UAE Government Appoints Spokespeople

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According to a front page story in The National today, the Federal government has moved to introduce a system whereby Federal government Ministries can have official spokespeople empowered to talk on the record to media on behalf of each Ministry and its officials.

The move received what appeared to be a cautious welcome from the UAE Journalists' Association. The new spokespeople would be "The only sources of information according to their roles and responsibilities", The National quotes Najla Al Awar, Secretary General of the Cabinet. However, she goes on to tell the paper, "Information collected through others at the governmental bodies shall not be considered as valid and authorised information."

So while the move would facilitate journalists' access to a responsible spokesperson, it would also appear to limit media to reporting only facts confirmed or released by that responsible spokesperson.

You tell me which is better...

Spam

no spam! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Fat Expat got hit by a content spammer today. Content spam is a constant annoyance for blog owners: if you choose not to use comment certification (all that entering 'buisfnark' from the picture before your comment is accepted), you have to tidy up after the jerks every now and then. It's an annoyance - particularly as they dump rubbish like commercials for property on recipes for fillet steak in red wine sauce.

To my delight, today's comment spammer was dork enough to have registered the website in his own daft name. A quick WHOIS database lookup tells us that his property website is registered to:

Florin Campulungeanu (gagiu@eim.ae)
971504785426
Fax:
Al Barsha
Dubai, 29948
AE

So, having his mobile number I called him up and let him know what I think of him, his website and his content spam. He claimed it wasn't his site. I pointed out that he was the administrator and the registrant and therefore liable for anything that happened in his name on that site. He said he'd just done a favour for a friend. I told him he was either remarkably naive or lying, but that I tended to drop down the slope towards the latter.

And then I posted a complaint with his contacts on The Fat Expat, the UAE Community Blog and this blog. I also put in a block request to Etisalat, which was pure badness on my part, but let's see what happens. The Etisalat complaint reference is 3712281.

I do hate spammers. But there's only one thing worse than a spammer - a dumb spammer. And you have to be pretty dumb to qualify!

Do, if you agree with me on the subject of spam, feel free to give Florin a call. His mobile's probably off by now, but you can always send him an email...

(Oh! Sorry to have put your full email address on this! gagiu@eim.ae wasn't it? Have fun, bots...)

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.

Books and Social Media

Some of you will know Dan Holloway, responsible for one of my favourite books on authonomy, Songs From The Other Side Of The Wall.

Dan's something of an intellect and given to visions of revolution. A talented, intellectual revolutionary is something of a rarity these days, I think you'd probably agree. Like many of us, confronted with the banal realities of modern publishing, Dan's been exploring alternatives and some of them may well start to define what we have been discussing (particularly over here at Lauri Shaw's blog) - the future of publishing.

Where Dan's particularly interesting is how he's experimenting with mulitiple media platforms - the book as a multi-threaded, collaborative experience rather than as a static, engraved achievement.

While Lauri has been making her most excellent book, Servicing The Pole, available for download a chapter at a time. Dan's gone further in that he is not only giving away his newest book, The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes, away on Facebook a chapter at a time, but is also allowing readers to contribute to the development of the plot. The novel itself dissects the real and unreal stories behind the creation of an iconic image.

So let's do some Dan-speak:

So, why? Literary anarchy or marketing gimmick?
In all honesty both. I have just finished editing my previous book, Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, which I expect to self-publish this summer. I spent a lot of time talking to people about how to market it, and the whole loss leader thing came up. On the other hand, the potential of the internet for bending fiction out of shape fascinates me. The web’s full of people trying to publish their novels in a new medium. There’s not many people trying to do something new. I’ve always loved the interplay between artist and audience you get in installation art – Sam Taylor Wood going to sleep in a glass box; Gilbert and George – well, being Gilbert and George. For me culture of any form is a process, it’s an interplay. The novel’s lost that. The internet gives us a chance to get it back – that immediacy and connection.

Have you found the process different from writing your previous books?
I’ve had two real revelations. The first is the way the novel itself relates to the virtual world I’ve built around it. Part of the site is devoted to news reports, snippets of biography, little teasers – these form a world in which the novel takes place. What that means is there’s a whole load of back story I just don’t need to put into the novel – it’s much leaner because so much is already known – or can be referenced elsewhere in the site. I can get on with the story – it’s funny. I’ve talked a lot in the past about how I hate the western novel’s slavery to story. I thought this would break that barrier. It’s actually ended up taking story to its tight logical conclusion. The second point is the way the two parts of the novel relate. There’s a lot of social commentary, political satire, stuff about art and celebrity. But there’s also a personal story – a man whose daughter went missing ten years ago. He’s on a journey both to find the real story behind this iconic image of a dead woman but to find his missing daughter, and to understand why some people are remembered forever while others are forgotten. Because the rest of the site has set the political tone, I don’t have to balance the two parts as I write – I can spend the early chapters drawing us right into the personal story that will keep the reader with me – and I don’t have to worry readers will think I’ve lost sight of the other angle.

