Tag: twitter

Journalistic Methods in Pakistan

ReallyVirtual2 Comments

One of the problems with news reports, whether in print or on a screen, is that most of us care enough to consume them but not enough to verify whether they are completely true, partially true or a whole pack of lies. This behavior is understandable as we have more important things to spend/waste our time on, like work, family and consumption of mindless entertainment.

All this changes if you are the news. After the ‘OBL tweet’, the more that I have tried to stay away from interviews and journalists, the more I have been thrust back into them. Ironic as it is, the last few months have allowed me to interact with a lot of journalists and observe how they go about practicing their profession. There are a few journalists who impressed me with their honesty and unbiased reporting, but the majority of journalism that I have witnessed has to do with loaded words, double-barreled questions and twisting of facts to paint a pre-conceived picture of the news, as they want to show it – some call it a ‘package’ in journalistic lingo. I had the chance to speak about my impression of journalism candidly with Steve Myers from Poynter, when he invited me for our SXSW 12 panel and talks at a few other institutes last year, and it was an educational experience. I have been trying to lay low and focus on my work instead of being a journalism critic since then – a role which I am still unqualified for, but it gets harder to ignore when you are the one being misquoted.

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to speak at the Social Media Mela in Karachi. Since May 2011, I have only scanned a very small portion of the thousands of articles written about Abbottabad, OBL and my tweets from ‘that night’, but while wasting time at the airport due to a delayed flight, I came across this ‘news’ from The News about my session at the SMM that day, and it shocked me by revealing that I had a daughter that I did not know of!

This piece of journalism has been nagging me for two weeks now, so I have no choice but to criticize it line by line – maybe this will even help a journalist or two, but at least writing it down will help me get it out of my head.

So first of all, the title – it says

The night that changed a tweeter’s life

Thankfully, my life has not changed much due to ‘the night’ – I am still living in Abbottabad, I am still doing my software consulting, and it has not made me richer by even a single penny (or rupee), but I guess that does not make a good headline.

The article then says

On Twitter, he is known as ‘Really Virtual’, but people worldwide know him as the guy who live-tweeted the Osama bin Laden raid in Abbottabad.

It is actually ReallyVirtual, or @ReallyVirtual – spaces are not allowed in twitter handles, but I guess the author doesn’t use twitter that much.

Before tweeting about the raid, the biggest achievement of Sohaib Akhtar’s life was to open up a coffee shop in Abbottabad, as he quipped he did not like the coffee there. But all that changed on the night of May 2, 2011.

The media people at SMM were given press kits, and the schedule in the press kit had the correct spelling for my name (for once), so this is a rather serious mistake. If this mistake was in a software, it would have been reported as a bug to be fixed in the next version – too bad news articles do not have next versions.

Then there’s the matter of the coffee shop being my ‘biggest achievement’ – at no point during the interview did I say or imply that. I do remember saying the coffee shop was an experiment in many interviews, but an experiment is certainly not a big achievement. Even the multiple technology patents that I have worked on or the successful silicon valley startup that I was a founding member of are not really ‘big achievements’, though they are much bigger than the experimental coffee shop that I started. The coffee shop is now being run by my wife and is doing well.

Sitting opposite the corporate lawyer and session moderator, Ayesha Tammy Haq, Akhtar spoke about how he did not know for an hour that a raid was under way. “Around 1am, I saw a helicopter hovering quite low in Bilal Town where I live, which is a rare event. And I tweeted my thoughts.”

The FAQ on my website has all the details about the raid and the tweets, but I guess the author wasn’t listening to me during the session and did not bother to check facts before writing the article either. I did not see a helicopter, I heard it, and to quote the Abbottabad Commission judges, I was an ‘audio witness’. I do not live in Bilal Town, I used to live a couple of kilometers away from it, a fact that I have repeated too many times to mention, in interviews and the FAQ as well.

For a minute, the helicopter took a few circles and then he heard a loud explosion that shattered a window of his house. And Akhtar tweeted that as well.

There’s a difference between ‘shattered’ and ‘shook’ or ‘rattled’ – the explosion did not shatter any windows, but I guess shattered sounds cooler so the author went with that.

