Corbis Blocked

Image via CrunchBase

Etisalat has blocked Corbis, the photo library owned by one William Gates III Jnr.

A major site used by millions of creatives around the world, the Corbis picture library is an important resource. Blocking it sets a worrying precedent - does this now mean that other picture libraries are going to be subject to blocking? And what does that mean for the UAE's creative industries?

Creativity comes with freedom of expression, they're old (ahem) bedfellows. Where there is creativity you find people pushing the envelope.

I think you need to take a position - make an evaluation of the cultural value of a site vs a couple of things you don't like. Not just smash in a block the second your software catches sight of a naughty bit.

This random blocking is helping nobody - I've posted about it before. Flikr is bad enough, social networks are bad enough.

But a major internationally renowned image library?

They've got to be kidding...

BTW, Du has not blocked Corbis. So we may yet see this potty decision reversed.

Magic? Not really, no...

Image by netzkobold via Flickr

UAE telco Etisalat yesterday unveiled the new 'HTC Magic' smartphone, a device based on Google's Android operating system. There's no sign from today's newspapers that anyone at yesterday's press conference chose to press the telco that likes to say 'ugh' on the massive network outages that have taken place over the last few days. We're all 'on message' today.

This is the third device that the telco has announced it will support and sell in a reversal of the decision, taken back in the early '90s, to liberalise the UAE's terminal equipment market. Etisalat also sells RIM's BlackBerry (the source of the great spyware scandal) and Apple's iPhone. That decision, formalised in comments to media yesterday, is a tectonic shift in the market and deserved more coverage than it got. But perhaps its importance wasn't blindingly obvious enough for it to be picked up.

Gulf News' slightly breathless coverage is eclipsed by Emirates Business 24|7 (which is now, of course, only published five days a week, making it Emirates Business 24|5, but we'll let that go), which trumpets 'Etisalat to launch own branded mobile phone'!

The Emirates Business story on the HTC Magic mixes it up confusingly with the news that Etisalat is going to go back into the 'own brand' terminal market, with a new 'phone being brought to market under the 'Etisalat' brand.

Gulf News' story provides a great deal more clarity, information and depth on the HTC touch, which is a nice surprise. It also points out that the phone will ship with 'Goggle' applications such as mail, search, maps and Google Talk.

Goggle. Nice one, GN subs.

The telephone's 'connectivity technologies' include HSDPA 7Mpbs and HSUPA 2Mbps, reports Gulf News with a charming and complete lack of context.

HSPA is the 'next generation' of telecom protocols, at times referred to as 'beyond 3G', High Speed Packet Access. it comes in two flavours Downlink (HSDPA) and Uplink (HSUPA) and supports hyper-fast mobile data rates - today's HSPA networks can pump over 20Mbps down to a mobile, while HSPA evolution is going to more than double that. So we're talking about hyper-fast network access, streaming video, rich content downloads and all that good stuff. Except, of course, at Etisalat's rates, the whole proposition is utterly ruinous.

At 7 Mbps, you would eat through 1Gig of data in a little over two and a half minutes, taking 25 minutes to munch through the 10Gigabyte package that will be bundled with the HTC Magic contract (reports, uniquely, The National).

Worse, you'll be paying a smidgen under Dhs75 per second for data access when you're roaming.

Yup - at Etisalat's ridiculous roaming fees of Dhs2.5 per 30 Kbytes of data, you'll certainly be loving that old high speed download Magic!

(If this post seems unusually grumpy, it's probably because my lowly 384kbit 3G Nokia has been cut off by said telco because my bill is over Dhs1,000. Or two seconds' worth of Magic!)

The Hungriness of Women

Why do I do this? Why don’t I learn?

Last time around was AdWomen, the event at Dubai's JamJar where I got torn to shreds by smart women with long, gouging fingernails while that craven ratfink of a journalist Austyn Allison looked on in vicarious glee and took photos. Did I learn? Did I hell!

Yesterday I gave a talk to the inaugural business lunch event of the Abu Dhabi International Businesswomen’s Group. And, like a fool, I let The National’s Jen Gerson see what was going on. I should have told her she couldn’t come, but she was insistent. Now I know why. Because she wanted to crow as I fell to a cannibalistic feeding frenzy.

