Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I was going to let it go, honestly. I told myself I was a mean spirited old swine and that I had no right to laugh at the debate on fiction publishing in the UAE that takes up two glorious tabloid pages in today's Emirates Today. But then they went and quoted a fellow mean-spirited old swine and I gave in.

Nancy Collisson, proposed by the newspaper to debate against the motion 'The UAE is likely to develop a significant fiction publishing industry', is the author of the popular Mr Buffy series of colouring books which, we are told, 'tell the tale of an ex-pat cat making friends and a new home in Dubai'. One can only assume that John Le Carré wasn't available.

While generally supporting our Nancy's stand against the evils of censorship (set against the chap from Motivate, for the motion, who apparently thinks that 'censorship makes for great art' - the less said about that the better, I think), I was struck by her use of a quote from Juvenal (attributed by our Nance to Decimus which, although it is Mr. J's proper first name, is generally not a name wot he is usually called): "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?".

Nancy translates that as: "Who among us has the authority to decide what is to be read?", a slice of piffle that could not be further from the meaning or intention of the original - which has got absolutely nothing to do with reading, let alone the assignation of authority. Even someone who spent two years of Latin classes reading thrillers disguised as Latin text books by covering them in brown paper (I did, too) could tell that.

Juvenal was, in fact, asking "Who will guard against the guardians?", a completely different question that aims to question, even provoke, answerability in the leaders of a city state. Incidentally, a city state that Bad Boy Juvenal satirised mercilessly because he hated it with a passion. "Who could endure this monstrous city, however callous at heart, and swallow his wrath?" Juve baby asks us, in one of his kinder moments.

Pithy stuff, then, for the inhabitants of a city state to be reading over their coffees, but not quite what I think Nancy intended...

I am nowhere near so cynical, incidentally, as to propose an alternative motion: that the UAE has already developed a significant fiction publishing industry...

How to embarrass your telco

The Road and Transport Authority of Dubai, which is responsible for much of the development of the city's multi-modal transport system, has today announced a new SMS-based taxi ordering system.

Hurrah!

The new service will consist of numbered location boards around the city, under which the taxi-needy can stand, texting 4777 and the location board number. The taxi will then be dispatched to the given location.

This strange and Heath-Robinsonesque workaround would, of course, be rendered totally unnecessary by the availability of any location-based service from the telcos that are meant to be providing mobile services in the UAE. Location based services allow information to be provided contextually using the GSM cell location as a cue and are implemented in other world markets, where they enable systems such as automatic location checking for taxis or other delivery based services, location-specific information services and all sorts of wonderful things.

It's a step forward from calling up and telling them where you are. But only just. The RTA's got the right idea here and obviously isn't going to wait 25 years for the telcos to bridge the growing advanced services gap.

RTA 1 Telcos 0.

Does Du do it for you?

What, indeed, to Du?

Go to www.du.com. It's a reasonably cool and very fast (the world's fastest, apparently) WHOIS lookup site (A WHOIS lets you find out who owns which Internet website, so you type in the name of the site and the WHOIS returns who the owner and operator of the site are).

Or try searching for du in Yahoo! and you'll get, among other strange things, Ducks Unlimited, the North American waterfowl conservation site. This is a neat link as if you look up du in Wikipedia, you'll find that one of the many things it stands for is the name in New Caledonia for Sylviornis neocaledoniae - an extinct galliform bird.

Wikipedia also tells us that DU, du or Du also stands for:

• Data unit
• Delhi University
• Delta Upsilon
• Democratic Underground
• Depleted uranium
• Desktop underwriter
• Dhaka University
• Dial-up access
• Disney University
• Dobson unit
• Doctor of the University
• Doshisha University
• Drexel University
• Ducks Unlimited
• Duisburg (city code plate prefix)
• Duke University
• Duquesne University
• Durham University
• Hemus Air (IATA airline designator)
• University of Denver
• December Underground ( AFI's 7th studio album)

Which, honestly, all says more about the telephone company than I wanted to say in the first place. I'm still with etisalat, despite having had every intention of switching.

As the late, great Ian Dury tells us: what a waste.

Marmite

Marmite has produced a limited edition of 300,000 jars made using Guinness yeast. It tastes very nice indeed. Mildly curious as to how they make the stuff, after a lifetime eating it, I wandered onto the website. Because that's what the Internet is for.

Rarely has a site impressed me so much initially and then driven me so surely to rage. It's BLOODY annoying. There's no information there. Nothing. You can learn more about Marmite from Wikipedia. Which is a worry in itself.

The idea's smart. You either love Marmite or hate it, is the thinking - hence the whole themed campaign that Unilever (what, did you think it was home made or something?) has undertaken around the love it/hate it theme. So you have a site that's divided into love heaven and hate hell. Cool. Except that the concept is taken to its idiot extreme by a group of pony-tailed tossers who write 'copy for the kids' like this:

"Eat Marmite? You don't just want to eat it, you want to bathe in it, wallow in it like a hippo in mud, slather yourself from head to toe and wrap yourself in bread and butter... And you know what? That's fine. Just fine. Completely normal in fact..."

That's just a small taste. The site is unremittingly pointless. Here. You decide for yourself. Does going there just prove that it's a great idea? No, because it simply exposes more people to a negative and frustrating experience linked to the brand. Sure, use 'rich content' technologies to make your marketing point and even have a goof around with it to show that your brand is really hip - if you really must. But people want information from company websites before they want funky fun experiences - and if that informaton is simply not available, you're just going to tee them off...

Marmite website? Hate it.

Fair Game?

