Scoundrel

A second weather post in a week! What a scoundrel!

I'm a sucker for reminiscences about the Middle East - there are some great stories told by the people that were here throughout the breakneck and often scary period of change that has transformed this part of the world over the past century.

Some of my favourite pieces of recent history come from the people that have lived and worked in the Gulf over the past 30 years or so - not just expatriates, either - although expat rememberences appear to be easier to access. BTW, Khalid Kanoo's book about his own life in Bahrain is a fascinating read.

So I really enjoyed this piece in The National by Clive Stevens (I'd have missed it but for a link left on a comment to my recent weather-man spanking weather post: commenter The Wiley Weatherman claims Clive's the nicest man in aviation, and let us grant that, but I still think they goofed the forecasts over this week.), a forecaster at the Dubai Met Office, which talks about the wacky weather he's seen over the years. Clive's short memoir is well worth a read.

In case you're interested in these kinds of things, I do heartily recommend a visit to Len Chapman's excellent Dubai as it used to be site, which has lovingly archived rememberences, images and other paraphenalia gathered from the many people who have lived and worked here over the years.

And finally, just to finish off my most rambling and shambolic ever post (cue for some bright spark to try and find a worse one, but you won't), here's a link to an amazing picture, the image of the week for me. Sure the lightning piccies in Gulf News (down to 450g today, BTW) are pretty enough, but Catalin Marin's stormy HDR Burj Al Arab image is a stunner. It's here over at Momentary Awe.

How smart are you?

How smart are you?

An idle click on a new Twitter follower message as I contemplated the second coffee of the morning led me to this Tweet:

"We launched the project site http://www.smartpeople.ae this is going to be revolutionary!"

There was something familiar about this. Maybe it was the over-excited tone, maybe the the lack of punctuation. Maybe the over-promising - 'this is going to be revolutionary'?

Really?

And then we have the Twitter ID - 'Albert Edison'. I smell ad agency.

The site's borderline slick, copywriter schtick with smart graphical treatment, some neat ideas, a Twitter feed and even a link to 'Our Facebook Page' that doesn't work. And yes, it's an 'integrated social media campaign' from someone. Ths is undoubtedly a company and a site driven by an ad agency - the 'feel' is unmistakeable.

But who?

You see, the first problem with this whole thing is that you need to be UPFRONT if you're a company using Twitter and other social media. There's no point in being coy - and you're just going to annoy people if you hide your identity and purpose.

And that's precisely what UAE telco Du has done with this campaign. 'About us' on the website doesn't say, 'Hi, we're du and this is our new campaign site'. In fact, nowhere on the site says 'Hi, we're du and this is our new campaign site'.

So no, I didn't think your idea was smart - I was mildly annoyed that you'd wasted my time and misrepresented yourselves to me, actually - and that you're crashing around 'social media' having learned none of the lessons of Wal-Mart et al.

Wise up, people.

THIS IS NOT A ONE WAY COMMUNICATION ANY MORE!

Update. The Facebook page is now working.

Just in case anyone out there doesn't know this, you can look up any UAE registered (any .ae domain) website and find out who owns it by using the UAE NIC WHOIS tool.

You can do the same with .com sites by using whois.com.

AdWomen

Austyn Allison is the editor of Middle East advertising and marketing magazine Communicate and he's looking distinctly nervous, beads of sweat breaking out on his upper lip as his shifty eyes cast around the white-walled warehouse. Those walls are decorated with insane pieces of highly complex black and white spirograph-inspired artwork, the sparse floor littered with industrial grade cream beanbags. Dotted around the room are groups of women, new entrants slowly building up to a crowd and Allison and I have clustered together for safety, a cocktail table between us and most of the attendees to the first ever 'TrendTalks' event held by Dubai's newly founded AdWomen group.

There are brightly coloured cupcakes and pizza at hand, a welcome diversion. I'm the first speaker, I've got 25 minutes on Social Media but everyone's on the cake course. There's a growing wind outside, a sandstorm that makes everyone a little nervous and I catch the outbreak of laughter as a gust batters the steel walls of the warehouse.

The sound of female laughter. I start to sweat.

