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... :)

National

There's a certain excitement in the air this week as the media luvvies that populate Dubai's 'scene' all wait for the new Abu Dhabi newspaper, The National, to hit the streets.

The first issue's due out this Thursday: a big and heavyweight team of journalists headed by ex-Telegraph editor Martin Newland has been ramping up for months.

It's going to be interesting. Gulf News has already significantly increased its local news coverage and everyone seems to think it's GN that will take the hit, if there is going to be any hit to be taken. However, the commercial powerhouse that is driving that daily 1KG hunk of paper isn't going to be too worried, one suspects, at least not in the short term.

We're certainly going to see a huge increase in journalistic activity generally. There are going to be a lot of people chasing those stories and looking for differentiated coverage - Newland's team will add something like 45 UAE reporters and 30 international reporters. And they're looking at a business section comprising something like 20 pages according to business editor Bill Spindle, who spoke at the monthly MEPRA klatch earlier this week.

So can we expect better journalism, more competitive journalism and more investigative journalism? I think we can. Quite how long the effect will last and how deep it will go remains to be seen. And, for me at least, that's the interesting bit.

Stuck

Have been meaning to share this minor amusement for some time now. Got my regular (and expensive) treat, Q Magazine and scurried home for a read. Imagine my surprise to find two of the pages stuck together. Yes! Magic Menon and his team of stoned, magic marker sniffing censors had been at work!

It takes quite a lot of magic marker to remove 100 bare breasted girls on bicycles. Not a single cheeky little nipple remains peeping through the dense sea of black...

Flacks

The UK has a brilliant online technology publication called The Register. It's been going for quite some time now and has built up a massive and loyal base of readers - it's very influential indeed in technology circles. El Reg, as it likes to style itself, is also pretty hard-hitting - it's cynical, sarcastic and irreverent in the extreme. It's also very good at breaking news and very good indeed at taking a long, hard look at the dynamics of an industry in which it is not only specialised, but entrenched.

Which is why it's such a great read.

So when two, presumably slightly flustered, PR people from British telephone company O2 had a conference call to discuss quite how to deal with the Register's treatment of some issues they've been having with bandwidth allocation, the last thing they'd probably want to do is patch in Register reporter Bill Ray to listen to them discussing how they were going to manage him.

That would be stupidity beyond belief, wouldn't it? That would be Darwin Award class stuff.

Perish the very thought...

SNAFU*

I posted about my awful bank, HSBC, and at how happy I was to make the move to Lloyds. Lloyds then proceeded to make an awful hash of setting up the account. They issued my debit card with the wrong name on it twice, managed to lose Sarah’s application for a Visa card and generally screwed up the Internet banking side of things by sending me an email to complete the process that was only distinguishable from a phishing email by the fact that it wasn’t as professionally presented as the phishing mails. I still can’t believe that a bank could be stupid enough to send its customers emails with live links to online forms that ask for secure information. It’s taken them over two months to fail to open an account properly. In the meantime, people have been walking up to me in the street, incredulous that I’ve moved to Lloyds and telling me how much they hate them. So we’ve decided to sue for peace and stay with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Blitheringfools Club.

Then I posted about the furniture cleaning company man being impressive. So impressive that when it came to the day of the actual cleaning, they didn’t turn up. They had decided they didn’t want to do the job. Their parent company, meanwhile, managed to lose a silk throw that was sent into them for dry cleaning, with much attendant unpleasantness and a week’s worth of hysterical phone calls from a ranting Sarah. The upholstery team eventually did turn up, just at the wrong time, and destroyed the afternoon although, and let us be thankful for small mercies, not the sofa.

So when Axa insurance sent me an SMS reminder to renew my car insurance, with my policy number in the message and their call centre number so’s I could call then and there to renew, I vowed not to post anything about being impressed. When the call centre took the call, dealt with it effectively and efficiently and renewed my policy on the spot, I promised myself that I would preserve the silence of the confessional. When the documents turned up on my desk, delivered by courier the next day as promised by the girl in the call centre, in order and perfect in every respect, I finally snapped.

It’s safe to post now.

*SNAFU is a great acronym, BTW. Just in case you didn’t know, it stands for Situation Normal All Fcuked Up.

Earthwards

I didn't see any announcements in the papers about this one. And I don't think Emirates announced it. Getting to the airport today, I notice a leaflet that says Silver Skywards members can no longer invite a colleague or other person to join them in the business lounge. The 'privilege' will be 'temporarily suspended'.

