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.

The Quietest Office

Image via CrunchBase

Apple has an office in the UAE. Operating out of Abu Dhabi media zone TwoFour54, it would appear to be something of a 'best kept secret'.

Where was the fanfare? The dancing girls? The roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowds? Companies typically waste no time at all in trumpeting office openings - look at the fuss Facebook and LinkedIn are making.

Tech website itp.net ran a couple of speculative stories on Apple opening a UAE office back in 2010 - one based on channel rumours of an office opening 'this year' and one quoting distributor Arab Business Machines (ABM) on how the opening wouldn't materially affect their business. And that's it. Nothing else. no announcements, no interviews. No Tim Cooks talking about commitment to the Middle East. Silence.

The only reason it came to light at all is that I mentioned on the weekly Unwired radio show yesterday that Apple had famously never opened a point of presence in the Middle East. In all these years, Apple has provided highly capable Arabic language support (it was very early to market with Mac Arabic language support for the burgeoning desktop publishing market, which it dominated in the Middle East) but never actually been here as such. A listener texted in 'not so' and so I asked Twitter.

The result was surprising. Not only did people come out of the woodwork with affirmatives, but one former journalist at The National even pinpointed the office building at TwoFour54 and mentioned that he'd been asked to desist from following up his story. Apple itself doesn't list out any worldwide offices on its website but does identify Apple UAE in its map of training centres.

So there we have it. Apple is actually here on our doorstep. They're just being very, very quiet about it...

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...

Stood Up On A Tweet

Concert de Madonna à Paris Bercy, Août 2006 (Photo credit: johanlb)

There are now a number of stories that have run in our local media that have been 'stood up' on tweets, those little 140-character darlings.

If you can muster a couple of grumpy tweets, it seems, you can run with "tide of public outrage" and even "down with this sort of thing", which is about as strong as it gets, if you ask me.

Yesterday saw a splendid example of such a story when Arabian Business ran, "Madonna fans vent fury on social media after gig" - a story based on two tweets. One of these happened to be from Maha, a friend of mine:. To quote the AB piece:

"Others suggested that the heat and humidity during the performance affected people's enjoyment of the concert.

Another fan @Meho_M tweeted: “I'm just about ready to pass out from exhaustion and the Madonna madness hasn't even started.”

If you look at her tweet (which most readers wouldn't), you'll see it was at 5.16pm, long before Maha arrived at the Madonna concert. In fact, it was sent before she'd even left Dubai for the gig. She'd just had a bad hair day. It's clearly used out of context in the piece.

Rather deliciously, the other tweet quoted in the piece, from @financialUAE, was a comment from the online sidelines - she wasn't actually at the concert at all!!!

But never mind, a story's a story, isn't it? It's not as if our journalistic standards are any different to the UK's either, as today's Daily Mirror shows us. Because, sure enough, here's our Madonna story again and it's based on the same two tweets!

The Mirror's story is a great deal grumpier, in fact: Time goes by... so slowly: Madge fans get mad waiting two hours for show in 40C heat  is the headline.

"Concert-goers in Abu Dhabi were left furious after the great-gran of pop kept them waiting nearly two hours in 40C heat." Thunders the Mirror. To be fair, they did manage to rustle up a couple more unhappy tweets for their story, but the fact is their piece on a 10:40pm stage appearance is partially 'stood up' on a couple of tweets cribbed from Arabian Business - one sent out over five hours before the gig and one sent from a commentator who wasn't actually there

And, one suspects, neither was The Mirror.

For there's little else to substantiate the story, which could easily have been written from the comfort of reporter Clemmie Moody's London desk. Well, when you've got people actually there tweeting, you don't have to be there to report on it, do you?

Context and analysis? Oh don't make me laugh...

Got Any Lebanese LIRA?

Pound for pound, the Lebanese LIRA is the daftest regulation you'll see in quite a while. It's yet another example of a government trying to define the role of online media as it struggles to manage the potential of unfettered human thought and opinion being freely shared, following hot on the heels of the American near-disasters we know so well as SOPA and PIPA. Once again, it shows legislators are hopelessly out of touch with the dynamic of that shifting, changing thing we know as the internet.