Allison's laughing nastily under his breath as the group's numbers swell and it's clear that I'll be talking to well over 50 highly intelligent, creative, capable and empowered women. He's snarfing vegetarian pizza as fast as he can - in case the scene turns ugly and he has to bolt, I know it. He knows what's going down - I'll get it wrong, stumble and they'll be on me, tearing into me like a pack of ravenous terriers. He's glancing around now, his nervous, calculating journalist's eyes darting between seemingly happy groups of women. It's too friendly here, too collegiate. We know it can become twisted and boil up into a paranoid, howling frenzy on a moment and Allison is giggling under his breath like Beavis and Butthead at the prospect of me going down.

And then it's time, organiser Preethi introducing me as 'prolific', I take the microphone in a sweaty hand - I can't believe she called me a media slut in front of these women, we all know what 'prolific' means. Maybe they missed it - I scan the room quickly, trying to take the temperature of the place. They're all over the room, sitting encased in beanbags, standing at cocktail tables.

Allison's at the back of the room: I can just see him, wearing a fixed, cheesy smile. He's got a camera, the bastard! He's going to catch it, my moment of undoing and the rage of the pack. His smile turns evil and the shadows catch his conniving head, horns seeming to spring up on his temples.

I'm talking now, too fast, the slideset boring me and irrelevant-seeming, even as I bring up the colourful foils. Ohmigod, I can't believe I started the story of the Internet at monastic scriptoria, it's too disconnected, too geeky. I'm away, scanning nervously for the frowns and raised hands that'll start the feeding frenzy but they're listening politely and I find that scaring me even more. They're giving my half-thoughts and mad reminscences consideration and I know this is the wrong thing to do.

And then the hail comes from the skies far above us, a sudden swelling of tiny battering rams, dinning down on the iron roof of The JamJar, the volume cranking up impossibly, drowning me out in a sound like mocking applause, ice smashing out of the sky to explode on the bouncing steel plates, the noise echoing around the warehouse like evil laughter.

I stop talking, deafened by the hail. People are getting up, milling around wondering how we can ever go on with the evening - so many people have invested so much in this, to bring it all together. And then it happens: one of the audience comes up to me, her finger outstretched and her voice loud.

"It's your fault! If you hadn't gone on about the weather in your damn blog, this would never have happened!"

I gasp a denial, but it's too late. They hear her and others take up the cry: 'Blogger! Blogger!'

Allison's taking photos as they start to advance on me, I turn to him for help but the swine's got the soul of a journalist - all he wants is his damn photos to stand up his story. As long as they're focused on me he's safe and I know he's going to skitter out of the fire exit like the journo rat he is as soon as he's got enough of a story for his damn rag.

I'm cornered now and they're onto me. I feel the first nails tearing into my flesh as they crowd around, reaching out to take their revenge. I go down, blackness reaching up to me as I reach for sobbing, gasping breaths.

My last memory was of a striking, red-headed lady in a black dress who looked remarkably like Tori Amos saying she enjoyed my Campaign column. That' s when I finally knew it was all a dream...

Where in the World is the Weather?

Yeah, I know. Blogging about the weather is as low as you can go. Bite me.

Forecasters told us that Dubai would be foggy yesterday morning (UK Met Office) followed by showers yesterday afternoon and evening. And then the real bad weather would kick in - thundery stormy things through to the weekend.

The radio news has been telling us for the past two days that massive enormous huge black gnarly snarly storms would envelop the UAE from yesterday and that we'd better start building arks if we knew what was good for us.

Dubai Eye Radio's delightful @Kimboid was heard this very morning prophesying doom, gloom and weather fronts that'd have you reaching for your galoshes like a passenger on the Titanic hearing a shout of 'Ice!'. 92 FM's Catboy has been more like Chicken Licken Boy, Tweeting of imminent weather that'd make A Perfect Storm look like Picnic on Hanging Rock.

It's 9.15am and it is sunny. The sky is blue. The birds, I swear, are singing.

Sack the weathermen, I say. Sack 'em all. Their job is easy - 363 days a year, 'tomorrow will be sunny and fine in Dubai'. 2 days a year 'a risk of some light showers'.

Klazart and Authonomy - Update

Harper Collins Publishers today published a statement on its authonomy book-review website concerning Vineet Bhalla ('Klazart') and the great voting debacle.

"48 hours ago none of us had heard of Starcraft. That was before Klazart posted his book on the site and started to invite support from the Starcraft community. His efforts were spectacularly successful and he has reaped the rewards of these newcomers’ support. We do not consider his actions to be breaching any site rules and his book will not be removed by us."

The statement goes on to say:

"We are willing to admit that the recent events have shown up real flaws in the algorithm behind the talent-spotter ranking. Some excellent suggestions have already been made and we’ll be considering these."

