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...

Mum, What's An ArabNet?

ArabNet founder Omar Christidis together with Samer Karam, Sana Tawileh and with the others on their team, pulled off a major coup – the first event in the Middle East that aims to foster web-enabled businesses and put start-ups together with investors and the other ecosystem participants they need to thrive and flourish. Alongside this, the conference aimed to investigate the issues, opportunities and future of doing business in an increasingly Internet-dominated Arab World.

The ArabNet conference in Beirut takes place yesterday and today. I attended the first day and so I can only comment on that – but I’ll be watching the Twitter feed (The tag is #ArabNetME) with great interest.

I’m by no means overdoing it when I describe ArabNet as a triumph. It’s actually a number of triumphs rolled into one. First and foremost, it’s a minor miracle that this event was put together so brilliantly and in Beirut, to boot. Sorry, chaps, but Beirut has not exactly carved its name recently as the place for important regional conference events and yet ArabNet has clearly shown that Beirut is not just a viable but a brilliant venue for them.

The event was impeccably organised. Having headed up teams doing stuff on this scale, I am only too aware of what a huge and difficult job it is. The technical setup, the exhibition area and the management of the entire staging and flow of the event were world class  – and so was the event itself. Great speakers included Aramex supremo Fadi Ghandour who was nothing less than inspirational in a mashed-up Anglo-Arabic after-lunch ‘graveyard slot’ address that had the audience standing, sitting, laughing and clapping – when they should by rights have been sleepily digesting. Some people had been whingeing on Twitter in the morning sessions that they thought the conference should have been held in Arabic – Fadi’s solution was to speak in both, with sentences that flew from East to West with brio and wit that must have had the poor old translator's head spinning.

Showing incredible wisdom for such a young team, the ArabNet guys masked the Twitter-feed displays to either side of the stage during the keynote session when a succession of important gentlemen spoke. The Lebanese Minister of Comms was indeed so incredibly important that he could only spare an audience of 1,000 highly online entrepreneurs and web-professionals from around the Middle East two minutes (and I do not exaggerate) out of his, we were told pointedly, busy schedule. He lost as many hearts and minds as Ghandour had previously won, his brief speech nestled cosily in a keynote session that, for me at least, resonated perfectly with a similar address I had heard given by Michel Murr at Termium over ten years ago - with nothing added and nothing taken away.

Twitter was not kind, and rightly so. ‘The Internet is important,’ was one of the many aphorisms that instructed us all. The howl of outrage was neatly masked by the ArabNet logo displays, but we could all see the feed on our screens. Which showed how totally disconnected the terrible old men up there were.

Lebanon has just about managed to cobble together one meg ADSL access – a somewhat pathetic achievement that was echoed in the conference room as more and more people snapped open their clamshells and tried to get online. Internet access slowed to a snail’s pace and yes, despite this, ArabNet trended Twitter globally for over an hour. Having said that (and being pleased for all concerned), I am increasingly worried at this new version of the Middle East’s old obsession with The Guiness Book of Records. People, it doesn’t have to trend to be important or relevant.

The day flew by – one session, the IdeaThon, had five new startup schemes sold to the audience by their progenitors in two minute pitches, while the afternoon Startup Demos session pitched ten up and running business schemes in need of investors (‘angel’ or otherwise). These pitch sessions provided great entertainment, were an inspiring display of innovation and gave a very clear indication that this region is now emerging, perhaps blinking a little, into an age of Web-enabled business.

The only part of the day that dented my enthusiasm and optimism more than the keynote session (note to Omar and team – you can ditch the suits next year and we’d none of us mind one jot) was the ecommerce panel. Badly led and therefore lacking inspiration or challenge to meet, it was as frustrating as watching someone wall-hanging yoghurt. Twitter was, once again, not kind and the general feeling in the room was up there for all to see – “please make this stop”.

And so on, via the Beirut-Amman joint Twestival, to the gala dinner – which was splendid. Tragically, the day having been incredibly long, I suspect a few hundred chocolate desserts (the end of a five-course menu) got trashed.

ArabNet was everything we had hoped for and more. Like the iPad, it’s not the end of the road but a first glimpse at where the future is headed. In well over 20 years of being involved with this region’s technology industry as a commentator and communicator, I can honestly tell you I have never seen such energy and hope for the future as I saw at ArabNet.

All they have to do now is brush aside the terrible old men and get the cost of broadband down, access speeds up and improve the availability and reliability of connectivity in the region. If anyone came away from ArabNet without the clear impression that this one single investment in infrastructure is vital to the future of the region as a viable economic force, then they were either daft as a brush or a Minister who was too important to be engaging with young entrpeneurs and innovators. Or both.

More fool them.

(A million thanks to ArabNet Conference Cartoonist Maya Zankoul, whose first pic of the day was an illustration for this post! Her cartoon above is licensed under a Creative Commons license. Another cool thing about ArabNet has been the assiduous support of a number of  bloggers, Twitterers, a cartoonist and a smart live feed too!)

