Is Guy The Citizen Pundit In Danger?

By | November 22, 2011
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Disastrous news for instant celebrities everywhere: Being mistaken for an Internet pundit on the BBC can bring you to the attention of the wrong people. Our hero Guy Goma, whom we (mistakenly) called a taxi driver when he was in fact an expert in data cleansing when the BBC mistook him for an Internet pundit and interviewed him live on TV, is in fact an illegal immigrant, according to UPI. (In turn, the BBC has possibly taken my suggestion that he be given his own showed too literally and has also mistaken him for a TV celebrity who can be wheeled on to answer questions about EU membership for Bulgaria and Romania. Painful stuff. (Here’s the clip. ) )

Anyway, the UPI story, which could take a lesson or two from my rather pompous diatribe on sourcing) rather brushes over the fact that that the Mail on Sunday story is not based on any interview with any British officials:

LONDON, May 21 (UPI) — BBC’s fake interviewee — an illegal immigrant from the Congo mistakenly plucked from the lobby and interviewed as an expert on British TV — may be deported. <snip> Goma — who coincidentally has a master’s degree in business from the Congo — tried to blunder through the question and answer session, the Sunday Mail reported. <snip> But it also brought the immigrant to the attention of British authorities who may deport him. That would be unfortunate because Goma recently applied for a technology position and wanted to capitalize on the publicity he’d received.

I may be missing something but I don’t see anything in the Mail on Sunday report suggesting the UK authorities are after him. Indeed, the entire story is based on an interview with Goma himself, which itself makes for hilarious reading (he’s hired a PR person to cope with the fame). True, he may be skirting on the wrong side of the law given he only has a tourist visa, but until the Immigration folk actually finger him, or say they’re about to finger him, I don’t see how one can say, as UPI said, his fame has “also brought the immigrant to the attention of British authorities who may deport him.” The Mail on Sunday didn’t say that, so why did UPI?

Anyway, I’m hoping that even if the authorities do start to think along those lines, they will recognise Mr. Goma as just the kind of addition the Brits could do with, and grant him whatever is necessary to keep him on our streets.

What Blogs Have Over Old Media

By | November 22, 2011
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Blogs have at least one significant advantage over newspapers: They are naturally configured to make the source of information clear. Whether a blogger indicates it in words (“according to Loose Wire, the earth is spinning”) as well as a link to the original source, or just via a link embedded into the declaration, the reader can easily figure out where the information is coming from. It’s neat, it’s simple, and it’s what the Web is all about.

Traditional media don’t have this inbuilt emphasis on sourcing, although they should. A good journalist always indicates, as high up as possible, the source of his/her information: “The earth is spinning, according to Internet blogger Loose Wire.” If the information seems somewhat hard to believe, or could be obviously a expression of opinion rather than fact, the source is placed first: “Loose Wire blogger says the earth is spinning.” But there’s no easy way in traditional print to offer the hypertext function of allowing the reader to automatically jump to the original source material to gauge its credibility for himself/herself, nor to check whether the original source has been quoted accurately and fairly.

But there’s a more important weakness, and it has nothing to do the shortcomings of the medium. It’s when traditonal media bury the source, leaving any but the most seasoned reader in the dark about where, in fact, the information is coming from. Take this account, for example, from the Sunday Times of London of reports that an immigration officer sought sex in return for helping an asylum seeker:

A SENIOR Home Office immigration officer has been suspended after allegations that he offered to help an 18-year-old Zimbabwean rape victim obtain asylum in the UK if she had sex with him.

James Dawute, 53, who works at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate in London, allegedly told the girl: “I know how to win your case . . . I can handle it, don’t worry,” before asking her to go to a hotel with him for sex.

The immigration centre at Lunar House in Croydon, south London, was the subject of a separate “sex for visas” scandal in January, prompting an inquiry into whether immigration officials were trading favours for sex.

Dawute is alleged to have signalled to a security guard to bring the girl forward after seeing her waiting at the centre. He is said to have passed her his telephone number on a piece of paper and asked for her number in return.

He then signed forms allowing the girl to claim emergency accommodation. According to the girl, Dawute called her two days later, saying he liked her and wanted to meet to discuss her application.

At the meeting in a Croydon noodle bar the immigration officer was recorded by reporters from The Observer as he told the girl he wanted to take her to a hotel to have sex and indicated he might be able to help her application.