Why? Because "given the exceptional growth of Emirates Airline, our existing lounge facilities are not able to accommodate the current volume of visitors."

Well, it's nice to see EK confirming what most of us have known for months already - that the current lounge is totally unable to cope with the volume of users, particularly at busy times like the 7-8am rush - being confirmed. Wiser heads know to nip next door and use the DCA lounge.

But the answer, surely, is to expand the facility, by hook or by crook - not to simply fail to provide people with something that you have undertaken to give them. That's just reneging on the deal. That's really bad for the brand - particularly given a frequent flyer programme asks people to make a significant investment in their relationship to that brand.

And to first tell them at the check-in? That's just poor communications.

Swatch

Nothing to do with watches. I mean like colour swatch. I would like to propose a new colour for the world's paint makers. Dubai Beige.

Dubai beige is the colour of Emirates uniforms - of shopping malls, hotels, residences and logos. It is the colour of the taxis and souks, embassies and free zones. It is the colour of Arabian Ranches and Emirates Hills and Dare To Dream Villas and Falcon Heights or whatever else you're dreaming up to sell to the rubes flying in on EK001 to buy up a slice of Dubai Dream.

C5 M35 Y65. Dubai beige.

Deadly

Three of the landlord’s maintenance team, all Keralite bandits who had taken up building maintenance as light relief after their previous careers as Indian Ocean pirates, were gathered in my kitchen hacking at a lump of asbestos which they wanted to use to back a fuse they were repairing. They were completely flummoxed at the fuss I made, were rather put out to be thrown out of the kitchen, asbestos chunk and all, and even more confounded at my point blank refusal to let them use the material in the house at any price. To them, this stuff was the most brilliant construction material of all time: easy to cut, strong, light, fire-proof and infinitely flexible. I was being utterly unreasonable, obviously. And the very thought that it could cause disease had them rolling their eyes and giggling at me: I'd obviously been pegged as the local English eccentric.

We’d arrived at a major cultural disconnect. In the UK, even the word asbestos is enough to bring in teams of environmental health officers dressed in biochemical hazard suits, carrying canaries in cages and shouting 'Stand clear!' into high powered bullhorns. And yet asbestos is still not only manufactured but used widely as a construction material in the Indian subcontinent. In fact, it is also still widely promoted – even if we have substituted the word ‘asbestos’ for ‘fibre cement roofing sheet’.

You can start to see why the landlord’s guys were so puzzled at my horrified reaction. Amazingly, it is still a subject of debate in India – with an active lobby calling for a ban in the manufacture and use of the material – and seeming to have something of an uphill struggle, too. Meanwhile, in the States, asbestos litigations have been estimated to have reached an overall value of $250 billion, involving in excess of 750,000 litigants. That’s a lot of sick people.

I suppose the question I was left with was how the hell they were importing the stuff into the Emirates. You know, with the world class strict building regulations and standards we enjoy and all that. How much of this very nasty material is being used in the houses we’re living in? Take a close look at any grey corrugated roofing you see around you – but don’t take too deep a sniff! As of 2006, asbestos was one of the top five imports to the UAE from the Czech Republic, one of the many places around the world where the material is still made – for export to developing markets, obviously, not for domestic use. It's far too dangerous for domestic use, after all!

It is, when you think of it, just a little bit evil, isn’t it? European countries selling materials that are known to be highly toxic (and that are banned in the EU) to ignorant, eager consumers in developing world markets. Including this one.

Romance

I tried to desist. But it’s no use.

Pal Kenneth found something special and was kind enough to make the ultimate sacrifice and give it to me. It’s an issue of a magazine called ‘Good Time’ which specialises, as it says on the cover, in hotels and dining out in the UAE. It is wonderful beyond words and I shall treasure it for a good time to come.

The magazine has, I believe, been written in the original Arabic and translated by a very literally minded person or an automated translation system. It is possible, just possible, that the translator is struggling to do his work under the influence of something chemical and powerfully psychosomatic. I suspect the latter, but whatever the cause, the results in print are rarely short of majestic.

Consider this, then. On the Emirates Palace Hotel:

• “Emirates Palace Hotel... wonderful architectural masterpiece enthralled eyes by design and ingenuity construction, its beauty takes you to the grand atmosphere a lot of people not tasked like this previously...”

This is the stuff, no? We go on:

• “Combining internal decor of the rooms between the designs Arab nobility and modern techniques of modern classical form and Duke simple harmony between sophistication and dazzling which exceeded expectations of visitors.”