The room was small, cosy. About 50 businesswomen, smart, educated, empowered. The same sort of bunch as AdWomen - just as pleasant and friendly and triggering the same gut-churning dread. Why didn’t I learn my damn lesson? Gerson is delighted as the room fills with ladies in smart outfits and suits, chatting to each other animatedly. She’s giggling insanely like a blonde Beavis and Butthead, darting glances at me as sweat breaks out on my brow.

“They’re gonna eat you!” she whinnies, licking her lips with sick anticipation. “Eat you! Hur! Hur!”

I try to ignore her vicious journalist’s jibes and prepare myself mentally for the talk. The projector’s bust and the Rotana people bring a new one. My palms are damp and I'm alternately freezing and sweating as the guests take their seats. They start to stand and introduce themselves to the new members who’ve turned up. This one runs a small business, that one's a lawyer. More than one lawyer. Too many lawyers. Dammit, they're going to eat me, then sue? Gerson’s standing by the door (just like Allison, I noticed, damn journalists always position themselves with a clear route to the exit) and leering at me. I can hear her gleeful whickers over the chatter in the room.

And then we’re off. IBWG committee member Pam introduces me and I walk up to the podium. Gerson’s words are ringing in my ears, “They’re gonna eat you!”. As I start talking, some fifty pairs of eyes are on me. The starter’s been served, but they’re not touching it and I’m suddenly keenly aware of the fact that I’m slightly overweight. They’d get a little over a kilo and a half each. I watch one lick her lips as I try to keep the flow of the talk going, showing them that image of the first Arpanet diagram, explaining how Caxton disintermediated the Catholic Church and the Internet disintermediated millions, talking about collaboration and the overnight movement of x-rays around the world. It’s disjointed, a tumble of thoughts and concepts and I just keep talking, suddenly aware that I’m in no danger as long as I stay up there, out of reach.

Gerson’s on her Blackberry, its lime green cover dancing as she thumbs profanities out to Twitter, lifting the damn thing to take photographs. She’ll be there as they tear my flesh and start feeding. I hit the last slide and we’re into Q&A. The questions are smart, businesslike. But I hear the rasp of indrawn breath through teeth in little sussurations, “Fff Fff Fff Fff Fff.”

One of the ladies smiles at me and I realise her canines are unusually developed.

Q&A is halted by the arrival of the main course and as I sit down I realise to my horror that Gerson’s legged it. When it’s so bad the journalists leave, you know things are going to get sadistically twisted fast. I’m still talking, trying to distract them. Pam and Karen are delightful company but I can feel the pressure around me. They’re just pretending to be interested so that they can move in when I’m relaxed. You don’t want the prey to be tensed up, ruins the meat.

And then it happens, the miracle arrives. The Beach Rotana’s chocolate covered chocolate mousse on a bed of chocolate and biscuit, drizzled with chocolate sauce and decorated with a long white chocolate twist. It’s an incredible dessert and I realise then that it’s distracted them – all eyes are on the plates and I have a window of escape. I babble thanks at them, but they’re not seeing me, forks rising and falling and little gasps of delight echoing around the room.

I grab my laptop bag and run, bursting through the door to freedom and the light of the lobby, chocolate still smeared across my cheek. My heart doesn’t stop hammering until I’m in the car and tearing up the blacktop to Dubai.

One day I’m going to get even with Gerson. One day.

The Arab Media Awards Changes

Image by sebFlyte via Flickr

Changes have been announced to The Arab Media Awards, a move that at least partly explains the stream of decidedly odd tweets emanating from the Dubai Press Club Twitter handle yesterday.

According to reports today, the awards are going to change to take more account of online media and young professionals. The inclusion of young journalists has been accomplished by adding a new award for, wait for it, 'Young Arab Journalist'.

As for online, the new focus for the awards, recognising the tectonic shifts that are shaking the world of print media around the world, has been accomplished by removing the word 'print' from the name of the awards.

If the story is complete, then there's no new award or category of awards for online journalism. Just the removal of the word 'print'...

So that's it. That's the evidence that these awards now recognise online journalism and which justifies Gulf News' headline, "Revamped award to cover all aspects of journalism".

