Southeast Asia is still dealing with the technical aftershocks of the Taiwan earthquake, with Internet access in Singapore slightly better than yesterday. From Singapore’s ChannelNewsAsia:

Taiwan’s largest phone company Chung-hwa Telecom said the quake which measured 6.7 on the Richter scale disrupted some 98% of Taiwan’s communications capacity with Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Hong Kong.

Due to the high cost of such submarine cables, most countries co-invest in a common communications infrastructure, and this multi-billion-dollar information superhighway has now been damaged.

The earthquake was so massive that even SingTel’s backup alternative cables were knocked out.

Some recent experiences:

• Since you’re reading this post, you can see host provider Dreamhost has been quite good, but some connection-oriented services like secure shell have not worked well.
• Google is very hard or impossible to access via Singtel and others. Search front page does not even bring up partial content, and Google Mail has been unreachable for over 24 hours. However, access to Yahoo’s search page is lightning fast.
• Skype voice calls from here were very poor yesterday. A call to the “echo123” test user last night was largely gibberish with packet loss of greater than 50%, probably due to congestion on what channels are left. Today, on a Skype video call to the US, it took a few tries to get a connection down to 20% packet loss. Even with that high loss rate, the audio/video was still very usable. Kudos to Skype for having a codec and transport that survives these conditions.
• Reports from friends in China say that PRC’s already “nonspeedy” connections have felt sluggish.

This is a counterpoint to the “death of distance” meme. In these situations, there is a benefit of having an email service provider near you geographically. (I’ve been out of luck accessing US-based Gmail).

With expanses of water separating countries around the Rim of Fire, the region will need to come up with more innovative and robust backup plans. After the South Asia tsunami, satellite communication was the solid backup for voice communication. But those “pipes” are too small to handle so much high speed Internet traffic. I can imagine ASEAN might be interested in collaborating on a true fault-tolerant infrastructure for the region that can survive catastrophic losses of submarine communication.

At least this outage coincides with the natural holiday slowdown for many companies. There is some serenity in being forced away from cyberspace and into meatspace.

The recent earthquake near Taiwan has had a major impact on Internet communications in the SE Asia region. While in Singapore for the holidays, access this morning was so poor on SingTel DSL, that over half of visited sites timed out, and most others were too slow to be functional. From CNN:

Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom said two of four major undersea cables out of Taiwan had been affected. Voice circuits had been reduced to 40 per cent of capacity to the United States and just 2 per cent to most parts of Southeast Asia.

PCCW, Hong Kong’s main fixed-line telecoms provider, said several undersea cables it part-owned had been damaged. “Data transfer is down by half,” a spokeswoman said.

Both Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel), Southeast Asia’s top phone company, and local rival StarHub Ltd., said customers were suffering slow access to Internet pages.

It’s amazing how fragile the Internet is in this part of the Pacific rim, even for the first-world locales above. We’ve become so dependent on it, that nearly everyone I’ve talked to has been affected.

This will possibly prevent my participation in the WikipediaWeekly podcast, where we use Skype to conference in all the panelists.

The Times Online is reporting the recent Wikia and Amazon partnership will result in a new search engine:

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo!
Mr Wales has begun working on a search engine that exploits the same user-based technology as his open-access encyclopaedia, which was launched in 2003.

The project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”.

Mr Wales told The Times that he was planning to develop a commercial version of the search engine through Wikia Inc, his for-profit company, with a provisional launch date in the first quarter of next year.

…

“Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results,” he said.

Spammers and commercial ventures are also learning how to manipulate Google’s computer-based search, he added.