Silence is Golden

Image via Wikipedia

The Etisalat BlackBerry update story has started to grow little legs now, with the coverage from Gulf News and ITP.net yesterday joined today by a story from The National and a GN followup. Both of today's UAE dailies focus on the irritation of subscribers and the silence of Etisalat, an angle that The National, in particular, highlights:

"Etisalat does not lack the ability to talk to the public. It is one of the UAE’s largest advertisers and it would be difficult to spend a day without seeing one of its promotions in print or on television. Its public relations machine is well oiled, putting out press releases daily..." says reporter Tom Gara before launching into an entertaining, if slightly surreal, series of nautical metaphors spanking the uncommunicative communications company.

Now coverage has gone international, with stories from Wired and from the UK's rightly feared (or revered, depending on which side of the industry fence you sit on. Rather marvellously, its tagline is 'Biting the hand that feeds IT') The Register.

It is, yes, a wee social media case study, this one. A single user posts some stuff he found on a specialist forum, triggering the swift passing of that information among a frustrated customer base that is being poorly communicated with. The news is examined, refined and passed on again, a great deal of that traffic going via Twitter BTW, and now it's going wild. Many media reports internationally are focusing on one or two media reports locally - the role of a single Qatari software expert being key right now in the coverage from 'mainstream' media as it is picked up by media outlets. In fact, both Wired and The Register covered the story from ITP.Net. And now uber-blog engadget has covered it from The Register. And if that isn't as bad as ReTweeting, I don't know what is!

Now major international technology media outlets are repeating a story based on the stated views of one man following his comments on a local blog. Scary, in its way. I'm not denigrating that expert, BTW: Nigel (and original discoverer DXBLouie) are both chaps that certainly appear to know a great deal about what they're talking about - as does Steve Halzinski, whose post on BlackBerrycool here still contains his considered view on the nature of the 'network update' that apparently forced BlackBerries into meltdown as they scrambled to contact an overloaded server.

News expands to fill a vacuum. Particularly a social vacuum. For what it's worth, my prediction is that this story will grow - Etisalat really needs to fill that vacuum before it does, although I suspect that by now the genie is well and truly out of the bottle.

Tortuous

Image via Wikipedia

Here's something I think is worth sharing. It came to me (and therefore to you) by a tortuous route, I found the link on a comment to an article on Australian marketing uber-blog, Mumbrella (sorry Tim, can't be arsed with the caps and things). But that's how the Internet works, no?

It's the story of how the UK's Guardian newspaper crowdsourced a complex data mining job, using its online readers to help it sift through hundreds of thousands of pages of public records. By making the whole exercise accessible and enjoyable to the public, The Guardian effectively managed to arrange for something like 35,000 people to help intelligently sift through over 170,000 pages of public records unearthed by the great Commons Expenses Scandal. The result was that The Guardian managed to comb 170,000 pages of data in 80 hours, extracting the valuable stuff for its journalists to work on.

It's here. The site, Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, is a must-add for your RSS feed if you have any interest at all in the evolution of journalism in the digital age.

I love this case study because it's a really smart application of technology in the spirit of the IBM PC and the Toyota MR2 (two of my favourite things, both originally cobbled together by inspired innovators on shoestring budgets raiding their companies' parts bins). I love it because it's a witty and smart piece of journalistic initiative.

But most of all, I love it because it shows how much more powerful you are when you enlist the help of your customers in the development of your product - which means respecting your customer enough to believe they are worthy enough to begin to possibly understand the arcane intricacies of your unique and difficult profession. Calling for feedback, input, insight or participation from a wider commuinty extends your reach beyond your own organisation's staffing capabilities and brings a wider range of heads to a problem - sometimes solutions to a problem can come marvellously quickly from the uninvolved. It has the potential to broaden your capability to innovate, creates a stronger sense of connection and ownership from customers and folds marketing neatly into product development.

The article on Mumbrella was, incidentally, this one, where News Ltd's editorial director is being a goof about Twitter.

When Twitter Falls Apart

Image via Wikipedia

Some commentators are now, quite properly, pointing to the very real failings of Twitter as an ongoing news source on the demonstrations taking pace in Iran.

This chap, Maximillian Forte, link kindly provided in a comment to this post by Graeme Baker, is certainly in that camp and provides a strong and lucid viewpoint.

It's perhaps interesting to look back over events in Iran and how Twitter, as a community, responded.

In the first phase, Twitter clearly led the news agendas of mainstream media, providing on the ground witness and a diversity of updates that caught the popular imagination - including triggering the #CNNfail protest that eventually forced the channel to react publicly and defend its woeful programming in the face of an important series of events.

In the second phase, Twitter started to clog up with useless ReTweets (RTs) of stale information as the public mood drove the need to be somehow participatory. The students in Iran who had been Tweeting updates fought to keep their links to the world open, but were battling not only those who wanted to silence them but trying to have their voices heard in the babble.

With the almost hysterical outbreak of wannabe participants came disinformation - calls to change your location to Tehran to protect the student Tweeters meant that now anyone could 'Tweet from Tehran' - and so more chaff joined the flow of information. That was made worse by a call to remove the ID of anyone you RTed in order to protect them - effectively depriving any information of a source.

If you weren't in the game early or close to people on the ground, and therefore following the right people, by now you were getting some pretty duff information - and fifteenth hand information, at that.