“I tried giving it the benefit of doubt by thinking that it might be a UFO but it turned out to be more than that.” He, however, took the whole incident a lot more seriously when he started getting calls from the people he knew.

When people use quotes around text, at least I expect the enclosed text to have been actually uttered by the person quoted. What I said was that there were all sorts of rumors in the air, that it was a UFO, that it was an enemy aircraft etc. – I did not ‘give it the benefit of doubt by thinking that it might be a UFO’. An explosion is serious enough, so I did not need calls from people to take it seriously, I don’t know why I was quoted like this in the article.

“They informed me that a raid had apparently taken place around my area and a terrorist had been caught,” he shared with the audience that listened intently to his every word.

Nobody informed me about a raid around my area at that point in time, nobody said anything about a terrorist being caught either! There is no tweet where I shared this with the audience.

Curious to know what happened next, Ayesha asked him what he did after that. “Nothing,” he replied, “I tweeted that, went offline and read a book.”

Ah, finally something in the article that I agree with!

The next morning, Akhtar woke up to the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed by the US Navy Seals in a midnight raid. But what disturbed him more was that he had 25 missed calls and above a hundred emails on his account. And to top it all, he reached a whopping 105,000 followers on Twitter within a few days.

25 missed calls? Never said it. Above a hundred emails, okay, though I remember saying a couple of hundred.

Everyone wanted to know him all of a sudden. While he was taken aback by the “sudden attention”, he said that it was overwhelming to the point of being harassed.

Nobody wanted to ‘know me’, they did want information about Abbottabad, what the town was like, what was happening, and all the stuff that journalists are interested in – ‘knowing’ me was not one of them.

The people in the audience wanted to know if he was “bugged” by the intelligence agencies or was he threatened with dire consequences, to which Akhtar politely replied, no.

Correct.

“The first people to meet me were Mosharraf Zaidi and Omar Warraich. The media was the only department that harassed me. So I wrote answers to all the repeated questions that news channels were asking me and posted them online.”

‘The media’ in its entirety did not harass me, only one outlet tried to get in touch with me by coming with the local police to the coffee shop, which does not look good for business and I would count as harassment.

Akhtar also made it to Time magazine’s issue about the raid and the man who live-tweeted it.

Ayesha asked him if he was afraid. “I was for a while. Afraid of the impact this incident would have on Abbottabad and our country.”

The incident not only earned Akhtar many followers, but instilled a feeling of responsibility in him as well.

“Some people tweeted that Pakistan is in the Middle East and that I’m an Arab tweeting from God-knows-where. But I clarified that. Similarly, there were equally outrageous remarks about our country that I clarified as well.”

“Arab tweeting from God-knows-where”? God knows where the author got this line from. I don’t remember mentioning any outrageous remarks about our country either. I remember mentioning there were incorrect facts about Pakistan that I tried to correct when I could, and still do.

For people outside Abbottabad, the reality that the Osama bin Laden was found and killed in their own country was difficult to accept. But Akhtar said the people in Abbottabad forgot about it a few days after the incident. But the changes were evident and hard to ignore.

“For instance, there were security checks that are usually found in Lahore and Islamabad. People were not used to that. Similarly, foreigners were thoroughly checked etc. So all of that was difficult to adjust to.”

Changes that were difficult to adjust to, never said anything like that.

What is most striking about Akhtar is his down-to-earth nature. He was sitting easily and had no airs about him as he spoke about the incident and his life after it.

Aww thank you for the compliment dear author, but I don’t see any reason to be proud of the tweets or to develop an attitude due to the whole episode.

Married and father of a daughter, he said he had met with the judicial commission on the raid as well.

I have a son! Male, boy, 9 year old, and no reason to believe there is a daughter out there that I fathered either.

When asked about what Justice Javed Iqbal had told him as the investigation got over, “He said tweet on,” he replied smiling.

At least the news ends with something that I actually said.

So there it is, a news article on me, dissected, which is probably a typical example of how news/non-news in Pakistan is written/created. I do hope the Pakistani journalism industry matures to a point where people like me start to reconsider consuming traditional news again, but until then, I will let my Twitter feed push the news to me.