A good review, then. And written in precise, clear language that anyone who has written copy for a Dubai real estate company would truly appreciate.

A review of Singapore’s Marina Mandryan Hotel takes us into a new world of strange, acid-fuelled other-space. The hotel is, apparently:

• “Characterized as a signatory in the heart of the Israeli ‘Marina any’ vital...” And if that weren’t enough by itself, the hotel’s spa, “means all procedures and treatments that remove tension and make the eradication times Hotel Marina Mandarin fun fact.”

Quite.

Passing through Australia, “beauty country” the magazine tells us, we land at Bab Al Shams which is, apparently, “constructed in the form of a traditional Arab bulwark”. It is here that the powerful hallucinogenics have really started to jack in with a deep surge of synapse-frying electrical overload. Struggling for some kind of control, our man is by now quite obviously pulling the text together through a haze of images and bad-trip sounds and smells.

• “Reflecting the spirit of grandeur himself prepared to provide dreamy atmosphere during handling and jpetk between instance, the visitor to a restaurant Knights will never forget the quality of the dishes provided underlying crew of cooks months in region.”

Smashing his head against the keyboard in an effort to retain some semblance of control, gnashing his teeth and keening in a high pitched wail, he goes on, a cry for help echoing in his writing: “I need to go Asterkhaek search for love outside the diet...”

The following review of an offroad safari confirms that the trip has turned very, very bad. Fighting off the gryphons and gibbering from fear of the shapes oozing out of the black, limitless corners of the room, our man is scared of offroading:

• “We cry of the terror and great surprise...we have barely believe what is happening to us and going by the positions we were not to live...”

And then, finally, a feature on dining in the dark completes what has been a most interestingly Keseyesque roadtrip, an electric cool-aid acid test magazine:

• “the difference lies in the exchange of roles where the guest in the Welfare of the blind (waiters) then, as if he is not sighted while waiters (blind) who are moving freely as if they are sights and servicing customers kindling pleasure dependent on them.” And then, deep into the review: “...in the home does not find a black guest, but not the only voice heard music and faint? Dishes and Spoons and some chats and laughs...”

You saw it here first. Good Time Magazine. Subscribe now!

Joke

Family out, couple of days off: a chance to visit Sharjah's Desert Museum and Arabian Wildlife Centre for the first time in a while. It's officially shut on Mondays, which explains why it was open on a Monday.

I can never visit the place without encountering the ghost of a rather remarkable woman called Marijke Jongbloed. I interviewed her for a magazine I was working on, just after the centre had opened many years ago back when the world was a sillier place. It was all a bit fairy tale: Jongbloed had originally moved out to Al Ain decades before and had carved a place as the UAE's most ardent amateur naturalist. Given the lack of professional ones, she quickly become the authority on the flora and fauna of the UAE.

Jongbloed had become concerned with the potential extinction of the 'dhub' or spiny-tailed lizard. The creature's tail was thought, by the bedouin, to be an aphrodisiac and its sole breeding ground, a large depressed area of desert to the left of the Sharjah/Dhaid road, was being decimated by love-lorn Lotharios looking for a lift.

So she wrote to the ruler of Sharjah, Dr. Sultan Al Qassimi. And he wrote back saying that he not only totally agreed with her, but would fund the creation of a nature reserve and wildlife centre.

When I interviewed her, she was weaning a hedgehog with a pipette. Marijke was a very large lady and it was a very small hedgehog. It was one of three species indigenous to the Emirates she told me, which did rather surprise me. I had always thought of hedgehogs as two-dimensional inhabitants of European roads.

She belly laughed, a deep, booming laugh, as she let me in on her favourite joke: she was building a major part of the centre so that the animals were outside and the humans confined. She thought that was only too appropriate. And so it is: today, as you walk around the centre, you're behind the glass and the baboons, cheetahs, wolves and Arabian Leopards are outside.

Marijke's great mission in life was the Arabian Leopard Trust. I'm not sure what happened: one day she was simply gone, leaving a whiff of sulphur behind her: something, somewhere, had gone wrong. And the Arabian Leopard Trust, founded to foster a breeding programme for these most attractive and almost extinct tarts of big cats (they lounge on rocky shelves at the Center, licking their paws and talking in languid, Terry Thomas lounge lizard tones, 'Helllooooo') appears to have disappeared too. If you ask one of the horde of under-employed local girls sat around behind the reception desk, you just get puzzled looks.

But I still see Marijke, in a red outfit, sitting in the garden with a hedgehog nestled in her big arms, every time I go to the Centre...