Phase three has been the complete breakdown of Twitter as a news source. The 'turn your avatar green' movement is a symptom of this. Vested interest has meant that clear disinformation is now being sewn into Twitter, with Tweets claiming that Arabs have been brought into Iran, stabbing people's sisters and so on.

But then Twitter was never meant to be a news resource and, I think most people would agree, can not be relied upon as a news resource beyond the fact that, as a platform, it lets fresh eye witness news travel fast. That first phase is where Twitter is potentially solid gold and where it has indeed led news agendas - not only inTehran, but also in the Mumbai bombings and other incidents.

Once it descends into fads and conversation, there is no news value in Twitter - as, indeed, there is rarely news value in conversations. That's just chattering - what the service, in fact, was built to do. Pointing to the chattering then squeaking about how useless Twitter is doesn't mask the fact that Twitter brought the streets of Iran to the desktops of millions of people across the world.

And CNN didn't.

Is Mainstream Media DOOMED?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Does the fact that social media has been leading the coverage of the Iranian protests mean the end of MSM, or mainstream media?

My post yesterday attracted a couple of interesting comments from The National’s Jen Gerson and Insurgency Watch’s Christopher Allbritton. Both are highly respected journalists with ‘form’. Jen’s points also led to a thought-provoking post on her blog last night.

So, to continue the conversation, I thought it might be worth taking their points as a Q&A...

Tonnes of the #iranelection tweets were rehashed MSM coverage
A lot of people were retweeting links to MSM pieces, yes. But if you were following close or primary sources, you were also getting the voice of people on the ground. Some of those voices, incidentally, are suspect. You have to take care over who you’re following and how much salt you take with each report. The skill in that is little more or less than a journalist would use to balance sources – and I do think that many people today have a refined enough news sense and awareness of the Internet to be able to make those judgements by themselves. We're big boys and girls now...

Having said that, a guide to decent breaking news is no bad thing - there are a lot of people out there Tweeting links to things that engaged or amused them - and when you start including hashtags, you have a good contextual stream. If you follow the right people, BTW, you get a better editorial pick than if you follow less acute observers. The choice, you will see, is in who you choose to follow. Same with journalism, same with newspapers. I read Jen because I like her writing and find it insightful. I follow @catboy_dubai 'cos he's a pal and is amusing. I like @deafmuslim because she’s a great writer and quite potty – and challenges my view of things. I choose not to read Germaine Greer any more. I loathe the Daily Mail. My choice of, errr, 'media'.

The awesome pics are from wire services
Images from wire services? Yes, of course. They're the images that most Middle East newspapers will use because they haven't got their own snappers on the ground. So I'll take a Tweet of a Getty/Reuters pic today over waiting until tomorrow

But there were also a lot of important images that weren’t wire service stuff. Like this image, for instance, that struck me so much. BTW, at the moment itself I don’t think we’re looking at sourcing halfway decent images – we’re looking at witness report that tells the story. Quality is not the benchmark.

Verifying information doesn’t mean waiting for a second Tweet. It means calling round sources or being an eyewitness yourself.
Although I am, by dint of my own background as a journalist and writer, minded to agree, I also think we’ve moved on a little. While there is undoubtedly room for sober, reflected, contextual analysis (something we see all too little of, BTW, in our regional media as well as international media) there is also room to take the stream of eye-witness report and form a view from that. If you’re seeing 30-40 people on Twitter saying that police are hitting the rioters hard and then getting Tweets detailing injuries, the flow of events would tend to suggest a measure of reality coming from the ground. Combined with real-time reports from newswires or other sources, you’ve got the story in front of you, but the story presented in a way that no broadcaster can equal – eye witness accounts of events unfolding, real people, real emotion, real reaction.

I do think that MSM often fails to meet that standard of journalistic integrity, BTW. Again, particularly in our region, good, balanced reporting that takes the facts, challenges them and searches for balance, completeness and the three sides to the story (yours, mine and the other guy’s) is often notably lacking.

Disinformation is a problem with crowdsourced media
Agree – because you’re actually in the crowd and so you’re as prone to each new rumour and report that’s coming through. Which is why, going back to your first point, it’s vitally important that we DO have people like Reuters and AP on the ground. Or people like yourself or Christopher. But that’s journalism, not media. I have RSS feeds of the major newswires and get the stories as they break. So I can verify the big stuff – which gives credence to the little stuff. And so I can quickly build a picture of which Twitterers are ‘on the money’ if I want to.

But this comes down to the point, I think. I don’t need CNN or Sky to see what’s happening – in fact, the whole #CNNfail thing was about thousands (tens of thousands) of people feeling strongly that CNN’s editorial judgement was deeply flawed in not affording these events top line coverage. I think many news outfits were unprepared, under-resourced and under-educated on the whole Iran story. So what's better, a young, unprepared cub journalist pitched into covering the Tehran story from the Dubai bureau, or witness reports from on the ground?

By the way, I will never forget seeing journalists in my hotel in Amman reporting 'from the Iraqi border' during the Iraq invasion. Not all journalism is bad, but the really woeful stuff has dented public faith in the credibility of journalism a great deal. And no, I don't like that at all.

