News Management At Twitterspeed

(Photo credit: mkhmarketing)

"Every minute that passes the poison is spreading into the system to all sorts of roots and you need to find a way to cauterize that very, very quickly."

That rather glorious quote comes from a chap at number 10 Downing Street, talking about news management and Twitter. It's carried in this piece in the Guardian. The piece looks at how the relationship between compliant journalists and dissembling politicians has moved to the Twitter age, in particular No. 10's intention to hand out 'Twitter exclusives' to journalists.

The quote is one of the scariest things I've seen in some time. While it recognises the viral nature of information movement in this connected age, it's the characterisation of information as 'poison' by political communications people I find unsettling. We're all enjoying new levels of transparency and demanding, in fact, better transparency from the people and organisations we support. Information as poison is counter-intuitive to that.

Of course the great challenge facing journalism is the direct nature of networked communications. I am in contact with my audience and don't need a journalist to filter or agree to carry what I have to say. Likewise, my audience has pretty much, by following me, decided it wants to hear what I have to say from the horse's mouth. This direct communication avoids the pitfalls of editorialism, whereby a third party decides whether what I have to say is important or relevant to the majority of an averaged audience. The development of that process to a high degree of refinement gives us mainstream banality such as CNN or Fox. But now people with special interests or a particularly strong interest in a given area or topic can go straight to the source, create their own feeds of information and even their own magazines.

We have many ways of presenting and consuming news - one of which is journalists who are now fighting to match information that's flowing at breakneck speeds. Along with that comes a loss in quality of information, with mainstream media dropping their standards to meet the exigencies of time and therefore adding immeasurably to the spread of that terrible poison.

Easy, then - give journalists you can trust to toe the line privileged access to information that allows them to do a better job of analysing and presenting it. That way, you get your side of the story out to some important multipliers and the journalist gets the head start they need to compete with Twitter-speed. You also have a neat control mechanism, because the second a journalist gets into that sort of cosy relationship, they've signed a Faustian pact. Go off message and you're out in the cold.

David Cameron was once negative about Twitter, but his new media strategies have been evolving since 2011 and now conservative MPs are encouraged to "tweet as a muscular force". That's another interesting set of multipliers, because No. 10 can depend on several hundred loyal MPs to RT what the PM had for breakfast. As long as that breakfast is 'on message'.

So what's changed? A compliant Westminster press carrying the government's message, the government media machine leveraging the voices of hundreds of MPs to get a critical mass of 'on message' communications out there at a local level and planned bursts of communication that pre-brief media under embargo to ensure that the 'right message' gets out there.

It's the poison. Like the magic in Terry Pratchett's books, the problem with that poison is it has a nasty habit of escaping. A wonderful example cited in the Guardian piece is chancellor George Osborne's 'Great Train Snobbery', the recent incident where an accompanying journalist live tweeted the chancellor's crass attempt to travel first class on an economy ticket because of who he was. The whole row blew up with blinding force and speed - such speed that there was a press pack awaiting the unprepared and clearly embarrassed chancellor as the train pulled up in London.

The poison had clearly spread...

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*

Disable The Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touchpad

Chuck Norris EX2 01 (Photo credit: (vhmh))

You CAN disable the touchpad on a Samsung Series 5 Ultra notebook computer.

One of the least endearing aspects of my recent technology shift from a dead Lenovo T61 and Windows 7 to a sleek Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook and Windows 8 has been the lack of documentation. Remember documentation? When things came with user manuals?

Ah, no. These days we have the Internet and so we don't need those nasty, papery manual things. You just go to our Internet-based resource centre and we'll answer any questions you might have.

What if it's something I don't know? I can't ask about what I don't know can I? And you're not actually telling me. You're just expecting me to sift through a wodge of data, rather than structure and present useful information to me.

That's okay, you can go to our user forums and see the answers our socially enabled peer group conversation community present to you. They're really committed and useful guys.

And what if I just want someone from Samsung to tell me how to do something? You know, someone who actually knows something about the product?

Simple! Talk to one of our trained customer support executives using email or our online chat facility!

Great. That's precisely what I did, because the otherwise very lovely Samsung Series 5 Ultra comes with the world's biggest touchpad and it doesn't have an off switch or appear to have a driver with that functionality. Which is mad, right? All laptops have drivers for their touchpads that allow them to be disabled, surely. And, yes, in the main they do. Except for this machine, with its aircraft-carrier sized, guaranteed to be touched at all times, touchpad. It's huge. I've found flies playing cricket on it. This, let us be abundantly clear, is the Chuck Norris of touchpads. You don't touch it - it touches you.

