the lack of the word 'opinion'. I gave in. In the good old days, you'd have seen that in Comments, but of course now it's debated on Twitter and Google+. *sigh*

The ITU In Dubai And All That

Téléphone ancien (Photo credit: zigazou76)

The Twelfth ITU World Conference on International Telecommunications is currently taking place in Dubai, with much international fanfare. The ITU is proposing to debate the re-writing of its 1988 regulatory framework for international telecommunications (ITR), allowing its members to contribute towards creating a new framework for 'the Internet age'.

Oh dear.

Cue spirited PR campaigns from Google (which has gone as far as to use the hallowed homepage to drum up support for it's 'Take Action' campaign for a 'free and open Internet') and others, pointing out that we shouldn't be letting governments decide on the future of the Internet. This is interesting, as that's precisely what governments think they not only have the right to do but, working on behalf of their respective peoples, should be doing.

Dubai, meanwhile, gets a win for hosting the event and racks up some nifty international publicity.

Of the many aspects of the 'Internet age' being discussed (in many cases, I fear, by people whose understanding of telecommunications is rooted firmly in yoghurt pots and string) is how telcos can share in the enormous revenues being derived from companies using the Internet to provide services to users. These people, argue the telcos, should be paying to use our networks.

It's not only absolute tosh as a proposal, it would be laughable if it weren't being actually listened to at the ITU. Telcos built the rods for their own backs long ago - they built roads and then insisted in charging tolls for the use of those roads which were calculated by the minute. Now they're trying to charge by the value of freight or the transaction you're travelling to close. With precious little innovation on offer, they're now challenged by the fact they have simply become bulk data providers, irrelevant to us in the main and certainly no active part of the thriving, active and profitable ecosystem of the Internet.

So what they want the ITU to do is grant them a charter to continue doing what they have done so well in the past - sit back and tax network users for using their networks, charging unfairly high rates for minimum quality service and contributing not one jot of value to the communities they are meant to serve.

For me the debate regarding regulation is of little interest - governments already regulate effectively enough at the state level and if they all decide to do more regulatin' I suspect there's little we can do.

But the telcos and their bid to pass a cash cow's charter? That's the one that'll affect you and me the most, I suspect...

A Tale Of Two Revolutions

Photo credit: Wikipedia

They are the best of times, they are the worst of times.

The Industrial Revolution changed the world and brought us to the world we have today. The compelling combination of innovation and communications transformed society, at first in the United Kingdom, where it had its roots, but then spreading to America, Europe and the rest of the world. The confluence of mechanisation, improvements in transport and communications and entrepeneurialism transformed agrarian societies and created industrial powerhouses that brought wealth and opportunity - and created poverty and appalling illnesses, too. It tore society apart and remade it. Constantly.

In the latter C18th and into the C19th, that revolution built cities as it emptied rural communities. The old ways had changed and people, from legislators down to the common man, had to find ways of adapting to the furious pace of change our world was suddenly pitched into. Life would never be the same again, from our views on community, family and morality through to the expectations we had of our rights and place in society.

Sound familiar?

Imagine, then, a country that took one look at the industrial revolution and threw up its hands in horror at the very prospect of change. Oh no, not for us these naughty steam engines, looms and ironclads! We'd rather stay tilling the land! These countries would arguably be the ones that would subsequently fall to the inevitable rush for empire - because an entrepeneurial revolution sustained by free market economics will inevitably cause expansion into new markets. And the sheer force of the explosion will open those markets by hook or by crook. As it did in the C18th, as Europe's powers jostled to dominate smaller, less able countries who were still in 'the dark ages' compared to these new, brash economies.

An alternative model might be to try and cherry pick from the revolution. We want the steam engine and the mill, but we'd rather not have looms if that's all the same to you. And we'll take canals, but pass on the roads. The trouble with this is that innovation revolutions are integrated - any part of the set of available innovations that is not embraced and made competitive will create a market opportunity for the expanding revolutionaries.