Blogging triumphalists don't give us enough credit
I don’t much like the tag ‘blogging triumphalist’, you’ll probably be unsurprised to know. I and many, many other people I know feel that we are not being well served by ‘legacy’ or mainstream media. But it’s the media I’m talking about – not journalism. Journalism online can positively thrive, Christopher himself is a brilliant example of that and I’ll add my two personal favourites, AdNation’s Eliot Beer and mUmBRELLA’s Tim Burrows. Both are former print journalists who have taken their work online and who are part of a richer, faster, more agile and more diverse online media that are winning people’s eyeballs because they give us what we want, how we want it and when we want it.

The crucial difference is that we can select what streams interest us. We can follow the people whose work engages us, whether they’re bloggers, Twitterers, photojournalists, writers or videographers.

And, by the way, one of those streams is wire services – the very same ones that fill the majority of the white space on the dead trees that are shoved into the hotel rooms, houses and offices of disinterested readers all over the Middle East every day. I don’t need to wait until tomorrow to read a watered down version of Reuters’ piece on Tehran, it’s on my desktop in two seconds thanks to RSS. And the pictures, too. AND the eyewitness reports that flesh out my own personal understanding of, and emotional attachment to, what's going on.

Twitter is one part of this emerging new media story, one of the information streams open to us thanks to the Internet. As consumers, we are increasingly using these information streams to customise and streamline the content we believe is relevant to us.

We don’t need translators or people to hold our hands and give us the context that we, poor mortals, are too dumb to seek ourselves. And if that’s journalism’s defence (I do not believe it should be, BTW), then God help journalism.

The Du Fail

Image by Fenchurch! via Flickr

A wee while ago I posted a grumpy response to the campaign being run by the UAE’s second favourite telco, Du, which targeted ‘smart people’ using social media tools, including Twitter and Facebook.

As I said at the time, and yes I do know that quoting myself is dangerously close to bloganism, “The first problem with this whole thing is that you need to be UPFRONT if you're a company using Twitter and other social media. There's no point in being coy - and you're just going to annoy people if you hide your identity and purpose.”

There was quite a lot of negative comment generally about the campaign, particularly on Twitter.

The campaign didn’t actually last very long. In fact, it looked like this:

Smartpeople follower stats

31 March - FB 46 members (13 admins), Twitter 81 followers (following 192)

6 April FB 116 members (13 admins), Twitter 127 followers (following 226)

13 April FB 184 (15 admins), Twitter 138 (226)

14 May - Twitter 152 Facebook 250

18 May - Twitter 152 Facebook 252

Last Tweet from @smartpeople was 19 April

Last post on Facebook page by 'Albert Edison' was 12 April


One can only assume that at some stage, someone smart pulled the plug. But then if there were actually smart people at Du, you’d have thought they wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

You’d be wrong.

Du’s new campaign, Be Heard, is similar to the last effort in that its ‘social media’ platforms are being heavily supported by traditional advertising spend. The drive to get you along to the beheard.ae website included emailers as well as muppies (the street advertising thingies).

When you get to beheard.ae you get asked to answer a load of questions of the ‘empowering’ nature: you know, ‘Do you want better value?’ ‘Do you want to save your time?’ ‘Do you want fries with that?’

The website is basically a ‘bait and switch’ advertising-led concept, getting you to visit a website ostensibly to ‘be heard’ when the objective is actually to position Du as cool and ‘with the kids’, to collect email addies and ‘profiles’ of people.

The site tells you how many people voted yes or no to each of the questions. With an attempt to build a Twitter following and an add to Facebook button, the whole thing could be termed an attempt at building ‘social media’ in that it fakes the egalitarianism of asking people’s opinions and letting them share the feedback.

You get the option of adding your own question for people to answer. Someone I know added ‘Don’t you think this whole dumb campaign is a waste of time?’ but I haven’t seen that one displayed on the site yet. So much for the democratisation of being heard.

The feeling of mildly frustrated emptiness that is the end result of going through this process is a little like going out for evening drinks with friends except you have to mime drinking instead of having real drinks and you have to bray like donkeys instead of actually talking.

There’s an ‘about’ button on the site. Once again, as with the failed Smartpeople campaign, that button doesn’t actually say that the campaign’s being run by Du.

The conversation about this campaign on Twitter has either been breathless endorsement (by the people behind it) or irritated commentary. Few managed to voice their irritation as well as advertising website AdNation:

“This one actually manages to be worse than Smart People – at least that had some kind of gimmick. Beheard.ae seems to just be a rather fatuous series of questions, which offer no real insight into anything.”

So again, we have an anonymous site that pretends to be social media and simply isn’t – it’s a company behaving dishonestly and completely misreading the sentiment of the target audience it’s addressing. It’s a company trying to use ‘social media’ but from an old school advertising standpoint, informed by the belief that the job of an advertiser is to shout slogans at people and the role of the consumer is to be the helpless victim of the sloganeering.

The site asks a range of questions, but that’s as far as it goes. They’re not discussed, they’re not part of a serious feedback scheme or the basis for a conversation. I can’t wait for the press release which I am sure, with a crushing sense of inevitability, will be sent out with the ‘results of the survey’.

The result of all this money and effort is that consumers (particularly the Twittering ones) have been actively sniping at the campaign, mildly irritated by it or simply untouched by it.

