Recession? What recession?

Image via Wikipedia

Gulf News is weighing in at something like (don't forget I'm using a Dhs19 scales from Lal's, so I can't really do the old atomic level measurements here) 540g these days, down from 1.3 Kg in November 2008 - and also down from the 640g-odd that it had sort of settled down to in February.

It peaks and troughs a bit, but it's been steadily trending down - the majority of the loss has, of course, been in the enormous volumes of clamorous and directive real estate advertising that last year was telling us to 'Live your dreams' and 'Dare to drivel' and whatnot.

At the same time, Al Nisr Publishing's Property Weekly (Al Nisr is GN's parent company) has dropped again from 72 pages to 66 - from a high of over 144 pages last year.

I take no pleasure in recording this. I have pals at Gulf News & PW and the newspaper has been my constant companion in over 15 years' living in the UAE. I'm rather fond of it, in a strange way.

But it's interesting, perhaps, for those who thought the worst was over in Jan/Feb and that we'd bottomed with the great Q1 shock, to see that the market's still losing value and that real estate advertising (and, arguably, advertising across the board) continues to shrink.

Disclaimer. This article is in no way intended to damage the economy or indeed to provoke any other economic affect beyond a mild look of passing interest between dunking the first and second Rich Tea biscuit in one's morning tea. No acarpi were harmed in the production of this post.

The New UAE Media Law is .Not. Law

Image by Amy.Ng via Flickr

The New UAE Media Law has been passed by the Federal National Council, according to the Emirates news agency WAM.

The WAM story, filed just now, says that some 60% of the law has been modified, but doesn't say how the law has been modified or indeed whether the controversial 'harm to the economy' clause has been softened or clarified - or whether the 60% modifications were to the version of the law that's being debated or whether they were the original revisions that took place in the two years the law was, to use Gulf News subs' favourite phrase, 'on the anvil'.

We'll doubtless see more on this tomorrow. The law itself has provoked widespread media concern - and it does not, as far as I am aware or can find out, recognise the 'e-world' (for instance bloggers, forum commentators or, say, Twitterers) in any way. So whether you can go to jail for blogging or Tweeting something because you're not a journalist and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law (that protection including huge fines) or not is still totally up in the air. Let alone where a journalist that blogs something stands.

Up until now, the party line has been that regulations will 'clarify' the law. But we haven't yet seen how clear the law, in its final form, truly is. Let's hope that one of tomorrow's papers gets to publish the full draft as approved by the FNC so we can see how the world has moved on since the UAE Journalists' Association published its voluntary Code of Ethics in October 2007...

** As has been noted on this blog before, 'post in haste, repent at leisure'.

Indeed, the new 'law' news from WAM is, as the (sadly) anonymous commenter on this post quite rightly pointed out, not really news. The President has not, as far as we know, signed it off. And so it's not a law. It's just the same old document (unseen) that we've all been waiting for along with some more comments on how it's going to be a wonderful law that we're all going to really enjoy living with. I'm going to hold on getting a red face over this until we see tomorrow's coverage from UAE media. This'll be interesting...

Hooters

I have wanted to share this for some considerable time now. It's one of my favourite press clippings ever. It's not just that former Hooters waitress Jodee Berry is suing her employer because she was promised a new Toyota for winning the beer sales contest and was blindfolded and led to the car park where they had put a Toy Yoda.

No, it's the look of cold, vengeful fury on her bilked little face that I love. That and the Yoda in her life...

It still makes me smile when I read it...

UPDATE

Thanks to former Alainite Brn, I can now share this link to the invaluable Snopes, which reports that Jodee settled on the matter for a sum that according to counsel would allow her to go to a Toyota dealership and "pick out whatever type of Toyota she wants."

Which is a hoot indeed, no?

Enough!

Image by el7bara via the banned website Flickr thanks to the wonder that is RSS...

The Guardian's been at it again. This time it's Simon "I saw the place two years ago through a plane window" Jenkins who has followed in a long and honourable line of Guardian writers who have lined up to give Lalaland an almost weekly kicking.