And so it is with the Internet Protocol in the UAE. And although the Internet is the core technology of our new revolution, it is merely a road network. The producers of raw materials, the refiners and manufacturers need hauliers to find their markets, but once the canals and roads are built, that's about it. You can build roads and charge tolls, but you can't own the traffic or the goods that pass over the roads.

Critically, you can't dictate to road users what they must pay to use your road if you are competing with other transport networks - the market then defines price. So when you have a Microsoft retiring Messenger and replacing it with Skype, the global VoIP provider whose website is blocked in the UAE, you face a very clear choice - one you have failed to face,  but known about, for years now. Do you reject the revolution (an attitude that has long been your inclination) or do you accept that you have no choice but to compete in the newly transformed environment or inevitably fail?

Both of the UAE's telcos now work on wholly IP based infrastructure. And yet we pay Dhs1.50 for a text message. That's the most expensive 160 bytes of data imaginable. Extrapolate that to a 1Gbyte month and you'd be shelling out about nine million dirhams ($2.5 million) for a normal data package. You can see how WhatsApp starts to look attractive, can't you?

Telcos have no choice but to adapt to the IP (and by that I mean VoIP) era. Their revenue models will have to change, they'll have to lean up and cut staff. I watched thousands of jobs go in the years I worked with Jordan Telecom going through just such a transformation. It's not pretty, but that's revolutions for you. They'll have to find new ways of creating products and services relevant in an IP world. I'd say the solution lies in transactional commerce over IP networks, but hell I'm just a PR guy what would I know?

Right now, we're busy sitting on a chair squawking 'go back' at the waves. But they're waves of innovation and they're inexorable...

Lebanon: Will The World's Worst Web Get Better?

Gulf News filed a Reuters report today on moves to improve Lebanon's internet access. The headline alone made me laugh, "Lebanon unveils faster, cheaper internet amid political bickering'. That's one of those 'Man found dead in cemetry' headlines. Nothing happens in Lebanon without political bickering.

Lebanon, as those who know it will attest, is a beautiful country of rich soil, glorious countryside and home to a fascinatingly diverse people capable of great cleverness. Beirut can be sophisticated, sexy as hell and enormous fun. It is also home to crushing poverty. And it's all strung together with public infrastructure that sometimes defies belief. From the rocky power grid (power cuts are still commonplace) through to the state of the roads, you're often left wondering quite how so much physical, intellectual and financial wealth sits alongside such tottering examples of failed governance.

Listening to the Ministerial addresses to ArabNet is helpful to reaching an understanding of this, I find.

Lebanon's internet is cited in today's story as being the 'world's worst... the country is always much lower down the rankings than many less developed nations such as Afghanistan or Burkina Faso.' The story goes on to recount, in shocked tones, how a 1 Mbps connection in Lebanon costs Dhs 279!!!

Errr. Hello, GN? That's about what we're paying here in the UAE. A one meg DSL line is Dhs249 a month, 2 Mbps costs a whopping Dhs349 a month and you'll pay Dhs549 for a 16 meg line. If you want the highest available speed from Etisalat, you can get a 30 Mbps 'Al Shamil' line for a mere Dhs699 a month. That's $191.5 to you.

I'm not even going to mention that the Japanese home gets an average 60 Mbps line at a cost of $0.27 per megabit month. Not even thinking about going there. Oh no.

Now the promises being made (because the story is, tragically, predicated on a promise not an actual physical delivery of service) are that Lebanon will get a minimum access speed of 1 Mbps for $16 per month. That would bring it in line with markets like the UK. I genuinely hope the promise (made to Reuters by Lebanese telecoms minister Nicola Sehnawi) comes through - although Ogero might have something to say about that - for two reasons. First and foremost so my friends in Lebanon can stop gnashing their teeth and throwing laptops against the wall in frustration. The selfish second reason is that it would add pressure on the TRA to finally act and bring down the ridulous broadband prices here in the UAE - prices that are undoubtedly a key factor contributing to hindering the adoption, use and the growth of the economic opportunity derived from technology in the UAE today.