I believe passionately that we should all make mistakes. Like some geezer said, ‘If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not innovating’. But repeating dumb mistakes, particularly when people actually explained the mistake and why it was a mistake, is a worry.

These two campaigns have arguably done more damage than good to the Du brand.

What's next? Will it be strike three?

Be honest with consumers.

Talk with people, not at them.

Stop shouting and start listening.

Get the message, Du?

(Thanks to CJ for obsessive monitoring & input)

Technofear

“Inventions reached their limit long ago, and I see no hope for further development.”
Julius Frontinus
Engineer
C1st A.D.

“That any general system on conveying passengers would go at a velocity exceeding ten miles an hour is extremely improbable”
Thomas Tredgold
Civil engineer & writer
1835

“This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”
Western Union, internal memo
1876

"I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of the expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of ... I would not care to be a member of the Aeronautical Society."
Lord Kelvin
President, Royal Society
1895

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
Charles H. Duell
Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents
1899

“Aeroplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.”
Marechal Ferdinand Foch
Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre
1911

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”
H. M. Warner, Founder, Warner Brothers
1927


“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Thomas Watson
Chairman of IBM
1943

“With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big slice of the U.S. market.”
Business Week
1968

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
Ken Olson
Founder, Digital Equipment Corp.,
1977

“If our language, our programs, our creations are not strongly present in the new media, the young generation of our country will be economically and culturally marginalized.”
Jacques Chirac

Sentiment on the The Arab Tweet

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I didn’t attend the ‘New Media’ session of The Arab Media Forum yesterday ( I served my time in the morning, alright?), but then I didn’t need to. Several people I respect were in the audience and were Tweeting highlights throughout the session. One of them was a colleague, one was another PR person I chat to and two were media people I know well.

I can wait for further analysis of the session, I can take my time. I got the high points, the headlines, as they happened – and from several different sources and viewpoints at that.

The people whose commentary on the proceedings was influencing hundreds, in fact going into the thousands, of people were not the ones on the stage talking at the Forum, they were in the audience. Between them, the Tweeters were talking to an audience of more people than the guys onstage with the microphones. Sure, the BBC will broadcast the session in a while – but we’ve already discussed it, deliberated it, shared it ‘on the record’ with the entire Internet and moved on.

And if that doesn’t give you pause for thought, I give up.

Incidentally, the Twitter users were likely the only people in the room full of hundreds of media people that knew, as they sat down to the session, that Roxanne Saberi had been released from the terrible, feared Evin prison in Tehran – that her father was actually on the way to pick her up at that very moment. The breaking news was flying around Twitter as the conference session started. Oh! And also the news that not only had the Pope called for a two-state solution in Palestine but that the Palestinian Authority press centre had been forced to shut down by the Israelis.

And it doesn’t take a newsroom of hundreds to do that. Or a ‘publishing house’. Or a ‘printing press’. Or an ‘editor in chief’.

Oddly, our little band of Twitterers probably represented the few people in the room that actually, genuinely cared about news like Roxanne Saberi and the PA media centre. Freedom is an Internet thing – the ‘old world’ is more reconciled to its lack.

So what did happen in the ‘new media’ session?

The 'traditional' media, debated their credibility and asked The Lone Blogger why he blogged ("Did you always want to be a journalist?"), comforting themselves with the fact that 'citizen journalism' wasn't as reliable as a 'real journalist'.

They, and Seymour Hersh, appear to have missed the point. The world is changing - it's not about bloggers wanting to be journalists. It's much, much bigger than that and it's time that many of our media woke up to the smell of coffee.

BTW, a Gulf News (600g) survey today, commissioned from IPSOS of some 2,000 people, showed that 76.2 of respondents strongly agreed with the statement 'The Internet helps me to keep up to date with the latest news'. GN's headline for the piece?

"Gulf News Stays Ahead of the Pack"

Which is fine, as long as your pack's not heading for the edge of a cliff...

The Arab Media Forum

Image by madmonk via Flickr

Today marked the start of the 8th Arab Media Forum. I'm quite fond of said forum, if only because it marked the start of this blog, back with this post which has always made me smile when I read it.

So I'm a simpleton. Get over it.

The keynote address at this year's gig was given by the Secretary General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa. He said a number of interesting things and, thanks to the simultaneous translation, a couple of slightly strange ones. There was one passage about dark oceans and creatures feeding on each other that had me slightly bewildered, but we soon found the track again.

(Offtopic, Moussa said that he was impressed by the life and verve he found in Dubai after having read so many negative reports in international media. He got a laugh out of his host, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid, which was nice to see to be honest.)

Moussa set the scene for the rest of the forum, making the point that the Arab World faced challenges in the evolution of its media, particularly with the transition taking place between online and print media, "The Arab World is still launching newspapers while elsewhere in the world, newspapers are failing" he said, talking about the movement of paper to electronic media.

Its funny that this thinking persists - that we're going to stop using paper and just move into being nicely regulateable and licensable entities, identifieable online media houses. It denies the very real atomisation that is taking place as a result of the boom in consumer generated media and content. The concept of media ownership is being redefined.