Simon's article, however, beats even Germainipops' whine for its inaccuracy and sheer noodle-headedness. He slags off Dubai for being super-planned, architect-designed and "bailed out by Bahrain and Dohar" (sic) among other things. As usual for The Guardian on Dubai, the article is so packed with untruth and unsustainable assertion that it simply does not stand up as a piece of professional writing.

It's amazing to me that one of the UK's leading and most respected quality newspapers continues to publish completely inaccurate rubbish about Dubai from people with no qualification whatsoever to be writing about the place - and I'd include actually visiting Dubai and speaking to some people here as qualification.

But the rubbish is popping up everywhere - not just The Guardian - to the extent where I'm finding myself, to my immense surprise, coming out of the Dubai corner boxing FOR the city.

I never thought that would happen!

Like many other residents who have commented on these articles, I've had enough, really. There are now so many articles packed with so much rubbish, from so many writers who have spent so little time here that you start to question whether you were right to believe in journalism in the first place.

Germaine did her research from a tour bus. Simon talks about looking out of a plane window. But the Sydney Morning Herald's Elizabeth Farrelly goes one better, starting her piece with the immortal words, "For longer than I can remember - six months at least - I've wanted to write on Dubai as a ruin. Not that I've been there..."

She goes on: "Dubai, the oilless emirate, was conceived as the business end of Abu Dhabi's more oleaginous cultural empire."

You don't have to believe me when I tell you that her article goes downhill from there - you can go and read it for yourself. I bet it makes you angry. And yet it's merely symptomatic of a whole outbreak of similar pieces, written by people that have never even visited the place they're so eager to vilify, never walked on the streets they accuse of being filled with prosecco swilling expats dazed with the crash around them.

Another excellent example of the genre is here, featuring yet another marvellous line: "So last week I spent an entire day reading newspaper articles and travel guides about Dubai and am now much better informed..."

There's plenty to accuse Dubai of - many of us posting to blogs here have had more than a few swipes at a whole range of issues. And there are plenty more, for sure.

But enough of this uninformed rubbish, really!

Pammy in Sammy Whammy

Today's 7Days carries the thoughts of former Baywatch Babe Pamela Anderson, who is apparently heartbroken at the captivity of Sammy the whale shark. Pictured wearing an ET t-shirt, oh sorry, no a PETA t-shirt, Pammy found Sammy's sorry story 'heartbreaking' when a friend 'told her' about it. A friend had also told her that Dubai zoo is a dump. She also 'hit out at the live importation of sheep from Australia and described it as a "hell" journey for many animals'.

Poor 7Days. They could have gone for the 'Pammy Backs Sammy' headline except it was rival Gulf News wot coined the Sammy the Shark name...

(Pammy is, according to 7Days, to lend her name to an eco-resort in Abu Dhabi and will return to the UAE later this year. Whoopee.)

Now don't get me wrong. I'm firmly of the belief that PR-disaster Sammy should be allowed to slip into the wild and out of the acquarium. The whole episode has been an awfulness from the get-go and IMHO should have been dealt with quickly, quietly and with dignity long before it ever attracted the attention of international animal rights groups.

But haven't we seen enough wild commentary from people acting on limited insight, knowledge, facts and experience recently?

From Germaine 'bus tour' Greer through the unfortunate Margaret Atwood who withdrew her support for the EAIFL based on initial (and one-sided) media reports to the savage shrieks of international opprobium heaped upon Dubai by the blogging, Twittering 'DIE DUBAI' brigade, particularly over the Peer affair, we've been getting quite a lot of this 'I've never been there but I've heard all about it' stuff.

BTW - the latest in a long line of uninformed guff and total tosh from international commentators that haven't even bothered to visit the UAE before slagging it off comes to us courtesy of '3,000 cars at Dubai airport' newspaper The Washington Post, which has come a long way from Deep Throat and all that. Take a look at this excellent example of the genre.

At least PETA activist Chrissie Hynde came here and said her piece...

A Strange Feeling

I'm currently in the grip of the strangest feeling. I'm actually feeling sorry for Dubai.