Fail

Image via Wikipedia

One of my favourite ever legal precedents is something of a media joke. If you want to tell someone to eff off without actually saying it, it is common to refer them to Arkell vs Pressdram. Pressdram is the publishing company responsible for the British satirical magazine Private Eye (not welcome, sadly, in the Emirates where it remains 'not on sale').

Arkell threatened the Eye with legal action in the correspondence, which has been reported as going something like this:

Arkell v. Pressdram (1971) [unreported]

Solicitor (Goodman Derrick & Co.):
We act for Mr Arkell who is Retail Credit Manager of Granada TV Rental Ltd. His attention has been drawn to an article appearing in the issue of Private Eye dated 9th April 1971 on page 4. The statements made about Mr Arkell are entirely untrue and clearly highly defamatory. We are therefore instructed to require from you immediately your proposals for dealing with the matter. Mr Arkell's first concern is that there should be a full retraction at the earliest possible date in Private Eye and he will also want his costs paid. His attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply.

Private Eye:
We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off.

That was the end of the correspondence but the start of a timeless reputation for Mr. Arkell, who remains, over 30 years later, a joke.

Anyway, I thought I’d just share this rather marvellous example of what happens when organisations do choose to ‘do an Arkell’ with online communities and commentators. Guinness fired off a ‘cease and desist’ at the chucklesome (and classic, you’ll thank me if you didn’t already have this one in your reader) Fail Blog.

Guinness was asking for a logo to be removed from a screen grab used on the Fail Blog - it qualified for a 'fail' entry for having a Guinness Book of Records record for 'most people killed in a terrorist attack'.

The blog modified the offending material and then posted up its opinion of Guinness and its pompous letter for its significant readership to enjoy. It also posts a link which it says is its full legal response to Guinness.

The link is a ‘Rick Roll’ – the modern Arkell vs Pressdram?

A Beautiful Failure

Image via Wikipedia

My post earlier this week about the days of makeup and SprayMount drew a couple of starry-eyed comments from fellow ancients who could remember the smell of galley being pasted down onto board, which was lovely. But a link I got from Nieman Labs yesterday night really made me stop and think about these things. Bear with me, this might just be relevant somehow, in some way.

Digital design agency Information Architects took part in a pitch to redesign Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger and lost the pitch in what they describe, rightly IMHO, as a ‘beautiful failure’. They had applied ‘new world’ design thinking to a newspaper. And golly, what an interesting set of ideas they presented. Their piece on it is linked here and I do recommend a read.

Newspaper design has long been predicated on the need to control the readers’ eyes, big bold headlines scream important story, type is arranged to give the reader a progression through the page, elements are balanced so that readers’ eyes find information in a logical, flowing way. Typography is used to denote importance – a bold cap in white space draws attention, an italic caption under a picture is an element we recognise and expect. In fact, if the text floating immediately under a picture weren’t a caption, we’d be wrong-footed by the discontinuity.

But Information Architects did a brilliant thing. They designed their newspaper as a paper for a digital age reader, recognising the fact that our habits, our expectations of the format of content, have changed.

The first thing that really got me going was that they had put important text keywords in blue. I thought that was amazing. Although, obviously, paper doesn’t hyperlink, we now know what blue means – it means a keyword. Together with their decision to go for a big body text with big leading, this meant their proposed body copy didn’t look like a newspaper. But IA had already realised that: they took the conscious decision to throw out ‘conventional’ newspaper design – the idea that a newspaper should somehow follow rules that made it look like a newspaper.

They did a lot of other cool stuff, too – mixing column formats and using infographics, big pictures and left to right, top to bottom prioritisation of stories, much of which was informed by using a ‘web-centric’ approach to design. But it’s the blue keywords that would have been a ‘beautiful’ revolution.

While you obviously can’t click on the blue words in the paper, IA’s idea was that by scanning these keywords, you should be able to read the basic, core, news on the page in 10 seconds. The paper’s website would mirror these keywords with a link to a series of sub-links arranged chronologically. That’s a huge decision, meaning that the journalist, or in this unfair world the sub-editor, would have to pick out the keywords for the reader – a new skill in itself. And then the web team would have to work with those words to provide depth and context behind them (something you could see a technology like Zemanta taking a role in). It’s an exhilarating idea that links print to web and challenges the way that information is presented, managed and prioritised by the ‘traditional’ medium because it recognises the way we have changed in the way we browse, consume and identify information.