Some initial thoughts:

• I’ve run into the same situation Wales describes in terms of “hotel” searches bringing up tons of agents and folks who have gamed the search engine algorithm for their top spots. They are not necessarily useless, but they very often have a low signal/noise ratio. But it’s not clear what should come up at the top instead. Spammers will certainly try to game the “human oriented” process Wikia puts into place, just like Wikipedia is facing a big spam problem. Will Wikia have the staff/community to combat this?
• Related to this, how will Wikia get a dedicated community to create better search results? Will a grassroots community help Wikia, a for profit company, further its mission and revenue generating activity? People are willing to contribute to Wikipedia because it is a nonprofit project, spreading knowledge and free (as in freedom) content. If you try to build the same around a for-profit activity, the dynamics are drastically different.
• It seems like rather than start from scratch with another search engine, a hybrid approach of using Google’s algorithmic search, plus the external links from Wikipedia, Wikitravel, etc. could be enough to “massage” the results to become more useful. The problem with depending purely on human-oriented processes for recommending links for a search engine result, is that humans might be good for the long-term horizon, but spidering the Internet gets the fastest changing information.
• The name is rather unwieldy. Wikiasari sounds like a plural of Wikisaurus, part of the nonprofit Wiktionary project. I predict lots of Wikisauri, Wikisari and Wikiasauri typos.

More related stories by IT Wire and UPI.

Despite still being widely blocked in China, Wikipedia still ranks high according to China Websites Ranking (中国网站排名). It’s the #1 online encyclopedia, and the #3 overall reference site.

This is actually quite surprising. It seems to indicate that even with the PRC actively blocking Wikipedia’s traffic into China, folks have sought out Wikipedia’s content over sites that are more easily available. We know the Internet has largely been considered an “entertainment and communication highway,” so let’s consider the general users of reference sites in China, namely students.

We’ve known for a while most college students in China are savvy enough to use proxy servers to skirt Internet blocking. It’s been thought they use proxies only on occasion, since firing up the software is such a nuisance. But it seems they may be bothering to do so when it comes to Wikipedia. That would be in sync with Wikipedia’s incredible popularity among high school and college students in the US. (Tell an American university student you’re taking away their YouTube, Myspace and Wikipedia, and they’ll likely complain the most about missing Wikipedia).

Another surprise — the folks who started the China Websites Ranking site include the State Council Information Office, which has a hand in the operation of the Great Firewall. So the SCIO’s own ranking shows that folks are getting around the blocks, and in large numbers.

ENCYCLOPEDIAS:

REFERENCE SITES:

Caveat: Though there’s not much information about their methodology, they say they have “experts” involved, and their tool looks quite like Alexa. So take it with some skepticism. Also, their numbers seem to be dated back to September of 2006, around the time that Wikipedia was unblocked for a brief period, so that may have skewed the results somewhat.

Time magazine made its annual pick of Person of the Year, and it’s “You.” It’s more dramatic if you have the paper edition which has a mirrored panel on the front in a Youtube frame, so you see your reflection. Pundits are already labeling it “cop out” and “lame.” (This is not unprecedented though. Remember Time chose the Personal Computer as their 1982 “Machine of the Year”)

But as someone who has focused on participatory media and a book about Wikipedia, you can imagine I found it a clever choice, even if the associated essays were not so interesting. You’re better off going to Edge or Corante. An excerpt from Time’s writeup graf:

“It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.”

Myspace wouldn’t be my choice for the list, since Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal, Xanga and others were around much earlier. I’d much rather see the real meta-filtering of Slashdot, Digg and Dailykos explained, or an examination the phenomenon outside the U.S., like with Korea’s Cyworld online community.

To the critics — sometimes there are indeed weird results with user-generated stuff. When I was doing a search for this article, I did a Google search for:

time you wikipedia

Try the Google search, in that order. Yahoo gives the same result.
And don’t hold it against Wikipedia. For some reason, people are linking to an article about a… cat.

UPDATE: Good post from my former partner in teaching citizen media, Dan Gillmor. “I look forward to the day when Time and other traditional magazines fully embrace us when it comes to the journalism. This is coming, and faster than anyone (including me) would have predicted just a year or two ago. It can’t come fast enough, because the time is short to make the transition.”

For the last year or two, there has been some mini-conflict as to whether Larry Sanger, the first editor in chief of Nupedia and “chief instigator” of Wikipedia should be referred to as co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Jimmy Wales.

This weekend, Larry posted his case for the title, and it’s rather thorough. Would be interesting to see what folks think, and whether this ends the debate.