The Abbottabad you don’t get to see

ReallyVirtual49 Comments
Medical Students in Abbottabad
Medical Students in Abbottabad

With their American accents and attitudes, you will not be able to single out these three guys from the rest if they were sitting in a coffee shop in California (an airport queue is a different matter though). They have spent a significant part of their lives in the US or the UK, and probably came back to Pakistan to attend medical school – a cheap and logical option for many. The low tuition fees means that don’t need to take out student loans, and affiliations of the Pakistani medical schools with American and British medical schools means these students can usually get a transfer in the last few semesters – or, leave for specialization elsewhere. They are just three of the many regular patrons of Coffity (or ‘the coffee shop’ as I tend to call it), the small coffee shop that I started in Abbottabad after craving for a few months for real espresso shots. Every few days, I am pleasantly surprised to see the diversity of the people that live in Abbottabad and visit the coffee shop.

Five days after the Operation Geronimo, I had a little chat with these students and asked them about the impact that the OBL incident has had on their lives. The response was the ‘nobody really cares’ that I already expected, but when I asked if any of the dozens of international journalists had approached them and covered their campus life (colleges and universities cover a significant portion of the Abbottabad real estate), the answer was a surprising ‘No’. To loosely quote them, the journalists were more interested in getting to the 600 odd anti-American protestors that gathered after the friday prayers to chant and shout their hearts out against the American invasions, than they were to cover the everyday life that was barely disrupted by this incident. These students also wanted to share their opinion about OBL and how their lives have (not) changed at all, but they were never given a chance to do that, despite being part of an important segment of the Abbottabad population – students. People may not know this, but Abbottabad is more an academic town than it is a military town – even the PMA is an ‘Academy’.

 

I do understand that menacing shots (from a few inches below their chins, just to get as much of the beards as possible) of open-mouthed, bearded protestors wearing caps is always good raw material for interesting news, but our media should realize that they usually also have Arab (yes, you heard me right, Arab!) students studying in these medical colleges, along with dozens, if not hundreds, of Afghan students.

So if you are an international journalist who is still in Abbottabad and waiting for the demolition of ‘the compound’, do try to go and visit AMC, FMC and any other *MC in Abbottabad and talk to a few students. Their worldview might be slightly different from that of an average Pakistani stereo-type, and their accents may be too American (or British) to mark them as a Pakistani when they open their mouths, but who knows, what they have to say might actually be newsworthy to some people – people who are tired of watching beards and banners all the time.

Pakistan Iftar Timing Alerts via Twitter

Sohaib Athar5 Comments

UPDATE: For iftar timings for Lahore in 2009, you can follow iftartime on twitter.

If you use twitter, you can follow iftar2008pak to get iftar (and later on, sehri) alerts for Lahore (and later on, other cities).
Right now, iftar2008pak will send out a tweet 15 minutes and zero minutes before iftar – due to various lags, it won’t be entirely accurate (but close enough), so please don’t blame me on judgement day if anything goes wrong 😉
Do add me up on twitter too, I’m ReallyVirtual there.

UPDATE: I’m a bit too busy to enter data for other cities like Karachi, Islamabad etc. but if anyone wants to help out (it should take a few minutes of your time), do get in touch and I will share the login details and steps to take.

5 Reasons GreenWhite.org is a Success

Sohaib Athar11 Comments

A guru blogger once shared the following piece of wisdom with me:

Posts with lists are more ‘successful’.

Here is a list of reasons why I think GreenWhite is a successful blog. I have to write this post as a lot of people have approached me this week and asked what GreenWhite.org ( GnW) is all about and whether it actually is a successful blog or not. Among the people who have asked this question are:

GnW, for those who don’t know, is a technology blog focusing on the news, innovations and emerging trends in the Pakistani IT industry. I am no blog analyst, but I would call GreenWhite a big success because:

  1. GreenWhite has built a community – In the two years of its existence, GnW has managed to gather and engage a strong bunch of IT professionals around itself – people who are writing and participate in valuable discussions on the Pakistani IT industry. As a Pakistani IT professional who follows 400+ Pakistani blogs semi-regularly, I do not know of any other IT blog focused on the Pakistani IT industry that comes close in this regard. Do share the address in the URL if you know of one.
  2. GreenWhite serves a small niche successfully – This post is intended to be read by a dozen or so people – it does not matter if 50 or 5000 people read it, as long as the intended target audience gets the message. Similarly, if we stop fooling ourselves, the Pakistani IT industry is TINY – GnW aims to serve this small niche, and if you will go through any 10 random posts on GnW, you will agree that it does the job well, which is another measure of success.
  3. GreenWhite has original content – Since our tiny IT industry does not generate hundreds of news items every hour, so GnW authors have no option but to write original content. The posts on GnW are not ‘originalized’, which is my term for picking up a few dozen ‘blogworthy’ hot news items from a few hundred (preferably before the competition does it, so that your post gets listed for a few Google keywords) and quickly remixing and rewording the resultant body of text before pressing the publish button. To use a hackneyed expression, GnW usually has something to say, while most local blogs have to say something.
  4. GreenWhite has been a catalyst – My first introduction to GnW was through the Startup Insider sessions, which was a commendable series of informal sessions between the wannabe entrepreneurs and the veterans, held in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad in collaboration with P@SHA. Dozens of CEOs and IT professionals were speakers / panelists, and hundreds of people participated in the series, but apparently that endeavor did not get the projection that it deserved, as many IT bloggers say they have heard the GnW name for the first time only recently. Just as the Bloggers’ Meetups are attempting to bring the wannabe bloggers together, the Startup Insiders brought people interested in IT startups together and gave many of them the push needed to ‘do their own thing’. Not many other blogs can claim to ‘walk the walk’. GnW can.
  5. GreenWhite has decent statistics – I think many of the worlds’ best blogs are undiscovered, and usually have less than 100 regular visitors, and yet there are many people just want safety in numbers, so they go by analytics figures, don’t waste time on any blog that doesn’t get trackbacked by a million other blogs and dont read a book until it is a bestseller or a movie based on the book is in production. For people measure success in percentages and clickthroughs, GnW has around 1000 subscribers, is usually in the top 100K blogs on Alexa (and has #666 rank in – though I am not a stats freak, but achieving a sub-100K Alexa rank with 90% audience coming from Pakistan and a few hundred thousand visitors a month, all without explicit SEO might mean something to the statistician sort.

So there you have it, for what ever it is worth, GreenWhite is a successful blog IMHO.

Before I go, here is a bulleted list of pointers:

  • I was approached by strangers (now friends) during the LBM08 event, and then on Skype during the KBM08 event – they wanted to meet and congratulate GnW representatives, and I had to tell them that the blog was based in ISB. I wish GnW was represented in the meetup, but regardless of whether GnW attends any meetings or not, this is the only measure of success that I would aim for if I owned GnW – actually no further justification of success should be required.
  • Hot Chick - reallyI read some twitter friend LOLing and saying that people believe that the success of a blog is limited to those who aim to create a difference in their society. That would be wrong, though I don’t know any blogger who would generalize success like that. I believe that boobie blogs may have their need in the world, just like gadget blogs, social welfare blogs or porn. The measure of a blog’s success is whatever its owner and readers want it to be – sometimes it is thoughts and dreams, sometimes it is rants, sometimes it is monetization by prolific content generation, and sometimes it is pics of hot chicks – but that is just my simplistic view of things, and you are welcome to disagree.
  • To answer another (very enthusiastic, judging from the !!!s) friend who said “… success story? honestly, this is the FIRST time I read this blog or even heard about it!!!” – it is simply because you belong to a different segment. You are facing the west, GnW is facing the east. In the blaagosphere fruit market, you are an apple, GnW is an orange, and there are melons and mangos and hundreds of vegetables, fruits and nuts like me around. Sorry to burst your bubble, but your knowledge of a blog’s existance is not a measure of success – after all, ten years ago, you didn’t know where babies come from!!! (I kid).

Disclaimer/Disclosure:

I have written 3 odd posts on GreenWhite.org so far. They are:

http://greenwhite.org/2008/10/24/rentacoder-says-stay-away-from-pakistanis/

http://greenwhite.org/2008/10/29/rentacoder-removes-offensive-message-and-applogizes/

http://greenwhite.org/2008/09/23/the-evolution-of-begging/

Wateen Spampaign on Pakistani Blogs

Sohaib Athar16 Comments

I can’t say that I’m disappointed with Wateen, as I don’t really care at all about that brand or whatever they sell, be it bandwidth, cell connection or water-balloons. I do have a serious problem though, when there is an intrusive attempt by corporations to use my belongings (this blog being one) or my surrounding to  sell their products – and Wateen did just that!

