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Pro-Symbian Internet m@fia and their machinations exposed

Version 8.

Symbian is an operating system (and consortium) for smart mobile phones conceived by Nokia and Psion to prevent Microsoft from overtaking cellphone industry - the "smart phone" part of the industry, part that lately grows rapidly.

Apart from corporations and companies that are in most cases nameless, albeit big, players, there are also journalists and bloggers, who not only are known by their names, but also who are influencing significantly how average people think about this new, emerging rapidly, category of cellphones: smartphones. We have 21st century now and English is a de facto global language - that´s why some online publications have bigger or more influencial readership, than paper newspapers and magazines. While marketing machines of big corporations still play leading role in a market success of products, slowly a trend can be observed: community websites, blogs and online magazines are gaining importance and influence... to the degree, that soon a corporation will not be able to succeed with a product, without appreciation and acknowledgement from the online community. ... it looks like the Cluetrain of Doc Searls is truly approaching.

Symbian poses to be "like Linux, but for cellphones", and Symbian consortium often uses the word "open" to even more pretend that Symbian is good, like clearly Open Source Software must be, due to pure intentions of people who develop it. Symbian also tries to hide the fact, that due to sheer numbers of units sold, Symbian is mainly just Nokia´s tool to combat Microsoft, and not a multipolar cellphone industry initiative. Similarly, contrary to the Symbian propaganda, Symbian OS is not an open source operating system but a closed proprietary system based on an outdated EPOC operating system for PDAs from British company Psion (thus it´s no coincidence that Symbian consortium is located in UK although most developers of Symbian work for Nokia in Tampere city in Finland).

Of course we cannot cover here (yet) all involved people, so we will mention here just some sample names to give you idea how this mafia works. Pro-Symbian Internet mafia consists of 2 categories of people: 1) professional journalists, writing for online publications, who pose to be against Microsoft for the good of common people and thus support "morally good" Symbisn, but in fact are just doing tabloid-style journalism to maximize readership 2) bloggers, who are students or have a job, but maintain in a free time some websites related to Symbian, for which they write alone or with help of likely minded Symbian fanatics. One very important thing to realize is, that those 2 categories of people are not acting separetely, but in cooperation - they are linking to each other websites in various articles and news items and thus supporting each and supporting the cause of Symbian.

Among professional online journalists, that are strong Symbian supporters, one of the most known is Andrew Orlowski:

... who writes anti-Microsoft and pro-Symbian news stories for "The Register" - a British online tabloid dedicated to Information Technology issues. Andrew Orlowski has citizenship of UK although he lives usually in San Franciso and is of Polish origins (hence the strange surname). He is a person, who sometimes is getting nasty to people, who happen to like Microsoft, to the extend that he publishes lies about them, publishes private emails publicly and has no problem with ruining life of other people just to attract even more readership in an old fashioned tabloid style. He is a nasty person, who just pretends to be a "fighter for the good". Speciality of Andrew Orlowski has been to attack and ridicule all efforts of Microsoft in cellphone industry, and at the same time to support Symbian in all possible ways. Nokia supports "The Register" by buying stories from it, for the sake of publishing them in their own "The Feature" website, and by inviting journalists like Andrew Orlowski, to various conferences and meetings (and covering costs). Andrew Orlowski himself has no technical skills and no technical experiences and that´s why for inspiration he is reaching towards writings of more technically talented people like other, external, professional journalists ("The Register" is even syndicating their content from time to time) and bloggers like Russell Beattie:

[picture removed on the personal request of Russell Beattie]