Lalaland is taking the most enormous pasting in the international media right now. The Israeli tennis player ban story and the British author book banned story are flying around and media are picking them up faster than discarded dollar bills. The 'conversation' on Twitter is universally negative and violently anti-Dubai, buoyed up with links to the New York Times piece that asserted 3,000 cars have been abandoned at the airport, Dubai's Wikipedia 'human rights' entry that details drug convictions at Dubai International Airport and stories on the tennis and book scandals.

The ban on Shahar Peer has led to an international outcry and the situation doesn't look as if it will get any better, with The Guardian reporting that a second Israeli player, Andy Ram may also be denied a visa - and that Dubai could lose the support of the WTA and the ATP as a consequence of the ban on Israeli players.

The banned British author story has also gained a lot of traction. Nobody has thought to question why a writer that had previously lived in Bahrain for five years would think that a book of that nature would go down well locally but the coverage has been another howl of anti-Dubai sentiment. And no matter how much you suspect it all of being an elaborately managed publicity stunt to get an unpublished book 'out there', the tone of coverage and sentiment is universally negative.

I do wonder how much of the outpouring of hate is about people giving someone else a kicking to help manage their own frustrations and fears in our straightened times. All of this comment, mostly based on little direct experience of the place and more direct experience of over-simplified and jazzed up media reports, does rather seem to position Dubai as the poster child for mindless excess and crassness.

But then Tinsel Town has hardly been tasteful or modest in its promotions, has it?

Relax

The Minister of Labour and chairman of the National Media Council, Saqr Ghobash, has written a piece in today's The National which seeks to clarify the aim and intent of the new media law.

In a piece titled 'Do not fear for press freedom', he says: "A rumour about collapsing property prices is insufficient information on which to base a story. A story based on a well-researched study by a leading bank or estate agent, however, is another matter entirely."

It's a sobering thought that this statement on how a journalist can 'stand up' a story could well be cited in a court of law in future as being definitive of the law's intent.

He notes that "Sadly, much of the comment (on the law) appears to have been misinformed or to be based upon a misunderstanding both of the current situation and of the contents of the proposed legislation." - Seabee deals quite neatly with our alarming propensity to wilfully misunderstand clear communication here.

The government is, apparently, to issue an appendix to the law over the next seven weeks that will clarify "vague provisions" according to the story in the print and digital, but not online, editions. The online (read 'most up to date') version of the story instead prefers to run instead with the comment from the UAE Journalists' Association, which is still not happy, it seems: “We asked for 40 things, not one or two.”

Worryingly, there's still no news on how the diverse and fast-moving world of online media will be treated under the new law - if, indeed, it is to be covered by the 'new' media law at all. And nobody appears to be asking the question of 'the concerned authorities', either.

Law

A great day for press freedom in the UAE?

The UAE media law passed through the Federal National Council yesterday and the newspapers, struggling to find any positive angle on the story, can only reiterate that the new law means that journalists won't face jail terms 'for carrying out their duties'.

The draft law just needs to be ratified by the cabinet and the President to pass onto the statute books. There has been a great deal of unhappiness expressed by the newspapers over the new law, which replaces the positively archaic 'old media law' of 1980. You can find an e-copy of the old law here and wonder for yourself at how much has changed. Or then again, perhaps not.

I tried, but failed, to find a copy of the new law anywhere, but The National does give more information on its provisions that anyone else today. Sure enough, the law stipulates fines of between Dhs 50,000 to Dhs 1 million for, to quote the Khaleej Times: "...newspapers or the rest of media, or the employees of the same receiving aid or donation, or similar benefits from foreign entity without the permission of the Council; repeating publishing or launching press campaigns with bad faith, and after being warned by the Council, in a way that demerit the reputation of the country, or its foreign relations and contacts, or violates its public order, or distort its national identity; publishing news that mislead the public opinion, in a way that harm the national economy of the country; carrying false news with knowledge; violating the conditions and restrictions stipulated for practising media activities governing the licence in regard."

The law would be enforced through the courts and not by the National Media Council (NMC), which drafted it. Journalists and editors alike have expressed dismay at the lack of clarity in the law. The editorial in today's The National makes the point: "Yet the new press law, approved yesterday by the FNC and sent to the cabinet for ratification, is unclear about what a newspaper can be punished for, and how it defines whether a newspaper has published information damaging to the country’s reputation or economy. The financial system should react to just the kind of information we print in our business pages every day. And if we are not distributing information that influences the choices people make in the marketplace, then we are not doing our job."