The Arabian Travel Market show has been thrilling visitors all week. Oh yes. However, few things have been more thrilling (no, not even the world's first Emirati space tourist) than seeing that weekly tabloid Xpress has run a piece, with no sense of irony whatsoever, on Zimbabwe's new tourist-grabbing scheme. Tourism there presumably needing a boost after all that farm burning stuff which the Western media made so much unnecessary fuss over.

"For the avid hunter there is no better feeling than taking down a lion in the wilderness of an African savannah," the Travel Round-Up piece gushes. Taking down? Taking down? It's got that lovely ring of yo mofo Tarantino to it, doesn't it?

It gets better. The piece quotes Gladys Dongo, Zimbabwe Tourism Authority marketing manager: "Few places in Africa can show you the big five (lion, elephant, water buffalo, rhinoceros and leopard) and even fewer will let you hunt them."

She obviously meant 'take them down in a murderous hail of hot lead and snuff them like the furry scum they are,' but was presumably being polite.

If the piece had you gasping in the face of its willingness to roll out a message that sharply smacks the arse of political correctness and sends it home without tea, the last paragraph will surely make your day. "Non-lethal hunts can also be arranged, where the captured live game can also be transported back to your country."

Very nice work. Should certainly get some good reader feedback...

UNESCO World Press Freedom Day

Today's Gulf News reports Egyptian journalist Howaida Taha was found guilty of 'harming the country's interests' by an Egyptian court and sentenced, in absentia, to six months imprisonment. Taha, who works for the Qatari Al Jazeera, is currently in Doha and can be expected to be staying there for some time to come.

Today is UNESCO World Press Freedom Day.

The timing. The irony.

Meanwhile, UNESCO interviews Ghassan Tueni: one of a number of features on its site today.

RIP Pandora

There are many wonderful things that the Internet brings us, but surely one of the most wonderful over the past year or so must have been Pandora. The idea was a brilliant one: select a band you like and, using an analysis based on a number of musical attributes, Pandora will play a stream of records from your band and similar types of music. Like Amazon's filters, you can select which tracks you like and don't like and Pandora will refine your stream until you get music that's pretty much bang on.

I found it a great way to listen to new music and found, and bought, quite a lot of music I wouldn't otherwise have been exposed to.

As of today, Pandora has been forced to suspend its service to anyone outside the USA, doing so by using your URL to determine you're not from the land of the free and the home of the brave. According to founder Tim Westergren, "We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that we must begin proactively preventing access to Pandora's streaming service for most countries outside of the U.S. It is difficult to convey just how disappointing this is for us."

Not to mention the rest of us. But the real losers in the long term are going to be the short-sighted yo-yo toting cretins behind the whole idiocy: the record companies. And I, for one, won't be sparing them many tears...

Worse? How can it get much worse?

The following is reproduced from the Arab Times in Kuwait via blogger Moocherx but I can't give you a direct link to the Arab Times piece as it has mysteriously disappeared from their online edition.

When things are bad, reflect that they could, indeed, be much worse...

‘Organless’ Indian tries suicide: The Asian man who cut his organ three weeks ago following a dispute with his wife who had allegedly informed him that she planned to divorce him and get married to another man tried to end his life by jumping from the third floor of the Adan Hospital, reports Al-Qabas daily. The man wanted to end his life after doctors informed him that they had failed to stitch his genitals back in place. The man who survived the fall is recuperating in the intensive care unit of the hospital. A case of attempted suicide has been registered against him.

The Fear Returns

Like the commercial frenzy that is the Christmas season, Dubai's summer season seems to get earlier every year. It's only the second of May and already the infinite-eyed yellow menace has popped up, specifically in today's Arabic language Al Ittihad newspaper. Worse, one's been spotted on Trade Center Roundabout. And that means we'll soon be seeing a great deal more of the little sucker.

Yes, it's Modhesh, the yellow jack in the box crossed with a mutant maggot. And you can bet your bottom dollar that he'll be popping into our lives with his unique blend of relentless, manic zeal for the next five months. Modhesh grinning satanically at us from every roundabout and pavement, filling the business sections of our newspapers, playing in bouncy kiddy-castle style videos every time we fly or take a taxi, leering out at us from a million handbills, advertisements and photofeatures.

It's not fair. It's not even officially summer. As everyone knows, it's only truly summer when Gulf News publishes a photo of a pigeon drinking from a tap...

Café Passé

She's done it again: Arab News' remarkable first lady of technology, Molouk Ba Issa, has once again filed a piece that is remarkably frank - particularly given the media environment in which she operates.

Sadly, this week she's documenting the parlous state of Internet Cafés in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province. As someone who has been following the Saudi Arabian ICT market on and off for something like 20 years (admittedly more off than on in recent years), I find it depressing reading. The Internet is a resource that many of us have come to see as critical and which we use extensively and thoughtlessley. Yet it is a resource that is apparently being effectively denied to people for no apparent technical or financial reason.

This next bit will delight colleagues used to my "I can remember when we had 8 inch floppy disks!" outbursts. Not.

During the first rush to the 'net, slightly late in the Middle East and taking place around the late 1990's, I found myself working with companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Intel to effectively 'evangelise' the new technology to an often very suspicious Middle East media.

I can't count the number of times we had the argument back then about the potential and likely benefits of Internet technologies compared to the possible downsides for the Arab World. The arguments were long, emotional and sometimes frustrating, a push and pull affair where the respect for tradition and strong moral values were sometimes visibly in conflict with the desire to succeed and move ahead.

Do try and take a look at Molouk's piece. Is this truly what happens when that argument is lost?