The Lebanese Internet Regulation Act requires owners of websites to register with the government. interestingly, the draft law was proposed at the start of a month where the region's most vibrant and important annual forum for the online and digital industries, the ArabNet Digital Summit, is to take place in Beirut. Debate on the regulation has been postponed for further discussion by the Lebanese cabinet, giving the public time to make its views known (not that anyone will be listening, I conjecture).

LIRA attempts to take the Internet and squeeze it into a square peg shape so it'll fit the Lebanese press law shaped hole. Any owner of a website would have to register with the Information Ministry and websites would be governed by the conditions imposed on journalists, media and broadcasters by the Lebanese press law, the law specifically mentioned in the new regulation is Press Law 382/94, which is the audiovisual media law - a law that, as far as I can make out, merely modifies and re-ratifies the existing 1962 press law. It does seem like a very lazy way of saying "See the press law? It holds true for the Internets as well, people" which, as we all know, simply won't cut it.

That's about it. There's absolutely no attempt to understand the dynamics of the Internet, let alone even defining what a 'website' is - does this law apply to blogs? Only to owned domain-hosted websites? Mobile Apps? Facebook pages? Twitter?

It'll be interesting to see if Lebanese information minister Walid Daouk will speak at ArabNet and, if he does, how he'll be received. There has been a very lively hashtag, #STOPLIRA, pinging around the Twitterverse for a few days now and it's likely quite a few of the 1,500 digital innovators, specialists and leaders who'll be attending will have some helpful hints and tips for the minister. As it is, the ArabNet organisers turn off the Twitter wall for the keynote session in which ministers traditionally like to tell the audience of web-heads how the Internet and youth are important to our future. You wouldn't want to be reading what Twitter says about that kind of thing, you really wouldn't...


A translation of the Arabic language regulation is to be found on Joseph Choufani's blog here.

Social Crimes

Image via CrunchBase

It must be me, but Gulf News seems more and more crammed with court reports than anything else these days and they're certainly coming thick and fast. From the Afghan charged with slashing a Range Rover tyre in a bid to steal $4m ("I am not guilty. I didn't use any sharp tool to puncture the tyre. I never tried to steal anything" he told the court, channelling Vicky Pollard) to the Bangladeshi kidnap and brothel case and the employee demanding Dhs3 million compensation for his false dismissal, the tales of crime and counter-crime are certainly stacking up. Today's paper also features two 'social crimes'...

Notable among the other tales of wickedness are the continuing Twitter trial, the man who's been held since February 19th for Tweets that cursed Dubai Chief of Police, Dhahi Khalfan Tamim. Claiming he's being held in solitary confinement, coerced and pressured, the man lodged a special plea to have the police chief attend the court and give a statement. The plea was denied and judgement in the case will be issued on April 1st. Someone's got a sense of humour.

Another court report in today's packed schedule deals with the worker and housemaid whose 'love flowered after they met on Facebook' and who are consequently being charged with having consensual sex out of wedlock. This is something taken seriously here in the UAE and they're being jailed for two months and then deported. Apparently the couple chatted for two weeks on Facebook and then fell in love, the consummation of this passion taking place at the housemaid's sponsor's villa and, although Gulf News doesn't mention it, presumably their subsequent interruption by a scandalised sponsor wondering what all the noise was.

Give people technology and they find all sorts of interesting and different ways to use it, no?

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.

Of Books and Stuff

I did another book club meeting over the weekend, which I posted about over on The Olives Blog. It was a great deal of fun, I can tell you.

I'm now gearing up for the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature at the beginning of March. I'm doing two sessions at the Festival, a panel discussion thingy and a workshop on self publishing and marketing.

The panel discussion is being chaired by literary agent (and former rejecter of my manuscripts, so we'll have a chat about that on the day, won't we?) Luigi Bonomi and features Dubai based author Liz Fenwick, whose debut novel The Cornish House was picked up by Orion and will be published in May and Sarah Hathorn, who self-published her book, Alexandra’s Mission: Teenagent, in 2010 as well as yours truly. We're talking about different routes to get published - Liz obviously got in the front door, while Sarah and I have both attempted to make our money busking outside.The session's linked right here.

