Death

Sharjah's Al Wahda Street. It used to be where Dubai came for the night out, you know. Honestly. It was a really kickin’ place by night – even today, its cellars can tell some stories from back then. After the big change in Sharjah, Al Wahda Street had to fall back on its other trade – being a second Beirut. During the civil war, so many families made their homes in Sharjah and Al Wahda Street was where they loved to live, eat and shop. There were classics: Red Shoe, Old Shoe, Bird, Valencia, Penguin – mad shoe shops, sharp suit shops: tailors that called you ‘Seer’ and knew what they were doing and more slicked back hair and Lebanese shop assistant attitude than you could shake a stick at. Everyone used to ‘do’ Al Wahda Street for clothes and stuff. It was just class – Al Aroubah Street was always Indian, all saris and souks, but Al Wahda was where you’d do the maddest Mediterranean magnificence.

At one stage in the '80s, some wag produced a spoof UAE job application form. It was one of those things that plays on the various nationalities that make up the 'entrepot' that everyone used to go on about so much. You had to tick your nationality and give your address. If you ticked Lebanese, it directed you to the question, "Where on Al Wahda Street do you live?"
It was funny because it rang true - Al Wahda Street was always a Little Lebanon. And that's what made it wonderful.

Shopping on Al Wahda Street was just a total pleasure; it always rewarded an evening’s wander, dipping into the stores, dropping by at Al Mallah for a shawarma or fatayeh and maybe a jooce cocktail. It was always part discovery, part entertainment – flashing neon lights and amazing, flashy fashions. And during the very height of the civil war, it was a place where a community in diaspora still lived as if nothing was happening, as if their families weren’t sitting in the cellars listening to the crack and thud of gunfire above and living off cream crackers or whatever else they could get their hands on that day. Somehow, Al Wahda Street's zeitgeist was to escape the civil war but was of it. It’s sort of complicated.

And now it’s gone. Dead. A few sad, gasping vestiges of what was life and drama, laughter and celebration still remain, but they won’t outlast the roadworks. The traffic problems and then the sliproad started the rot, the parking metres confirmed it as a rot. Now the Wahda Street Masterplan Phase Four or whatever they’re calling it has really screwed things. Wahda Street is dead, extinguished by a strange and cack-handed attempt to do something, anything, with Sharjah’s traffic.

In the meantime, possibly the strangest and most dangerous diversion in the country now takes traffic from Dubaiwards up through the backroads between Al Wahda Street and the Industrial Estate: the mad two and three and two lane route snakes past shops and workshops, godowns and sideroads. Men on bicycles career around the corners, cycling against the traffic and groups of shalwar khameeses scurry across the road as the cars try and work out what they’re supposed to do in the face of a total lack of road markings and signage, let alone lighting. There are few barriers and those that are there have come askew. It’s a Wacky Races alleyway of death through the backstreets and someone’s going to get hurt pretty soon.

Is this really the best thing to have done? Is this really the apogee of urban planning? I really do wonder...

Word

I own the word ‘Numklefutumch’!

It originated from The Young Ones, the brilliant 1980s British comedy series led by Rick Mayall and Adrian Edmonson, Nigel Planer and Christopher Ryan and even featuring the occasional burst of Alexi Sayle. There’s a scene in the episode 'Boring' where two of Satan’s little helpers have an argument: one’s called Orgo and one’s called Numklefutumch. Numklefutumch has a problem because, as a little devil, nobody ever says his name, so he’s never called to earth to do evil, while Orgo is always getting stuff because people say ‘shall we go to eat out or go to the cinema tonight?’

At that point, Neil The Hippy tries to read something in the newspaper and pronounces it “Numklefutumch”, calling our little devil to earth in order to get up to some naughtiness.

So it’s word that, oddly, stayed with me. I started using it in the phrase, ‘faster than you can say Numklefutumch’.

And now, thanks to the strange dynamics of the Internet and search, if you google it, all you get is me.

I shall die a happy man... Odd, marginal and perhaps irrelevant, maybe, but happy nonetheless.

