Category Archives: Technology

Analyzing Occupy Wall Street, with Rushkoff and Wikipedia

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Doug Rushkoff has a great piece on CNN deconstructing the Occupy Wall Street motivations and goals. Just publishing this is commendable on the news network’s part, since he aims his sights right on CNN’s own anchor Erin Burnett for the shallow, gotcha journalism she debuted this week on her new TV show.

I’d also been thinking along Rushkoff’s lines. What exactly was Occupy Wall Street trying to achieve? In many ways, it resembled the WTO protests I covered in 2005 in Hong Kong. That mishmash of protesters from the “Global South,” subsidized farmers from Korea, Southeast Asian sex workers, and domestic maids, among others, had common gripes, but exhibited no central leadership or coherent manifesto. You felt the vibe. You knew what they were against. But you didn’t know where it was going.

WTO protesters in 2005 in Hong Kong

To me, Occupy Wall Street reminds me a lot like the folks who edit Wikipedia — a leaderless grassroots gathering of passionate individuals with similar concerns, trying to find consensus. Rushkoff describes this better as: a “decentralized network-era culture,” concerned about sustainability in their movement, rather than victory.

“It is not about one-pointedness, but inclusion and groping toward consensus. It is not like a book; it is like the Internet,” says Rushkoff.

The full piece is worth the read, because it’s this type of analysis Rushkoff does best: Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don’t get it – CNN.com.

Egypt: Crowdsourcing Speak2Tweet Transcription

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With the Internet and mobile blackout in Egypt, a lot of attention has been drawn to the Google project Speak2Tweet, which allows people to call a phone number and leave a message. That audio file is then put up on SayNow, and the page is Tweeted out as @Speak2Tweet.

I’ve collected 1070+ of these messages since it started, and plotted how often they occur on a chart.

What’s fascinating is that onlookers decided it wasn’t enough. So as a grassroots project, Twitter user @BaghdadBrian started a public Google Spreadsheet, and asked for volunteers to catalog all the audio messages, and transcribe them. His request got tweeted, and retweeted.

People came, to the tune of 50 or so simultaneously reading, listening and writing entries. It was so popular, it overwhelmed the limits of Google Docs. (I know, I helped to automate the importation of Speak2Text entries, and things got very sluggish.).

Other volunteers then translated those messages into English (and French, among others). After moving to more restricted access, the results of this crowdsourcing is now served up on http://egypt.alive.in.

Transcripted message from @Speak2Tweet on egypt.alive.in

Transcripted message from @Speak2Tweet on egypt.alive.in

Appreciate for a moment the chain of software and human effort that has been slapped together within two days to accomplish this:

Egyptian -> plain old telephone line -> voice message -> digital recording -> SayNow web site -> @Speak2Tweet twitter feed -> scraper -> Google Spreadsheet -> human transcription -> human translation -> human double checking -> exported to CMS -> appears on web site.

Open source software, APIs and free tools have made this possible. But even more important, crowdsourcing and collaboration are now part of the standard toolkit, and it’s amazing to see how quickly this has become part of our “new media literacy,” such that within hours, it can be harnessed for human rights and crisis response.

(For more on this ongoing trend, please do visit the awesome CrisisCommons project)

What Hath Wikipedia Wrought?

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At Wikisym 2010, I delivered the closing keynote to a great set of academics and researchers from around the world.

It was also the first public venue where I described a new project I’m starting called WikiFactCheck, which attempts to bring the culture of reliable sources, verifiability and citations set by Wikipedia to the task of fact checking news outlets and sources. This will start with focusing on the US “Sunday Morning talk show” circuit, a cause taken up prominently by Jay Rosen and projects such as PolitiFact and Meet The Facts. But the effort can be extended to other domains, such as political debates, speeches and briefings, and I look forward to seeing the brainstorming around this.

See the following for the complete presentation, and feel free to visit the wiki above and contribute your ideas. I will be giving a brief talk at AEJMC in Denver, Colorado about the WikiFactCheck project.