Just before Moussa came onstage, a panel session had taken place with, among distinguished others, Abdul Hamid Ahmad, Editor in Chief of Gulf News (540g), who pointed out that venerable, 150-year-old institutions like the great American newspapers were shutting down and wondered what would take their place.

As if the process of their decline wasn't being driven by their replacement.

Portentous statements will be made, great declarations will be delivered, many issues will be debated. But the winds of change sweeping around the world, the process of disintermediation and the tools that are driving new ways of sharing information, thoughts, collaboration and innovation are not going to be among the many things the Forum considers seriously. The Middle East media, remember, is still launching newspapers.

It's as if we're making a virtue of being behind the curve - a curve we continue to lag ever more as we fail to teach online skills in schools and retard adoption through protectionism, mad pricing and content blocking.

I get the feeling that this is going to be something of a theme for this forum which features just a single session on online media, tucked in at the end of day one's proceedings. This panel (led by the BBC's Hossam Al Sokkari) will feature Google's regional manager and is the reason the forum will get to hear from its one, lone, blogger - an Algerian called Issam Hamoud.

One social media figure among all those media glitterati in this two-day media-fest. One 'public voice'. One ambassador for the 'new media'.

It reminds me a little of Michael Moorcock's excellent Brothel In Rosenstrasse (The book is, incidentally, most certainly NSFW, part of its quirky charm). The enemy army is on the borders of the city, but life goes on inside the brothel, unchallenged for the moment by the changes taking place outside, a bright burning of licentiousness in negation of the great and inevitable truth that's all around.

Until, suddenly, everything is rapidly, inevitably swept away along with the world that existed before it.

Legacy media is not going to be killed by social media, despite the much-publicised declines and closures. But it is being transformed by it - and those who are not driving that change are likely going to be swept aside by it.

The Arab Media Forum has, IMHO, missed a trick. So, arguably, has the Arab Media.

But Amr Moussa knows what's going on, at least...

YouTube Ban in UAE 'on Anvil'?

Dubai's Chief of Police has called for YouTube to be banned in the UAE.

The news, broken yesterday by Arabic language daily Emarat Al Youm, is carried on the front page of today's Khaleej Times.

We would be following the exalted example of two of the world's most successful states, Pakistan and Bangladesh if we went for a ban. As KT reports, Bangladesh blocked YouTube last Sunday, Pakistan in February last year.

Lt Gen. Dhahi Khalfan Tamim was talking to the general assembly of the Juveniles Education and Care Association when he apparently said that YouTube contained content that 'sparked dissension'. He is reported as saying to Emarat Al Youm that 'publishing pornography and defamation is not freedom.'

Blocking YouTube will further deny Emirati, and other, youth here of the opportunity to embrace a range of technologies and changes in social behaviour that are revolutionising the world around us.

That we are even contemplating blocking sites that contain content we don't like is a deep concern - the trick is engaging in a conversation, taking part in the interplay of ideas and opinion that is driving the Internet - and the flow of public opinion around the world today.

The Kipp Report filed a piece yesterday about Dubai briefing top London PR agencies to try and find out why international media coverage was quite so excoriating - and about what to do to try and combat the outbreak of bad news and negative opinion. (It quotes a certain mouthy PR, sorry about that)

Reports like this are unlikely to to help - wait until this one gets out and online.

No matter how many 'feel good' spin doctors you consult, no matter how many yummy stories they put out, this has gone beyond conventional media. The debate, the coverage, the opinion that's driving the negative sentiment isn't on dead trees - it's in electrons. It's online communities and commentators that are spreading the word, sharing the links, adding to the debate and driving the howls of 'Die Dubai'!

That's the choice ahead of Dubai and the UAE - be part of the conversation online - embrace it, open it up, encourage it and educate your people so that they can join in with it. Or be a disempowered, dumb whipping boy.

I can hear the crack of leather already.

Goof

Image via Wikipedia

Image via WikipediaThe changes that ‘new’ media approaches are bringing to the way in which we browse, consume and are affected by information are fundamental. And most of those changes are being brought by the process known as disintermediation – the idea being that any intermediary is now potentially out of a job. Gone are gatekeepers – and nowhere is this more true than in our ‘traditional’ media.

Take a newspaper as an example. Yesterday’s model was that an event was reported on by a journalist, perhaps commented on by a columnist. The participants in the event were certainly not expected to actually commentate on it. Just comment, if the journalist or TV crew picked on them. The letters page was pretty much the only way Joe Public got ‘voice’ and even that was guarded by the letters page editor. And similarly broadcast media such as radio, where DJ’s talk to us and where feedback was limited to carefully regulated, breathless, gushing teenagers requesting tracks for their friends (it wouldn’t do for them to be asking for Rammstein or Ministry during a drive-time slot, for instance) or perhaps to angry of Bur Dubai calling into the midnight talk show.

Now newspapers put their pieces online and public voice gets to comment on those pieces. What’s more, the success of a given piece of writing is not longer judged because it reached the readership of a single slice of tree, but on how much it is commented on, linked, referenced by blogs, Tweeted, Digged, tagged or shared in a myriad new ways across myriad content streams.