Footnote: As you will see from the comments, I screwed up faster than you can say "nmkl pjkl ftmch"... :)

Spanked

Gulf News today carries, on page 41, a slightly strange advertisement for telco Du’s Unlimited Blackberry offer. The ad, which struck me as unusually weak in a market slopping over the brim with weak advertising, offers “unlimited wireless access to email, calendar, messaging and internet through seamless and secured office connectivity”. It features a sketch of two aliens looking amazed at a Blackberry, having discarded a number of other useless gadgets.

Unusually, Gulf News has also, on page 36, spanked the offer editorially. GN’s Nadia Saleem not unreasonably points out that the ‘unlimited’ Du offer is actually limited to 1 Gb of data transfer, after which usage is charged at Dhs 0.01 per kbyte (or, in other words, a cool Dhs 10 per Mbyte). When contacted about the fact that its ‘unlimited’ offer is actually limited (a slightly paradoxical thing, I’m sure most would agree), Du apparently told our Nadia, “someone might use the data access facility to download movies all day or use the mobile as a modem to transfer large amounts of data”.

Ooh! The rotters!

Firstly, the point is surely that in today's 'always on' world, the data volume is not the charged unit in the vast majority of internet transactions. Package prices are the way forward and the amount of data used in a given package is not germane. The internet is not circuit switched - you pays for the pipe - access not volume. Operators billing volumetrically for access are sort of cheating, really. Particularly when they have mobile IP infrastructures.

That apart, I personally received something like 250Mbytes of useful* email this month, despite being on leave for three weeks of it - and the month's not over yet. If I include the junk, we're looking at a mailbox of over 300 Mbytes and I haven't started allowing for internet access, streaming video or any other cool apps or toys. So it's actually conceivable that a heavy user would actually want 1Gb of access.

What’s missing here are a few words on their advertisement to explain that they don’t actually mean unlimited when they say unlimited. Perhaps interestingly, Etisalat, the big telco, doesn’t limit its unlimited offer.

I bet the GN advertising sales boys aren’t talking to our Nads today, though...


PS: I know I said I wasn't posting for a couple of days, but I couldn't resist it...

*Useful is a relative term.

Back

Back in town. Need a couple of days to get over that...

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...

Greenwash

It's funny sometimes how you get back home and find yourself out of 'the buzz' - particularly, in the UK, if you speak English with an English accent but don't know what an Oyster card is on a bus or, even worse, try and poke a pound coin in the slot the tickets come out of.

These days I'm usually caught out on leave one way or the other, so being asked in a Marks and Spencer service station off the M4 if I wanted a 5p plastic bag, I naturally asked "And the alternative is?"

I got an amazed look, a glance to a colleague that said 'I've gorra right one here, Carol' and then the rather acid response to my question: "You have to carry the shopping yourself."

I elected to do so, as did the bloke in front of me: I picked up the crisps he'd dropped and handed them over to him as he left the till clutching at his armful of food.

Walking away from the shop with my Dr Seuss-like pile of of sandwiches (a little old lady kindly picked up the smoothie I'd dropped on the way and gave it back), I found myself irritated. Why 5p for a bag? If I want to give 5p to an environmental charity, I will. But I couldn't believe that the compliant Brits were willing to walk away with tottering armfulls of food because some wee fascist retailer has suddenly decided to charge for bags 'to help the environment'.

What really got me going was the obvious greenwash here. M&S gives 1.85p of the 5p, 'the profit' according to the company, to Groundworks, an environmental charity it supports. The remainder, 3.15p, presumably goes to Marks and Sparks to pay for the bag, the administration and associated costs. So Marksies get to save the costs of the 394 million plastic food bags it hands out every year - now we pay for them. And it gets a nice slice of greenwash uncritical media coverage. And we get inconvenienced but all keep quiet about it because we're, well, just terriblhy British.

More fool us.

I think it's crap that M&S has got us to pay for its bags and dressed it up as a 'green' initiative. If it really gave a hoot, it'd match the donation the hapless consumer is being forced to make - in M&S' name.

Sarah, of course, thinks that I'm a total twit for getting worked up about this...

BTW - I forgot to do the maths on this. At 3.15p per bag, M&S is set to save £12.4 million a year out of this greenwash.

Blogs

VLPW
Very Long Post Warning

I’m sure there have been gigabytes written on this topic, but I somehow feel the need to add to the weighty wodge that’s clogging up the useful stuff (like this) flowing around the Internet.

