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Textually.org: Guerrila Innovation. SMS Enabled Art Toilet at The Danish National Gallery

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 08:45:56 +0000

In conjunction with a music event held outside the The National Gallery in Copenhagen earlier this summer, the gallery introduced a new kind of service: Art Toilets.
Besides being cleaned after each visit, the Art Toilets were equipped with art magazines and posters, thereby turning the trivial and potential unpleasant activity into a somewhat nice and memorable experience.

To access the Art Toilets, users were required to send an SMS to a dedicated number, which in return gave them a virtual toilet token, free of charge.

The phone numbers were collected and later used by the National Gallery to kick start a new SMS service.

Textually.org: iPhone app for virtual gifts

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 07:51:26 +0000

Little World Gifts - Demo from Katie Lips on Vimeo.

For the person who would rather receive pixels instead of presents for Christmas, the Little World Gifts app for iPhone, lets users buy virtual Christmas gifts for each other.

Spotted on mocoNews.

Textually.org: Turkey Timer app

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 07:39:56 +0000

A usefull app for this Thanksgiving, Turkey Timer which helps you figure out just how long it takes to cook your turkey.

How does it work? Enter the weight of your turkey, whether it's stuffed, your desired internal temperature, and whether you plan to baste the turkey. Using algorithms based on top cookbook instructions, TurkeyTimer will track the approximate brownness of your turkey, the approximate internal temperature of your turkey, and about how long it will be until you can take the turkey out of the oven.

You will even be reminded when it's time to baste the turkey.

Textually.org: eBay launches holiday deals app for iPhone

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 07:33:49 +0000

In time for Black Friday, eBay is offering a free eBay Deals app for the iPhone that is a tool for finding and buying the best deals on eBay.

In their own words: Create, edit, and save your personalized searches so that you won’t miss out on that must have item. The eBay Deals application even lets you share the items you find on your favorite social network. Upcoming releases will enable you to further refine your deal searches and set alerts for the deals that mean the most to you.

[via Cnet news]

Textually.org: New Website keeps track of rejected iPhone apps

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 07:23:12 +0000

A new website of interest for all app developers, App Rejections.

App Rejections keeps track of rejected iPhone apps. The blog features the name of the rejected app, Apple's justification for rejection, and then an editorial comment.

If YOUR iPhone app has been rejected by Apple in an unusual or unfair way, please write about it on your blog / news / etc, and send a link to @redglassesapps on Twitter.

[via PCMag]

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution: The Mayflower Mob

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:47:40 +0000

SmartMobs is about the networking of people that has been made possible by the new era of connectivity. In the spirit of the history of Thanksgiving, this post is a tip of the tall pilgrim hat to the mobbing of ancestries online.

An extensive, mature example of the networking of ancestries online is the material available on the descendants of the original Mayflower Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts in 1620.

MayflowerFamilies.com is a major website for the Mayflower early families and their descendants — who must by now number in the thousands. Governor Bradford kept his own accounting of the core network formed by the passengers on the first trip of the Mayflower to Plymouth. Bradford wrote 30 years later of an expanding Mayflower mob:

Of these 100 persons which came first over, in this first ship together; the greater halfe dyed in the generall mortality; and most of them in .2. or three monthes time. And for those which survied though some were ancient & past procreation; & others left ye place and cuntrie. yet of those few remaining are sprunge up above .160. persons; in this .30. years. And are now living in this presente year . 1650. beside many of their children which are dead and come not within this account.

The pages of MayflowerFamiles.com, and many other websites, record in great detail the network of descendants from these earliest pilgrims. The first small mob who survived the winter of 1620-1621 celebrated the First Thanksgiving the following fall, along with the native Americans who helped them provide the harvest feast.

Happy Thanksgiving ye one and all.

Textually.org: European MPs votes on new telecoms law

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 07:30:20 +0000

The European Parliament has approved a major overhaul of telecoms law across Europe. The BBC reports.

The package includes a provision for "internet freedom" - the first time it has been referred to in law as fundamental right says the EU.
Member states have until May 24 2011 to include the legislation in their own rules.

It comes amid controversial laws being introduced in France and the UK to cut off persistent illegal downloaders.