A number of writers have already left the site - a vast number have stayed but are grumbling away on the forums.

Meanwhile, the book's number 6 on authonomy with over 1200 votes. Some 2,000 new users joined the site over the weekend and have yet to vote for anything.

Is this most controversial of books any good? Will it get anywhere? See for yourself: it's here. What do YOU think?

Having a Chat

"The Conversation" is a blog that is developing quite nicely, thank you very much. It's an interesting read: two smart young Arab women, one based in London and one based in Dubai, just talking about the stuff that comes to mind, that engages them and happens around them.

I don't just like it because they're both friends but because it's an interesting read - a combination of opinions that spans the world and from two people whose common experience, culture, language and friendship ties them together as it finds them apart.

It's also interesting because both have native language English skills (I like to think enriched by some of my own additions to the old vocab) - Sarsour in particular suffering somewhat at the hands of her British colleagues as she works in London: “I would die if I thought you were correcting my English, I mean... You’re a foreigner!”

So this is a plug for that blog. It's here - do have a read and let me know what you think!

Gamers Break Authonomy

It's a remarkable old world, chaps and chapesses. Really.

Many of you will be all too familiar with my involvement in Harper Collins Publishers' authonomy, the peer-review writers' site that involves thousands of writers clambering up a greasy pole to get their work in front of an HC editor for review. Every month the top 5 books, voted by the 'community' get reviewed by an HC editor (or janitor, we can't quite be sure which sometimes). To date not one top 5 book has moved beyond a read and crit, apart from a suspected 'token full read' given to my mate Simon Forward. The crits have been of variable quality, that afforded my own first book, Space, a good example IMHO of the WTF quality of some of the crits that HC hands out.

(If you would like to read some quality stuff, try my second book Olives, BTW. I ain't 'plugging' that one, though - it's a serious book about the Middle East, while Space was a comedy about chickens and stuff.)

But that hasn't stopped thousands of new writers from posting their work up there and trying to climb that self-same slippery pole. It's hard, folks - you have to chivvy people to go and read your book by participating on the forums, plugging the book and generally shouting a lot. And then they have to like it enough to vote for it - vote enough times for it to beat out everyone else and rise to the top of the begrudging souffle that is the online slushpile. You need hundreds of votes.

But, rather brilliantly, uber-gamer Vineet Bhalla, 'Klazart' to his mates, posted a YouTube video urging fellow gamers to pop over to authonomy, log in and vote for his book. (It's here...)

In a marvellous demonstration of the sheer power of social media, hundreds of gaming fans (possibly thousands) have done just that - garnering Vineet's book over 700 votes in the past 48 hours and launching it up the authonomy charts by some 3,000 places to its current 17 - and rising.

The howls from the authonomy 'community' of writers, bilked by the brash 'gamers' who've suddenly appeared on the site, have been wonderous indeed - suddenly the place has come alive again and started to pop and splutter with action and life - from apopleptic authors ranting pompously about cheats and darn gamers to gamer punks telling them all to piss off as they scrawl on the walls and pour beer on the carpets. The gamers have a point - the authonomy 'rules' make it clear you're welcome to invite friends and family. HC can't have imagined that 'family' could include over 8,000 gaming fans who follow a popular gamer's YouTube space!

Authonomy's forums, which had settled down to a rather sedentary and boring repetition of every topic, from how you deal with POV (Point of View. If you don't know, don't bother. It's not critical to your life, believe me) to whether book titles that contain leopard testicles are saleable in today's market, have suddenly come alive and thrill to the sound of argument, contention and challenge - battle, even.

It's great. It's like an invasion of anarchists at an old people's home. Any half-decent anthropologist would get a thesis and at least two bacon sandwiches out of this lot.

But the influx of new voices has been too much for the site - authonomy has gone down, baby, a mere few thousand new readers has been enough to smack the servers for six and deny access to many, the site's up and down like a tart's knicks. (Well, it is Sunday and sysadmin Rik will be down the pub sinking a few nutty browns before dragging his weary arse into the laughter factory tomorrow morning.)

Meanwhile, I do heartily recommend nipping over and taking a look at the writers vs gamers debate - it takes me back to the late 1970s and, for me, that was a good time.

Oh what larks, Pip!

Enough!

Image by el7bara via the banned website Flickr thanks to the wonder that is RSS...

The Guardian's been at it again. This time it's Simon "I saw the place two years ago through a plane window" Jenkins who has followed in a long and honourable line of Guardian writers who have lined up to give Lalaland an almost weekly kicking.