(The image at the top of the post is one of my favourite things, BTW. It's the first sketch of 'the Internet')


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Cheeky Nigerians

Image by Toban Black via FlickrDubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA to you, mate) has issued a warning alerting people to the fact that www.difcuae.org (Dubai International Financial Capital) is a naughty website that makes "false, misleading and deceptive statements" and advising people "not to deal with the Firm or persons connected with the website."

The site appears to be a link in an email scam, with The Real Dubai International Capital similarly getting hot under the collar that it has been cited as an authority by the scammers.  DIC publishes an example of one such scam mail, an email purporting to be from a gentleman called David Smoot. Mr. Smoot signs off the email with his hotmail address (always a confidence booster, that), dubai129@hotmail.com, which is strange given that he has access to the much more believable domain of difcuae.org - Mr Smoot is named on the website as CEO of Dubai International Capital.


A quick WHOIS lookup confirms one's suspicions - as The Chemical Brothers tell us, It Began In Afrika:

Domain ID:D162062108-LROR
Domain Name:DIFCUAE.ORG
Created On:18-Apr-2011 14:04:30 UTC
Last Updated On:18-Jun-2011 03:49:53 UTC
Expiration Date:18-Apr-2012 14:04:30 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:PSI-USA, Inc. dba Domain Robot (R68-LROR)
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:ABM-11191927
Registrant Name:Olatubosun Olajubu
Registrant Organization:Olatubosun Olajubu
Registrant Street1:Isolo
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Lagos
Registrant State/Province:Lagos
Registrant Postal Code:00000
Registrant Country:NG
Registrant Phone:+234.8068929148

The website's got a Du mobile number as a UAE contact number, but you can always cut out the middle man and call Mr Olajubu directly in Lagos to give him your bank account details and a copy of your letterhead and signature.

Are people truly that stupid? Do they actually fall for these scams?

(Update: As you'll see from the comments, Mr Smoot IS the CEO of Dubai International Capital - just not the one in Lagos...)

World's Worst Web?

Back in the late nineties, I travelled to Beirut in the company of Microsoft's Middle East marketing manager to manage the opening of the company's office in Lebanon. The trip was the culmination of a long campaign I had been involved in to have an intellectual property protection law passed that would protect IP holders from the endemic piracy in the country. The campaign was kind of successful in that the law was, indeed, passed. The law was, of course, subsequently ignored by pretty much everybody, but that shouldn't really surprise anyone.

My marketing manager colleague was horrified* to see that there was a ledger on the visa desk, where issued visas were recorded manually. This despite the presence of a distinctly computery thing on the desk. Given MS was touting e-government pretty hard at the time, she seemed to find the presence of a totally manual, analogue thing in the middle of a process that everywhere else in the world had automated somewhat incongruous. That ledger is still there today, folks.

I mention this in the context of a few tasty finds by pal Bilal El Houri, following on from my amused post last year about old skool websites.His challenge was to find worse sites than these little beauties, all examples of quite how far down the e-government road the Lebanese government has travelled since back then. Clue: the answer is not very far, really.

This is the Lebanese Ministry of Telecommunications website.These are the people responsible for the Internet in Lebanon. Yeah, yeah, I know: it figures.

Here are some other beauties. Remember, these are NOT snapshots from Way Back Machine. This is Lebabon today.

The Ministry of Higher Education

The Ministry of Agriculture

The Directorate General of Emigrants
(Their English version is a howl, BTW)

The Ministry of Industry

Thanks, Bilal. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry...

BTW, all those years back, we visited the Prime Minister, Selim Hoss and the president, Emile Lahoud in the same day, with an MS exec in tow, a 'veep' if I remember right. The BBC correspondent in Beirut at the time, the wonderfully named Chris Hack, had an acid aside for that one: "Where else in the world would the president and the prime minister be rolled out to receive an effing commercial traveller?"...