Read full article.

danah boyd: spectacle at Web2.0 Expo... from my perspective

zephoria-blog@zephoria.org (zephoria) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:41:14 +0000

Last week, I gave a talk at Web2.0 Expo. From my perspective, I did a dreadful job at delivering my message. Yet, the context around my talk sparked a broad conversation about the implications of turning the backchannel into part of the frontchannel. In the last week, I've seen all sorts of blog posts and tweets and news articles about what went down. At this point, the sting has worn off and I feel that it would be responsible to offer my own perspective of what happened.

First, context. Web2.0 Expo is an expensive conference filled with all sorts of webby types, entrepreneurs, and business folks interested in technological development. It's a conference known for great talks by high profile people. Most of the talks are pretty conversational in nature - there are plenty of staged interviews and casual presentations.

Because of the high profile nature of Web2.0 Expo, I decided to write a brand new talk. Personally, I love the challenge and I get bored of giving the same talk over and over and over again. Of course, the stump speech is much more fluid, much more guaranteed. But new talks force folks to think differently and guarantee that I target those who hear me talk often and those who have never seen me talk before.

A week before the conference, I received word from the organizers that I was not going to have my laptop on stage with me. The dirty secret is that I actually read a lot of my talks but the audience doesn't actually realize this because scanning between my computer and the audience is usually pretty easy. So it doesn't look like I'm reading. But without a laptop on stage, I have to rely on paper. I pushed back, asked to get my notes on the screen in front of me, but was told that this wasn't going to be possible. I was told that I was going to have a podium. So I resigned to having a podium. Again, as an academic, I've learned to read from podiums without folks fully realizing that I am reading.

When I showed up at the conference, I realized that the setup was different than I imagined. The podium was not angled, meaning that the paper would lie flat, making it harder to read and get away with it. Not good. But I figured that I knew the talk well enough to not sweat it.

I only learned about the Twitter feed shortly before my talk. I didn't know whether or not it was filtered. I also didn't get to see the talks by the previous speakers so I didn't know anything about what was going up on the screen.

When I walked out on stage, I was also in for a new shock: the lights were painfully bright. The only person I could see in the "audience" was James Duncan Davidson who was taking photographs. Otherwise, it was complete white-out. Taken aback by this, my talk started out rough.

Now, normally, I get into a flow with my talks after about 2 minutes. The first two minutes are usually painfully rushed and have no rhythm as I work out my nerves, but then I start to flow. I've adjusted to this over the years by giving myself 2 minutes of fluff text to begin with, content that sets the stage but can be ignored. And then once I'm into a talk, I gel with the audience. But this assumes one critical thing: that I can see the audience. I'm used to audiences who are staring at their laptops, but I'm not used to being completely blinded.

Well, I started out rough, but I was also totally off-kilter. And then, within the first two minutes, I started hearing rumblings. And then laughter. The sounds were completely irrelevant to what I was saying and I was devastated. I immediately knew that I had lost the audience. Rather than getting into flow and becoming an entertainer, I retreated into myself. I basically decided to read the entire speech instead of deliver it. I counted for the time when I could get off stage. I was reading aloud while thinking all sorts of terrible thoughts about myself and my failures. I wasn't even interested in my talk. All I wanted was to get it over with. I didn't know what was going on but I kept hearing sounds that made it very clear that something was happening behind me that was the focus of everyone's attention. The more people rumbled, the worse my headspace got and the worse my talk became. I fed on the response I got from the audience in the worst possible way. Rather than the audience pushing me to become a better speaker, it was pushing me to get worse. I hated the audience. I hated myself. I hated the situation. I wanted off. And so I talked through my talk, finishing greater than 2 minutes ahead of schedule because all I wanted was to be finished. And then I felt guilty so I made shit up for a whole minute and left the stage with 1 minute to spare.

I walked off stage and immediately went to Brady and asked what on earth was happening. And he gave me a brief rundown. The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast. My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that's not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked. And responding the exact opposite way the audience wanted me to. This pushed the audience to actually start critiquing me in the way that I was imagining it was. And as Brady went on, he said that it started to get really rude so they pulled it to figure out what to do. But this distracted the audience and explains one set of outbursts that I didn't understand from the stage. And then they put it back up and people immediately started swearing. More outbursts and laughter. The Twitter stream had become the center of attention, not the speaker. Not me.