What should you do if a blog slags off your company or makes snarky comments about your customer service? What are your rights and how can you fix the damage? Here’s a handy ten point guide for companies that feel themselves wronged by blogs. And it's FREE! It might even help the smattering of dorks that have tried to ‘right wrongs’ on this blog by posting inane comments from behind their corporate firewalls.

1. Think
Before you rush to make a dim-witted comment on the blog, think about it. What has the blogger said that you disagree with? Is it an opinion or a factual error? Can you back up your assertion that there is a fundamental error? Can you provide evidence that the opinion expressed is ill-founded or at odds with the majority of people? If you work with a PR or communications agency, get their counsel before you act.

2. Remember: it’s a conversation
If you’re being attacked by blogs, it may be worth taking a look at the situation they’re highlighting and seeing if the point is valid and addressable – and then addressing it before going online and saying so. If the attack is invalid, then it’s worth acknowledging the point that’s been made before making your, well-argued, counterpoint in a measured, respectful way. The more aggressive the blogger, the more a measured tone will position you as the reasonable and authoritative participant in the conversation. It’s literally just like a face to face conversation – and wagging fingers or shouting will just get people’s backs up – even if in response to someone who’s obviously infuriated. Think how you’d behave in a customer service situation. Well, bloggers are just customers with an audience.

3. Most blogs don’t matter
Before you go making a great big song and dance, consider doing absolutely nothing. Most blogs are read by an average 1.1 people – the 1 being the blogger. Is the blog well respected and well read? Will it influence opinion? Just because someone in the company has emailed a link to the blog around every member of the management team doesn’t mean that the blog is normally well read. And a few hundred visits to a marginal blog prompted by that email, by the way, will just let the blogger know that they’re onto something that gets them more readers. So they’ll likely do more of it, not less.

4. Blogs can matter very quickly
I’m going to be very Delphic now. In deciding to ignore a blog, do bear in mind that blogs can go from zero to hero in absolutely no time. A lot of today’s journalists spend a lot of time on blogs and the oddest things can result in a huge amount of interest. Take a look at this blog, a case study of how a blog can make a fundamental difference – and do note that this is case study from the Middle East. There have been instances of a blog post making national front page headlines within 48 hours in Europe and gaining over 2 million readers as a consequence. And then there are companies that have turned expressions of customer dissatisfaction made on blogs completely to their advantage. The success story is built around actually listening to what people are saying, not ignoring it.

5. Don’t hide your identity
Like the Ray Bans ad says: don’t hide. There may be an urge to post a positive, balancing comment on the blog under an anonymous handle or a pseudonym. Do be aware that most bloggers have access to tools that allow them to track back visitors to the blog. You make a comment on my blog? I know who you are. So if you work for a major daily newspaper or a telco and you don’t like what I’ve got to say, have the guts to say so under your own name. Because I’ll know anyway and just ‘out’ you for being a custard. And so will most other people who write blogs.

6. Find out who the blogger is
No, I don’t mean set the secret service on ‘em. I mean take the time to read some of the blog at least, look at past posts and comments and see if the blogger is authoritative or a loose cannon. There’s nothing more awful than watching some corporate flak try to make a fool out of a widely respected expert because they didn’t bother finding out who the blogger was – regardless of whether they blog under their own names or pseudonyms, bloggers have an ‘identity’ in the overall conversation. Take a look at the blogs that link to/are linked to out of the blog. Look at Technorati and find the blog’s rating. Perhaps do a google or two and find out how the blog ranks on search. Authority is about tone, resonance and reach.

7. Take some time out to understand blogs in general
Know what a troll is? Or a trackback link? Understand the importance of RSS and feed readers? Know what IMHO stands for? If not, find a younger member of your staff and get them to explain it all to you before you start blundering around crashing conversations. By the way, if you want to know what blogs are saying about your company, consider setting up a Google alert.