* You should have seen her reaction to B018, mind...

PS: Dany Awad (@DanyAwad) adds to the charge sheet with this here link to the Electricite du Liban website! Class! And they keep coming in - this link to the brilliant National News Agency website from Amer Tabsh!

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Google+ -- Information Overload?

Parental Guidance Warning. This video is icky.

It's like a helter skelter, this social media business. And there are times when you might just want to get off before your head explodes.

Google+ has finally pitched me into information overload. I'm dealing with too many streams of information and it's becoming uncomfortable. I know I'm an unusually 'connnected' person: quite apart from the Twitter, Facebook, Blogger triangle, I handle reasonably large volumes of email and follow a lot of blogs and sites. I'm rarely truly offline. It's one reason I find it funny when my bank tells me they tried to get in touch with me but couldn't. I mean, there are people who actively try to avoid me and find it hard. It got so bad that when we returned from getting stuck under the Tikkipukkapokka, or whatever it was called, Icelandic ash cloud, I actually gave interviews to media amused that I had been caught offline in a totally analogue rural lighthouse.

Apart from the radio shows, conferences and other presentations and workshops I do, I'm also spending most of my days managing one aspect or another of online communications. Online stuff has come to dominate my working life as we have started to transition from 'traditional' public relations practice to integrate more and more online thinking into our communications work with clients. When you add stuff like GeekFest which, despite my best efforts to be UNinvolved still has created a regional network of Facebook and Twitter feeds with thousands of people behind them, you can start to appreciate how very, well, online things are.

And that's been fine. I've been good with it. I've used a few wee tricks to help things glide along: I'm not a huge fan of Facebook, but the blog updates my Facebook page with every post so at least there's the appearance of engagement. I rely quite heavily on NetVibes, an RSS reader which organises my many streams of information into nice, manageable tabs that let me dip into updates of what's relevant when it suits me. Twitter has become a comfortable background habit, a sort of place you drop into on the way from a completed activity to a new one. (If you find me on Twitter at the weekend, chances are that Sarah's trying on some new clothes in the shop.) And I have been quite selective about what 'social media' sites I use, so although I'm 'on' Quora, FourSquare and the like (you have to understand what makes them tick, at the very least, if you're going to advise clients), I'm not active.

Strangely, most of my writer friends are on Facebook and fewer use Twitter. Another oddity is that people have started commenting on blogposts on Twitter rather than using Blogger's comments feature. It's always fascinating to see the shifting dynamics of different networks and their interactions, a little like the iridescence of oil on water.

But Google+ has presented me with a dilemma. Do I stay or do I go? It's yet another social network, it's becoming more demanding as more people have joined up and started to poke around, exploring what the new room looks like. It extends the powerful sharing capabilities of Twitter, allowing longer posts than 140 characters along with link sharing, but brings the powerful 'circles' feature to bear. Circles are like Facebook's 'Lists', but are more siloed - you share easily with only the circles you want to share with.

It's very similar indeed to Facebook, in fact, but it's a lot faster - perhaps a result of the fact that it's still dominated by 'early adopters' and therefore a geekier, more aggressively 'sharey' crowd.. I was asked what Google+ was like yesterday and I replied "More Facebook than Twitter but more Twitter than Facebook". If that doesn't seem helpful, well, I don't know.

Google+ is disruptive. It's Facebook at near-Twitterspeed. I'm finding I have to consciously decide whether to share information on Twitter or Google+ and frequently wondering why I'm sharing at all and just don't bother. The world, as a consequence, has not ended. Life has gone on. The one decision I have not had to make is whether to share on Facebook, because I never really considered it a sharing platform in the same way as Twitter, for instance. and yet Google+ is just that - it makes it very easy to share links, pictures and thoughts. It combines some of the learnings from Buzz and Wave and makes crowdsourcing and conversation easy. But the wide-ranging topics and speed of updates are slightly scary and very distracting. Even Google has been caught out with the volumes - they had issues with their notification management servers as a result of demand spikes from Google+.