This week, Citizen Lab released the Psiphon tool for surfing the Net “freely and securely” by having trusted friends and family members run a special version of a personal p-r-o-x-y server via SSL. Its biggest advantage is that it does not require any client software whatsoever.
I’ll post a full rundown of the tool this week. It’s an impressive accomplishment that, while not the magic silver bullet, is another excellent utility for the tool chest.

At Danwei, Ann Condi has a nice roundup of the general “apathy” of Internet users in China about getting around the Great Firewall. It’s worth a read.

Those outside of China often imagine hordes of Internet savvy Chinese Web surfers scouring the Internet for cracks in the Great Firewall, avidly downloading precious snippets of information blocked by the government to disseminate among the circle of politically-aware Chinese cybernauts. The hope is that the Internet is having a transformative effect on China by allowing The Truth – or at least some essential truths – to seep into this tightly controlled information environment. And surely (the assumption goes) the vanguard in this process of “peaceful evolution” would be young, English-speaking urban professionals.

This image is largely a myth.

It’s not hard to see why. Most Chinese language content they seek is all inside the PRC and filtered by domestic companies because they are within the sovereign borders of the PRC.

As long as content does not hit on the sensitive topics, Chinese surfers can get through to international sites. But cleverly, the PRC government always returns a technical error (ie. “TCP connection reset”) which makes it hard to determine if it’s an intentional block. The other day, a media executive and Chinese national referred to the no-no words as 3T1F, which I thought was a nice succinct way of putting it:

But would life without censorship necessarily “free” Chinese minds? Would they start clamoring for the truth?

Consider this: American web surfers have a completely unfiltered Internet, but they’re mainly using email, Youtube, Myspace, sports, entertainment and news sites. Being free of technical censorship, however, does not necessarily make for an informed populace.

• Americans are oblivious to similar historical ulcers, like the illegal annexation of Hawaii and overthrow of the monarchy by rich American businessmen backed by the US military.

• Most citizens know nothing about the CIA staging a 1953 coup to remove democratically elected Mossadegh in Iran. You want democracy in the Middle East? Well they had it. The U.S. usurped it.

• How about the disgraceful working conditions in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands where U.S. minimum wage does not apply, and with sweat shops and child prostitution a common sight? Congressmen in the U.S. actively sought to keep Saipan in third world status to exploit the cheap labor and dreadful working conditions.

What’s the point? It’s easy to see the splinter with the Great Firewall when there is a log in your own eye.

Of course we’d like to see a day when China’s Internet can become more open for the benefit of Chinese and for the benefit of the world. I’m confident that will happen sooner than later. I’ve already made the case that participation from PRC users would be great for the global community.

But being jingoistic and simplistic about it is problematic, and even harmful. The moral righteousness exhibited by many Western countries and NGOs trying to push for change is enough to make even the most staunch critics of censorship within China wince in disgust.

The foreign news media in Beijing (and the rest of China) are cautiously optimistic after new regulations were announced this morning. Many of the guidelines are technicalities about equipment and visas. But the most prominent things in the new nine “articles” that stand out (China Daily, and government site):

• Article 1: These Regulations are formulated to facilitate reporting activities and… to advance and promote the Olympic Spirit during the Beijing Olympic Games and the preparatory period.

Nice public relations move and pleasant wording.

• Article 6: To interview organizations or individuals in China, foreign journalists need only to obtain their prior consent.

This seems like it could be liberating, if you don’t need a government handler trailing a video news team (as you have now). However, organizations and companies may still feel they had better clear it with the local authorities. Also, I would find it hard to believe this would be an absolute policy.

• Article 7: Foreign journalists may, through organizations providing services to foreign nationals, hire Chinese citizens to assist them in their reporting activities.

Again, the choke point could still be these “organizations providing services” who might need to clear things with authorities. Still appears that PRC nationals will not be able to serve as full bylined journalists for foreign publications. Will have to see how significant this is.

• Article 9: These Regulations shall come into force as of 1 January 2007 and expire on 17 October 2008.

Unfortunately they do have a definite length. A possibility for permanent change after 2008?