8. Don’t crash the conversation
Think of it all like you’d think about joining a real-life conversation. In posting to my blog, I’m putting something into the public domain that I think people will find interesting or that I just want to get off my chest. Usually both! It’s a bit like standing on a soap box. People are kind enough to drop by and listen to me – some have a chat with me at the end of the lecture. And I go to their lectures too – to listen and have a chat afterwards. It’s all pretty civilised most of the time. It’s relatively easy to join the conversation as long as you don’t crash in without having bothered to listen to the preceding debate. Again, just as in real life you wouldn’t rudely barge into a group and vent your opinion on a topic without taking the time to find out what the prevailing opinion and tone of debate was like. Well, not unless you want the group to all round on you and tell you to shove off, that is...

9. You can’t make it go away
Barring access to a blog from the corporate network because it has attacked your company will just ensure all your staff go home and take a look at what all the fuss is about. I worked with one company that did just that, in the face of our advice, and we watched in frustration as they embarked on a futile and highly visible witch-hunt that resulted in scoring 11,000 visits to a blog that wouldn’t have got 11 visits otherwise. For one reason or another, you have earned the attention of a blog. Depending on the situation, it’s likely that the best and most advisable course of action is to engage with that blog’s author and balance the POV with your own or even, gasp, act on the input.

10. Consider blogging as a tool
Don’t think of blogs as purely a dangerous manifestation of unfettered opinion and irresponsible ‘citizen journalism’. Blogs are so much more than that. They are a powerful medium of expression that is increasingly becoming an important barometer of public opinion and source of public voice. They are self-correcting in a way that conventional media aren't - people will correct a mistake on a blog faster than you can say 'nmkl pjkl ftmch'. And they're part of the revolution in social media that is changing the way people today communicate. They're not about to go away, in other words. By the way, this post is a very good case in self-correcting point!

You can actually use a blog as a highly effective platform for your company to engage with customers. Take some time out to have a look around and you’ll find that they’re actually a neat tool. You don’t have to have a million readers for a blog to matter, either. It’s better to have a few hundred people that want to interact with you than advertise to 100,000 that don’t. Remember, this is the era of the ‘long tail’. So think about joining ‘the conversation’. I think, after a while, you’ll be glad you did.

Wheeee!

I'm sorry, three posts in a day (even if two ARE very silly) is too much, but I just HAD to share this deliciously silly PR shot from the Emirates Airbus A380 launch in Hamburg. You can, of course, click on it to make it bigger. BTW - they're wearing the new uniform...

I wasn't going to say anything about it, honestly. What with some 200 journalists attending the launch, including ace broadcaster Malcolm Taylor, and the papers all going mad about it, I already thought it had overkill scrawled across it - although (and I would like to be clear about this) I'm very happy for Emirates, which I admire.

However, asking the crew to run along the tarmac making big propeller arms has resulted in my favourite photo of the month, without a doubt!

Cuil

Thanks, as usual when it comes to geek stuff, to the usual Italian gent.

There's a new search engine in town. It's called Cuil, pronounced 'cool' after the Irish folk hero Fionn mac Cumhaill or if you're American, apparently, Finn Mac Cuill. Fionn gained all the knowledge of the world by sucking his thumb. It's complicated and involves a salmon.

There are some potentially cuil things about cool, including the fact that its results aren't simply link based (ie: it doesn't rank sites higher just because they've got more links to them) but also promise to be more contextually relevant. Search results are categorised where relevant, which means if you search for 'Dubai', you get tabs which include Dubai Hotels, Jobs in Dubai and Dubai Airport. They missed tabs for 'Dubai Traffic and Dubai Rent' but it's already looking like a pretty different approach. Y0u also get a pretty smart drop down menu of categories, including one on 'neighbourhoods of Dubai'.

It's brave enough. I'm old enough to remember a world before the Yahoo! Google duopoly: Alta Vista, Lycos, Webcrawler and a million other search engines once jostled for our attention and our searches. Cuil offers, for the first time in years, something different and an alternative to the leviathan. Only time will tell whether it's going to work out a winner. But for now, take a tootle along and check it out before the servers break - everyone's talking about the Cuil new kid on the block and their servers are already creaking under the strain of all that buzz...

Scooped

On Wednesday 23rd July, this blog featured the news of the forthcoming Isra'a wal Miraaj holiday falling on Thursday (it was broadly expected on Wednesday), quoting Arabic daily Al Bayan. Gulf News finally ran it today. That's a five-day delta!

I have a new curse for journalists: May you be scooped by bloggers!

I have now, sad to say, amused myself.