A TweetDeck for Google+ may be the answer, a Circle Manager. It might be that we evolve better techniques to manage circles based on topics and content flows rather than relationships.

But right now, Google+ is a time-suck and I'm having to consciously invest in it as everyone tries to figure it out. I suppose the great difference is I'm still there looking around - with Wave and Buzz, I was out of there within 48 hours. This time it's more sticky.

The jury's still out, but I'm beginning to see how Google+ could well do what Orkut failed to do. But something's got to give somewhere - we're fast approaching the point where I cannot see how people could maintain yet another platform. I reckon two's company, but three's a crowd.

Anyone else out there reached a limit?

Digital Day

Image via WikipediaYou've got to admit, any conference organiser that offers to have their carefully assembled and constructed event chaired by me has to have their heads examined. But sure enough, you'll always find a looney on the bus and the organisers of Dubai's Click 5.0 digital media conference, IQPC, have gone ahead and done just that.

It's going to be an interesting day, and not just because the gig's being chaired by a gibbering lunatic - there are some really good speakers and some smart, practical case studies planned, including one session entitled 'How to sell social media to your CEO' which has me fascinated already.

If you haven't got tickets yet, you're too late - but you can follow proceedings at #Click5. Any complaints about the chairman are obviously to be ignored...

Who's Afraid Of A Regulated Web?

French president Nicolas Sarkozy has come out and said he wants a regulated web - "You need to hear our limits, our red lines" he told an audience at the two-day 'e-G8' conference. The AP report is linked here. His is not the first whiff of regulatory sulphur, of course - only the other day I posted about the British culture secretary sending out a clear 'enough is enough' message regarding privacy on the Internet after Twitter 'made a mockery' of that Great British Institution, the super-injunction.

Of course, it should come as no surprise to hear those who govern us (all too often, you can't help but think, forgetting they're supposed to be representing us) starting to talk about regulation. Wikileaks was a massive wake-up call to governments, followed by the wake-up call of the 'Arab Spring'. We now know two things we did not fully appreciate a year ago.We have to redefine privacy, secrecy and transparency and we have to redefine governance, the aspirations of people and the way in which they are represented.

But redefining these things doesn't necessarily mean micro-regulating them, at least in part because it's so fast moving out there you'd be hard put to keep up - and that's a key problem governments have found in the past: you can't create legislation that keeps up with innovation. The Microsoft vs DOJ case showed quite clearly that an entire technology market, let alone platforms and applications, can change during a single action in the courts, let alone the time taken to draft and pass a piece of well defined legislation.

Establishing a set of principles might be a nice approach to take, but then we've been doing that ourselves: up to now, morality and behaviour on the Internet have been largely a function of communities - we all know what the rules are (if you use someone else's link on Twitter, you include in the tweet that it was via them; if you send unwanted emails to people you'll be called a spammer and face consumer unhappiness; if you hijack a hashtag, you'll get pwned all over the place and so on) - or are in the process of coming to terms with changes and defining rules as a pretty much consensual process.

Of course, regulating the Internet in the name of privacy and responsibility is all very well, but we also have to be wary of regulating discourse - even when that discourse is uncomfortable for us. And here's the issue at the heart of government discomfort with that discourse: the ability for people to share opinion and organise in shows of public opinion that are not ordered through the representational process that has put the people in government where they are.

I mean, imagine a world in which everyone's voice could be heard! How insane would that be? A world where everyone had access to a viable way of voting instantly on any given topic, of canvassing opinions and sharing information without fear of corporate interference, lobbying or governmental mendacity, a world in which we didn't actually need to be represented by politicians because we have the mechanisms in our own hands to represent ourselves.