Those links, the food of the new media leviathans, bring prominence, SEO and clicks. Similarly in radio, DJs (and other celebrities) are beginning to find that connecting with their audience using ‘social media’ adds another, growing dimension to the business of broadcasting. Those willing to give up the gatekeepers, or the gatekeeper role, are finding themselves part of a wider and more engaging dialogue that enhances their reputations and audiences.

In other words, today’s media depend on the feedback and discourse of an actively engaged readership. The reader is a participant, is increasingly a central part of a dialogue that makes journalists, writers and broadcasters answerable and publicly accountable in ways that no media law can.

In short, you goof, you get trashed...


This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named 'A Moment with McNabb' columns in Campaign Middle East magazine.

authonoblog

OK.

I said I'd done posting about authonomy, the Harper Collins social networking slushpile writer's group peer-review website thingy. And I lied.

In about 10 days I'll get my very own crit from an HC editor, which will be nice. Not really expecting 'We love you, here's a contract' so much as 'Nice, tidy it up'. We'll see.

Meanwhile, this is the last 10 days of the current month at authonomy, and a number of smart, talented people are now hoping for their own 'top out' moment on the editor's desk. I'd like to recommend you pop over and take a read of these books then add them to your bookshelf so that they get the backing.

There's a lot of debate about this, but one of the things I find so neat about authonomy is the possibility of a new egalitarianism in literature: we're getting to choose the kinds of book we'd like to read from a sample of raw work. There are over 3500 books on authonomy and getting to the top of the pile is some achievement.

Some of you guys were kind enough to help me do it: take a look at these little marvels and see if you agree with me that they should be in bookshops!!!

The Voices of Angels is young adult fiction from Spain-based expat Hannah Davis. It's a magical wee book, about a girl called Lizzie who can see people 'marked' with their own imminent deaths. Her parents send her to stay with her grandmother in Andalucia where she discovers that the veil dividing this world and another, more infinite existence, is so thin that she can walk through into infinity.

Songs from the Other Side of the Wall is an amazing piece of literary fiction, a book whose author is able to paint with language, creating masterpieces of precise word-pictures, colours and wordscapes that have you reading for the sheer joy of consuming Dan Holloway's writing. It's the story of a girl whose lover is killed and who reconnects with her estranged parents, finding love and redemption as she rebuilds her life.

Carry Me Away by American journalist and editor Robb Grindstaff is the story of Carry, a 'GenX biracial military brat' who lives her life in the belief that she is going to die at 20. It's a remarkable portrayal of a young woman, brilliantly executed and deftly paced. It's a very 'American' book in its tone, dialogue and language. And it's eye-poppingly good.

Punchline by Paul Fenton will make you laugh. If it doesn't, you're dead.

Diary of a Small Fish is another very American book. Author Peter Morin has built a tense political thriller, with whip-crack dialogue and a nice cynicism that combines with, somewhere, just a little bit of heart. It's a damn good read, a sort of curl up by the fire with a glass of red sort of read.

Last, but not least, I have to mention Tybalt and Theo. Much beloved Dubai (and now Spanish) blogger Keith Williamson gives his own little spin to the financial crisis by building in a splendid time-shift and throwing in porridge-bowls of silliness. It's rushing the authonomy charts and currently sits at 25.

Did I say 'beloved'? Sorry meant malign hunchback misanthrope. Key got stuck or something...

Faced

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

This is interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SiteMeter

I posted a strange searches post the other day and a few people have asked, on and offline, how I found out what search words had led people to this dim and far-flung cupboard somewher at the back of the dazzling global repository that is the Web. The answer is a little 'widget' called SiteMeter.

SiteMeter is a neat little utility used by many bloggers. It comes in two flavours, a free to use version and a more 'functionally rich' paid for version.

SiteMeter tracks visitors to blogs, reporting on the number of visitors to a blog per day and reports on traffic by day, month and year. It also evaluates the number of page views a blog is achieving and tracks visitors to the blog.

SiteMeter lets you see who's visiting, when and from where - how long they spent on the blog and what things interested them most.

Few people appear to realise that bloggers using SiteMeter can also obtain a lot more information about visitors. Their IP address, for instance - as well as the browser, operating system, language, Java version and even the screen resolution their system supports.

SiteMeter tracks the time of visits and the visit 'path', letting you see which pages a visitor entered on and which ones they visited, left comments on and exited from. It lets you see where they came from (hence the ability to 'track back' Google searches) and where they went to on the way out.

SiteMeter also lets you analyse traffic by search engines, referring sites and so on.

It can be a slightly invasive tool in the wrong hands, but it's generally a useful and interesting way to get a snapshot of what's happening with your blog. It's also how bloggers can work out when people from corporate companies leave 'anonymous' comments on their blogs!

Gumpf

Well, General Motors certainly don't think much about the treatment they've been getting at the hands of bloggers.

According to a report in the Financial Times, carried today by Gulf News, GM's spokesman Tom Wilkinson reckons, "We've found that the travails of the auto industry have spread beyond the business pages to the general media. Bloggers and others tend to pick up misinformation and recycle it endlessly."

So here, perhaps, is an example of a company that didn't just sit back and sulk when it doesn't like what's happening out there in the Internet. It got off its bum and did something about it. GM's GMfactsandfiction.com website not only directly addresses hard questions, it even asks readers to submit rumours!