What Hath Wikipedia Wrought? Crowds remaking the news

View more presentations from fuzheado.

Google Cheeky in China?

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Today, Google made a cheeky move on its China site (Google.cn) in order to preserve its domain name and ability to operate in the PRC.

As you may recall, in January Google decided they no longer wanted to comply with censorship guidelines in China and started to redirect visitors to their China “content” sites to servers in HK, where there are no censorship restrictions. In that move, the search, photo and news sites became hosted on unfettered servers at google.com.hk, while others like music and maps kept their locations on mainland servers.

On the Official Google Blog, Chief Legal Officer David Drummond was rather frank about their recent move:

…it’s clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable—and that if we continue redirecting users our Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed (it’s up for renewal on June 30). Without an ICP license, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn—so Google would effectively go dark in China.

Now it’s important to note that until this move, Google.cn traffic has been a “redirect,” meaning visitors to www.google.cn were sent automatically to www.google.com.hk en masse. Clicks in Google’s top bar to music and maps would go back to google.cn, but it was by default an HK site. That is likely what Drummond was referring to as being “unacceptable” to the PRC authorities.

Today, Google changed how this works in order to comply with the “letter” of what the authorities wanted, even if it wasn’t keeping in the spirit:

…instead of automatically redirecting all our users, we have started taking … them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering. This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page.

A number of folks have asked whether this is a backtrack by Google on their January announcement.

Not really.

It shows Google is interested in keeping their presence in China, especially when there is much potential profit in entertainment and tool-orientedinformation services (translation, mapping) that don’t run afoul of Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra.

But it is not much of a change from their earlier stance, and all Google is willing to do is to put up an intermediate landing page as a facade. And when I say facade, it truly is one.

Google.cn facade


The front page of Google.cn may look like a normal search page, but it’s actually a large button. Once you click on any portion of the screen it brings you to the old redirected page at Google.com.hk.

It’s hardly going to make PRC authorities happy, even though Google.cn is no longer just a redirect, and does technically return a page from a PRC server to the web surfer.

In fact, it can be seen as the least amount Google could do to comply with ICP guidelines. It will be interesting to see if it gets renewed.

Grand Canyon Pay Phone

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Curiously enough, in the last day more people have inquired about my using a pay phone from the Grand Canyon to do a public radio interview than about the fate of Wikipedia.


The background: I got a call from LA’s public radio station KCRW on Thursday asking if I could participate in discussion about Wikipedia’s pending changes feature. This was while I was on a five day getaway, and just a few hours before driving into the cell phone blackout void known as northern Arizona. Everything from Fredonia (near the Utah border) down to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon is pretty much a cell phone black hole for AT&T, and I suspect pretty much every carrier. Also, radio producers crave land lines for their reliability and general quality over mobiles.


Locals confirmed there was no telecom whatsoever (wired or wireless) between where I was at Jacob Lake (a small outpost/lodge) and the precious pay phones run by the National Park Service 44 miles away. I had to cover that distance in an hour, half of which I could go 70 mph, but the rest a curvy and hilly affair that featured deer and cow crossing warnings.



View Grand Canyon North in a larger map


Driving slightly on the edge of responsibility, I made that distance in roughly 50 minutes. We pulled into the parking lot of the Grand Lodge, grabbed any staff member I could find and asked if they had pay phones that could receive calls. They didn’t know, but pointed to a bank of phone booths.


It was 20 minutes to show time, and I didn’t know how I’d get on air.


AT&T, to their credit, had at the very least a weak circle of cell coverage around the lodge, but it would have been awful for radio broadcasting.


I went into the phone booth, noted the 928 area code number on the pay phone, dialed it from my cell phone and voila — it rang. I texted the number to the KCRW producer, and 15 minutes later, there was a ringback and I was on the radio show.


Doing KCRW To The Point interview


Phone booth, Grand Canyon North


It worked. And after a spirited discussion on Wikipedia, I took twenty paces and had this beautiful view from the lodge.


20 Paces Away, in Lodge


Another twenty paces, and I had this panorama.


