The UAE TRA: More Front Than Brighton

The UAE's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, or TRA, has called for increased use of social media services. The most immediate result of this announcement was me spitting tea out all over my long-suffering (and terminally ill) notebook.

The story, carried by Gulf News today as a 'Gulf News Report' rather than, more truthfully, a subbed WAM file, is linked here. It really is a quite remarkable display of doublespeak.

"The emergence of social media has opened gateways of communication with the rest of the world," said Mr. Al Ghanim. "It is always a good idea for a company to use social media to connect with communities they serve because it improves media coverage. In addition, social media encourages user participation, openness, conversation, connectedness and a sense of community."

Go to http://www.orkut.com from the UAE and you'll find it is blocked. Yes, it's not the most brilliant social media site in the world, but it is blocked by the TRA because of the content that people have put up on it. The TRA has had a long history of blocking 'dating', sorry, I mean social media sites. Twitter was blocked until August 2008, retarding the platform's adoption in the UAE. Flickr was similarly, until relatively recently, blocked in the UAE. Blogs have also been blocked by the TRA, including the still-blocked Secret Dubai Diary.

Take a look at the little beauty above: it's a snapshot of tweets from @theuaetra and it's totally representative of the 102 tweets that the organisation has pinged out into the Twitterverse in a one-way sputtering of informational spitballs. There has been no interaction at all - although it'll be interesting to see how today goes.

The TRA's YouTube channel contains nine videos uploaded three days ago, two three weeks ago, three a month ago and so on. Started at the end of December 2010, it initially drew quite high views (total views of its uploaded videos just top out the 5,000 mark) but the last batch of videos have earned one or two views each. Rather charmingly, comments are enabled, but I couldn't find any actual comments, even on videos that have attracted over 200 views. The channel has eight subscribers and one friend.

The TRA is also on Facebook, where it has garnered a remarkable 63 Likes. Again, the information flow is pretty one way with no Likes, Comments or Discussions. The oldest post I could find was dated the 2nd March. There is precisely one consumer interaction on the Facebook page and I reproduce it below. Beyond this, I have absolutely nothing more to say on the matter.

"Social media encourages user participation, openness, conversation, connectedness and a sense of community."

Who's Afraid Of A Regulated Web?

French president Nicolas Sarkozy has come out and said he wants a regulated web - "You need to hear our limits, our red lines" he told an audience at the two-day 'e-G8' conference. The AP report is linked here. His is not the first whiff of regulatory sulphur, of course - only the other day I posted about the British culture secretary sending out a clear 'enough is enough' message regarding privacy on the Internet after Twitter 'made a mockery' of that Great British Institution, the super-injunction.

Of course, it should come as no surprise to hear those who govern us (all too often, you can't help but think, forgetting they're supposed to be representing us) starting to talk about regulation. Wikileaks was a massive wake-up call to governments, followed by the wake-up call of the 'Arab Spring'. We now know two things we did not fully appreciate a year ago.We have to redefine privacy, secrecy and transparency and we have to redefine governance, the aspirations of people and the way in which they are represented.

But redefining these things doesn't necessarily mean micro-regulating them, at least in part because it's so fast moving out there you'd be hard put to keep up - and that's a key problem governments have found in the past: you can't create legislation that keeps up with innovation. The Microsoft vs DOJ case showed quite clearly that an entire technology market, let alone platforms and applications, can change during a single action in the courts, let alone the time taken to draft and pass a piece of well defined legislation.

Establishing a set of principles might be a nice approach to take, but then we've been doing that ourselves: up to now, morality and behaviour on the Internet have been largely a function of communities - we all know what the rules are (if you use someone else's link on Twitter, you include in the tweet that it was via them; if you send unwanted emails to people you'll be called a spammer and face consumer unhappiness; if you hijack a hashtag, you'll get pwned all over the place and so on) - or are in the process of coming to terms with changes and defining rules as a pretty much consensual process.

Of course, regulating the Internet in the name of privacy and responsibility is all very well, but we also have to be wary of regulating discourse - even when that discourse is uncomfortable for us. And here's the issue at the heart of government discomfort with that discourse: the ability for people to share opinion and organise in shows of public opinion that are not ordered through the representational process that has put the people in government where they are.

I mean, imagine a world in which everyone's voice could be heard! How insane would that be? A world where everyone had access to a viable way of voting instantly on any given topic, of canvassing opinions and sharing information without fear of corporate interference, lobbying or governmental mendacity, a world in which we didn't actually need to be represented by politicians because we have the mechanisms in our own hands to represent ourselves.