The workshop is on how to self publish your book and how to subsequently market the thing. For a start, what should you be doing about editing your MS? What platforms to use to publish it - and how do they work? How do commissions etc work out? What are the restrictions that apply to publishing here compared to, say, the UK? And then how do you put it in readers' hands?

As Simon Forward pointed out in his shockingly sensible guest post on this very blog the other day, the wonderful egalitarianism of self publishing has not only resulted in the lunatics having a good bash at taking over the asylum, it has opened the gates of qualitatively filtered content hell and also resulted in the Internet filling up with plaintively parping authors wittering 'Read my book, read my book, read my book' all the time.

So how can you possibly get your book noticed while standing out from the crowd? The workshop's a tad pricey at Dhs 200 (it's linked here if you want to rush over and sign up) but if you're planning on self publishing a book in the UAE, I guess I'd easily save you that in time wasting publishing lessons learned that you won't have to, let alone the stuff on marketing and promotion (note I am not outselling JK Rowling, so my wise words on promotion are perhaps worth considering rather than following slavishly!).

Both sessions take place on the 9th March in the afternoon. If you want to follow the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature on Twitter, the hashtag's #EAFOL and the main festival programme's linked here because quite apart from my stellar self, there are a number of other (obviously less important) writers giving talks, sessions, workshops and general literary chatter.

The Newest Profession

The blog is littered with writer types this week, sorry. Today comes a guest post from deepest Cornwall as mustardy-shirted author Simon Forward takes the helm and tries to crash into the nearest landmark. I leave you in extremely unsafe hands indeed...

The Newest Profession? Independent authors, of course! They’re everywhere these days. Loitering on every virtual corner, peddling their innermost thighs – I mean thoughts, for a few pennies and bringing the internet into disrepute. As rampant and desperate as a sexbot, their responses are almost as automatic and you could be forgiven for not realising there’s a real live person on the other end of that Tweet.

They weren’t getting anywhere through the traditional route, so zealously guarded by agents and publishers (the two faces of an industry Janus, albeit both are wearing blinkers and looking backwards). So they removed the gatekeepers from the equation and struck out alone.

Unfortunately, even with the gatekeepers out of the way there’s this massive fence to climb. And it’s getting higher. Readers are building up the walls against the rabble. And who can blame them, with an mob of whores scrambling to find some way into their personal library? Pick me! Pick me! It’s like the X Factor audition stages out there. Tens of thousands of hungry souls – Zombies Got Talent. There’s a reason ITV show an edited version of the competition – who wants to sit through that lot of hapless wannabes? I pity the readers, I really do.

As a reader, I’m hugely selective. A book’s something you invite into your life, after all, and spend a fair chunk of quality, intimate time with. I’m very fond of my Kindle (if you turn that around you get kind of my Fondle, but I digress), so I’m very fussy about what I put on it. (In fact, I’ve ended up with a collection of reads queued up from people I know, so there’s a strange kind of non-industry nepotism going on there. Luckily, most have been good, but I’ll admit it’s possibly not the best filter for buying books.)

Currently, I buy hardly any traditionally published books except for firm, established favourites. I don’t buy into the notion that the backing of a traditional publisher is an integral stamp of quality. I’ve seen too many bloody good manuscripts passed over and too many not-so-good ones passed through the system and excreted onto the bookstore shelves. Too often it’s a stamp of mediocrity. It’s safe. It’s the soft option. It’s selling wool to sheep, which is what large parts of the industry are good at. Trouble is, any readers who are looking for something new may well be inclined to turn to the independents. But a brief scan of the internet will turn up a baffling array of authors bleating for attention, with way too many press-ganging a small army of friends and relatives into posting 5-star reviews on their Amazon listings. Trying pretty much any trick, in fact, just to turn a trick.

Readers, be afraid. Be very afraid.

But, on the other hand, as an author, what’s a whore to do? I’m reasonably sure batting my eyelashes and hitching up my skirts is not going to do me – or anyone else – any favours. There’s a great scene in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross where Alec Baldwin is lecturing a bunch of losers on what it takes to succeed in sales. He reaches into his suitcase and produces a pair of brass balls. I’m not sure how far those would get you on the streets of Babylon, but it seems to me you need them for this business.

