Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog

One of the neat little projects we've been working on is an iPhone version of our English Website. It's still in beta but if you've got an iPhone head over to http://i.aljazeera.net. It's just barebones news optimised for your iPhone viewing pleasure.

"In one generation we went from riding camels to driving Cadillacs. The way we are spending money today, I fear we will soon be riding camels again" - King Faisal (d. 1975) of Saudi Arabia

I am thoroughly enjoying Adrian Monck's recently published book Can You Trust The Media.

...The media is not in the information supply business. It is in the distraction business. It wants to occupy the seconds, minutes and hours of our lives that are not spent earning the money required to make us valuable to businesses as a consumer or governments as a taxpayer, and as much of our working time as it can. It is there to force itself into out consciousness and by doing so, live another day.

And to claim that headspace, the media is prepared to do almost anything. It will purvey naked flesh, stock prices, sexual impropriety or political analysis, all in the hope of securing our precious attention. An important way of getting into our heads is by selecting those things that are new or unusual or presenting the familiar in novel ways. In shorthand, the news.

How honest and refreshing...

I'm at "Embracing New Media in your Public Relations and Corporate Communications Strategy" in Amsterdam where I'll be speaking about "Using Social Media to Enage with New Audiences" tomorrow.

I'll be twittering the interesting bits (hashtag #onlinepr) so you can follow it here. Robin Hammond from the BBC is here as well so you probably want to keep an eye on his twitter updates as well.

I can also report back that even with my horridly poor Afrikaans, I can still pick up a bit of Dutch. Just a little....

It has already been widely reported that many Chinese are not happy with "Western" coverage of China and Tibet. Without going into the details, I suspect they have a point - these are complex issues and often cannot be reduced to simple sound-bites.

What is extraordinary about this is that it has resulted in ordinary Chinese citizens taking action - from a boycott of Carrefoure to a rumored Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) against CNN.com that is going to take place today.

CNN is already reporting some mild disruptions of it's Asia service.

Update : Ethan Zuckerman is speculating that the Chinese filtering of CNN.com at the national level may have been done to protect CNN.com against the DDoS.

Marc Lynch points to a new opinion poll by Shibley Telhami (Brookings Institute, University of Maryland) which was just released. It covers public attitudes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. (download : ppt -you may need to remove the .pot extension)

While each section is interesting and worth looking at, I flipped straight to the end to the findings on media viewership

While there are no accurate ratings for TV viewership in the Middle East, conventional thinking is that everyone watches Al Jazeera so the findings come as no surprise.

I would be interested in seeing the results of the same questions one year after BBC Arabic has been on the air. Al-Arabiya must be very worried...

The latest promo for our audience participation initiative:

This is the one in which my friend and colleague Raja Sharif makes his TV debut. Which just goes to prove, you can even make a lawyer cool if you give him a Mac ;-)

ComputerWorld has just published an interview I did with them during Media '08. We talked about Web 2.0, Open Source and Al Jazeera.

After the initial excitement over my brief exchange with Downing Street I wrote a piece for the for the Mail & Guardian's Thought Leader blog on the larger question at hand - the illusion of engagement.

...Downing Street is not only using Twitter, it is also reaching out through Flickr and YouTube. It is a good strategy that creates the illusion of a genuine attempt to engage with citizens and may help Downing Street bypass a hostile domestic press.

While many are hailing this as a great move forward in open government, I'm not so sure. It's easy to get blinded by all the fancy Web 2.0 goodness that surrounds this initiative. Yes, it's great that Downing Street is doing this, but let's be honest: Are a few video responses on YouTube really going to mean anything or gauge public opinion when nearly a million people pouring on to the streets of London didn't?

As evangelists of new media, we often get caught up or blinded by its use. One of the things I always remind my team of is : "never drink your own kool-aid".

Richard Sambrook has noted that the Prime Ministers office in Britain has not only started using twitter to send out press release notices but are also ">responding to questions. Nice.

Now let's see if they have an answer for this....

Update: Number 10 has responded :

Update 2:


This is what I call the illusion of engagement.

Over on the SensePost blog Haroon tells the story about how he returned a report back to an analyst saying "once more with feeling..."

This reminded me of a story I read where Henry Kissinger kept asking Winston Lord "Is this the best you can do?" when he handed him a draft policy paper. After 9 attempts of revising the document the staffer finally replies in exasperation yes and Kissinger says "Good, now I'll read it..."