Why do I need an MP to vote on my behalf in parliament when I can register a vote on a website instantly and have that vote counted in picoseconds? What if the Internet could slim down government in the same way it has slimmed down other disintermediated processes?

What if?

We are all publishers

Image by noobbaru via FlickrThere’s been a lot of talk in the UK about super-injunctions, triggered by the seeming inability of anyone in public life to behave with even the scantest degree or morality or decorum. I suppose when the world’s most powerful man goes around inserting himself into interns, the Governor of California lives surrounded by his secret children and the head of the IMF seems to be channeling Casanova, you could forgive a certain laxity among the minor stars in our firmament.

The problem, of course, is that while they all like doing these things, they don’t like us knowing about them. I think, actually, part of the fun of doing it in the first place is the frisson of danger it involves. When the brown stuff really does hit the fan, using some of one’s hard-earned millions to brief a brief and gag the media seems to gaining in popularity. In the UK and elsewhere, ‘the media’ includes a clamorous pack of newspapers casting ever further afield to find salacity and scandal to reverse their plummeting sales figures and so taking an unusual interest in any scraps they can find.

What’s making things so much more fun these days is while you can use your power and wealth to gag a newspaper, you can’t gag the Internet. Once stuff is out in the wild, it’s game over. The publication of the names on Twitter of six people seeking “super-injunctions” to stop media publishing their names caused an outbreak of great wailing and gnashing of political teeth, with British Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt telling The Independent:

"We are in this crazy situation where information is available freely online which you aren't able to print in newspapers. We are in a situation where technology, and Twitter in particular, is making a mockery of the privacy laws we have and we do need to think about the regulatory environment we have.”

The problem is, of course, that Twitter, Google et al are all arguing that they are not the publishers of this material, they are merely a medium, a tool of communication. It would be like suing a telephone company because someone said something bad over the phone or sent a libellous fax. Or suing the paper mill because its product was used to commit a libel.

This is one reason why Goog and friends are so very hesitant to take judgement calls over content posted on their platforms – the second they do so, they become editors and therefore publishers.

Governments are less than happy about this – and it can only be a matter of time before legislation is brought to bear on the free-for-all aspects of online platforms. The UK government is already making a racket about legislating against online platforms (Hunt was paraphrased in the Indy story linked above as saying there "may be a case for converging the regulation of traditional and new media"). If the industry won’t regulate this content itself, governments are arguing, then legislation must be brought to bear defining the responsibilities of platforms for the content they carry. This’ll potentially create an odd situation where communication platforms are forced to become, effectively, publishers by law.

Until that happens (and I fervently hope it doesn’t), the responsibility for creating, moderating, curating, sharing and publishing the content we post online actually belongs to us. We are all publishers.

You’d have thought democratic governments, the representatives of the people, would be happy that we’ve found a medium of open expression which gives us all the opportunity to take responsibility and use the power of free communication. But then those in power (as I found when I had that spat with German state secretary for the Federal Ministry of the environment, nature conservation and nuclear safety, Matthias Machnig) believe only they understand, and therefore should wield, power.

Including the power, as public figures, to behave awfully in private then gag the public.

The Arab Media Forum's Elephant

Image via WikipediaThere's going to be a pachyderm* in the room at this year's Arab Media Forum 2011, the event that sparked the very birth of this little blog. It's not a new elephant, but it's been getting bigger every year. This year, it's going to be interesting to see if a single delegate gets to squeeze in.

It's the Internet and the way in which our media landscape is not only being changed, but torn up and remodelled - not just by social media, but by our new information consumption habits. It is not, according to today's Gulf News and previous reports, a topic up for discussion. In fact, Gulf News' subs reach a new low today. Failing to stand up a headline with the story is one thing, but when you're failing to stand up sub-heads, my but you're in trouble. The sub-head in question, 'Social Media' is followed in the story by anything but any mention of social media at all.

The GN story's headline sort of frames the story: "Forum to look at impact of Arab Spring on media".