As a Doctor Who author, once upon a time, you could sit back and let the brand sell your books for you. And I remember attending two different conventions, one in the UK, one in the US. In London, the writers were like B-list (I’m being charitable) celebs, we had some fun on a discussion panel in a relatively small room tucked over on one side of the hotel. In Los Angeles, we were A-listers, welcomed and celebrated as near as damnit on a par with the stars of the show. I’d sit on the signing panel with fellow authors and fans would come coyly over to me and ask if I’d sign their copies of my book. One even brought a bag full of all the Doctor Who output – books, audio dramas, a novella – I’d written at that point. Sigh. I’ve come over all nostalgic for those days now.

Part of the reason I’m getting misty-eyed is because I wasn’t there to sell books. I was there to enjoy myself. Which has a lot in common with why I write. But yes, I’d also like people to read my books because, you know, I get exponentially more enjoyment out of other people’s enjoyment of the things I enjoyed writing. Still, for all my desire to share, I’m preternaturally shy. I pour my heart and passions into my stories – why the hell would I want to pour myself and my opinions out all over the internet? Yuck. I hate myself a little bit more every time I do it. Those virtual street corners are far from my natural environment – well outside my comfort zone. I have this conviction, you see, that anything interesting I might have to say is limited to my works of fiction.

Today I would rather be back in my shell, writing my latest sci-fi adventure. That will be of interest to readers. But the poor thing’s being (temporarily) neglected again in favour of promoting my latest release.

If a book is released on the internet and no-one’s around to see it, does it make a sound? Simple answer: no. Authors have to advertise on Facebook and Twitter and all the rest, and beg for a simple RT or a wall post to pass the message on, spread the word. And like wealth, the bulk of Retweets and FFs generally flows upwards to those who least need them. So authors have to work harder to make themselves heard, which in turn drives more folks away because, let’s face it, do we really want our Twitter streams flooded under a deluge of #PleaseReadMyBook?

So it would seem that while publishers, agents and self-whoring authors are all keeping good books safely out of the reach of readers, we authors are also keeping ourselves away from (writing) good books. Where, I’d venture to suggest, our time is best spent.

Back in 2008 when I first signed up on the Harper Collins’ authonomy site, there was so much wild abandoned pluggery it’s a wonder God didn’t step in to strike the whole thing down. The funny part is, there were two key figures most known for their shameless plugging. One Alexander McNabb and, er, me. Him in his field of sunflowers, me on my Cornish cliff top in my (then-infamous) mustard shirt. When it comes to whoring, he taught me everything I know.

But that’s the thing: it was funny. To start with, I was there to enjoy myself, to have a laugh – and laughs we had aplenty. And why not? It was a game. Until I suppose we all discovered there wasn’t a prize. But it was also, as I wrote in a post for the authonomy blog, something of a microcosm of the indie publishing universe. The experimental authonomy world was flat and when we all travelled to the edge we fell off into a bigger version of the same old circus.

Readers, authors, publishers. We’re all losers in this game, the way it’s currently being played.

Maybe what’s needed is some kind of convention. An organised virtual event or one-stop shop, a meeting point for readers and authors and publishers. Somebody is at least talking about something of the sort:
Is it the answer? I’m not sure what shape this new model should take. I have no idea - because that, like the whole whoring business, it’s outside my remit. It’s not my cup of tea. All I know is, something needs to be done by somebody.

“Change, my dear, and not a moment too soon,” says the Doctor at the end of the Doctor Who story, The Caves Of Androzani, and at the beginning of another regeneration. Of course, what was needed to trigger it was Peter Davison’s Doctor keeling over and dying.

I’m not sure what we should learn from that.

Meantime, if anyone needs a whore I’ll be the shy, reluctant one still trying to wear his author hat while accessorising with something sluttier.

A Worrying Journalistic Twend

Image via CrunchBase

From decrying Twitter as lacking the context and analysis they, exclusively, provide, journalists have increasingly embraced the medium in their reporting. Part of the reason for this is that many journalists have taken to Twitter like wee ducks to water, finding it a valuable tool in a number of ways. For many of the UK-based journalists I follow on Twitter, it would appear to provide an ideal platform to bitch about each other. Elsewhere, journalists find it a useful tool for crowdsourcing as well as keeping up with local events. Tweet about a terrible car crash or massive factory fire and chances are you'll soon pick up a news journalist asking for more information.