Here is the full story as told by Winston Lord himself

Well, basically it was, I went in with a draft, and it was actually of a presidential foreign policy report. This is slightly apocryphal and not directly on your subject here, but I would go in with a draft of the speech. He called me in the next day and said, "Is this the best you can do?" I said, "Henry, I thought so, but I'll try again." So I go back in a few days, another draft. He called me in the next day and he said, "Are you sure this is the best you can do?" I said, "Well, I really thought so. I'll try one more time." Anyway, this went on eight times, eight drafts; each time he said, "Is this the best you can do?" So I went in there with a ninth draft, and when he called me in the next day and asked me that same question, I really got exasperated and I said, "Henry, I've beaten my brains out - this is the ninth draft. I know it's the best I can do: I can't possibly improve one more word." He then looked at me and said, "In that case, now I'll read it."

The sad thing is that in big corporations "almost good enough is almost always good enough". This is often not a function of the quality of work someone is capable of producing but of the organisational culture that plagues large bureaucracies and often perpetuates meaningless work. I've found that one of the key aspects to leading a group of smart people within such organisations is the ability to know when to except "almost good enough" from your people and when to demand exceptional performance.

Robin is asking whether "auto-feeding links to twitter spammy?"

I immediately tweeted him saying spammy. I'm going to have to qualify that yes by saying it depends on how I follow you. If I'm getting your tweets by SMS I definitely consider shoveling links from your blog or delicious stream annoying. If I'm only following you on the web, then I don't really mind since it's not that intrusive.

So the implication of auto-feeding links is not necessarily me not following you but rather not receiving your tweets via SMS.

Of course, if I really were interested in your blog-posts I'd be subscribed to your blog via RSS anyway....

P.S. You can join me on twitter here.

08032008431, originally uploaded by mohamedn.

I saw this truck in Sydney and thought "Wow! It's finally happening - IT is becoming no different from other parts of the a companies general infrastructure." Just like other building services - plumbing and electrical, we just want to see it as transparent as long as it works.

There is no added value in the pipe/network in itself. Largely traditional IT services like e-mail, networking and so on are expected in the same way you expect water to flow out of a tap.

The value is in how these services are used...

My colleague Abdurahman Warsame is the Blogger of the Week over at Global Voices Online.

Did anyone else know that Warsame was born in Saudi Arabia? I have a feeling he has been purposely downplaying this fact. I've just chastised him for not being proud of his Khaleeji heritage. From now on I hope he follows the office custom - when someone asks where he is from he needs to reply "Saudi Arabia" and then when they probe confusedly asking "but where are you really from" he should say "Somalia"....

Be sure to head over to his blog No Longer at Ease for some great blogging. I've been a regular reader for a longtime - in fact what he doesn't know is that I had his blog in my feed reader long before he joined New Media and that his blog was one of the key factors in me recruiting him to join the team as our social media analyst! Which in way proves Seth Godin's right....

The idea of Joe Public being in the right place at the right time with his camera is nothing new. What is new is that the statistical probability of someone having a camera and sharing what he has witnessed has shot through the roof.

The ubiquity of cameras on our mobile phones and the ability to share our photos/pictures has given popularity and impetus to the concept of the "citizen journalist" - a person who will not only witness but testify on events as they unfold.

While nearly every media organisation has some sort of initiative to harvest contributions from the public, it isn't always clear whether they are aware (or have made Joe Public aware) of the potential risks involved in pulling out his camera. This becomes especially important when Joe Public may not be in New York shooting pictures of a fallen crane but is in a country where the authorities don't take kindly to someone snooping around with a camera. And I'm not only talking about totalitarian regimes where there is no free press - back in 2004 I had a cop in South Africa threaten to break my digital camera in the Sandton Convention Centre where I decided to take a picture of some peaceful protestors being thrown out.

My colleague Safdar has been leading an initiative to look at how we can use mobile phones for field-reporting as well as public contributions. I'm glad that he recently experienced these risks first-hand - he was recently traveling in the UAE where he happened to be driving passed what turned out to be a drug bust. He pulled out his camera phone and started snapping away...

So i naturally pulled out my N96 and snapped away. Almost instantly, one of the guys outside ran to our car and confiscated both of our phones. Turned out they were undercover drugs police on a raid. We were given a number of the drugs police department to get our phones back.

After what seemed like hours of driving, we finally managed to find the police station. We were summoned by the undercover police from the scene and asked a few questions. They mainly wanted to see the pics taken at the scene.

The stern faced undercover cops broke into brief laughter when they came across a video clip titled Arab Usher and they returned the phones shortly after.

His message when he returned to the office : "All this Citizen Reporting stuff is risky business!"

This clip seems to be doing the rounds on the new media conference circuit... Kevin Anderson used it at Media '08 (which was the first time I saw it) and Abdurahman blogged that Robin Hammond used it at Digital News Affairs.

I used it at a meeting to kick off a new project we're working on and it was a clear winner...

This video just blew me away. I've been getting everyone around me watch it and now its your turn too...

• Journalism.org- The State of the News Media 2008
  The State of the News Media 2008 is the fifth edition of our annual report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism on the health and status of American journalism.

  (tags: media journalism report)