Yes, I cried. Yes, I left Web2.0 Expo devastated. I hate giving a bad talk but I also felt like I was being laughed at. People tried to smooth it over, to tell me that I was OK, that it wouldn't matter, that they liked the talk. But no amount of niceness from friends or strangers could make up for the 20 minutes in which I was misinterpreting the audience and berating myself. Nothing the audience could say could make up for what I was thinking about myself while on stage. So I went for a massage. And I spent 90 minutes trying to tell myself that I am a lovable creature. And when that wasn't working, I told myself to suck it up and deal. I knew that if I could convince myself to look like everything was OK that eventually I would believe it. Or at least that it would all go away.

Being on stage involves raw emotions. I have never gotten over the rawness of it all. I no longer vomit before every talk (although I used to) but my stomach does try to do the macarena. Or, more likely, the ridiculous dance done by 80s hair bands as they thrash about. I can't eat before I give a talk. And I visit the bathroom a bazillion times. Even when I'm brilliant on stage, I'm nervous as hell. But it's also emotionally and physically exhausting. I walk off the stage high as a kite and then, two hours later, crash. Giving talks drains me. It's brutal to try to publicly convey information, to be the center of attention. I much much much prefer to be the one observing than the one speaking. But I feel like giving talks is important. So I speak. But it ain't easy. And so when I walk off a stage not feeling invigorated, all I get is the raw drain, the gut-wrenching, nauseating feeling of pure misery. 20 minutes of being punched in the face, kicked in the stomach, and the shameful sensations one gets when one is forced to watch a Lars von Trier film. That's how I felt at Web2.0 Expo.

So.... the Backchannel?

Now that you've been forced to read my inner neuroses on public display, let's talk about making the backchannel the frontchannel. First off, let's be clear: I could not and did not see the Twitter stream from stage. Nothing was conveyed to me until the end. The stream was not a way for the audience to communicate to the speaker, but for the audience to communicate with itself. Lots of folks have talked about making the stream available to the speaker. Have any of you seen ustream? This is filled with "speakers" reading the stream and it's very choppy. There's no way that a speaker can simultaneously consume a stream and convey a message. Sure, a message every 30 seconds or so, no problem. But a stream? No way. And certainly not a long message... and, on stage, 140 characters is long.

Let me highlight a comment that Dan from HonestlyKid.net left on my blog earlier this week:

It seems that the more subtle the speaker's point, the more impatient and nasty the audience became. While it's easy enough to blame the new tech in the room for this shoddy behavior, I'm not sure we're seeing anything new at all here. It certainly didn't feel new to me from where I sat. Consider the recent Town Hall meetings around health care - substantive discussions of important issues were subsumed in cat calls and shouted rumors.
That said, having participated in this bad behavior, I noticed something else about the way it felt to put something on that wall. The twitterwall subverted twitter's more symmetric conversation model of communication. Posting to the wall was like creating and sharing a public secret about the speaker (a little like political grafiti except it wasn't anonymous).

The wall made a spectacle of the crowd's impatience and anxiety feeding on the speaker's inability to respond. That spectacle united us not as a single group receiving challenging ideas from a thoughtful orator but as quite separate individuals struggling to listen, read, respond, and make sense of the event. We moved from web conference to twitter circus.

I think that Dan nailed it. I think that the backchannel is perfectly reasonable as a frontchannel when the speaker is trying to entertain, but when the goal is to convey something with depth, it encourages people to be impatient and frustrated, to feed on the speaker. There's a least common denominator element to it. I was not at Web2.0 Expo to entertain, but to inform. Yes, I can be an entertaining informant, but there's a huge gap between the kind of information that Baratunde tries to convey in his comedic format and what I'm trying to convey in a more standard one. And there's no doubt I packed too much information into a 20 minute talk, but my role is fundamentally to challenge audiences to think. That's the whole point of bringing a scholar to the stage. But if the audience doesn't want to be challenged, they tune out or walk out. Yet, with a Twitter stream, they have a third option: they can take over.