Eye witness reports have long been a mainstay of local news reporting and Twitter merely makes those eyewitnesses easier and faster to access. What I find mildly worrying is the increasing number of stories being filed out there that are 'stood up' on Tweets. It would seem that all a journalist has to do is find a few outraged Tweets and before you can spell veracity backwards we've got headlines like 'public rage' and 'Internet outburst'. The great thing about this is there's no seeming need to actually quantify 'public rage', and making the assertion can now be backed with a couple of tweets from Furious of Guildford and Angry of Barsha. Even worse, the tweets from those with an opposing or more moderate viewpoint get left out because they don't help the angle the journalist has taken - we none of us are interested in that. As I have long said, we slow down to look at the terrible accident, but we never slow down to look at the happy family having a picnic. What sells newspapers (or clicks, which in many ways are worse for preserving news values than the pressure to sell papers) is drama, outrage and the like.

And when you can tap negative public reaction, all too easily expressed on Twitter but almost always only half the story as online opinions are almost invariably balanced by others weighing in, you've got a nice easy story that really doesn't require much work at all to put together. As long as you don't muck it up by presenting the whole picture and actually bothering to produce a professional tone analysis rather than a few selected tweets...

Five Smarter Tweeting Tips

Image via CrunchBase

Just in case they're of any use, here are five smarter Tweeting tips triggered by things I've been noticing cropping up on Twitter recently.

1) Want retweets? Write for retweets!
Just in case you're asking, 117 characters is a 'retweetable' tweet - you can retweet without having to edit my tweet. In fact, much of my Twitter editing time goes into editing other people's tweets so I can share them. That's partly my fault, I have a long twitter handle (this has long been a subject of debate, but it's my name and I'm sticking to it) - but it's also people not thinking about where their tweet is headed. This is not a good thing, as generally you're sharing a tweet because you want to share information widely (otherwise, surely, you'd just be keeping it to yourself!) and retweets are grist to the sharing mill. With this in mind, it's generally a good idea to keep Tweets to around the 120 character mark. And, of course, a link will further reduce your character count! This means some judicious editing, but doesn't mean you have to sacrifice 'proper' language.

2) Edit like you mean it
I've come across a few posts out there about 'why writers should tweet' and the like and, while I generally agree that Twitter is a great way for content producers (that's what we call writers these days. It's so much more practical than 'novelist', isn't it?) to connect with audiences, I think it has a much more powerful role to play. You see, Twitter is a fantastic editing tool. The discipline required to get your message across in 140 characters (or, in my case, in 117 characters) is considerable. But it can usually be done - and without resorting to eight year-old text speak - with a little consideration and some editing.

The skills used in twediting are the same skills we use when editing writing - boiling sentences down so they say what you mean without unecessary verbiage and redundancies, rephrasing sentences to make them crisper and clearer. In fact, rare is the tweet that couldn't use a quick edit.

I thought I'd just pick a tweet at random to show what I mean:

The weather is so poetic this morning;the inspiration is just itching 2 get out doesn't it?We hope that ur inspiration is fully active 2day

This tweet left one character .What can we do to improve it? Well, we can get rid of 'this morning' as we know it's the morning. We could also get rid of 'doesn't it?', although you could argue this is an invitation to engagement, which would be a good thing. So we'll just change it to 'isn't it?'. And we can now ditch the 'text speak' and be left with a properly punctuated tweet of 120 characters that hasn't lost a thing:

The weather's so poetic; the inspiration is itching to get out, isn't it? We hope your inspiration's fully active today!

3) Delete Redundancies 
One word you can almost always ditch, in twitter and MSs alike, is 'that' - a word responsible for almost as many wasted bytes as Tim Berners-Lee's //. It's almost always redundant. Phrases like 'somewhere else' can become 'elsewhere' and save five characters. And an odd thing I frequently see is hashtagged tweets that repeat the whole hashtagged phrase unnecessarily, as in:

Please read my book Olives! http://bit.ly/ttJ0Uq  #Olives


Obviously, the hashtagged Olives can go, the tab being appended to the remaining Olives. And you can stop saying 'dah' in that tone of voice, I see people doing this all the time.