(Zemanta is a cool plug-in I use to provide me with contextual information related to blog posts - it selects copyright-free images for me to use and provides 'autolinks' for posts. I don't usually use the links but I did in this post both to 'blueify' it and also to show how a technology like Zemanta could be used to help automate the production of links for a project like Information Architects' newspaper. Okay, okay I'll be a good boy and get back to the snarky, goofy stuff next week, promise.)

Deoxyribonucleic Acid

Image via Wikipedia

I have to confess, when I first saw the news that a group of police and forensics experts will meet today in Sharjah to discuss setting up a UAE national DNA database, my first reaction was of irritation. We've just been through the laborious process of having our finger, thumb and palm prints, our photographs and our other identity details taken, so if you wanted my DNA you could have had it then.

If you consider the disastrous roll-out of the national ID card system, one can only shudder at the potential in this new move. Commented on at length by many a blogger and even held out to dry by the dailies eventually, the conflicting announcements, lack of preparedness and ill-assembled systems deployed to manage the ID card process resulted in protracted, and comic, confusion on a huge scale. Imagine a repeat performance only accompanied by men in lab coats swabbing our cheeks and pecking little hunks of us off to be labelled and then mixed up.

But my irration passed as I read the story (once again, it was The National wot had the skinny) and saw what I can only describe as eminently sensible comments from the Chairman of the Emirates DNA Working Group, Dr. Ahmed Marzooki. He talked to The National about a possible 10-year programme, with initiatives to set up a legal framework to deal with issues of individual privacy and also to look at facilities, procedures, staffing and the like.

Marzooki also pointed out that the imperative to collect the data wasn't just criminal investigation (although that surely must be the most important driver) but also to be able to identify people in cases such as natural disaster and other tragedies - in fact, just back in August, a process was started by Dubai police to try and identify the relatives of eleven men who were killed in a fire villa in Dubai's Naif area. Storing the remains, contacting relatives, taking samples and shipping them must be a laborious and immensely expensive process - the database would mean an end to that type of investigation and speed positive identification for families and friends.

So I came away impressed with this clear evidence of quality of thought and with the feeling that if Marzooki, the man who is Interpol's only Middle Eastern representative, is at the front of this one, we may just see the lessons of the ID card roll-out learned.

We may even see the data integrated with the ID card biometric data, albeit with access controls in place. We may...

Disintermediation Rules

Image via Wikipedia

Phil was a typesetter and he used to typeset the books I edited and published. I’d send him my copy, marked up by hand (point size, leading, a wiggly line for italics, underline for bold) and he’d send me back galleys, long strips of single columns of type which the graphic artist would then ‘lay out’ onto boards, creating pages of book and magazine out of strips of type glued down with ‘SprayMount’, a highly egregious sprayable glue.

We’d size pictures manually, then attach them to the artwork (a box was drawn to give the printers a ‘keyline’ to place the image in) ready for sending to film.

Then along came Digital Research’s GUI, or graphical user interface, GEM and with it Ventura Publisher, a black and white piece of software that let you ‘lay out’ pages onscreen. I had a chat to Phil about the new software and how he had to invest in it so that he could run my pages.

‘Rubbish! That’ll never take off! You can’t match the quality of compositors’ work, proper typesetting, with that amateur junk!’ said Phil. 'My Linotronics cost £30,000 a piece - nobody can compete with stuff like that!'

Within the year he had gone bust and I had taken all my business to David, who I didn’t really like very much but who would ‘run out’ my pages from Ventura as one single layout, all ready for the printers once I’d just taped the pictures to copies of the proofs. I didn’t need a graphic artist anymore, either - I did my own layouts onscreen. They might not always have followed the rules of typography as they existed in Caxton’s day, but then we were redefining what you could do with type anyway – for a few halcyon years, drop caps and huge lettering ruled magazine layouts all over the UK.

Ever since then, I have heard people talking about quality as the reason why technology, the Internet in particular, won’t disintermediate them. But the amazing fact is that we don’t actually care about quality. Some of the most popular videos on YouTube are some of the crappiest pieces of filming. I play my music in my car, ripped from my ultra-high quality CDs and converted to lo-fi MP3s, using an iTrip radio transmitter thingy. The quality of what I am listening to is probably less than that of a Chrome cassette.