The problem with a public-facing Twitter stream in events like this is that it FORCES the audience to pay attention the backchannel. So even audience members who want to focus on the content get distracted. Most folks can't multitask that well. And even if I had been slower and less dense, my talks are notoriously too content-filled to make multi-tasking possible for the multi-tasking challenged. This is precisely why I use very simplistic slides that evokes images for the visual types in the room without adding another layer of content. But the Twitter stream fundamentally adds another layer of content that the audience can't ignore, that I can't control. And that I cannot even see.

Now, I'm AOK with not having complete control of the audience during a talk, but it requires a fundamentally different kind of talk. That was not what I prepared for at all. Had I known about the Twitter stream, I would've given a more pop-y talk that would've bored anyone who has heard me speak before and provided maybe 3-4 nuggets of information for folks to chew on. It would've been funny and quotable but it wouldn't have been content-wise memorable. Perhaps that would've made more sense? Realistically though, those kinds of talks bore me at this point. So I probably would've opted not to give a talk at all. Perhaps I'm not the kind of speaker you want if you want a Twitter stream? But regardless, what I do know is that certain kinds of talks do not lend themselves to that kind of dynamic. I would *NEVER* have given my talk on race and class in such a setting. I shudder to think about how the racist language people used when I gave that talk would've been perceived on the big screen.

Speaking of which... what's with the folks who think it's cool to objectify speakers and talk about them as sexual objects? The worst part of backchannels for me is being forced to remember that there are always guys out there who simply see me as a fuckable object. Sure, writing crass crap on public whiteboards is funny... if you're 12. But why why why spend thousands of dollars to publicly objectify women just because you can? This is the part that makes me angry.

Now, I don't mind being critiqued. I think that being a public figure automatically involves that. I've developed a pretty thick skin over the years, but there are still things that get to me. And the situation at Web2.0 Expo was one of those. Part of the problem for me is that, as a speaker, I work hard to try to create a conversation with the audience. When it's not possible or when I do a poor job, it sucks. But it also really sucks to just be the talking head as everyone else is having a conversation literally behind your back. It makes you feel like a marionette. And frankly, if that's what public speaking is going to be like, I'm out.

I don't want to be objectified when I'm speaking - either as a talking head or a sexual toy. I want to inspire, to invite you to think, to spark creative thoughts in your head. At Web2.0 Expo, I failed. And I failed publicly. I'm still licking my wounds. But I can take the fall. I can't take the idea that this is the future.

So I have a favor to ask... I am going to be giving a bunch of public speaking performances at web conferences in the next couple of months: Supernova and Le Web in December, SXSW in March, WWW in April. I will do my darndest to give new, thought-provoking talks that will leave your brain buzzing. I will try really really hard to speak slowly. But in return, please come with some respect. Please treat me like a person, not an object. Come to talk with me, not about me. I'm ready and willing to listen, but I need you to be as well. And if you don't want to listen, fine, don't. But please don't distract your neighbors with crude remarks. Let's make public speaking and public listening an art form. Maybe that's too much to ask for, but really, I need to feel like it's worth it again.

For those looking for the text of my Web2.0 Expo talk, it's here: "Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media."

speaking conference web2.0expo twitter backchannel

Textually.org: First app to go Red for Bono: (Shazam)RED

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:19:47 +0000

For the first time, an app is part of Bono's (RED) Project, a business model created to raise awareness and money for investments in African AIDS programs.

Teaming up with the world's most iconic brands, Shazam has launched a special charity edition app for iPhone.

When you buy (Shazam)RED, 20% of the purchase price is contributed to HIV and AIDS programs in Africa.

[via TechRadar]

Textually.org: Tourists get tweets from New York toilets

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:04:55 +0000

Five new restroom ambassadors will soon be tweeting from Charmin toilets opened last week at Times Square after beating hundreds of hopefuls for the coveted jobs. Reuters reports.

They won a contest that included aspiring actors, students and even a businessman hoping to greet and chat with tourists and hoards of holiday shoppers visiting the Manhattan restrooms.
Each winner will collect $US10,000 for six weeks of work.

Read full article.