Samsung's support operative came back in response to my email, confirming my worst fears. "You can't disable the touchpad on a Samsung Series 5 Ultra."

Which had me consigned to typing tweets six times as each attempt saw a feather-touch of the ball of my thumb select all and then my next key press replace the text. Cursors would appear in random places around the screen, replacing and deleting lumps of text and objects before I realised it'd gone again. My language, never particularly temperate, has become decidedly nautical.

I evolved an insane typing technique, like a digital tai-chi movement, The Crane Over The Keyboard. Repetitive Strain Injury loomed on the horizon as I picked my way over the huge expanse of the Monster Touchpad From Hell. Sure enough, every couple of minutes, a brush on that vast, hyper-sensitive surface would bring on-screen mayhem.

It's so unfair. This machine is the dog's, seriously. It's sleek and titanium-shelled, as light as a feather and slimmer than a supermodel with amoebic dysentery. It is in every way perfect. Apart from Chuck The Touchpad.

I took to tweeting at @SamsungGulf, but that was about as much use as nailing cats to a hovercraft. They're too busy using Twitter on relentless promotional broadcast mode to actually talk to anyone who isn't giving them some sycophantic, pandering guff they can retweet. (This, to Samsung, is presumably 'engagement')

It's one of the worst Twitter accounts I've seen in a long while. Absolutely zero back from them. Just a constant tide of 'Tell us your favorite way of inserting a Galaxy SIII'...

And then a conversation with Sheheryar at @LaptopsinUAE about something completely different turned to the S5. I'd decided to break the warranty and have him crack the case and neuter Chuck by yanking the connector. And he came up with the idea of hitting Fn F5. Because that is how you disable the touchpad on a Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook.

So here's a big, fat THANK YOU to Sheheryar, for doing what Samsung's support droid and their useless Twitter account should have done. For knowing his way around laptops and being able to help someone who just wants to get on with using a functional tool. I didn't have to retype a single word of this post and that feels oh, so good.

Chuck is dead.

What's Your Favourite Colour?

Color your World (Photo credit: Michelle Brea)

For some time, The Niece From Hell was in the endearing habit of filling any untoward social silences by incessantly asking 'What's your favourite colour?' until you either answered her or bludgeoned her into stillness with a spade.

While she has now thankfully outgrown the habit, I am frequently reminded of it when I see brands 'seeking engagement' online. The prevailing wisdom from many 'experts' is that you should ask questions to obtain 'engagement'.

The trouble is, true engagement comes from asking questions that matter, that are genuinely seeking answers. Blindly ending every post with 'What do you think, what's your favourite chocolate moment?' is at the least insincere. It can also lead to some hilarious moments, as the Lebanese mobile company asking just such a question got caught out by a rather large bomb last week. One delightful response to the question (which was something like 'We love furry animals, what's your favourite furry animal?') was 'Why don't you stop screwing around on Facebook and go fix the mobile signal that's down so we can contact our family and friends?'

A meaningless question topping off every communication also quickly just blends into chatter. It's such a shame - the chance to recruit consumers and use their feedback to genuinely hone a product, its distribution and its marketing is being wasted by brands hiring agencies to make social media go away - the online version of that wholly disempowering entity, the call centre.

What do you think? What's your favourite question?

Beirut, Bombs And Chaos Theory

Rafic Hariri beirut 2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I follow the #Beirut hashtag (Tweetdeck's multiple columns are a wonderful thing) and so it was that I had just finished putting up Friday's guest post by Micheline when I caught the first tweets from Achrafieh as people reported a loud explosion, some asking 'What was that?'.

The tweets quickly became more specific, Ashrafiyeh pinpointed and a large blast. People close by talked of the ground moving, while an increasing number of tweets mentioned Sassine Square - a busy area of restaurants and cafés. There was a sense people were holding back from saying it was a bomb, perhaps a gas cylinder. Anything, in fact, but a bomb. Nobody wanted to admit it could be that.

The first twitpics showed a black cloud above the city. Now tweets talked of a bomb, people linked the location to the headquarters of the March 14 movement - the anti-Syrian coalition named for the date of the last such bombing in Beirut - the massive car bomb that killed Rafiq Hariri.

