Internet Filtering in the United Arab Emirates- What you see if you hit a forbidden site
The full list of prohibited content is here. Removal requests for the UAE firewall can be submitted here.
Hair removal cream Veet bids: “Goodbye Bush”
Some campaigns are brilliant and of their time. So much so that people mention them to their friends and write about them on the blogosphere - a clear sign of a winning idea.
The ad campaign for hair removal cream Veet in the Australian Daily Telegraph was launched by Creative agency Euro RSCG, to note the departure of President George 'Dubya' Bush and in of course to promote Veet's hair removal cream.
And even better in context:
Daily Star bombs The Sun newspaper (but is an in-joke really a good campaign strategy?)
With bingo bringing in high revenue streams for online newspaper editions, it is little wonder that the Daily Star chose to hit The Sun where it hurts with its bingo advertising campaign - but bombing The Sun's Wapping HQ with Bingo balls?
I'm sure the Sun's staff in Wapping will see the hilarity. After all, James Murdoch has recently decided to postpone the move from the Wapping site to a new venue, at least until financial conditions improve.
Whether any Daily Star readers will understand the in-joke is quite another matter.
Libel as an expense line – Robert Murat and the Cost of Doing Business
Robert Murat, the first named suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, has settled his libel action against a number of British newspapers over claims he was involved in her disappearance. And the sum of the settlement? It is estimated at somewhere in the region of £500,000.
To you and me this might be a large sum of money, but in context it raises an important question: Is this sort of sum a deterrent against libellous press?
If you look at the detail carefully, you will realise that between eleven media outlets this averages a payout of £45,000 per company. This is hardly an enormous expense, if you consider that these are vast organisations with multi-million pound budgets. In fact, it doesn't even tickle the bottom-line.
When Madeleine McCann disappeared and Murat was first named as a suspect, British newspapers had to take a call as to whether they should take the risk and apply different rules to Murat's case because he was abroad and there was less likely to be an issue with contempt of court proceedings, or libel. The Murat story sold large quantities of newspapers, and made substantial revenue for media outlets.
If media owners look back on Murat's libel case and consider whether they would have reported it in the same way again knowing of today's outcome, I suspect they probably would.
So while the Press Gazette's view is that "Big payout for Murat could increase pressure on journalists", media bosses may well look at the bottom line and say - it's just the cost of doing business.
Gitmo Interrogation Video Released (View it here)
Guantanamo Bay Interrogation Video Released - Gitmo Interrogation of Canadian Prisoner
Lawyers for a 16-year-old Canadian prisoner at Guantanamo Bay released seven hours of videotaped interrogations today, providing a first-ever glimpse into the secretive world of questioning enemy combatants at the isolated U.S. prison in Cuba.
Omar Khadr's lawyers released excerpts of their client being questioned at Guantanamo Bay in 2003. The videos are available to view here:
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Pregnant Man Thomas Beatie Gives Birth to New Lengths of Ratings Spin
Here's a story you would only dwell on briefly if it were on Jerry Springer: a woman who wanted to become a man had her breasts removed and took hormones to make her look more masculine, but still kept all the original plumbing. Then she gets pregnant - not all that surprising, as she's still biologically a woman.
And then someone has a slow news day, and "Pregnant Man" is born. Yes, it is a human interest story, but repeating the words "pregnant" and "man" in close proximity makes it into much, much, more: a miracle, a mystery, a freak show event.
And the interviews continue - ABC alone shows him four times in less than three months, Oprah puts her hands on his growing belly. A miracle! A pregnant man! A story we will now have to follow to its conclusion and the birth (for which I wish them well, by the way).
Better still, to increase the excitement of the media circus - Pregnant Man announces he wants more kids after this one. "A sequel!" someone cries out in the news room. There will be Pregnant Man 2, and 3 and whole franchise to boot. The Filipino community points out that Pregnant Man, Thomas, was born Tracy Lagundino, to a Filipino father and a Caucasian mother. Someone is writing a book, someone else is writing the script. A man-made kitchen-sink story if ever there was one.
And a couple of trivia notes for your background files:
1. The Druze, a small secretive Islamic sect, believe that the messiah will be born to a man. This new arrival can come at any moment, so all Druze men walk around with baggy sack trousers, to catch the messiah when he pops out, and so that he doesn’t hit himself by falling on the ground.
2. Last year Neonode, a Swedish mobile phone company, also used the Pregnant Man headline to create a buzz - around their new product the N2 Phone. This was apparently because their chief product designer was expecting to "deliver" the new phone – after a long pregnancy. They had set up The Pregnant Man Blog, which I am sure now gets a lot of weird and wonderful traffic.
UPDATE on 4 July: Well "Pregnant Man" has now given birth. The full story is here.
This is a story waiting for a sequel, if ever there was one...
The mystery of Entela Hysko – And how her name became a small Internet snowball
I'm still piecing the puzzle together, but for those of you who have spent an hour or two (or three) trying to figure out who Entela Hysko is, here is my analysis of how you got to hear about her.
It's one of those Internet phenomena, that you look at and think: this is an example of something that can happen on a much bigger scale. It's a mini-Internet-storm, but one that you can model future hurricanes on, or perhaps Net-avalanches.
It all starts with the tragic death, in a car accident, of Albania's biggest media mogul, 40 year old Dritan Hoxha. Hoxha died in Tirana on Friday 23 May 2008, when his Ferrari Fiorano crashed into a tree.
Hoxha founded Top Media Group, which spanned radio and TV stations, including a highly successful pay TV platform. He was a big name in Albania.
The news item which reported Hoxha's death also mentioned that the police confirmed that a 27 year old woman, Entela Hysko , was with him in the car at the time of the crash, and also died as a result.
What seems to have happened afterwards, is that the Internet was flooded with searches with the name "Entela Hysko", all trying to find out who she was ('who was the mystery lady in the Ferrari with the media mogul?'). But alas, this information was not available anywhere, and the only thing that came up was the same police report, replicated in news pieces in Albanian, Slovenian and Serbian.
What made things worse for those searching for Entela Hysko, was that quite a few websites, this one included, contain a feed of the most searched for words on Google, taken from Google Trends. When Entela's name became one of the top trended search words, the sites with Google Trends feeds were the only places (in English) that contained the words "Entela Hysko" - and as a result, they themselves got hit by large numbers of clicks that came from these searches.
It followed that site owners, baffled by the spike in traffic on their sites, all driven by this unfamiliar name, started searching for answers. Naturally, they googled Entela's name too, which conversely only made things worse. A snowball effect started, bringing further sites into this recursive pattern, and making the phenomenon even bigger (including pushing the term further upwards on Google Trends).
I hope that this entry may help to end this growing effect, especially bearing in mind the young woman who tragically lost her life in the crash.
UPDATE ON 29 MAY 08 - I've heard from several people who have expressed disgust that Dritan Hoxha death was all over the news and Entela who was with him barely got a mention.
One of her friends produced the following video and placed it on YouTube:
Page3 of The Sun – Breasts, Dubai Style
Cover 'em up love!
I just had to share this one: if you get The Sun newspaper in Dubai, you'll find that all Page3 breasts are covered by what looks like a thick black marker.
Of course, this is done to guard the modesty of the model, and I'm sure Danni, 22, from Coventry would be delighted (she supports David Beckham's efforts to stamp out malaria, by the way).