Tuesday 3 June 2008
Shill
It's not often I shill for clients on da blog, but I liked this thingette from IBM employee Sacha Chua so I've put it here. Later on today, if I'm lucky, a few of the delegates from this year's Arab Advisors Fifth Annual Media and Convergence Conference will swing by to take a look at it, because I'll have pointed them here.
They'll also be able to read the thought provoking article here, which my mate Gianni turned me onto.
Sacha is a self-confessed member of what we old people like to call Generation Y. It's not a term with which I'm particularly comfortable, but then I've heard even worse epithets. I happen to hate, with a passion, 'digital tribe' and even worse is 'digital native'. The idea that someone grew up in a digital world is interesting, but I don't think that labelling and boxing them is desirable or even funny, clever or mature.
As it happens, I grew up in a digital world myself, but a strange and fast-moving digital world where I was filled with round-eyed astonishment at the things happening around me. I grew up in a world where my school didn't know what number base would be the number base of computing, so I was forced into calculating in binary, octal and duodecimal. Crap - hex won out. I learned to use a computer with a card reader, then a teletype. Later on came coding punch tape for CNC turret presses, eight inch disk drives, 20lb portable computers, memory chips the size of aeroplanes and all the rest of it.
It might not have been Facebook, but it wasn't exactly an 'analogue upbringing' either.
Which might be part of the reason why I find it so intensely irritating to have to watch telcos and telecom vendors trying to 'get to grips with the kids'. They'd be well served to just try a little wide-eyed curiosity themselves and start exploring this brave new world we've all been building, rather than just trying to shoe-horn it into old fashioned revenue models from their heady circuit-switched days.
Here endeth the geek session. Back to being silly tomorrow... promise...
Wednesday 16 April 2008
Conference
On June 1st in Amman, the iblogimedia conference will take place. This is the Middle East's first social media conference. I'm sort of mixing work and pleasure by posting about it here, because we're involved with supporting the event but, hey, rules are made to be broken, no?
Whether it'll do anyone any good to talk about Web 2.0 for a day is yet to be seen, but I am personally hopeful that the event will help to bring greater awareness of consumer generated media in the Middle East to a wider audience, share experience and ideas and also help organisations to define ways of gaining benefit from working with social media. There are some really cool speakers and panellists lined up already.
I look forward to seeing you there... :)
Friday 22 February 2008
Cruel
As if to show that the mighty Guardian can, indeed, take it on the chin, Charles reports on the fascinating affair of The Guardian's very own home grown scandal - that of the 'gap blogger'. The gap blogger, a young chap called Max, has been given a slice of the Guardian's blog in which to report on his travels in his 'gap year'. A gap year is the year between school and university that many, often well-to-do, British kids spend backpacking around the world and discovering themselves. Incidentally, I do think that people who set out to discover themselves are often just trying to travel away from the fact that what there is there to be discovered is very little indeed.
So Max, apparently no different from any other 19 year old, gets to write on a British national newspaper's blog. A break which few aspiring young travel writers could expect to get. The fact that Max's travel writer dad is a Guardian contributor introduces a beguiling whiff of nepotistic sulphur to an otherwise drab contribution: Max's first piece is really no more or less than you'd expect - a little silly, naive, slightly clumsy and perhaps gawky. What's perhaps surprising is that The Guardian Blog is supporting such a poor contribution.
And this is where we get to the real fun of the affair: the tide of abuse that nestles in the comments. It's even possible that the phrase gap blogger might enter our dictionaries or even transform into a real life honest-to-goodness meme.
I do recommend a flick through Max's first (and last?) post and the consequent howls of rage from readers. The criticism is nothing less than coruscating - and the volume of comment is quite remarkable. It's a rollicking good read and a fantastic example of social networking at its most... social or anti-social? You decide!
Thursday 21 February 2008
Blocked
Before you get all excited, it's important to understand what the word liberalised means. You probably thought, like many people, it meant something like 'to make or to become more favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs'.
Progress, in this case, means extending the site blocking policy that Etisalat currently supports to its competitor Du and formalising the criteria to be applied to what content is to be blocked. That includes 'dating websites': Emirates Business, in its incisive report on the move, quotes a spokesman for the UAE's Telecom Regulatory Authority, the TRA, as saying that sections of social networking websites such as Facebook that encouraged dating would be banned but that residents would have access to the website excluding those parts.
Let us be very clear here, perhaps clearer than we have been over our use of the word liberalisation. Social networking results in opening up channels between people of every origin, creed and colour to enjoy dialogue, to share their thoughts, creations and experiences. It's really quite important.
We're not talking about blocking commercial pornography, sexual or blasphemous content here. We're talking about stopping people, individuals, exchanging information over an open platform.
It does strike me that if you can't deal with what other people have to say, or can't stand the thought that the people close to you cannot deal with the moral challenges of unfettered thought, I'm not really sure that the answer is sticking your fingers in your ear and shouting 'Lalalalalalalala' until they go away.
But I am sure that these blocking policies have the potential to continue retarding the adoption, innovation and use of these emerging technologies in the region. Liberalisation is an inexcusable misuse of language to describe this move, both on the part of the regulator that used it and the newspaper that allowed it to pass unchallenged.