News started flowing thick and fast. A car bomb, very big. People were reporting casualties. The first images from the scene came in, confirming what people had feared - a massive explosion in the busy area. The phone network was down but 3G was still working. Mainstream media reports were mentioned, LBC first to the news. The volume of retweets was going up as mainstream outlets were quoted. Some outlets ran with graphic images of body parts and pools of blood. Reports of deaths from mainstream outlets, one dead said one outlet, two said Reuters, three said another. The UK's Guardian was quoting tweets and showing twitpics on its website, many people cited Reuters' reports. Twitter started carrying calls for blood from the hospitals, queues built of up people volunteering to donate. One Lebanese news channel was reporting it wasn't a car bomb, another that the bomb was actually in a bank.

Joining in the fray, reporting at Twitter speed, mainstream outlets were helping the confusion as they posted information without confirmation and certainly lacking the 'context and analysis' that have been so often cited as a reason for their relevance. The volume of retweets was very high now,  voices from around the region joining what had been a very local conversation.

It was horrible to watch. So many friends in Beirut and here, worried for loved ones who lived or worked in the area and then, as the news sank in, so much bitter disappointment that once again the lives and hopes of ordinary people are to be sacrificed, that the optimism was to be ground out of everyone and replaced by fear. Waking up the next day to the headlines confirmed that yes, this was an assassination, that a key member of the March 14 movement was dead, along with seven others and tens more had been injured.

As so many times before Twitter looked like a Lorenzian water wheel. Initially it efficiently carried eye witness reports, the first news breaking and confirmed by multiple sources and twitpics. With the huge increase in volume comes retweets and second generation shares, the water wheel starts to become more erratic and it becomes harder to filter the information.

What I found interesting was the sight, the first time I have noticed it, of mainstream media sources getting right in there and posting flows of unconfirmed information, reprocessing tweets and posting 'breaking news' with clearly little attempt at filtering the raw data. People quickly quote mainstream sources because we have so long been told we can depend on them, yet the information they were providing was of no different quality to that being shared by eye witnesses. Mainstream media were retweeting witnessesx. I thought it a dangerous precedent.

Anti Social Media

Khanjar, Saidi-type, circa 1924, from Oman. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oman's National Human Rights Commission has come out against the online commentators and activists who have been irking the government to the point where there have been a significant number of arrests recently.

The Commission's statement, linked here, is a model of clarity. For instance: "NHRC pointed out that there is a difference between the freedom of opinion as a right and the practice of this right in reality. The dividing line makes the practice of this right legal and going beyond it a crime punishable by the law. The rule in this issue is that the freedom of individuals stops when the freedom of other individuals starts."

Right.

The Omani public prosecution issued a statement last week that clarified its position on the issue of opinion expressed online and "calls upon all citizens on the importance of following the legal methods and means for the expression of opinion in line with the legal concept for the freedom of expression."

The problem is, of course, as Omani columnist Susan Mubarak points out in Muscat Daily, there is no official 'line' that defines quite where " the freedom of individuals stops" and "the freedom of other individuals starts". Her excellent piece on the issue is balanced by the Uriah Heep tones of the Oman Tribune.

Article 29 of Oman's 'Basic Statute of the State' guarantees "The freedom of opinion and expression thereof through speech, writing or other forms of expression is guaranteed within the limits of the Law." Those limits are, of course, nowhere defined.

Further clarifying its statement, the NHRC said that "It affirmed that it supports the freedom of opinion, which seeks to achieve the public interests rather than those harming or insulting others."

The 'About Human Rights' page on the NHRC's lovely, retro-style website is "under construction". You'd have thought it would have been 404, wouldn't you?

(Update: I've just learned from @muscati that a female member of the NHRC has resigned from the commission as a result of its decision to make this statement.)

EIDA Discovers The Internet

Eida (Photo credit: cgsheldon)

A lovely piece in Khaleej Times today lifted from national news agency WAM  telling us how the Emirates Identity Authority is launching "the Social Media engagement service". 

The brave providers of 'context and analysis' didn't even bother changing WAM's copy,  using the official headline and including the redundant definite article and the unnecessary caps for social media. You can read the EIDA announcement on the authority's website here.

I must confess, they might have made a remarkable four year long hash of their communications, but EIDA has consistently served up quality entertainment.