Why do I need an MP to vote on my behalf in parliament when I can register a vote on a website instantly and have that vote counted in picoseconds? What if the Internet could slim down government in the same way it has slimmed down other disintermediated processes?

What if?

Raise The Sea Mermid!

The Sea Mermid and Lady Rana washed up on the beach down the road from our house after the late winter storms we had in late January and early February this year, ending up on the same stretch of sand some ten days apart in what must be a million to one coincidence. I posted about this event, giving an entirely more accurate account than Gulf News and The National, incidentally, both of whom stuffed the story up.

For months now, the two ships have been sitting just as the were the day they were beached by their captains, guarded by a solitary Sharjah policeman. They eventually even installed a plywood hutty thing for the sentry.

Last week cranes and other materiel started appearing on the beach front, joined by a large winch and lots of other bits and bobs. It started to look like a serious cargo cult had arrived into town. Now they've hauled the poor old Sea Mermid right up onto the beach and they've started breaking her apart, cutting her up for scrap. After that, they'll do the same with the Lady Rana - apparently the Sea Mermid (it's actually registered under that name believe it or not, wrecking my theories about dyslexic maritime sign writers!) is the better of the two ships, but they're both to go.

A source close to the matter who declined to be named as his Tufty Club membership hadn't come through confirmed that both ships were being scrapped by Dubai Shipbuilding & Engineering. So there you go!

Ebooks Outsell Booky Books. So What?

Image by englishpen via FlickrWith the news that ebooks have now outsold booky books, we can perhaps now recognise the tipping point has been reached.

One fascinating report I’ve seen of this year’s London Book Fair neatly paints a picture of an industry reeling as it comes to terms with the ferocity of the changes taking place around it. More and more writers are taking to putting their works up on the Kindle store and other self publishing platforms rather than go through the relentless round of submissions and rejections that getting published entails.

HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray, speaking at the LBF, called this time 'a watershed'. Murray was noting that sales of a number of HC's front list titles were running at over 50% on ebook formats - he also noted that the growth in e-readers (to 40 million) was having a disproportionate effect on the market because e-readers had reached 'core' readers, people who buy over twelve books a year.

There are reports of Amazon employing editors and seeking an editorial director. This is interesting precisely because if Amazon decided to have its own imprint, it could pick from the many new titles being uploaded to the Kindle e-book store and take the best of them and place them under its powerful marketing wing – with editors guaranteeing the quality of books under that imprint.

That would address one major complaint of the post-ebook era - the lack of qualitative guarantees where so many authors now have direct access to the market without the checks and balances of editors and the like.Yes, this gives a more egalitarian market with greater choice for readers (and less Katie Price schlock being pushed in our faces), but it also atomises the market (there is such a thing as overwhelming choice) and makes it potentially hard for readers to work out when a book is total rubbish. I have to confess, of my current crop of 34 Kindle books, one non-fiction title turned out to be a rip-off project.

But with editorial input, an imprint, Amazon could possibly create something a little like Authonomy done right. Everyone’s uploading their books, the best of those books are plucked out and given a sheen by Amazon, which could sell books under its imprint at a premium (because you know they’re good) and effectively become its own publishing house. Now a publishing house that owns the majority of the distribution medium becomes interesting. It would be like one publisher owning every high street bookstore (remember them?).

It’s also potentially massively anti-competitive, but that’s another kettle of frogs.

Big Bang (Blowing up Paradise)

As if you needed any, above is incontrovertible proof of my long-held assertion that Modhesh is evil.

Yesterday, largely unheralded, was the 55th anniversary of the first airborne hydrogen bomb tests on the Pacific island of Bikini atoll. Life magazine, in commemoration, has released a remarkable 35-slide set of images from the bomb tests of the cold war, including one that scared me more than even the awful plume over Muraroa atoll - an image of a group of sublimely insouciant nut-heads cutting into a mushroom-cloud shaped cake. What tremendous idiocy it must have taken to celebrate this dubious 'achievement' in this way.

Take a look at the picture set, linked here,do - it's really quite stunning.

Of course, the 36th picture never made it to Life's pages. It's the one above, exclusive to Fake Plastic Souks, that proves what we've always known about the little critter...

We are all publishers

Image by noobbaru via FlickrThere’s been a lot of talk in the UK about super-injunctions, triggered by the seeming inability of anyone in public life to behave with even the scantest degree or morality or decorum. I suppose when the world’s most powerful man goes around inserting himself into interns, the Governor of California lives surrounded by his secret children and the head of the IMF seems to be channeling Casanova, you could forgive a certain laxity among the minor stars in our firmament.