So how far does the interactivity go?
Well there’s commentary – like you get on a DVD, podcasts, real time editing so people can see me changing my mind. Then there’s events – this is about an image – so I’m holding a contest to design the image – people can enter online or by flashmob – hand me their entry at the café in Waterstone’s Piccadilly 11am on April 21st.

It seems like you’ve approached this in a very calculated way. Is your heart really in the book itself?
At first I told myself it was but I may have been kidding myself. This started as an experiment. But because I’ve gone straight to the emotional heart, it’s actually become the most personal thing I’ve ever written. It feels like I’m baring my soul every day. I just love some of the characters. And they all go to some very dark places. And all of it without a break, with the constant pressure of a deadline, and only an hour a day actually to write in. It feels like I’m putting myself through a very public wringer.

Isn’t the whole thing a bit, well, mad?
Well, I don’t believe in clinical. I don’t get people who bury themselves in their study and won’t show anyone what they’ve done. If your art isn’t a two way thing it’s not art. It might be therapy, but it’s not art. Art makes you vulnerable, puts you on the line. It’s raw. Or it’s dead. Er... Like a shark in formaldehyde :)

So how do we keep up with the project?
You can go to the group The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes on Facebook. I’m also Twittering all my updates there – you can follow the agnieszkasshoes Twitter. And if you get lost just steer from my website.

What next?
A break? In a month or so one of my writing groups, The Bookshed, is bringing out an anthology, Short Fuses – an incredible collection of cutting edge shorts. This autumn sees the release of the first set of books from Year Zero Publishing, a hugely exciting, edgy collective of writers I’m part of – and which you, Mr McNabb, are also playing with.

I’m expecting Songs from the Other Side of the wall to be one of the first Year Zero issues. Next year’s book will either be a body-swap I’ve been working on (a Chinese girl who’s an only child and a Polish boy who’s an identical twin), or a book I’ve always wanted to right about an affair between a 50 year old woman and her 18 year-old student. Either way I’ll always keep up the book a year. If you can’t wait for any of that, you can read one of my shorts, Coastlines, about a Spanish civil servant’s affair with a Chinese businesswoman, in the anthology “Great Short Stories from Youwriteon.com Writers”, which is available from Amazon.

Lightweight

Image via Wikipedia

Look, I'm really sorry. Gulf News has been a constant companion to me for the past fifteen years and I regard this most hallowed of newspapers with great affection. The recent spate of GN-unfriendly blog posts is purely coincidence and certainly doesn't signal an outbreak of anti-GN sentiment.

But I picked up today's issue and it felt so light that I had to go back to my newspaper weighing habits. It weighed in at 470g, a new low for the newspaper that tipped the scales at a whopping 1.3 kilos last November, pre-crunch.

I stopped weighing it last week after it had settled down to a steady 670g on most days.

Drub That Sub!

Gulf News' sub-editors are having a bad week. After yesterday's awful front page headline, today they've managed a nice, 48 point bold literal.

Dr. Shaikh Sultan Al Qassimi Sultan gets Hamdam award for academic excellence

No he doesn't. He gets Hamdan award, named for HH Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum.

It's online, too. Here.

Oddly enough, I sympathise. I once caused the word Midddle East to be typeset in 96 point text across a double page spread in a book I published in a former life. It took a year before anyone noticed.

I have always blamed a variant on Douglas Adams' SEP Field. The SEP or Somebody Else's Problem Field is an invisibility cloak that uses incongruity, for instance a spaceship that looks like an Italian bistro. The disconnect is so overwhelming that it causes brain skitter and is ignored as somebody else's problem, so rendering the cloaked object invisible.

The same is true of literals. Especially in headlines.

(Wow. I'm not going to be GN's 'weekly blog pick' this week, am I?)

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.

Gulf News Stumped

Who took the decision at Gulf News to run today's front page headline?

'Lahore attack stumps world' must rank as one of the worst headlines I have ever seen.

Surely even the most feckless intern would balk at cracking a cheap gag at the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan yesterday? It's not even a great gag. It's a crap gag, playing on 'stumps' as in cricket stumps and 'stumps' as in Billy stumped me with his question

I'd rather have seen 'stuns' - not perhaps the most original headline in the world, but certainly one that would have accurately reflected public sentiment - but GN's sub preferred to be clever-clever. And crass.

It's not as if the story then goes on to show how the world was 'stumped' by the attack. The story clearly shows the world has immediately and strongly condemned the attack.

Decorated with a bloody picture of a dead commando, one of the seven Pakistani commandoes who died protecting the Sri Lankan team, the weak joke is an unjustifiable lapse in taste and common sense. On the front page of a national daily newspaper.

What were they thinking?

(Postscript: Have removed the original link to the headline as they link to the current day's front page rather than preserving the link to the day you originally linked to. Cheers Gianni!)