The "Social Media engagement service" will help customers with queries and "underscored the Emirates ID’s keenness on keeping pace with the development of the modern media and employing the social networking tools for upgrading the ID card-related services and meeting customers’ requirements by responding to their queries and solving their problems most urgently through the channels they prefer in their daily life."

EIDA has already lauded its own success with  the service, replying to over 1,700 customer queries and complaints last month alone. It's followers have grown by 40% over the month-long test period.

If you want to social media engage with the Emirates ID people, you can talk to them on Twitter @EmiratesID_HELP or on Facebook, where you can pick up insightful hints and tips such as 'Important info! Ensure that all personal data entered in the e-form are correct'.

There is also, by the way, a new ID card status service. I've just renewed my visa (itself a somewhat fraught process in the circumstances) and am waiting for my new ID card so I thought I'd try it out. Apparently I'm 15 years old, which is always nice to discover when father time weighs down on one's shoulders. Quite where my ID card is, I couldn't honestly say...

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Off To ArabNet I Go!

Two years on from the first ArabNet Digital Summit in Beirut and the world has changed. I don't know that ArabNet can take the credit for that, but organiser Omar Christidis can certainly take credit for knowing when to start a serious regional digital conference with a focus on startups and 'the digital opportunity' in the Middle East.

As I posted at the time, the first ArabNet Digital Summit in March 2010 was something of an eye-opener. With low expectations confounded by a very high standard of event, ArabNet showed that there was undoubtedly a flowering of talent, innovation, interest and investment in the region's digital industries. The second ArabNet a year later cemented that, although a daringly expanded event did expose a couple of organisational weaknesses. That didn't really matter, the highly ambitious agenda was expanded to include a developer day event, the two day core conference and a community day. The ArabNet team went on a road trip around the region, literally taking a bus from country to country and arranging presentations, workshops and the like with the aim of uncovering, even fostering, the region's potential startups.

This year, the ArabNet Digital Summit is a five day event - the popular Developer Day has been expanded to the plural, the two day conference remains at the core of the event. There's a one day 'Industry Day' (taking place concurrent to the second Developer Day), which aims to examine how digital technologies are transforming a number of vertical industries in the region. It's a smart idea, because it means taking an approach to technology that is necessarily made relevant to each of the industries the day serves, which include healthcare, banking, travel, education, and government.

Then we have the two day ArabNet conference, the 'Forum Days' which include a number of keynotes, panels, workshops and the much-loved 'Ideathon' (pitch a startup idea from the stage) and 'Startup Demo' (Startup pitches its work and seeks funding) competitions. There's a third competition, as well, for agencies to case study their digital campaigns.

As usual, I'll be there causing trouble. I'm moderating a session on Industry Day, 'Social Media and Customer Relationship Management' and then during the main forum, I'll be presenting on how companies can, in fact need to, 'Take back your content' - how companies are going to need to plan and execute content strategies in this world of 'discoverability' we're carving for ourselves. Then I'll be moderating a panel on 'The Future of News' which will be, if I have anything to do with it, a real bunfight.

Apart from the stuff I'm doing from the stage, I'll be doing the usual at ArabNet - meeting smart and interesting people, learning about what's happening around the region and soaking up information and best practice from the speakers onstage.

See you there!

Here's the Spot On ArabNet page, BTW!

We Are All Publishers

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

We are all many things. You can be an oil executive, commuter, father of three or violent crime victim to journalists, depending on whether they're quoting you on oil prices, late trains, the joys of parenting or the nasty gash in your cheek.

Today, all four of the UAE's English daily newspapers report on a lawsuit filed against a 'tweeter' for insulting the Chief of Dubai police, Dahi Khalfan Tamim. I thought that was interesting. If he'd insulted Mr Tamim by phone, would the papers have called him a phoner?

So what makes Twitter so special? Well, this is the first lawsuit filed by a public official in Dubai against someone using Twitter. It's illegal to insult ('curse') a government employee in the UAE, the offense carries a maximum Dhs30,000 ($8,000-odd) fine or three year jail sentence. So the chap in question, an Emirati gentleman, is potentially in quite serious trouble - defamation is something taken very seriously here in the UAE and, actually, in the region as a whole.

It's yet another reminder that despite the access we have to the wonderful playground that is social media, these platforms are public places and subject to the law in the same way any other public pronouncement would be. While the authorities struggle (or fail to get to grips with) with the nature of these platforms and quite what 'publishing' is in the digital age, the platform owners are quite clear - Facebook, Twitter, Google et al are providing a platform onto which YOU publish content. In putting content 'up' on these sites, you are taking on the responsibility of a publisher.