As far as I can see, the law makes no reference to the 'e-world' and remains firmly rooted in the idea that 'the media' is content produced by licensed entities that squash ink onto dead trees and that would be held to account according to the terms of their trade license.

Where does that leave someone writing a blog, commenting on a forum or posting up to You Tube? Where does it leave the UAE's fast-growing band of Twitterers or the groups of unhappy residents airing their grievances online? Where does it leave someone posting a comment to a blog, tagging a photo, founding a snarky Facebook group (like this or this!) or publishing an e-book?

It leaves us all relatively unsure of quite where we stand, that's where, with a court system that has no provision in law whatever for online activity, a judiciary that is unlikely to be trained or cogniscent of online systems and a minimum fine of Dhs 50,000. Oh, and that's assuming that a 'blogger' will be treated as a 'journalist' and not just an unlicensed entity.

In short, I suspect it rather leaves us all, journalists and others, exactly where we were in 1980, except that now we (possibly) can't go to prison - until, of course, we can't find Dhs 1 million and then we'll presumably be banged up anyway for defaulting on the fine.

BTW, I am mildly surprised that none of our media have pressed the point about the media law and how the National Media Council views the online world. It's really quite important, chaps...

Free

The UAE Journalists' Association has told the mighty Gulf News (800g) today that it will provide legal support to bloggers facing legal action in the UAE 'provided they abide by the ethical and professional rules of the profession'. The piece comes as part of a spread on press freedom and the state of media in the United Arab Emirates.

"The new policy helps in improving the quality of blogging in the Emirates and enhances the transparency and the credibility of news reporting on cyber sites. The only condition on the bloggers to avail themselves of the services of the association is to identify themselves clearly and follow 9 ethical rules in reporting or casting their views, including offering a level playing field for different parties related to the issue of reporting.'

And what, you may as, rules are they? Thanks to GN, we find out that they are:

"Bloggers should refrain from using inflammatory language or tarnish the credibility of an establishment or individual without substantial evidences. Those who continue casting their views under vague identities will not be able to seek the association's help."

So no more anonyblogging, folks. Not if you want the help of the UAE Journalist's Association, anyway. 'Vague identities' are out. I wonder just what a 'vague identity' is...

Or 'tarnishing the credibility of an establishment'. That's a nono, too. Damn. So no criticising any companies, then. Hands off HSBC and Al Habtoor, Alexander. Let alone the RTAs and EIDAs that make our lives so very wonderful and joyous.

There's no mention of what precisely the '9 golden rules' are but I did post here about the UAE Journalists' Association Code of Ethics, which is a list of 17 rules. Strangely, it's not available on the UAE Journalists' Association website which is, incidentally, only available in Arabic. So I guess you might as well just pick the 9 you like best from that list and abide by them, folks.

Interestingly, there's also quite a grumpy editorial from GN's editor-in-chief, linked here, which is worth a read, flagging up major concerns with the much-awaited new UAE media law. I do recommend a read of this piece most heartily:

"Furthermore, the long-awaited new press law, currently under consideration to be issued soon in its final version, has failed considerably in addressing the needs of the journalistic body and the changes that have taken place so far in the country."

Hot stuff indeed from Abdul Hamid Ahmad about the new draft law that, among other things, replaces a prison term for journalists (and bloggers, then?) with a million Dirham fine.

Sky

The Sky News team is in Dubai for the week, which was why Sarah and I sat open-mouthed watching the box last night as anchor man and long-time respected broadcaster Jeremy Thompson extolled the virtues of this global downturn-beating economic miracle, this city of iconic developments, this miraculous, visionary place with the 'go for it' attitude.

The tallest tower, the biggest mall, the most expensive firework display and, of course, the Palms all came in for a mention. It was odd to see them talking about de old place like dat!

Welcome, Jeremy and team. We look forward to a week of insights and revelatory reporting that gets beneath the microns of goldy paint to give us all a better understanding of what makes the Shiny tick.