The Last Minute Dick

Image by

http://www.prestonlee.com/archives/67

via CrunchBase

Pal Carrington shared this post from Seth Godin's blog. Just in case you don't know him (cue screams of 'don't know him? Don't know him?' from the neologists and social media gurus out there), Seth Godin is a frequent, respected and much followed commentator on social media, marketing and suchlike. He's a big, major league US business guru.

In fact, there's something of a Seth Godin cargo cult going on out there. If Seth says 'Hey! Stick pins in your eyes to enjoy success on the Social Web', you'll hear the sounds of screaming from all over Silicon Valley.

But I do have to take issue with the Sethmeister over this one. He says:

I hate going to the post office in the town next to mine. Every time I go, they look for a reason not to ship my package. "Too much tape!" "Not enough tape!" "There's a logo!"

The same thing happens with the tech crew before I give a speech. About 75% of the time, the lead tech guy (it always seems to be a guy) explains why it's impossible. Impossible to use a Mac, impossible to use the kind of microphone I like, impossible to use my own clicker, etc. And then, the rest of the time, using the same technology, the producer asks, "how can I help make this work for us?" and everything is about yes, not no.

To get the full effect, you'll have to go to his post - I shortened it.

Now here's where I got the issue. While I agree with the general (and, I thought, rather obvious) point that people who say 'yes' are nicer to deal with, and more successful, than people who say 'no' by default there is, as Berthold Brecht tells us, an exception and a rule.

Nearly every major conference event I have organised, moderated or otherwise been involved with has resulted in the appearance of the Last Minute Dick, or LMD.

The Last Minute Dick ignores all calls for papers, all emails asking speakers to please note down any special requirements and all requests for their PPTs and other materials before the event. The LMD will miss the speakers' briefing the day before because he's way too busy for that kind of thing.

And then he'll turn up on stage with less than an hour to go before the start of the event (always less than an hour, from 55 minutes to 15 minutes) holding his memory key with a 90 page PPT on it that integrates to five embedded videos, requires a simultaneous sound track to trigger using SMTP time coding and absolutely needs us to download and install SWIFF player from the Internet on the stage laptop. His videos will need the newest Vidalia Codec to be installed and support for Flash Version X, where X is the version above the one you actually have installed on the stage system.

He'll also need an intro video to be played from another file that will invariably crash the carefully pieced together sound/light integration that the team has been working all night on to ensure it's stable. It's on a Blu-Ray disk.

He'll pull a full John McEnroe on you when you tell him that you don't actually have Flash Version X.

"Whaat? What kind of two-bit penny-anny dump is this? Call yourself conference organisers? Jeez! Everyone got Flash X! And Blu-Ray? What do you MEAN you don't have a Blu-Ray player set up? I don't need to tell you to get a Blu-Ray player, surely? I mean, every organiser in the world has a spare Blu-Ray player! Do you know how often I speak at these things? Proper ones? In big cities? Do you? Do you? I mean, do you know who I am?'

Yes, I do. And you're a dick.

You can guarantee, by the way, that his requirements will ensure that something goes horribly wrong for the next speaker. And that you'll be around to hear him telling everyone who'll listen what complete gherkins you and your crummy company are for messing up the stage settings like that.

I'm with the guy on the stage, Seth. If you didn't tell 'em you want your own Mac, clicker or wombat on heat up there on stage, he's totally right to tell you 'no' when you pop up demanding it as the gig's about to start. And I'd back him for telling you to get off his stage, too. Because the event's always bigger than the one, lone and invariable LMD...

The Holiday That Wasn't There

Image via Wikipedia

It's Sunday! No Monday! No Sunday! No Monday!

Finally Gulf News puts the endless speculation to rest. The forthcoming one day national holiday on the occasion of the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) will take place on Saturday for the private sector and Sunday for the public sector.

(Sound of tyres screeching)

Hang on. Isn't the Prophet's birthday by custom celebrated on the 12th of Rabi Al Awwal, corresponding this year (Hijri 1430) to Monday the 9th of March 2009?

This new arrangement means that the UAE's private sector, which takes a Friday/Saturday weekend - the same as the public sector - will not get a day off at all. And nobody will take a day's holiday on the right day.

"We did not want to cause any interruption between the public and private sectors," UAE Minister of Labour Saqr Ghobash told Gulf News, explaining the reason why the change made the holiday 'more coherent' with the public sector holiday.

Oddly, he also told GN, "As far as I know, the majority of companies in the private sector have only one day off, which is Friday."

Why, then, if you are going to move the holiday to the wrong day at all, would you not give both public and private sectors the Sunday holiday? "Giving the holiday on Sunday would have caused another interruption in the holiday," Ghobash told GN's hard-eyed hack on the front line of the war against flibble.

So that's nice and clear, at least.

PS: We're taking Sunday anyway. Nyer Nyer Nyer Nyer Nyer...