4) Consider the structure of your tweet
People often seem to forget that starting a tweet with the @ character means that only people who follow you AND the person you're @ing will see that tweet. If you want to address the widest possible audience, restructure your tweet to place the @ handle within the tweet itself, for instance:

Hey, @alexandermcnabb, I just bought your book! #Olives

Another thing about twitter handles is they're not invalidated by punctuation, so if you tweet Hey, @alexandermcnabb! I'll still get that tweet - there's no need to add a space either side.

5) Bear context in mind
When you tweet 'You're absolutely right!' to someone three hours after they have shared the tweet you agree with, you're likely forcing them to backtrack the conversation to find out what on earth you're talking about. Similarly, a Tweet like 'I think you'd probably agree with @randomperson on this one!' is hardly helpful.

Tweeting a link to your content more than once is a temptation, but I always think it's politer to append 'in case you missed this' or another phrase that makes it clear you're repeat tweeting.

Happy tweeting!

The Daily Mail Blows It. Big Time.

The UK's Press Gazette gleefully reproduced yesterday the screenshot of the year. The Daily Mail, the right wing conservative UK newspaper, ran the Amanda Knox verdict story on its website. Except it ran the wrong story. Knox was, of course, acquited.

The Press Gazette story is linked here. I do commend it as rather fun.

The Mail realised its awful mistake and took the story down after a couple of minutes but the internet she do not forgive lightly. The botched story became a news story in its own right, with even the Washington Post weighing in and enjoying the Mail's humiliation. As it happens, The Sun also blew it but nobody mainstream seems to have got a screen grab before the piece got taken down. These guys did, though.

So how could such an awful mistake happen? Well, as the Press Gazette piece points out, newspapers do prepare materials in advance - obituaries are written for celebrities while they're still in rude health, waiting for the day they peg it. And papers will also do 'yes' and 'no' pieces for highly anticipated events with only two possible outcomes, such as high profile trials. They're called 'set and hold' pieces. It's one of a number of journalistic practices that are not widely known and would cause some concern amongst a reading public used to depending on papers to tell the truth and deliver... are you ready for this... context and analysis.

Sure, but all the same, why were they in such a rush to push the button? Well, I rather suspect there's a new pressure on them, the pressure of social media. The first word the judge uttered was 'guilty' but that was to the charge of slander. The second word was actually the one the world was waiting for. The Mail and The Sun, under the pressure to show it they are still relevant as a news source online, both leaped into action too soon - the very thing that makes journalists get sniffy about Twitter.

We're being told all the time we can trust mainstream media. That's ever less the case as dubious practices come to light and as that media scrambles in an undignified rush to try and beat all of us eyewitnesses to the punch. They're better off not trying - but cleaning up their act and truly delivering added value to the voices of the people who are there at the time.

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?)

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...

Wittering About Twitter

Image via WikipediaTwitter remains a very powerful communication tool indeed - in fact, I'd say it's getting more powerful by the day. One thing I had noticed recently is that this blog is getting more traffic referred from Twitter or Twitter clients than it gets from Google Search, which is something of an inflection point, I think.

Now I'm hardly about to make claims about Twitter being bigger than Google based on the trickling traffic to a marginal little blog in the middle of nowhere. But I did think the event worth noting.

Twitter is a great medium for pimping content - whether you're pushing your blog, your ebook or the article you just posted for a newspaper, it lets people share the links and, where the link is interesting, the power of the retweet will ensure hundreds, then thousands of people will see it within seconds flat. I've made the point before, specifically over here at the Spot On blog, that retweets mean exponential growth in the number of eyeballs exposed to a message. Because of the nature of Twitter in the Middle East, still at an early adopter stage, that audience tends to be strong on communicators, media people and journalists.

I don't always remember to tweet links to posts but there are a couple of aggregators that do, so there's usually a link or two to the blog floating around on Twitter somewhere. One result of this Twitter traffic has been the fact that people frequently comment about blog posts on Twitter. Which I find slightly odd, I have to say...

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.

Citizen Journalism. Bah.