Russell Beattie without frequent links from Andrew Orlowski and "The Register", would be a totally unknown Java programmer, and his blog would be unknown - and it is not just a theory but practice, that can easily be proved with calculation of how Google PageRank of one website influences the ranking of the page to which it links. "The Register" has high ranking (8) and thus pulls up, with frequent linking, the ranking of Russell Beattie´s blog to higher value (7). At first glance blog of Russell Beattie seems to be a nice and sincere place - but only until you will learn the true nature of this guy, which is: constant deleting of non-positive posts and blind, full of ignorance hatred towards Microsoft and uncritical love towards Java. On top of that he is publishing private e-mails sent to him on his blog, and is sending such private e-mails to several other people - he is a very nasty person. The fact, that Russell Beattie is working in USA for a company financed by Nokia Ventures - a subsidiary of Nokia may be partially a reason. But the reality is, that he simply has very narrow horizons and little knowledge of anything other than Java - his grasp of .NET is nonexistent and thus can´t be objective - can´t be platform agnostic. While blog of Russell Beattie is only written by himself, his another, less known (Google-wise) creation is Mobitopia, that theoretically is platform agnostic but in fact is just another place where Russell and also some other Microsoft-bashing Symbian fanatics are writing. One of the Microsoft-bashing writers for Mobitopia is Rafe Blandford:

Rafe Blandford is a student of geography (as if it would have to do anything with Symbian - but it doesn´t), who lives in UK, and owns second-popular (after my-symbian.com and according to Alexa.com; All About Symbian has only traffic rank of 58976 - much smaller compared to 13127 of my-symbian.com) community website dedicated to Symbian cellphones: All About Symbian. He also owns spin-off websites like Your Symbian and All About NGage. While Russell Beattie has some, albeit narrow minded, understanding of wireless technologies, Rafe Blandford is a total ignorant - a small kid - with one idea in mind: blind anti-Microsoftism (his website mentions and links to stories from "The Register" and fuels anti-Microsoft hatred) and uncritical support for everything about Symbian. Besides this: any, even slightly pro-Microsoft, postings are being removed from forums of his websites giving one-sided and untrue view of the situation on the market of smartphones.

While we clearly couldn´t cover in this short story neither all characters from this pro-Symbian mafia, nor all aspects of their activities, we exposed however some facts about them and gave you just the first glimpse. This truthful story will be extended in future - watch version number above...

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It is worth mentioning that apart from above mentioned people, who often use dirty tricks and spread anti-Microsoft hatred, instead of concentrating themselves on Symbian itself, there are some web publishers, who have more professional approach, for example my-symbian.com and SymbianOne.com .

my-symbian.com got recently community award from Nokia itself - other contestants were "The Register" (above mentioned), "All About Symbian" (above mentioned) and "InfoSync World". my-symbian.com concentrates on publishing news mainly about new software releases and user support within forums and it features also reviews of Symbian phones. There is no anti-Microsoft hatred but just professional approach and concentration on the topic at hand. According to Alexa.com my-symbian.com has the biggest traffic among Symbian dedicated websites, traffic rank: 13127.

SymbianOne.com is another website, that has yet little traffic according to Alexa.com, but also tries to concentrate on Symbian stuff first, instead of spreading anti-Microsoft hatred and doing dirty tricks. Glenn Letham wrote to msmobiles.com this:
what about SymbianOne.com? Launched last August when I left wirelessdevnet as my role as managing editor, this site is rapidly rising to the top of the original content and true symbian-developer focused resources. Symbian expert Richard Bloor maintains the technical contributions while myself, glenn letham, heads up the content syndication, merketing, PR, and contacts with editorial contributors (our articles have appeared in computerworld, Nokia newsletters, WDN, the register, and numerous others). Not mentioned, but definitely worth a look and should be in here.. its almost insulting that you hype my-symbian so much and leave us out - my-symbian is pretty much a store-front to promote the sale of symbian games, downloads, and ringtones. Unlike many of the other "news" portals devoted to the OS, we´ve been in attendance at a number of symbian developer events like NMIC, the N-gage launch, Nokia´s Mobile media market, a symbian S60 innaugural developer training seminar, CTIA etc...

As far as above mentioned "hyping" is concerned: we don´t believe what webmasters say - we estimate traffic with Alexa.com (see links above) and PageRank with Google Toolbar. This what webmasters want us to believe is irrelevant. Relevant are only these numbers and the facts: which websites stick to professional writing about Symbian itself, and which websites use dirty tricks and spread irrational anti-Microsoft hatred and propaganda.