Isn't it interesting that the Arab Spring (sic) is having an impact on media rather than the other way around? I do wonder if the many portentous debates between 'important media figures' will include the appalling mendacity of the region's media when faced with the challenge of change - not least the Egyptian media's craven cries of 'Lalalalala' when faced with the stark facts of Tahrir.

Looking beyond the half inch of Methodist near-beer that is the debate about the Arab Spring and its impact on our media, you'd perhaps be forgiven for wondering why the impact of the online revolution that preceded, helped to drive and then was accelerated by that self-same spring isn't worth debating and highlighting. Perhaps it's not 'media' within the narrow definition of a Press Club. Although the people served by the media are increasingly deserting the paper form for online sources - and changing the way they consume media and the types of information they access.

It's a fundamental change in human communication that has helped to reshape our region, driving change across our societies and challenging many aspects of our media - including the practice of journalism, legislation, individual and collective freedoms, activism and responsibility. There is no greater challenge to our media, in fact. But it is obviously not the right 'media' for this forum. This year, we haven't even seen reports of a token blogger to lighten the mix.

Giddy up, Jumbo!

* Apropos of nothing, many, many moons ago, Gulf News reported on an mistreated elephant at Dubai Zoo. The picture caption, thanks to that strangest and most malign force, the GN Subs, referred to 'the unfortunate pachyderm', which triggered a scramble at Spot On to see who could fit the word into a piece of client work that day. Carrington won with brilliance, although I don't remember quite how.

Are Your Footprints All Over The Web?

Image by Andreas-photography via FlickrThe answer's probably yes.

The recent massive facepalmohmigodicantbelievetheydidthat scandal involving Facebook hiring a bunch of mendacious flaks to tout around fear-mongering stories about Google's 'privacy issues' merely highlighted (as Gulf News' Scott Shuey pointed out in his Saturday column) the issues of online privacy in general - and didn't leave Facebook unscarred. Amusingly, Shuey points out that, in his experience, most PRs are "...soulless drones who would sell their own mothers to keep a client happy."

I can't disagree with him, but then most social media sites and online publishers are soulless bots who are already selling us all to keep clients happy. It's a marriage made in heaven, no?

As time goes by, we're putting more and more data out there - and that data can be interconnected in ever-more creative and interesting ways. I was highly tickled the other day to do a Google Image Search on myself, looking for a picture someone had taken of me wot we needed for a presentation. As well as the usual daft pictures of me (of which the sunflower one is a firm favourite), the search started to throw up images from my blog and, as we go further down the search, images from people associated with me for one reason or another. The growing tree of interconnectedness was fun, if mildly disconcerting - try doing an image search on yourself and see what I mean (I assume you're in the habit of Googling yourself or have set up an alert on yourself/your unique identifying keyphrase).Bing also delivers, although relevance appears weaker and the associations come in more strongly and earlier.

Here's a scary trick. Take a look at your Google Search History, linked here. You'll have to sign in with Gmail and then you can access your entire history of search - every last query stored for posterity on Goog's servers. I deleted mine, believe me you don't want to see the things I was looking up while I was researching Beirut, something I have alluded to in posts passim!

The basic rule of thumb is that if you put it out on the web (and by that I most definitely include Twitter and all other things comfortingly transient), it stays out on the web. Take three or four seemingly disconnected pieces of data and you can start to build a profile - the more comprehensive the profile, the more sticky every new piece of data becomes until you can build exponentially more intelligent data sets that define you very nicely indeed.

Facebook has consistently been in trouble over things like privacy settings and is often accused of encouraging people to share too much. But that's the trouble with social search - you're selling increasingly intelligently filtered access and so you need to get people to share more as well as create more from what they do share. It's a self-fulfilling beast. And it's after your data.

There's no need to buy a nuclear bunker quite yet, but it would do as well to be aware that you're now essentially a public figure. And you're leaving footprints behind all the time...