(A shiny tick to me, a buffed parasite to you)

Siam

There was a wonderful little moment during my stint with Brandy Scott on the Business Breakfast last Thursday: we were talking about the US presidential candidates and their public relations and communications strategies, particularly in the light of the excruciating McCain/Letterman affair. John McCain blew Letterman out claiming that he had to fly to Washington to focus on the financial crisis and then Letterman cut live, during the McCain-less show, to the same McCain being made up for an interview he’d granted to CBS’ Katie Couric. An infuriated Letterman let rip throughout the show and, in fact, has been doing so since.

So we talked about this, about interview management and planning communications strategies on the theme of what we can learn from the US presidential candidates’ management of their communications.

At one point, the delectable Brandy asked me what I thought about Sarah Palin and my response was something along the lines of “I know! I mean, here you’ve got this mooseburger eating, hunting shooting fishing NRA-head who believes that polar bears aren’t under threat and that global warming isn’t a product of human activity and she’s come from being the mayor of some village and suddenly she’s potentially the most important person in America!”

And then Brandy, who is (unlike your correspondent) really rather good at her job, looks across the mikes at me and deadpans, “I meant her PR.”

My father once taught me the Siamese national anthem. You sing “O” then “my watan” and then “a’s Siam”. Put them together in one fluid chant and repeat. It’s the kind of thing that my father used to do to me, a traumatic childhood.

Nowadays I occasionally have cause to remember it and chant it to myself...

Faced

A certain media organisation in Dubai has blocked its staff from using Facebook during working hours.

This is interesting.

I have spent quite a lot of time evangelising 'social media' and the proper use of these increasingly important tools in a professional context. If you want, incidentally, to learn more about social media and leading edge innovation in web-based technologies, do subscribe to partner in crime Carrington's Insane Web 2.0 Bonkers Twitter Feed.

Banning Facebook means that the journalists and researchers working for that organisation are just a little bit more disempowered than their peers. My colleagues use Facebook extensively as a social tool, but also as a business tool. Much as their relationships with media, analysts, consultants and clients often extend into social relationships (we work with people we like, right? We do business over lunch, drinks or shisha, right?), the boundary between work and social has never been more fuzzy. For instance, we had a suhour event last night where people stayed way into the early hours (PRs and journalists alike) because they wanted to. Because they wanted to catch up, share information, gossip, put the world to rights and all the rest of it.

No more or less, in fact, than we do on Facebook.

Last year we found ourselves needing to conduct a flash survey to get the picture on broadband adoption in the region. The guys sent out surveys to their Facebook contacts, result: 100 regional answers back that afternoon and a reasonable 'snapshot' sample of the situation we wanted to evaluate. A couple of weeks ago a journalist we wanted to contact wasn't in town and wasn't roaming on his mobile - but he was on Facebook. Result: we got through, had the conversation and did business. There are a large number of examples like this: Facebook is an extension of our 'analogue' social relationships in an age where social relationships are being complicated by the availability of new tools.

Consider this. You tell John that Peter is your good friend. 'Wow,' says John. 'That's lucky, because I really need to speak to him! Do you have his mobile number?'

And you don't. What's John's first inference about your friendship? Likely that you've been telling porkies and that you're not really good friends wiht Peter at all. You'd have a friend's mobile, right? Of course you would: although the tool itself has nothing to do with the depth or success of a relationship, it is a tool that we all use as part of the broad communications toolset we have today. It's almost inconceivable that you wouldn't be calling or texting friends - and the same is likely true of business contacts.

Facebook is not actually that interesting. It's just another communication tool. In any business where relationships are important, for instance in PR or in journalism, Facebook is an extension of our communications toolset - it adds another dimension to our ability to communicate effectively. And that is particuarly true if we are taking a role in a community of people that are using that tool themselves.

Banning Facebook in the workplace as policy is not only myopic and doomed to failure, it is disempowering. Better to encourage the use of Facebook and other, similar, networking tools in a working context to support better, smarter communications for your people. Banning it is, as Ammouni tells us, 'hiding behind your finger'.