(It's one reason why my money's on strange German internet maverick kim.com in his case against Uncle Sam in a New Zealand court - his website, megaupload, was a 'platform' for people to use, his lawyer is expected to argue. So the responsibility for copyright infringement that took place on the site would be the users' not Kim's.)

The defendant and Kim.com actually have something in common - both have been refused bail, in the case of the Emirati gentleman, he's been in Al Slammer since February 19th and has had his case adjourned to March 11th. (Kim.com was eventually granted bail, BTW). By that time, he'll have spent three full weeks in custody as a result of his tweets.

Whatever the context of the story, you can bet one thing. These days, we are all publishers.

Nostradamus

Image via Wikipedia"A Facebook group on the conflict between the army and Fatah Al Islam in Lebanon grew a membership of 8,000 in a single week: an average of two new members every minute. The movement of people, of opinions and debate in the new social networks can take place with incredible rapidity. This debate is taking place in a region where public debate, assembly and the mass publication of opinion have traditionally been discouraged. There is a new egalitarianism in the air and it’s a heady scent for many.

A flash survey of 100 Middle East based Facebook users tells us that 93% of them are using broadband connections. And 89% of them have laptop computers. 73% of those Facebook users are between 25 and 35 years of age. The survey took less than 1 hour to conduct.

There is a strong and growing Arab community using broadband technologies to move video content across the Internet, often as part of participation in social networks. The video featuring King Abdulla II of Jordan produced by the One Voice organisation, calling for peace and understanding between Palestinians and Israelis, has drawn over 279,000 views in Youtube. Video clips on Lebanon have consistently drawn above 150,000 views, while other topics and productions from the Arab world have consistently driven between 60,000 and 1 million views. Few FTA channels in the region could claim such viewership.

Social networks, the core aspect of the thinking that has been characterised as Web 2.0, are driving the adoption of broadband services in the Middle East. Perhaps interestingly this is not a technical audience of technology early adopters. That the growth in adoption has not been stronger is almost undoubtedly a product of prohibitive pricing strategies among the region’s operators."

That was all written early in 2007. Not bad, huh? I recently had reason to revisit a white paper I'd written together with Spot On bright spark Mai Abaza to support my presentation at the Arab Advisors Convergence Conference in Amman. The above text is part of the argument we were making that regional telcos needed to bring down the price of broadband and stop considering it a service for shifting big files and start looking at it as a way for many people to shift many files quickly.

I recall asking the conference how many had heard of the phrase Web 2.0 or social media and getting a show of eleven hands from an audience of hundreds of operators. That's telcos for you.

Re-reading this reminded me there's a line that connects Nahr El Bared with Occupy Wall Street - those Facebook groups that sprang up contained debate and discourse we had never before seen in the region - passionate and sometimes violently abusive, the adoption rate of these groups and the way they brought people together were stunning to watch. Of course, Mai and I were so busy examining the implications for the broadband market we missed the wider implications that here was a new platform for discourse and organisation that would grow to have the ability to bring down governments.

Those groups showed people in the Middle East, for the first time, that they could not only talk to each other, but broadcast opinion to tens of thousands. It took four years' growth in adoption, but the seeds sown as the Lebanese army blasted the Nahr El Bared camp using helicopters carrying bombs in home-made cradles would lead to something a great deal bigger...

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...

The Gay Girl Media Conundrum

The Gay Girl in Damascus affair has been a fascinating, if slightly irritating, sideshow to the appalling events in Syria as the country's people continue to struggle to push for change and reform in the face of brutal repression.

It's been extensively reported on elsewhere, but I am particularly interested in the reactions from 'traditional media' who appear to be taking an increasingly solid stance with reference to social media and the way it impacts/relates to the role of 'traditional' journalism. Gulf News wags its finger in an editorial today, "Beware of social media's dark side", in which it calls for 'this episode' to be 'a lesson for all of us'. Quite what the lesson is, GN doesn't make clear. I get the feeling that the writer really wanted to say 'don't trust social media because it can all be a pack of lies and that's why you need us, journalists, to filter this stuff for you' but couldn't really, because of course the biggest dupes of all have been the journalists who ran the story, parroted it and unquestioningly (especially in the Middle East's media, who should surely have known better) ran it from the newswires.