20 More Paces away


As I told Warren Olney on the show: “Never underestimate the value of a landline,” especially in Northern Arizona.

Crowds, Collaboration, Content and Curation Remaking the News

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Here’s my presentation at Columbia Business School’s Transitioned Media conference where I talk about “The Wikipedia Revolution:Crowds, Collaboration, Content and Curation Remaking the News.”

Transitioned Media

The new concept I’m introducing is a new way to look at content and curation, and this graphic attempts to distinguish between roles done by the mainstream media outlets/government, and the “crowd” at large. Hope to followup with a post soon with more details.

Understanding Content and Curation

Understanding Content and Curation

NPR’s advanced HTML Beta

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This week I’m at the International Symposium on Online Journalism at Univ. of Texas-Austin, an event that’s been a great source of professional and academic dialogue regarding digital journalism.

One of the neat demos was from NPR’s Kinsey Wilson, who showed their iPad-specific web site. If you visit npr.org with the iPad Safari browser, you’ll get redirected to their beta site created with “HTML5″ – npr.org/tablet (though Dave Stanton of U of Florida points it it’s really XHTML 1.0 Transitional. You don’t need an iPad to see it: use Safari for Mac/Windows or Firefox 3.5+ to visit that URL directly)

Without plugins, they’ve added an audio clip playlist manager that’s pegged to the bottom of the screen. On a landscape laptop screen, it looks a bit big and intrusive.

On a portrait-screen iPad with high pixel density, it’s very nicely sized and placed.

Wilson said the NPR team took about three weeks to finish the project. When the iPhone first launched, Steve Jobs famously said you don’t need apps, since rich web content is all you need. We know now Jobs changed his mind, but NPR is showing how you can make a web page feel very “app-ian” with some simple HTML additions.

China’s Social Networking Sites

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With the rumors of Facebook getting into China this year, VentureBeat has put out an excellent roundup of the big four social networking sites in China:

  • RenRen
  • Kaixin001
  • Qzone
  • 51.com

What’s interesting is that each one comes from a different angle: students, music/games, instant messaging and rural users (respectively). That makes for an interesting scrum, as no single service rules the landscape quite like Facebook does in the US.

I’ll be on KCBS radio tomorrow to talk about Facebook’s prospects.

In general, RenRen (nee XiaoNei) is the most like Facebook, as it launched as pretty much a pixel-for-pixel clone. It has a valuation of approximately $1.2 bln with Softbank recently buying a 35% stake.

I’m not hopeful Facebook will make any successful splash in the China market, though the way it’s been reported via sina.com, there’s every indication this is just an unsubstantiated rumor.

iPad the Spork

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After two days of showing the iPad to the community at USC, I got an interesting questions from a student in class: “It isn’t really a computer, it really isn’t a mobile device, so what is it?”

The best explanation I came up with: a spork.

It’s a digital spork.

Spork
Spork

Now I mean that in the most affectionate way. Rather than doing neither thing well, it does two things quite competently in one tight package.

It’s a browsing device with a large bright screen, powerful processing for multimedia and enough storage/connectivity to mimic a laptop. On the mobile side, its 10-12 hour battery means you constantly use it without rationing your time (this could be a bad thing), you can toss it in your bag without thinking twice, and you can lean back in bed or lounge at the beach to use it.

Now, the “lean back” aspect makes things interesting.

This is what makes the device so exciting for publishers and TV folks.

See, this whole laptop-based “lean forward” crouching over your keyboard phenomenon is foreign to them. It’s too participatory. You’re at your keyboard, ready to comment, to chat, to pan, to praise. You’re multitasking,  your attention is scattered, and you’re almost always one tiny step away from being bored and doing something else.

Traditional media companies aren’t used to that, and haven’t understood what to do with it.

Instead, the iPad brings back the passive, single-tasking, lean-back experience. Lean back is what they understand — couch potatoes, lounge chair magazine leafers and bathroom readers. You’re doing one, and one thing only.