Spanked

Gulf News today carries, on page 41, a slightly strange advertisement for telco Du’s Unlimited Blackberry offer. The ad, which struck me as unusually weak in a market slopping over the brim with weak advertising, offers “unlimited wireless access to email, calendar, messaging and internet through seamless and secured office connectivity”. It features a sketch of two aliens looking amazed at a Blackberry, having discarded a number of other useless gadgets.

Unusually, Gulf News has also, on page 36, spanked the offer editorially. GN’s Nadia Saleem not unreasonably points out that the ‘unlimited’ Du offer is actually limited to 1 Gb of data transfer, after which usage is charged at Dhs 0.01 per kbyte (or, in other words, a cool Dhs 10 per Mbyte). When contacted about the fact that its ‘unlimited’ offer is actually limited (a slightly paradoxical thing, I’m sure most would agree), Du apparently told our Nadia, “someone might use the data access facility to download movies all day or use the mobile as a modem to transfer large amounts of data”.

Ooh! The rotters!

Firstly, the point is surely that in today's 'always on' world, the data volume is not the charged unit in the vast majority of internet transactions. Package prices are the way forward and the amount of data used in a given package is not germane. The internet is not circuit switched - you pays for the pipe - access not volume. Operators billing volumetrically for access are sort of cheating, really. Particularly when they have mobile IP infrastructures.

That apart, I personally received something like 250Mbytes of useful* email this month, despite being on leave for three weeks of it - and the month's not over yet. If I include the junk, we're looking at a mailbox of over 300 Mbytes and I haven't started allowing for internet access, streaming video or any other cool apps or toys. So it's actually conceivable that a heavy user would actually want 1Gb of access.

What’s missing here are a few words on their advertisement to explain that they don’t actually mean unlimited when they say unlimited. Perhaps interestingly, Etisalat, the big telco, doesn’t limit its unlimited offer.

I bet the GN advertising sales boys aren’t talking to our Nads today, though...


PS: I know I said I wasn't posting for a couple of days, but I couldn't resist it...

*Useful is a relative term.

Meejia

This link came to me thanks to Charles Arthur. It's an amazing blog that charts job cuts in US newspapers. It's looking like carnage out there: US media houses are reporting drops in their profits anywhere from 47 to 87%.

US newspaper advertising, local and national both, dropped by over 7% in 2007, together with smaller drops in specialist magazines, radio and a number of TV categories. The biggest rise in advertising volumes was the Internet, a growth of almost 19%.

UK newspaper sales have dived over 11% over the past four years on average, with year on year drops to April 2008 as high as 10 and 12%, as people move to the Internet for their news, views and conversations.

At the same time, many journalists are also using the 'new tools', including blogs. A survey by Pleon's US partner, Brodeur, showed that over 50% of journalists spent an hour a day reading blogs. Almost 50% of them blog themselves - and 4 out of 5 US journalists believe that blogs have made reporting more diverse. 65% of US media regularly read blogs that cover their area of reporting. We're even seeing a re-birth of media interest in, and reporting of, blogging in the UAE, although I honestly think this article today that quotes a certain devilishly attractive cove could, and should, have gone a lot further.

It's probably no coincidence that the biggest recent influx of journalists from 'more sophisticated' world markets recently to the UAE was to Abu Dhabi's The National - and that there are something like 20 blogs coming out of that team right now, including a 'team blog'. In other words, blogging is part of life for journalists from other parts of the world - online habits are ingrained in them that are perhaps lacking in our regional media - but that's changing fast.

If you doubt that change, read this (courtesy Gianni)...

What on earth am I getting at? Well, there's a movement going on here. As consumers' eyeballs are moving online, the money's following them. And media houses are being dragged along behind the money, trying to find new revenue streams that will replace the advertising and copy sales revenue of the 'conventional' media model. It does remind me of the struggles of circuit-switch mentality telecom operators trying to deny the existence of the virtually free of charge Internet telephony. And the typesetters I used to work with who didn't believe that desktop publishing would replace professional compositors. And the people at travel agent Thompsons who lost their jobs to people like me who book holidays on the Internet. And on and on and on.

The list is, of course, of people being disintermediated by the Internet. And media in key world markets are facing that self same pressure right now. To misquote Larry Ellison, "It's online business or out of business". The problem is that online revenue streams aren't acting like conventional revenue streams - and there's a shortfall in revenue that's behaving conventionally.