Simon's article, however, beats even Germainipops' whine for its inaccuracy and sheer noodle-headedness. He slags off Dubai for being super-planned, architect-designed and "bailed out by Bahrain and Dohar" (sic) among other things. As usual for The Guardian on Dubai, the article is so packed with untruth and unsustainable assertion that it simply does not stand up as a piece of professional writing.

It's amazing to me that one of the UK's leading and most respected quality newspapers continues to publish completely inaccurate rubbish about Dubai from people with no qualification whatsoever to be writing about the place - and I'd include actually visiting Dubai and speaking to some people here as qualification.

But the rubbish is popping up everywhere - not just The Guardian - to the extent where I'm finding myself, to my immense surprise, coming out of the Dubai corner boxing FOR the city.

I never thought that would happen!

Like many other residents who have commented on these articles, I've had enough, really. There are now so many articles packed with so much rubbish, from so many writers who have spent so little time here that you start to question whether you were right to believe in journalism in the first place.

Germaine did her research from a tour bus. Simon talks about looking out of a plane window. But the Sydney Morning Herald's Elizabeth Farrelly goes one better, starting her piece with the immortal words, "For longer than I can remember - six months at least - I've wanted to write on Dubai as a ruin. Not that I've been there..."

She goes on: "Dubai, the oilless emirate, was conceived as the business end of Abu Dhabi's more oleaginous cultural empire."

You don't have to believe me when I tell you that her article goes downhill from there - you can go and read it for yourself. I bet it makes you angry. And yet it's merely symptomatic of a whole outbreak of similar pieces, written by people that have never even visited the place they're so eager to vilify, never walked on the streets they accuse of being filled with prosecco swilling expats dazed with the crash around them.

Another excellent example of the genre is here, featuring yet another marvellous line: "So last week I spent an entire day reading newspaper articles and travel guides about Dubai and am now much better informed..."

There's plenty to accuse Dubai of - many of us posting to blogs here have had more than a few swipes at a whole range of issues. And there are plenty more, for sure.

But enough of this uninformed rubbish, really!

A Small Personal Hell

Image by Dave Delaney via Flickr

For a couple of weeks now, I have been getting the same joke appearing with increasing frequency in my 'Tweet Deck'.

Tweet Deck is a really cool application that lets you monitor several Twitter conversations or 'feeds' - you can search for, say, your company name and then you'll see any Tweet that mentions your company. It's pretty useful for taking a look at the conversation, both looking out for topics that engage you as well as for professional reasons such as reacting to customers or other stakeholders in your company/client company.

For what it's worth, many people I knew that could make no sense whatsoever of Twitter found that it all suddenly made sense when they used Tweet Deck.

But this damn joke was missing me. Every time I read it, I got more and more worried about my lack of a sense of humour. I just couldn't for the life of me see it. I know I'm dense, but that dense, really?

A couple of days ago I told someone about the joke that made no sense - and as I said it out loud, the clouds lifted and sunshine enveloped me. At last, I understood. But it's the most crap joke in the world and, because I have a Twitter feed set up for the UAE OR Dubai OR Abu Dhabi, every time anyone anywhere in the world tells this awful (and increasingly popular) joke on Twitter, I get to see it again. And again. And again...

Don't mention the Flintstones in the United Arab Emirates. Apparently those in Dubai dont get it, but those in Abu Dhabi do!!

It's like a small personal hell...

Relaxing the 30 Day Rule - Good and Bad?

It's funny how two journalists can listen to the same speech or panel session and get two completely different takes on what went down. I guess you'd put it down to 'finding the angle'.

Gulf News listened to Dubai's Department of Economic Development chief economist Raed Safadi and came away with a story that Dubai's strategic plan is under review and that 'Everything has been put on the table, the stimulus package and policies - with one aim, to safeguard jobs."

Nice.

The Kipp Report came out of the session with 'Dubai Government 'may' review 30 day cancellation policy'. They also quote Safadi as saying that everything is on the table, but add him saying 'nothing is taboo.'

If the 30 day rule is eased, a lot of people will breathe a significant sigh of relief and a great deal of experience and knowledge of this region could potentially be retained. A great deal of misery would be avoided for thousands of families.

Of course in this post-Klondike era the yahoo financial services types, the vendors of quack remedies, card sharps, good-time girls and real estate sharks would also get to stay on for longer, too.

But you can't have everything...