The story was broken, the blog conclusively proven to be a hoax, by online activist Ali Abunimah, who posted his reservations on his 'Electronic Intifada' blog (linked here), other bloggers (such as Liz Henry) were expressing doubts - and, to be fair, NPR's Andy Carvin, as well as the New York Times were onto the story and chasing down the increasingly ethereal 'Amina' - but most mainstream media (and, it should be noted, ALL Middle East media) were still just parroting the same stuff, derived from the blog itself, unthinkingly.

The fact is a number of people, connected online, contributed to reality checking and then publicly outing the fraud. They used their online experience, online resources and tools. They did not use the tools of 'traditional' journalism and arguably did not necessarily adhere to the standards of traditional journalism.

Commenter Charles on Liz Henry's BookManiac blog rather nails it, BTW: "One thing that struck me about the whole sordid affair was the narcissit, paternalist nature of it. Here is a white heterosexual man who, instead of supporting the efforts of real GLTB Middle-Easterners, decided instead to steal the spotlight from them and claim their voice. I guess he figured his little brown brothers and sisters just couldn’t do it themselves, so he appointed himself their spokesperson. That is rather disgusting."

Twitter Outrage Shock Horror

Dubai's tittle-tattle-tastic tabloid treat 7Days today jumps the shark and manages to be the first paper in the UAE to completely stand up a story on Twitter. 'Beach snaps land Terrys in hot water' is the stuff of tabloid dreams and is based on England and Chelsea captain John Terry, on holiday in Abu Dhabi with his wife Toni, 'frolicking' in their hotel swimming pool and beach. The 7Days story is based on a number of mildly, in my opinion, invasive snaps run by the Daily Mail (the original snaps are linked here so you can throw a brick through the screen or write to your MP or whatever it is you want to do, but I do warn you that they contain a woman wearing a skimpy bikini so clicking on the link does rather imply that you wish to see this kind of thing)  last weekend.

7Days' story is classic tabloid stuff: "The Twittersphere has been set alight by a diatribe of disgust at photos..." it starts out - rich stuff, indeed! You'd have thought it trended or something, but of course setting the Twittersphere alight (the Twittersphere? It sounds like someone's dad trying to be cool and 'rad' with the kids. I hate the neologism as much as I hated Blogosphere) isn't really about empirical evidence of a tide of opinion so much as being able to pick out a few ranty tweets and fling them at a page of type. Which is, of course, what 7Days has done: the negative comments have been plucked from an almost negligible trickle of reaction to the Mail story on the 9th June, you can see how the Twittersphere can be 'set alight' by a handful of tweets by clicking this here link to a Twitter search of "John Terry" Abu Dhabi.

Of course, the 9th June Tweet from 7Days' own Twitter feed, @7DaysUAE  "England and Chelsea footballer John Terry spotted in Abu Dhabi: http://goo.gl/Abubm" now takes us to an empty page. Can't be seen to be stoking too much of that shock and outrage, can we chaps?

So what about the 'diatribe of disgust'? Take a look at the Twitter search above - there's very little beyond the tweets that have been selected by 7Days. A couple of people wonder how genuine Terry is, a few more discuss Toni's skimpy bikini. One person said, incorrectly, that the Terrys behaviour would have been treated more harshly in Dubai and one lady called Toni 'a WAG doormat'.

Two things we can learn from this:

One, a newspaper will stand up a half page story echoing a tide of righteous public disgust on an infinitesimal sample of Tweets. This distortion of expressed opinion coming, let us not forget, from those who purport to give us 'context and analysis' and help us poor rubes to understand what's going on by filtering the facts for our convenient consumption.

Two, if you're a-tweetin', there's nothing to stop a newspaper using your tweets in a story. You have spoken and done so in public and on the record. And like anyone who goes on the record, your opinion can be used in any way whatsoever, including out of context or as part of a story that distorts your intention. That's what makes going on the record so potentially dangerous.

By the way, I do not doubt most people here find the images at best vaguely incongruous and at worst offensive, but let us not forget that these people were in a private hotel beach, where a different standard of dress and yes, to an extent, behaviour has long been accepted compared that expected in public places, including public beaches, in the (highly tolerant) UAE. And they didn't choose to make these images public.

(I have to record the POV of one cynical pal who thinks actually they did choose to make these images public in a bid to court publicity. Who knows?)

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.