This, therefore, would seem to be a time to behave unconventionally...

Silvio

Gianni posts a link to this story which I otherwise would have missed. Unlike myself, being of mature years and a more reflective and sensible nature, he declines to comment.

The White House, home to that fine, upstanding fellow George Bush, apparently handed out a press pack to members of the media travelling to the G8 Summit that neatly positioned Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi as “one of the most controversial leaders in the history of a country known for governmental corruption and vice”.

It gets worse. The four page biography of Berlusconi contained in the press pack was apparently yanked from an encyclopaedia without being edited or checked and also referred to Berlusconi gaining his position through his media contacts.

Brilliantly, it went on to highlight his early career: “He earned money by organising puppet shows and making people pay a ticket, he sold vacuum cleaners, worked as a singer on cruise ships, made photographic portraits, and did the homework of other students in exchange for money.”

The White House has been forced into a grovelling apology to Silvio and 'the Italian people'.

You gotta love it.

Meanwhile, in related news, the gravitas and deportment of said Italian premier are here displayed for all to see. A pair of classic Silvio moments:

Rabid

Head for heights in Dubai

In a city that contains the world's tallest man-made structure, it can be hard to get a sense of perspective. Joy Lo Dico is dizzied by the highs and lows of the planet's most extreme tourist destination.

Saturday, 19 April 2008

For his 1979 travel book Arabia: Through the Looking Glass, Jonathan Raban stopped off in Dubai as the petro-dollar boom kicked in. Thirty years ago, no-one in Dubai could have foreseen the seven-star hotels, the extravagant shopping trips of Colleen McLoughlin and her fellow Wags, or George Clooney dropping into town. But its arrogance and aspiration was already evident to Raban.

"We passed the Dubai Hilton," he wrote. "It looked to me like a Hilton but it was marked by one of those singular honours which count for so much and seem – to an outsider – so numbingly unimportant. At that particular moment it was The Tallest Building In The Gulf and Sheikh Rashid of Dubai was apparently doting on it like a favourite child. Looking at its smug, slab-sides cliffs of glass and concrete, I hoped that it would not be allowed to enjoy its pre-eminence for too long."

STOP!

Stop right there. Yet another stupid report by a dumb 'been there for three days and know it all' blow-in, yet another useless, two-dimensional characterisation of Dubai from yet another someone who can't be arsed to look beyond the blindingly obvious. And the worst crime of all? She's started the whole stupid pile of ordure with a quotation from the original 'Been there, seen it, done that, gonna write it up and be home for tea' writer, Jonathan Raban. The man that dropped into the Gulf for a week, wrote a silly book about it filled with sweeping generalisations and assumptions and got away with the whole awful episode purely because so few people knew better in those days.

It is typical of Raban's slapdash, silly little book that he mistook the 33-storey Dubai World Trade Centre Tower for The Hilton, the four-storey building next door. It is even more typical that The Independent's brilliantly insightful journalist repeats the idiocy as she embarks on her shallow, idiotic sprint through Dubai before loading up on duty free and snatching her flight home to show her tan and some yellowish-looking diamonds to her mates.

It's enough to make you puke.

And if it's not, you can find the whole dumb, excruciating 'Paid a ferryman Dhs 100 to take me on a trip on the creek and bought a fake watch that fell apart, too' (Abra fare to anyone with half a brain, Dhs 50) piece of travel writing mediocrity here.

At least it's not as bad as the silly arse from the Daily Mail who wrote up how fun she found it shopping last year in Dubai's 'delightful and traditional old souk' - you guessed it, the Madinat Jumeirah.

The souk that was the inspiration for this blog's name, in fact.

Flacks

The UK has a brilliant online technology publication called The Register. It's been going for quite some time now and has built up a massive and loyal base of readers - it's very influential indeed in technology circles. El Reg, as it likes to style itself, is also pretty hard-hitting - it's cynical, sarcastic and irreverent in the extreme. It's also very good at breaking news and very good indeed at taking a long, hard look at the dynamics of an industry in which it is not only specialised, but entrenched.

Which is why it's such a great read.