So the iPad gives them hope the pendulum can swing back away from the wild chaotic bazaar of the mouse-based desktop, and back towards what they understand. And to help monetize this, they now have the elusive micropayment system they’ve been missing for a while — the iTunes Store. Years of Apple iPod and iPhone consumers buying songs at $0.99 and apps at $0.99 have conditioned the populace to pay these micro-amounts, driven by an ephemeral impulse buy for content.

Or so the industry hopes.

It’s a very real possibility it will be successful, even if I don’t particularly care for the trend.

Paid apps already available from Time and ESPN replicate the web content on those sites, but with more interactivity and a rich multimedia display. Folks who think this is folly, that the same content can be had for free on the web, and will kill the iPad paid-content market, need to consider consumer behavior more carefully.

By that logic, bottled water companies should not exist because of course we have free water everywhere, from taps and bubblers.

We know otherwise. That Evian, Perrier, SmartWater (and even Aquafina selling what is practically the same as tap water back to us) make money, and lots of it, is no secret. There is upselling of what is commodity. And if there’s ever a perfect partner for making that work (reselling what is common at high markups) it’s Apple.

And that’s what we’ll see — a bustling marketplace for captive content. That’s not my concern per se. What does give pause is a whole new generation of content that is not linkable, commentable or recordable. The iPad is a closed box, and for that reason, the rich discourse (and ugly trolling) goes away. But along with that goes the chaotic mashed-up marketplace that has spawned a creative content community.

For that reason, I hope the iPad will be good like a spork is good on a camping trip –something that will do the trick in adverse conditions, but not something you’d want for your main dining experience. Because that lean-back experience takes away the culture of the read-write web, and that would be a step backwards.

Update: my friend Cory Doctorow has an even stronger warning when it comes to the iPad: “Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either)“.

Comcast-ick

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Today marked a signifcant setback for the network neutrality movement. The dream of keeping Internet traffic unshaped, unprioritized and unfettered was dealt a blow by a decision by the US Court of Appeals.

The panel of three judges unanimously invalidated the FCC’s authority to mandate that Internet traffic has to be treated equally. This was originally brought about by Comcast’s throttling of users’ BitTorrent traffic in 2007, which led to a 2008 FCC order to the cable provider to stop the practice. Since then, the FCC has been on the winning side of court cases maintaining the status quo and the agency has enforced “network neutrality” across Internet service providers.

Today’s ruling changes things, but it’s not as bad as one might think.

Though it started with BitTorrent, peer to peer file sharing is the least interesting of the cases out there. Instead, follow the money.

The idea of Comcast, AT&T or Verizon arbitrarily prioritizing packets by traffic shaping has been the scary scneario for a number of Internet-age content providers who have profits in mind, and hope to challenge powerful traditional telecom and entertainment companies.

Of particular interest — providers of Voice over IP, such as Skype, and those who serve up video that directly challenge the role of cable TV providers in delivering video content (ie. Netflix, Hulu and others). Consider also how much Google is getting into the both of those spaces with YouTube and Google Voice, and how much Apple depends on speedy download of video content for iPad and other devices.

Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, observed that this was not a lasting victory for ISPs.

With perhaps the best quote of the day, he said, “Comcast swung an ax at the FCC to protest the BitTorrent order… And they sliced right through the FCC’s arm and plunged the ax into their own back.”

That’s because there are some possible easy remedies for the FCC. The agency can reclassify broadband as a telecom service that deserves heavier regulation, which would change things rather quickly but not without controversy.

Or on a longer time scale, Congress could act to give the FCC this exact authority to regulate broadband. An FCC statement released today said, “the court in no way disagreed with the importance of preserving a free and open Internet; nor did it close the door to other methods for achieving this important end.”

It’s clear the FCC folks are sticking with their stance, and confident of a solution.

Until then, we should expect to see bandwidth shaping experiments from DSL and cable providers. But this has always been a huge risk in upsetting customers. In an age of Twitter and Facebook, we’ll quickly see people diagnose, triangulate on and react to these types of efforts.

Caveat Comcast, don’t get too comfortable.

Also crossposted to Journalistech.org