"If you’ve read or heard something about GM we’d love to know about it so that we can have an opportunity to address it."

It's certainly an agressive and targeted outreach effort that pulled major global media hits when it was announced on the 5th September. The editor of GMFactsandfiction.com is, incidentally, one Tom Wilkinson!

If you Google General Motors Blogs, you'll find that at least the first three pages of results are utterly dominated by GM's own blogs: a nice effort at SEO domination, for sure. A quick search of other coverage shows much of it is 'on message', too. Top marks for GM?

Well, let's not be so quick to go clapping backs.

It's actually quite hard to find the 'negatives' that GM has reacted so strongly to. So at first glance, we've got an impressive piece of PR work that got GM's story out there and shouted down the critical voices quite neatly, apparently addressing their assertions and restoring 'balance' to the debate. But it's done so with such efficiency that there's no debate at all to speak of...

And the GMF&F site doesn't allow people to post comments. So it's not really dialogue: it's just big-budget shout it from the rooftops assertion. And the trouble with that kind of assertion is that you can't really take a realistic tone and address the debate as a participant - you're just blaring your viewpoint and not listening to others. And that's not polite conversation.

There's this blog, for instance, which accuses GMF&F of 'cherry picking' and then goes on to take a sharp cutlass to the site. And, in fact, there is an increasing volume of comment on blogs of a similar nature, although the tone of response is generally cautious and wary rather than condemnatory.

As one forum comment put it: "I looked at that website. It's sad when a formerly proud American corporation resorts to peddling half truths like that on a website. No solid facts are provided about their dire financial situation and yet GM has the arrogance to try and dupe the public into believing they aren't receiving a government handout. Sad, sad, sad."

Perhaps interestingly, the day before the outreach on facts and fiction started, GM apparently recalled almost a million vehicles due to a fire hazard... the recall is also carried on the US NHTSA database under NHTSA Campaign Number 08V441000.

Although GM appears not to have issued a release on that... Almost a million fire hazards wouldn't be as important as 'addressing myths'.

Or am I just being too cynical again...

Warned

Aren't blogs funny? It never rains but it pours. Some days you've got nothing at all to add to the world, some days things you want to get out of your system just come tumbling out.

Some people read this post. I'm sure quite a few more read it when it ran on Arabian Business. Some even heard me blithering about it on the radio (and were kind enough not to complain).

But, surely, this poor berk wasn't among 'em - otherwise he'd have thought twice about the way he tried to handle disappointed consumer Moryarti when he posted his 5th September grumpy blogpost about a hotel Ramadan tent that failed to live up to expectations. Yes! Cue relentlessly positive comments from someone quite obviously working for the hotel in question. And then some rather... acid responses from the Moryarti himself... a fun read!!!

They can't say I didn't try to tell 'em, can they? >;0)

Kipp

I do agree wholeheartedly with Kipp's slightly grumbly blogpost about the RTA's adoption of social media.

If they're really getting hardcore about online media, they'd do well to start reading some of the reaction from 'customers' on the UAE's blogs. Although I suspect that when it comes to true 'customer feedback', we're looking less like joining a conversation and more like sticking our fingers in our ears and shouting lalalalalala until all the naughty people go away...

And this at a time when the RTA's Salik website still, a year after the launch of the toll, isn't fully functional and doesn't actually provide a fully transactional service.

A Facebook page doesn't make you cool - but it certainly can make you look like an organisation that doesn't get the dynamics and potential of the Internet but which is ticking the 'things we feel we should look like we're doing' boxes...

Meejia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scoop

In what must stand as a major triumph for ‘citizen journalism’ in the Middle East, I can exclusively reveal to you that this silly little blog has scooped The Gulf News in a deep and fundamental way. Well, in a small and silly way at least.

Today’s multi-kilo wodge of tree landed on my desk containing the excellent story, ‘Special petrol shortage in some pumps’, reporting that ADNOC had run out of ‘Special’ grade petrol (95 octane to you, mate). As regular readers of this motley collection of half-baked bibble will attest, you read it here first - last week, in fact!

I shall refrain from any unseemly triumphalism.

GN also features another story that featured elsewhere first: yesterday’s edition of The National carried the story (chucklesomely headlined ‘Diesel demand delays drivers’) that Abu Dhabi was groaning under the strain of supplying enough diesel to meet the massive demand for ADNOC’s cheap diesel – currently retailing at Dhs10 less than other brands of diesel. As has been mentioned here before, the resultant tailbacks have been massive and Abu Dhabi and Sharjah have both implemented rules to send trucks and large vehicles outside the city limits to refuel.

As GN points out in its story today, ADNOC is not answering press calls, which is really not the way to manage the situation (as we saw yesterday with Etisalat). That’s a shame, because this story is really quite fun.

Why should fuel shortages in Abu Dhabi tickle me?

Well, let’s reflect on this for a second. One of the world’s largest oil producers and a country where the stuff, literally, comes out of the ground, is now facing a wide range of transportation challenges, including the danger of not being able to ferry workers to building sites and food to retailers. Because it’s run out of fuel.

Priceless!