So when two, presumably slightly flustered, PR people from British telephone company O2 had a conference call to discuss quite how to deal with the Register's treatment of some issues they've been having with bandwidth allocation, the last thing they'd probably want to do is patch in Register reporter Bill Ray to listen to them discussing how they were going to manage him.

That would be stupidity beyond belief, wouldn't it? That would be Darwin Award class stuff.

Perish the very thought...

Cruel

It was none other than Guardian technology section editor and blogger Charles Arthur who, via his report on his blog, turned me onto a most amusing little corner of the Internet which I, in turn, feel compelled to share with you.

As if to show that the mighty Guardian can, indeed, take it on the chin, Charles reports on the fascinating affair of The Guardian's very own home grown scandal - that of the 'gap blogger'. The gap blogger, a young chap called Max, has been given a slice of the Guardian's blog in which to report on his travels in his 'gap year'. A gap year is the year between school and university that many, often well-to-do, British kids spend backpacking around the world and discovering themselves. Incidentally, I do think that people who set out to discover themselves are often just trying to travel away from the fact that what there is there to be discovered is very little indeed.

So Max, apparently no different from any other 19 year old, gets to write on a British national newspaper's blog. A break which few aspiring young travel writers could expect to get. The fact that Max's travel writer dad is a Guardian contributor introduces a beguiling whiff of nepotistic sulphur to an otherwise drab contribution: Max's first piece is really no more or less than you'd expect - a little silly, naive, slightly clumsy and perhaps gawky. What's perhaps surprising is that The Guardian Blog is supporting such a poor contribution.

And this is where we get to the real fun of the affair: the tide of abuse that nestles in the comments. It's even possible that the phrase gap blogger might enter our dictionaries or even transform into a real life honest-to-goodness meme.

I do recommend a flick through Max's first (and last?) post and the consequent howls of rage from readers. The criticism is nothing less than coruscating - and the volume of comment is quite remarkable. It's a rollicking good read and a fantastic example of social networking at its most... social or anti-social? You decide!

'Unbalanced' Women Unfit to be Judges: Lawyers

According to this most amusing piece over at Arabianbusiness.com, sent to me by grumpy and misanthropic Scottish person Angus, Qatari lawyers have come out and told it like it is: women are of an unbalanced disposition and therefore unfit to be judges.

AB based its piece on a chucklesome survey carried out by Qatar's very own The Peninsula: the newspaper polled Qatari male lawyers on the question, no doubt expecting an outburst of blind, vacuous misogyny and getting its money's worth as a result.

"A woman is emotionally and physiologically not geared to fit in the role of a judge since the job demands a balanced disposition," one lawyer was quoted as saying in the Peninsula piece.

Meanwhile, in today's Peninsula, researcher Dr. Rana Sobh tells the paper's breathlessley excited reporter: "There is a lot of prejudice and misunderstanding of Middle Eastern women in the West. Middle Eastern women are depicted in the Western media as oppressed and ignorant."

I suspect I might not be the only person in the world to spot something of a disconnect here...

What larks, Pip!

Biting The Hand That Feeds

As we continue to applaud Sheikh Mohammad's wise intervention in the Khaleej Times journalists threatened with jail case and his Undertaking That Journalists In The UAE Will Not Face Prison As A Potential Consequence Of The Pursuit Of Their Profession (with certain caveats as confirmed by certain authorities in a certain way), media and the law are something of a focus around here at the moment. It is perhaps timely and even mildly amusing to see the news that a journalist is suing the government-owned Dubai Press Club, his former managing editor and his former employer, the enormous Saudi Research and Marketing Group over an award for journalism.

The problem, apparently, is that the journalist feels that a $15,000 award for investigative reporting was wrongly presented by Dubai Press Club to his managing editor, as the journalist claims that he contributed to the report. He is suing for just under $137,000.

Litigious hack slaps back indeed.

The Gulf News report of the scrap details the slightly complex nature of the suit, which has now gone to appeal having been thrown out by the Civil Court for 'lack of evidence'.

None of the investigative reporters involved appear to have seen fit to question scrabbling in the dust for a cash award for journalism made by a government-backed entity. Strange, that...