The Unbearable Ubiquity of Twitter

Image via CrunchBaseI have now seen a number of friends taking nervously to Twitter, stumbling around for a while blindly and then giving up on it only to return a while later and find things generally easier and more productive than they ever would have thought. From being critics of the 'I don't want to know what you had for breakfast' school, they have become rabid adherents.

The increasing ubiquity of Twitter fascinates me. Its role in spreading news, information and opinion with blinding speed becomes ever greater - from small events of interest to only a few (Google's Android Market will expand to 99 countries, excluding the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt - the region's three largest markets. Thanks, Twitter) through to its role in the 'Arab Spring' alongside cousin/rival/deadly enemy Facebook.

All this stuff is leaving 'traditional media' rather racing to catch up. The Arab Media Forum this year, Gulf News tells us, is to discuss the way in which events in the region have impacted regional media - rather tellingly, there's no discussion of media's role in those events.

I was disconcerted while in the UK to hear Sky News telling me that "the British Foreign Secretary has tweeted he is to meet Hillary Clinton". That one really gave me pause for thought - a national news channel reporting on a tweet? And it's now commonplace for journalists to 'stand up' stories on tweets - not just the Hollywood gossip tabloid stuff, but serious news stories. Mind you, I was equally disconcerted (not to say amused) to learn that Pippa Middleton's bum had its own Facebook page before the wedding was over!

One area where I do have increasing issues is in media reporting the weight or movement of public opinion by citing Twitter. One story in Gulf News today on the possible accession of Jordan and Morocco to the Gulf Co-Operation Council (the Middle East equivalent of the EEC) tells that 'a number of Twitter users specifically targeted Morocco for criticism...' It's by no means the only example of media citing Twitter as 'public opinion'. Fanboy that I am, it's not.

While undoubtedly true, 'a number of tweets' is hardly empirical evidence of a shift or trend in public opinion. But then we're all beginning to accept it: if it's not on Twitter, it didn't happen, aren't we?

Talking of traditional media, today's Gulf News piece on the newspaper that removed Hillary Clinton and Audrey Tomasoni from the now-famous 'White House Situation Room' OBL picture because they may be considered 'sexually suggestive' is rather coy about quite WHICH newspaper did this. It was this newspaper, a Brooklyn based orthodox Chasidic Jewish newspaper. Presumably GN felt it couldn't for some mad reason use the word 'Jewish'. I do feel somewhat misled - I'd originally thought it was perhaps a Saudi paper... but I had to find out the crucial (remember 'when what when where why how'?) details myself online.

Context and analysis? Nah, I'd rather trust Twitter...

Benihana Kuwait. What you can do.

I'm sorry, I know I'm going on about this but I believe strongly that it is wrong and should be addressed by the very public that Benihana Kuwait has shown such contempt for in its actions.

I sent this message to Benihana Tokyo, the company responsible for the international Benihana franchise,  tonight. You can do the same - cut and paste mine, write your own, whatever. Just use the contact form linked right here.

Hi

I'm contacting you to let you know that I, and very many others across the Middle East, am angry and concerned that one of your franchisees has seen fit to issue suit against a blogger who posted a negative review of a poor experience in Kuwait's Benihana franchise.

The resulting online outcry will not go away, more and more mainstream media are picking up the story and it is highly likely to be covered by international media. It's a landmark suit - not only against Kuwait's most popular blog, not only unfair but also the first time that a company in the Middle East - a region with its own issues with censorship and repression - has sued a blogger.

Benihana Kuwait's maladroit handling of this issue has already created a social media case study that will run and run. It's time to stop this.

I urge you to pressure your franchisee into dropping this unwise suit. It has already caused untold damage to the Benihana brand in this region - you can act before it does so internationally.

The guys at 2:48AM shouldn't have to defend an expensive, scary and vicious - let alone frivolous - suit from a corporate company in this way for expressing their opinion as consumers. It's got to stop.

Thanks.

PS: A chronology of this goof-up is now up over at the UAE Community Blog.

Why The Benihana Story Matters

Image via WikipediaIt's been amazing to watch the Benihana Kuwait story spiral into the stratosphere. That the story has such a strong pair of legs is squarely down to the fact it matters deeply to very many people in the region and around the world - consumer opinion expressed in a blog crushed by a lawsuit filed by a company.

The story(I posted this yesterday which has more detail) was carried across a number of blogs yesterday (and will be in more today, doubtless). As SeaBee pointed out: "I wonder if they're beginning to understand how business works in the real world. You know, the place where customers have a say too. Where bullying and threatening creates a backlash."