It’s only in the sixth paragraph of an 11 paragraph story that the source of the information is made clear: a rival newspaper. As far as I can make out there is no original reporting at all in the whole story. This is not just sloppy journalism. It’s a reflection of the fact that competition between newspapers is often conducted to the detriment of the reader. Here, the reader has no idea where the allegations come from (four “allegations/alleged/said to” weasel words in as many paragraphs) until the source is mentioned. (There’s an example of how the story was better handled in The Independent, which mentions the source in the second paragraph.) When the reader’s interests — who alleges this? Where did you get your information from? Is this your material or someone elses? Can I trust you on this and future stories to be straight with me? — are thrust aside for the interests of obfuscating the fact that a rival got the better of you, you can understand why some folk don’t mourn the slow demise of the traditional newspaper.

Imagine how this might have been handled in a blog picking up The Observer story: the link to the original in the first sentence, along with a “report in today’s Observer”, perhaps even a mention of the byline. In the meantime, I think traditional newspapers could do well to focus on raising their game to compete with blogs — not just in aping the technology that makes them so powerful, but the transparent sourcing, that invites readers to check with the original and draw their own conclusions.

It’s all about the reader, and always will be.

Tsunamis, Warnings and the SMS

By | November 22, 2011
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Systems — especially warning systems — need to work perfectly, or not at all. Take Thailand’s new tsunami early warning system, which recently failed a trial because busy phone networks took hours to deliver vital SMS messages, while some some warnings sent by fax didn’t turn up at all, according to AFP. (More on the drill from DPA here.)

The report quotes Thailand’s National Disaster Warning Centre as saying that text messages sent by cell phones to emergency coordinators around the country took hours to arrive, while warnings sent by fax during the morning drill also failed to arrive. Said Pakdivat Vajirapanlop, the centre’s deputy operations chief: “The problem we faced was with communications. We have no idea whether our messages sent to local operations chiefs by fax and SMS arrived on time or not, and by midday some of them said they did not recieve the SMS. We need to know whether they have received our messages. What can they do if the messages don’t arrive on time? Then the warning is useless,” he said.

Indeed. SMS is not a reliable way to transmit messages, especially during a crisis. A warning system is as weak as its weakest link, and relying on SMS, or even fax, is not going to work. I’m just not sure what would work under such circumstances. The system needs to have an inbuilt check that a) ensures the message reaches its destination and b) the sender receives confirmation that the recipient has received and opened the message (what you might call passive acknowledgement. The recipient doesn’t need to actively acknowledge the message has been received, because that requires a further step. The message itself actually has an inbuilt acknowledgement mechanism.

SMS actually allows this confirmation, where the user can receive an SMS back informing him his message has been received by the sender. This system is not perfect of course, since nowadays SMS messages are filtered by increasingly sophisticated smartphones. So, for example, in the past an SMS’ arrival would intrude upon the recipient by a) making a noise and b) appearing on top of any other data or image on the phone’s screen, now smart phones can handle the SMS differently, from directing it to a specific folder to not appearing on the screen at all if another program is being used, or the phone is in silent mode, say. A great example of technology actually getting in the way of using the communication device as an alerting mechanism.

There are other ways, of course. One could use email trackers like MessageTag or DidTheyReadit which would alert the sender that the email has been sent. Although not popular with privacy advocates, this might be a way to inform a sender of a tsunami alert that a message has been read — even when, and perhaps where. Perhaps email trackers could be packaged and sold for this purpose?

On the other hand, how about picking up the phone and calling someone?

The Blue Frog Burps His Last?

By | November 22, 2011
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Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent at The Guardian is reporting that Blue Security is killing off the Blue Frog, saying it “could no longer continue to operate in the face of an escalating threat to the internet from a malicious Russian spammer known only as PharmaMaster.” The Blug Frog had been under serious attack from PharmaMaster, knocking it and much of Canada off the air via Denial of Service attacks on its servers.

Eran Reshef, the founder of Blue, said his company, which recently drew $4.8m (£2.5m) in funding and counts several senior industry figures as directors, was simply unable to become trapped in a war against a criminal group. “This is something that’s really got to be left to governments to decide. To fight the spammers you really need to spend $100m.”

Reshef is quoted as saying “it’s a dirty little secret that there is no real way to totally prevent denial-of-service attacks – if the attacker is prepared to put enough money in, then they can beat you every time.”