The problem, of course, is that while they all like doing these things, they don’t like us knowing about them. I think, actually, part of the fun of doing it in the first place is the frisson of danger it involves. When the brown stuff really does hit the fan, using some of one’s hard-earned millions to brief a brief and gag the media seems to gaining in popularity. In the UK and elsewhere, ‘the media’ includes a clamorous pack of newspapers casting ever further afield to find salacity and scandal to reverse their plummeting sales figures and so taking an unusual interest in any scraps they can find.

What’s making things so much more fun these days is while you can use your power and wealth to gag a newspaper, you can’t gag the Internet. Once stuff is out in the wild, it’s game over. The publication of the names on Twitter of six people seeking “super-injunctions” to stop media publishing their names caused an outbreak of great wailing and gnashing of political teeth, with British Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt telling The Independent:

"We are in this crazy situation where information is available freely online which you aren't able to print in newspapers. We are in a situation where technology, and Twitter in particular, is making a mockery of the privacy laws we have and we do need to think about the regulatory environment we have.”

The problem is, of course, that Twitter, Google et al are all arguing that they are not the publishers of this material, they are merely a medium, a tool of communication. It would be like suing a telephone company because someone said something bad over the phone or sent a libellous fax. Or suing the paper mill because its product was used to commit a libel.

This is one reason why Goog and friends are so very hesitant to take judgement calls over content posted on their platforms – the second they do so, they become editors and therefore publishers.

Governments are less than happy about this – and it can only be a matter of time before legislation is brought to bear on the free-for-all aspects of online platforms. The UK government is already making a racket about legislating against online platforms (Hunt was paraphrased in the Indy story linked above as saying there "may be a case for converging the regulation of traditional and new media"). If the industry won’t regulate this content itself, governments are arguing, then legislation must be brought to bear defining the responsibilities of platforms for the content they carry. This’ll potentially create an odd situation where communication platforms are forced to become, effectively, publishers by law.

Until that happens (and I fervently hope it doesn’t), the responsibility for creating, moderating, curating, sharing and publishing the content we post online actually belongs to us. We are all publishers.

You’d have thought democratic governments, the representatives of the people, would be happy that we’ve found a medium of open expression which gives us all the opportunity to take responsibility and use the power of free communication. But then those in power (as I found when I had that spat with German state secretary for the Federal Ministry of the environment, nature conservation and nuclear safety, Matthias Machnig) believe only they understand, and therefore should wield, power.

Including the power, as public figures, to behave awfully in private then gag the public.

Yellow Peril

It's summer and Paris Hilton's in Dubai. Yay.

The Emirates ID Card. Meh.

Image via WikipediaHaving applied for, and received, my Emirates ID card ages ago, I no longer take much notice of announcements, pronouncements and other strange noises coming from EIDA, the Emirates ID Authority. This is lucky as I would have gone mad.

The Cards Middle East conference has been taking place this week and EIDA's officials have been taking the opportunity to further inform the public regarding the ID cards, the introduction of which caused so much fun and hilarity. If you're interested in the backstory, you'll find much of it documented gleeully here.

Monday saw EIDA announcing that soon people will be able to use the PIN number issued with their cards. I cannot for the life of me remember being issued with a PIN number alongside my card, but who am I to argue? The PIN number I don't have will soon allow the public to access online services from the government, at first in Abu Dhabi. This is a good thing and I, for one, have no intention of letting any hiccups in the past colour my view of the most excellent services being planned for the future.

Today's announcement is that PROs can now pick up ID cards on behalf of company employees. For those unused to the many strangenesses of life in the UAE, a company's public relations officer, or mandoub, is the guy that takes care of visas, health tests and the many other government requirements businesses here have to satisfy. The EIDA move is all part of the 'redesign' of the card issuing process. Given the cards were first introduced/announced back in 2008, you'd have thought we'd had plenty of time get the process bedded down, but apparently not. Applicants have complaning about delays in issuing cards that stretch into weeks according to Gulf News, which does cite EIDA as saying 70% are delivered within five days.

The big news, however, is that the National ID card is 'to be mandatory' according to the GN piece, which manages somehow to keep a straight face in its reporting of a card we were first told would be mandatory back in 2008 and which has managed to be largely useful in the intervening period as a way of opening certain types of locked door, as a handy wallet-stiffener or a useful tool in prising apart the fingers and thumbs of accidentally super-glued infants.

Any contributions regarding other potential uses for Emirates Identity Cards are welcome.