Tuesday 2 October 2007
UAE Facebook Ban Shock Horror Rubbish
The story is one of those that should have been strangled at birth. There have been connectivity issues over the past few days from the UAE, likely a router or two taken out over in the
So Facebook users in the UAE have been rushing off to their favourite place and finding the site’s just timing out on them. And, according to KT, they’ve been scared that this means Facebook, as Orkut was before it, has been banned for being a ‘dating site’.
It is perhaps worth mentioning that the whole Web 2.0 adoption thing in the UAE is being slightly held back by the fact that many cool Twitter-like things have been banned because they encourage ‘dating’.
When the UAE content filter decides that something’s just too naughty or interesting to be looked at by our delicate, tender little eyes, the site gets blocked and you get the above, quite distinctive, message on your screen. The lack of such a message (sites affected over the past couple of days have just been timing out. I’ve personally been having huge issues with Blogger, Google and Yahoo at various times) is something that the Facebook users fearing a ban have presumably been failing to think through.
Contacting the telco (Etisalat) and the regulator, KT’s reporter was told by both that there was no ban in place and that there had been connectivity issues. The regulator told KT that readers having access issues could use the Du network instead, which did rather make me chuckle given the user feedback we’ve been seeing here on FPS. Most people would conclude at that stage that they had a non story on their hands, rather than a front page blast as the story really boils down to ‘Stupid People Find Nothing is Happening’.
Or, perhaps, if you wanted to run with it and be sensible: ‘UAE Internet Failures Irk Users’.
Tuesday 18 September 2007
Beating the UAE Content Filter
OK. So I made up the fingernails and pasta bits.
But I found ‘illegal’ an interesting use of words. I think a telecom regulator can say that something is contrary to regulation, but can they claim it as illegal without the backing of an actual law to enact? I thought that something enshrined in statute was law and that the application of that law and precedent through the courts defined legality or illegality. And UAE law (I will rapidly say that I am no expert and invite anybody who knows better to please contradict/clarify this) wouldn’t appear to be particularly hot on the whole issue of cyber-legislation, let alone the application of any such legislation in the courts.
Although you could try applying the UAE publishing law to the Internet and the whole issue of what content is acceptable or not, you’d have a hard time squeezing that round peg into the square hole that is the WWW. As far as I’m aware, Etisalat’s proxy server and content blocking/filtering system was wholly unilaterally implemented and was not a legislated requirement. As others have pointed out in the past, the Etisalat filtering system not only filters content that would be considered offensive in a Muslim country, but also does a neat job of blocking Israeli sites (handy: you can’t actually get information from moderate Israeli voices or even research Israeli companies investing in areas that are of commercial interest to the Arab World), IP telephony providers such as Skype and, the great crime to my mind, a number of social networking sites such as Flickr and Twitter.
A digression. Given that the latter are core components of the Web 2.0 revolution that everyone’s bibbling about, I like to save up some anger about that whole decision that social networking is ‘dating’ and therefore unacceptable. I have pointed out before (not least when speaking at conferences) that the human race has been able to ‘get it on’ for some considerable time before Twitter was introduced. I don’t think blocking Web 2.0 networks will stop that boy meets girl thing from happening, do you?
Getting back to the point, then: although there are laws governing the creation, possession and sale of offensive content, and these define what constitutes offensive content in the UAE, I am not aware of laws that govern blocking competitive service providers or social networking sites. That would be a highly advanced (more advanced than anywhere in Europe, the
So given the above holds water, you have to question the TRA’s ability to use the law, as it so readily threatens, to pursue people who sign up to this new proxy service. Of course, once content is physically present on a machine/storage in the UAE, other, highly effective and easy to understand laws come into play. But access alone… that’s a difficult one, no?
A small thought: the Internet is not blocked in
Incidentally, the Emirates Today headline screams ‘INTERNET BLOCKER BEATER’ and is directly underneath an Etisalat strap advertisement that says ‘Wherever you go, we extend your reach’.
A nice piece of flat-planning and a beautiful last thought. :0)
Wednesday 12 September 2007
Blog Gets Action, Justice
The full story is here. It’s been viewed over 3,700 times and drawn over 200 comments, the vast majority from truly horrified people who undoubtedly sparked major and widespread word of mouth awareness of this appalling situation. The story was also picked up by ‘conventional’ media and ran widely. The combination of word of mouth, blog and media resulted in
As pal and passionate social media advocate Gianni will tell you, over 40% of journalists surveyed in the
Husain’s blog helped to get action and will, hopefully, also get justice for his father and the family. Which I, for one, find really quite cool.
Thursday 14 June 2007
The Web 2.0 Interview
So, to avoid the flames and fire engines, here is the link. They used the photo from my Facebook profile, which is all very Web 2.0 of them but it's not quite the suit that serious clients want to see, is it?
Which, of course, I quite like... :)
From The Dungeons
Book Marketing And McNabb's Theory Of Multitouch
(Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I clearly want to tell the world about A Decent Bomber . This is perfectly natural, it's my latest...