Image by bunky's pickle via Flickr

Another Arab Media Forum already! It hardly seems a year since the last one. It's now become traditional for me to celebrate the birth of this little bloggy thing (with this post) during the 2007 forum, as it is that very event wot was taking place as I first hit the 'Publish Post' key.

This year's forum features more social media stuff than ever before, but that's not really terribly difficult as it has previously had the token panel or two, last year there was even a blogger. I have to confess I didn't bother going this year. It didn't really seem terribly relevant - many of the discussions are taking place in an environment where change is driving a huge movement away from traditional media sources - even here in the Middle East where we are, as all agree, lagging. Broadcast is less challenged than print, but the low quality of regional printed news media will just exacerbate the speed of movement.


I was interested to see that 'a participant in a session on citizen journalism' (Gulf News didn't bother naming him/her) talked about the National Paints fire, the news of which was broken by our very own Albert Dias (@albertdias), quickly followed up by a Twitpic (Twitpic or it didn't happen is increasingly the standard).  We managed to get Albert on the 'phone for the opening of the Dubai Today Radio Show which made for a brilliant and dramatic opening to the show as Albert provided us with a cogent and intelligent commentary from the scene, 200 metres away from the holocaust that was devouring the huge paint store, his voice surprisingly calm against the background of explosions and sirens. And yes, BTW, I'm delighted we scooped GN online by at least 45 minutes.

So was this the 'citizen journalism' that the Forum was, yet again, debating? Well, not really. Albert wasn't a journalist, he was an eyewitness. It's just that he has access to much more efficient sharing networks: breaking the story on Twitter doesn't mean reporting it. It's just that we get access to the cold, hard facts that are the stuff of journalism. The journalism came when we decided to broadcast his voice, questioning him with a listenership, and principles of reporting, in mind.

That role, the role of taking the evidence and collecting it to give as rounded and objective a picture as possible, will never change. More of the responsibility for it is being put in our hands as we sift through sources of hard news and data, shared sources of fact and opinion. But we'll always need people to bring it together for us. It's just that we're going to want them to be online and, ideally, to be independent and have a sound reputation. Mendacity, in this environment, is not really an option- and trust networks, reputational networks, will become the cornerstone to popularity, and therefore revenue, into the future.

Journalism doesn't actually need huge publishing houses and hundreds of makeup artists and printing presses and all the rest of it. It doesn't even need massive recording studios, satellites and specialised receivers. The networks in place today, even with the lack of lower prices and higher bandwidth in our tragically under-served region, provide journalists all the access they need to inform and serve their audiences. But they will never again be the only source of information available to consumers.

A debate they might just get around to having next year. Or maybe not until the presses finally grind to a halt and they realise that nobody cares anymore.

The Inevitable Blog Post

Image via Wikipedia

Dubai’s popular Barasti Bar started as a pleasant little seaside watering hole but has grown over the years to become a major venue, to the point where it now hosts gigs, last night’s double bill of Vanilla Ice and Snap! being one such case in point. The gig was free to women and ‘FaceCard’ holders (FaceCard is Emirates Airline’s staff discount card), while tickets were Dhs100 for the blokes. Which, in the cold light of day, does strike one as delightfully sexist.

However, there was a minor problemette with the concert. Sheikh Ahmed bin Zayed Al Nahyan died in a glider accident in Morocco earlier in the week. He was the brother of the UAE’s President, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed and also the head of ADIA, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Although not a major seeker of the limelight, he was a greatly respected man with a major role in the national economy. His death was announced and a three day period of national mourning started yesterday – the radio stations (talk and music stations alike) cut over to classical music and flags flew at half mast. His funeral took place last night and was attended by the UAE’s rulers, their representatives and a large number of key figures in Emirati society.

There was some doubt as to whether the Vanilla Ice gig would go ahead, but that was soon cleared up when Barasti sent out a text message at around midday:

STOP! COLLABORATE & LISTEN! VANILLA ICE AT BARASTI IS GOING AHEAD TONIGHT AS PLANNED. NORMAL OPERATION. WE ARE NOT DRY! NICE, NICE BABY! 5PM-3AM C U ON THE SAND

This was sent out seemingly at random – recipients included a colleague who had never signed up to any Barasti or Le Meridien mailer programme. And it caused offence, of varying degrees depending on the recipient. Among UAE nationals, it caused grave offence and sparked an outraged reaction which was immediately communicated to a wide audience on Twitter by a furious Mishaal Gergawi, an influential newspaper columnist.