When technology improves access, quality becomes secondary. And quality is the last refuge of the about-to-be-disintermediated.

Social Media and Libel

Image by Felipe Bachomo via Flickr

I’ve talked quite a bit on the radio over the past few weeks about Internet libel. It’s an interesting area and one where I think we all are guilty of being perhaps not quite as careful as we should be - particularly on Twitter!

With the ruling by a UK high court judge that blogging is essentially ‘an act carried out in public’, we not only lose the right to anonymity (not that I’ve ever done any of this stuff anonymously), but also have a precedent that social media interactions are ‘acts carried out in public’. That means we are open to charges of libel and defamation where we make assertions regarding people and also companies over social media platforms. There are already cases lodged as a result of material posted on MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter in both the US and UK. Having said that, the world's legal systems are still struggling with the whole issue - so nothing is clear.

Which means that, fine, today’s consumer has a megaphone – but today’s consumer has also to be aware that they may be held answerable for their use of a medium that has the reach (and, let’s face it, potentially way beyond the reach) of a national daily newspaper.

Similarly, any company threatening suit against people for something they have said online has to think long and hard about the consequences to the company’s reputation in the long run. While we are now seeing an increasing number of precedents being established by litigation, they are by no means concrete and supported by a body of established law – certainly not in the US and UK, let alone somewhere like here in the UAE. And companies 'picking' on bloggers, FaceBook users and other social media users are risking disastrous loss of credibility and respect from consumers - who are enjoying the new found freedoms, increased information flow and empowerment that using the Internet is bringing them.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the removal or alteration of offensive material is often all that is required to mitigate any serious threat of legal action. So online commentary is particularly hard to legislate for in laws that depend on the presence of immutable, physical, media.

In other words, we need to perhaps take a little more care, but companies with brands to protect need to cut consumers a hell of a lot of slack and, by the way, the answer for companies feeling wronged by consumers is dialogue, not 'cease and desist'.

Billion Dollar Baby

It’s less than four years old, something like 40% of new sign-ups to it don’t last longer than a month before wandering away and it hasn’t generated a red cent in revenues. And yet last Friday, venture capitalists invested a reported $100 million into Twitter, effectively valuing the fledgeling company at $1bn – more than General Motors was worth when it went bust.

Another way of looking at it would be to value every single tweet ever tweeted at $1 - Twitter recently went past the billion tweet barrier.

With something like 54 million visitors a month and a goal, according to documents leaked to TechCrunch, of netting a billion users by 2013, Twitter certainly captures a lot of eyeballs. That billion user figure isn't ridiculous, BTW - Twitter's already smashed its own growth targets. And it’s eyeballs that make all the difference in today’s Adword world – Google's annual revenues of $21bn-odd are made up in the vast majority of clicks – each netting a few cents. Those revenues, to put them into perspective, are worth something like a sixth of global annual television advertising revenue and are also equivalent to total US print advertising spending - the latter falling as fast as Internet advertising spend is rising.

With much speculation as to how Twitter is actually going to make any money, some form of advertising is top of most pundits’ agendas. The documents leaked to TechCrunch appear to show that Twitter isn’t really quite sure what to do with the goose it has found itself holding. And despite that goose never having laid an egg, some smart money is betting that when it does, it’ll be gold.

What makes Twitter neat is that its open APIs mean that lots of smart people are dreaming up new ways to use all those eyeballs – there’s a long list of things you can do with Twitter that don’t actually involve Tweeting at all. You can share files, music, pictures, video or links, even make payments - that last link is a service called TwitPay that lets you link your PayPal account with Twitter, which means you can now buy and sell stuff with a Tweet.

So Twitter is becoming a sort of central switch for people who are talking and sharing stuff, a way of flagging up the availability of news, information and content. And, in fact, that's how many of us are now using Twitter - to share information, links and stuff we find interesting.

The stuff itself isn't on Twitter - but Twitter is how we send the signal to go get it.

And that's where Google came out of absolutely nowhere to become a world-straddling colossus. Nothing we want is on Google - it's where we go to find it.

Which is why I think Twitter could be as big as Google and why I think the smart money is being, well, smart...

PS: I know, I know. To be honest, I'm not really a rabid Twitter evangelist. I just look and sound like one. It'll pass.