Today, around noon, I received a comment spam from Wateen advertising their broadband packages on a post that has nothing to do with broadband.

Exhibit A - Spam by Wateen
Exhibit A - Spam by Wateen

The spam was sent by a certain H. S. Kiani (probably a desi John Doe) from the IP 116.71.34.205, with the email waristerrorism@yahoo.com.

I whois’ed the IP to verify that it was official Wateen spam generated from their own servers (and not a negative marketing campaign by one of their competitors), before trying to call their tollfree number and asking them about a certain Mr. Kiani, and was amused to see that the IP belonged to PTCL.

Despite being a very satisfied PTCL customer, I sent an email to Mr. Kiani, showing my interest in their amazing offer, and I also added him up on Yahoo Messenger, but so far there has been no response from him. If he does reply (one can dream, no?) I intend to ask him a LOT of questions.

A quick look at my analytics plugin (Open Web Analytics) revealed that the visitor had hit the same post twelve times before submitting the spam.

Rasala Group Spam
Wateen Spam

In parallel, I was also asking my tweeple on Twitter if they had received the same spam today, and not surprising, many of them confirmed their blogs, or the blogs that they read, were targetted by Wateen today as well. Here are a few tweets from this noon, recording things as they were uncovered. The ones in italics are mine.

  • Nice! Wateen (or some Wateen rival) just sent some comment spam about their broadband on my blog, including their URL and phone #! about 2 hours ago from TwitterFox
  • Has anyone else from Pakistan received comment spam from Wateen about their 1mbps package today? about 1 hour ago from TwitterFox
  • UzEE @reallyvirtual Lol. Tell them you wont remove the comment if they give you 6 month subscription free. about 2 hours ago from mobile web in reply to ReallyVirtual
  • @uzee I’m emailing the guy who spammed me, and calling the Wateen # mentioned afterwards. Funny thing, they used PTCL IPs to spam! about 1 hour ago from TwitterFox in reply to UzEE
  • phpgurru @ReallyVirtual I also received wateen spam from the IP 116.71.34.205 40 minutes ago from TwitterFox in reply to ReallyVirtual
  • aqeeliz @ReallyVirtual Quite a few other Pakistani blogs I read have gotten comment spam about Wateen package. less than 5 seconds ago from web in reply to ReallyVirtual
  • harisn @aqeeliz @ReallyVirtual I also got that Wateen spam comment. Infact I still have it in my pending comments hehe 8 minutes ago from m.slandr.net in reply to aqeeliz

Shafiq from Shafiq.pk also shared that the text in the comment spam is the same as the one broadcast in Wateen’s radio ads, so this is a coordinated campaign. Aamir Atta pointed out this article by Bites85 on his blog propakistani.com that notices the recent rise in spampaigns by Wateen and other telcos very recently, so at least a few other bloggers have noticed as well.

This is the normally the point in the post where I start my rant, but it is almost my bedtime so I will not spread a lot of negativity, and instead, I will just ask a few questions and hope that the relevant people (read Mr. Kiani & Co.) will step up and answer them. What I really want to know is:

Wateen:

  • How could you possibly conceive a spampaign in the Pakistani Blogosphere and not worry one bit about it backfiring? Do you think the Pakistani bloggers are so naive that we will let your comments pass by unnoticed and let them stay on our blogs?
  • How can you support bloggers’ meetups all over Pakistan one month and spam the same bloggers the very next month?
  • I wrote down my email and blog URL on paper during LBM08 , which was supported by you. Did you take the URLs so that you may add me to your spam list? Did I opt-in? or are you spamming all the blogs aggregated on bloggers.pk ?
  • Do you think I will trust your brand in the future, after you abuse my contact information?
  • I was all praises for LBM08 and still think its effect as a catalyst was significant, despite whatever motivations you had as a supporter. Do you think that I’ll feel the same way the next time you support any event?

PTCL/PTA:

Bloggers:

  • Did you receive the same spam from Wateen this week? Care to share your  blog URL?

Enough questions. Time to sleep.