It got taken up by a fast-growing community on Twitter (use the hashtag #BenihanaKUW to see the conversations) and then someone found that Benihana Kuwait had a Facebook page. The resulting flood of comments made it quite clear that public opinion was 100% against the idea of a company suing a blogger and expressed shock, outrage and a deep rooted anger.

Later in the day, the papers picked up on the story, The National, Gulf News and 24x7 all ran stories which, at least in the case of the first two, ran in print today. And now million-subscriber website The Next Web has picked it up - which is the start of what, IMHO, is an inevitable move into the international media.

Why so much outrage? It's a complicated mixture - most of the online people who have commented know perfectly well that Benihana's reaction is unacceptable today. Consumers have a new freedom to express their views and opinions in ever-expanding forums and it's a right we're not willing to give up easily. We're not going to tolerate being bullied or seeing the truth repressed. On a larger scale, that same sense of empowerment and fairness is driving some reasonably large collections of people, a million of them on the streets of Cairo today. Without wanting to 'big up' the Benihana story, I do believe it is a microcosm of the bigger one we're watching unveil in Tahrir Square.

We're talking to Kuwaiti blogger Mark on the Dubai Eye Techno Tuesday show today at 11am Dubai Time. If you're Dubai-based, you can catch it on 103.8FM or if not you can listen to the livestream at http://www.dubaieye1038.com  and follow the hashtag #DubaiToday.

Update: Here's the AudioBoo of today's talk between Jessica Swann, myself and 2:48AM's Mark  As many will know, this afternoon Benihana Kuwait chose to delete the comments from its Facebook page, one of the most obnoxious gestures of absolute contempt for the views of the general public - its customers and potential customers.

Egypt's Tweets of Rage

Image by National Media Museum via FlickrEgypt's Day of Rage unfolded yesterday afternoon, the news of gathering crowds and images of protesters heading for Tahrir square shared over Twitter by activists and people in general in a fascinating, blow-by-blow (later on, literally) account. I can't find Ramadan Al Sherbini's lead story from Gulf News online today, so here's a link to another of his stories on the protests.

As before, with events in Iran (which I wrote about extensively in relation to the role of social and mainstream media, you can get the backstory here if you like), the information flow quickly became cluttered with a mixture of retweets, Twibbons and other outside voices clogging up the #Jan25 and #Egypt hashtags.

However, as before, those of us following a number of people in Egypt had access to reliable, first-hand information and were able to watch the story unfold. As the afternoon wore on, mobile networks went down around Tahrir - the government was blamed for the outage, but operators are insisting it was their networks at fault - and vendors around the square, cafés and the like, took the password protection off their wireless networks so people could continue to get word out. There were widespread reports that the government had blocked Twitter, but this is a technically aware generation, people - access was obtained using different clients and proxies.

Mainstream media got access to events through Twitter too - sometimes even quoting the Tweets of journalists on the stweets such as this example from the Wall Street Journal. Such a huge repository of eye witness reports makes for a fascinating account of events - and, importantly, creates awareness and publicises the protest. This post, from Global Voices, shows how Tweets can be used with devastating effect in reportage. There were a lot of brave journalists among the crowds, including Al Jazeerah's cameraman, who was hospitalised with four rubber-cased bullets lodged in his arm as police tried to break up the demonstrations.

Twitter was also being used as an organising tool, with people able to share information widely - when you tweet to a popular and timely hashtag, you're effectively multicasting. And it's being used to get word out this morning, as a second day of demonstrations appears to be on the cards.

There has been a lot of debate over the role of social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, in Tunisia and, prior to that, Iran, both in terms of quite how fundamental both were to events and how reliable reports were. Without a doubt, the closer you are to an event, the more reliable Twitter becomes - by closer, I mean that you have established relationships with people of reputation on the ground or, at the most, at a second remove. Once you get past the third degree of separation, you're losing eyewitness credibility and getting bogged down under the hashtag traffic. But you're also seeing a world that has had its attention brought to the Jan 25 protests and reacting overwhelmingly in support of the protestors, something that Tunisia hacked Facebook to stop and that Egypt appears to have blocked Twitter to stop.

Blocking Twitter won't stop word getting out. You're as well to try and stop grains of sand falling through marbles. Here, for your amusement, is the official word from the Egyptian State Information Service. Compare it to #Jan25 and enjoy.