The Arab Media Forum's Elephant

Image via WikipediaThere's going to be a pachyderm* in the room at this year's Arab Media Forum 2011, the event that sparked the very birth of this little blog. It's not a new elephant, but it's been getting bigger every year. This year, it's going to be interesting to see if a single delegate gets to squeeze in.

It's the Internet and the way in which our media landscape is not only being changed, but torn up and remodelled - not just by social media, but by our new information consumption habits. It is not, according to today's Gulf News and previous reports, a topic up for discussion. In fact, Gulf News' subs reach a new low today. Failing to stand up a headline with the story is one thing, but when you're failing to stand up sub-heads, my but you're in trouble. The sub-head in question, 'Social Media' is followed in the story by anything but any mention of social media at all.

The GN story's headline sort of frames the story: "Forum to look at impact of Arab Spring on media".

Isn't it interesting that the Arab Spring (sic) is having an impact on media rather than the other way around? I do wonder if the many portentous debates between 'important media figures' will include the appalling mendacity of the region's media when faced with the challenge of change - not least the Egyptian media's craven cries of 'Lalalalala' when faced with the stark facts of Tahrir.

Looking beyond the half inch of Methodist near-beer that is the debate about the Arab Spring and its impact on our media, you'd perhaps be forgiven for wondering why the impact of the online revolution that preceded, helped to drive and then was accelerated by that self-same spring isn't worth debating and highlighting. Perhaps it's not 'media' within the narrow definition of a Press Club. Although the people served by the media are increasingly deserting the paper form for online sources - and changing the way they consume media and the types of information they access.

It's a fundamental change in human communication that has helped to reshape our region, driving change across our societies and challenging many aspects of our media - including the practice of journalism, legislation, individual and collective freedoms, activism and responsibility. There is no greater challenge to our media, in fact. But it is obviously not the right 'media' for this forum. This year, we haven't even seen reports of a token blogger to lighten the mix.

Giddy up, Jumbo!

* Apropos of nothing, many, many moons ago, Gulf News reported on an mistreated elephant at Dubai Zoo. The picture caption, thanks to that strangest and most malign force, the GN Subs, referred to 'the unfortunate pachyderm', which triggered a scramble at Spot On to see who could fit the word into a piece of client work that day. Carrington won with brilliance, although I don't remember quite how.

Are Your Footprints All Over The Web?

Image by Andreas-photography via FlickrThe answer's probably yes.

The recent massive facepalmohmigodicantbelievetheydidthat scandal involving Facebook hiring a bunch of mendacious flaks to tout around fear-mongering stories about Google's 'privacy issues' merely highlighted (as Gulf News' Scott Shuey pointed out in his Saturday column) the issues of online privacy in general - and didn't leave Facebook unscarred. Amusingly, Shuey points out that, in his experience, most PRs are "...soulless drones who would sell their own mothers to keep a client happy."

I can't disagree with him, but then most social media sites and online publishers are soulless bots who are already selling us all to keep clients happy. It's a marriage made in heaven, no?

As time goes by, we're putting more and more data out there - and that data can be interconnected in ever-more creative and interesting ways. I was highly tickled the other day to do a Google Image Search on myself, looking for a picture someone had taken of me wot we needed for a presentation. As well as the usual daft pictures of me (of which the sunflower one is a firm favourite), the search started to throw up images from my blog and, as we go further down the search, images from people associated with me for one reason or another. The growing tree of interconnectedness was fun, if mildly disconcerting - try doing an image search on yourself and see what I mean (I assume you're in the habit of Googling yourself or have set up an alert on yourself/your unique identifying keyphrase).Bing also delivers, although relevance appears weaker and the associations come in more strongly and earlier.

Here's a scary trick. Take a look at your Google Search History, linked here. You'll have to sign in with Gmail and then you can access your entire history of search - every last query stored for posterity on Goog's servers. I deleted mine, believe me you don't want to see the things I was looking up while I was researching Beirut, something I have alluded to in posts passim!

The basic rule of thumb is that if you put it out on the web (and by that I most definitely include Twitter and all other things comfortingly transient), it stays out on the web. Take three or four seemingly disconnected pieces of data and you can start to build a profile - the more comprehensive the profile, the more sticky every new piece of data becomes until you can build exponentially more intelligent data sets that define you very nicely indeed.

Facebook has consistently been in trouble over things like privacy settings and is often accused of encouraging people to share too much. But that's the trouble with social search - you're selling increasingly intelligently filtered access and so you need to get people to share more as well as create more from what they do share. It's a self-fulfilling beast. And it's after your data.

There's no need to buy a nuclear bunker quite yet, but it would do as well to be aware that you're now essentially a public figure. And you're leaving footprints behind all the time...