Although I wasn’t personally offended to the same degree as Gergawi, I had to agree that Barasti’s text seemed remarkably ‘off colour’ given the nation was in mourning. If it had been sent to a list of Barasti ‘regulars’, it would likely have caused little or no comment. Sent to a wider audience, shared on Twitter, it caused considerable comment.

Word spread quickly, as it does on Twitter, and something of a feeding frenzy developed. I have to confess to finding mobs ugly and it’s likely that at least some degree of the outrage being expressed wasn’t born out of truly offended sensibilities as much as it was from people finding voice in their pursuit of Renard. However, that’s just human nature and reflective of the tide of any strongly felt opinion – it’s just that on Twitter it moves very fast.

One thing I thought was interesting was that we could actually share in the reactions of the wide range of people that make up our strange multi-national community – we got to feel, for instance, the pulse of the Emiratis among us in their reaction to the whole affair. That’s not a voice we usually get to hear.

The news broke later in the afternoon that Barasti had decided to cancel the concert, with a cunningly worded story on ArabianBusiness.com, which took the smart angle of crediting Twitter with the cancellation, thereby playing to a considerable gallery. There’s nothing humanity likes more than to be confirmed in its beliefs and Twitter certainly lost no time in celebrating its seminal role in changing the world.

Judging from what we saw develop on Twitter, it’s probably safe to say that a similar reaction was making itself felt offline and that it was more likely this offline development that caused the cancellation. Twitter’s ability to share information, and reflect opinion, at blinding speed certainly meant that thousands of people were aware of this whole incident within minutes and so it’s likely that a combination of opinion shared online and action taken offline resulted in the cancellation. I don’t really see Barasti’s management saying ‘Wow, Twitter’s not happy! Better can the gig, chaps!’

But we’ll never really know.

Personally, I’m more interested in the text that sparked the whole thing. Insensitive, ill thought through and badly executed, it’s symptomatic of so much of the lazy, drab marketing that takes place in our world today. SMS spam was never a clever idea. When you combine that with the sensibility of someone that has forgotten we are actually living in a foreign, albeit highly multicultural, country and that there is some respect due to that nation, the result was always going to be disastrous.

If that text hadn’t gone out, I do tend to think the concert would likely have gone ahead. And done so largely unremarked.

Twitter and the Crash

Image via Wikipedia

News is flooding Twitter regarding the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET409 off the coast of Beirut as I write this. There are persistent tweets about survivors, but no confirmed MSM (mainstread media) reports of any survivors as yet. There were 90 people on board, 82 passengers and 8 crew - Ethiopian Airlines was very fast indeed to get a press release out, proving neatly that the BBC had flubbed and reported the wrong passenger/crew numbers as 83 pax, 9 crew. A small detail, but the devil's in details.

The 'plane itself had just been bought from Irish low cost carrier Ryan Air, apparently, and was delivered in December. Specialists in aviation were soon tweeting detail like that, which together with eyewitness reports and breaking news from websites like CNN, made for the usual compelling viewing of a news event unfolding on Twitter.

Tens of people are dead and we're using words like compelling viewing. What's happened to us?

We're involved in the story now, of course. I saw the tweets from Beirut as I settled down in the office and passed on the most pertinent of them. It was interesting that people were being more cautious than they have before in annotating tweets with 'unconfirmed'.

Having sent out the 'heads up' and given links (thanks to @SpotOn) to a couple of journalists who were covering events, I stopped passing on news. The passenger names being Tweeted out (albeit they had been read out on LBC TV, a departure from the European practice of letting civil defence notify families before names are broadcast) nagged at me, along with details like the number of bodies that had been fished out of the sea at such and such a point.

And yet this is how our news comes to us - on the second, from the event, unfolding with each new fact, supported by a community that has formed around its common interest in the event, brought together by a hashtag.

I found myself thinking of the image of Iranian student Neda Soltani, whose last sight on earth as her eyes flickered closed may well have been the cameraphone lens pointed in her face. There's something terribly comforting about being in a mob that I don't like.