A surprising conclusion, if true (Bobbie has checked around and says it is so.) Certainly I think Reshef is right that it’s up to governments to deal with this kind of thing; Blue Frog was good in principle, but its supporters began to sound more like vigilantes than a serious and kosher effort to combat spam.

PR, Bloggers and Teeth

By | November 22, 2011
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Should PR people read blogs? Or more specifically, should PR people read the blogs of those people they’re pitching? Or, more specifically, should PR people read the blogs of people they’re pitching and take personal events, comments and references into account when they’re making their pitch? Answers to the first two questions are pretty obvious, but I’m not so sure about the third one. The issue has come to the fore with Microsoft mega-blogger Robert Scoble, who has written about the sudden and serious illness of his mother on his blog. But he’s still getting pitched by PR companies:

It’s amazing how many product pitches I’ve received in the past few days. Even in phone calls. Do they not read my blog? Do they have no clue what’s happened in my life in the past five days?

Apparently not.

The discussion in the comments that follows is interesting, and revealing, as is this interview with PR giant Richard Edelman. I have great sympathy for Robert, but this episode inadvertently raises all sorts of questions — about blogging, about PR, about the community that builds at the intersection of blogs, comments on blogs, and the conferences that bring such people together. I’m not going to pass comment on Robert’s choices but here, for what they’re worth, are some thoughts about this grey area:

Having a blog:

  • A blog is a great way to share, but unless it’s password-protected, you’re sharing with everyone, forever. That means opening up your life to some great people, but it also means you’re opening up to the whacko across the street with a gun. Be ready to share with people you may not want to share with. Because you already are.
  • Conversely, it’s fine to be personal on your blog, but unless your blog is entirely about your personal odyssey, don’t expect everyone who reads it to relate to or deal with you on all the levels you write on. Some people may have enough friends already, and just be interested in your professional comments on how to put ships in bottles.

Being a PR person pitching a blogger:

  • Pitches should never be made by phone without an email requesting a chat first. Phone calls are no longer as acceptable as they were; they are now as intrusive as a foot in the door.
  • PR people should find out if their mark has a blog, and if so, read it. For background, and to make sure the person is not on holiday or in the middle of a gender-change. It’s good to include some reference in the pitch to the fact that the blog has been read but there’s really no need to be smarmy. (“I’m a huge fan of your blog since before you started writing it and your post about how spammers are really annoying was just so spot on I had it tatooed in its entirety on my children’s foreheads.”)
  • A PR/journalist relationship can be as close as lips and teeth, but teeth can bite, and should. (The teeth is the journalist. Please keep up.) A journalist will always, if not today then at some point in the future, write something the PR person doesn’t like about their client, and the PR person needs to be ready for that. So should the journalist. The two can be best buddies, but I find that makes it harder to do one’s job, and be seen to be doing one’s job as a journalist al dente.  So I keep my personal distance. That’s just me. I think it was the BBC’s John Simpson who quoted someone as saying that people should always feel a journalist at the table was a menacing presence. As a journalist you’re not there for the people you’re dining with, you’re there for your readers/viewers.
  • If that’s true of journalists, then I can’t see any reason why it shouldn’t also be true of anyone being pitched. The pitchee — whether blogger, opinion shaper, or journalist — represents an opportunity for PR to get their word out. So anyone accepting pitches should have teeth. And be prepared to use them.
  • If you have teeth, you can’t expect — indeed, you wouldn’t want — PR to take your personal life into account. They can be nice about it, but it shouldn’t affect their pitch, and whether they’re nice about it or not, it shouldn’t affect your likelihood to bite. After all, you’re both supposedly on office time, and office rules apply. It doesn’t mean not sharing your personal life, but it means either being ready to have people say “sorry to hear about your cat’s demise, would you be interested in reviewing our new kitty litter?” or leaving out those parts of your life from your blog that may muddy this relationship.

Robert’s overall experience as a mega-blogger is an interesting one in itself, and should be studied in much greater detail. There’s a transparency there that is refreshing and I believe it has influenced the direction of technology blogging, PR, journalism and the whole environment in which technology has evolved. That’s quite a powerful contribution. But I feel we’re still tweaking the edges of this intersection and, perhaps as with many other parts of this new world, we may find the lessons of the old world still apply.