Textually.org: Clickatell's 2009 Festive Mobile Marketing Handbook

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:59:07 +0000

As organizations look for more effective and cost efficient ways to reach customers during this year's holiday season, many of Clickatell's customers are taking advantage of mobile marketing for immediate reach, reduced campaign costs, higher customer satisfaction, increased traffic—ultimately resulting in higher profits.

SMS global gateway Clickatell has published its '2009 Festive Mobile Marketing Handbook' to help large and small businesses conceptualize, implement and monitor effective mobile sales, mobile marketing, and customer relationship management campaigns this festive shopping season, using the power of SMS.

Read full Press release.

Textually.org: New iPhone ads tout holding voice and data connection simultaneously

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:31:41 +0000

Apple iPhone Ad - Did You See My Email? from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

Apple iPhone Ad - What Time's The Movie? from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

Spotted on Business Week, two new iPhone ads launched last night, touting the iPhone’s ability to hold a simultaneous voice and data connection at the same time.

Textually.org: SMS opens public restroom doors in Copenhagen

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 07:41:40 +0000

According to The Copenhagen Post Online, four public restrooms in Copenhagen have been fitted with technology that enables customers to pay with their cell phones, by text message.

The new SMS service provides a more flexible alternative for the users. We’re looking forward to seeing whether or not it becomes popular in Copenhagen. A success could lead to more SMS toilets being built around town.’ Claus Robl, division manager of the city’s technical and environmental department.

Textually.org: Cake Release Second Ringtone of New Music

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 07:39:50 +0000

Alternative rockers Cake, debuted their second ringtone of the recently recorded song titled “Federal Funding” this week. Glide Magazine reports.

The group is currently in the midst of recording their sixth studio album and sharing the results with their listeners first, via a series of six free ringtones.
Each ringtone is based on a song from the group’s upcoming album and is only released to Cake listeners who are members of the band’s mailing list.

Every six weeks, a new ringtone from a recently recorded Cake song will be sent out to all of the group’s mailing list members up until the new album launch during Spring 2010.

Cake’s new project is being written, rehearsed and recorded entirely with solar power.

To sign up and download the new music, visit: http://cakemusic.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/list/cakeusa2/.

Textually.org: Donate your text messages to science

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 07:33:38 +0000

A Université de Montréal researcher has a special request for Canadian texters: "Everyone young and old, students and workers, artists and business people, no matter who you are, send me your text messages," says Patrick Drouin, a linguistics professor at the Université de Montréal who is overseeing the North-American leg of the international research project called Texto4Science.

In recent years, texting as a means of communication has become a genuine societal phenomenon," says Drouin. "These messages, also known as SMS, are of a limited length and can be sent or received with a cell phone. This growing phenomenon is the source of great debate especially with regards to language. There is also great creativity stemming from the need to communicate succinctly and quickly, which is what my team plans to study.

The Texto4Sciencee project will be led by the Université de Montréal in collaboration with the University of Ottawa and Simon Fraser University. The research team hopes to collect 300,000 French text messages between November 2009 and April 30, 2010. To reach this target, participants are asked to forward text messages that they have sent to other cell phones to a short code number: 202202. Texters can then complete the online form at www.texto4science.ca.

Data collection for the Texto4Science will allow texters to actively contribute to a Canadian science project while being eligible to win prizes. Collected information will be analyzed and stored in a database. Phase two of the project, which will study English text messages, begins in 2010.

[via EurekaAlert Press release

Textually.org: 10,000 iPhone apps submitted every week

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 07:25:23 +0000

In an interview with Business Week, Apple's CEO, Phil Schiller, talked about the app store's approval process and revealed that 10,000 applications are submtted per week.

[via InfoSyncWorld]

Development Seed: Week in DC Tech: Thanksgiving Edition

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:41:59 +0000

Tweeting for charity and PHP this week in Washington, DC

It's a short work week for most of us, with Thanksgiving just around the corner. And that means that many of us are already getting ready to travel to visit family and friends, planning for one on the biggest feasts of the year, or just daydreaming about some relaxing time off work. There aren't many tech events out there this week to distract you from all of that. Below are two that sound interesting to us, and as always you can find a full listing of local tech events at DC Tech Events.

Happy Thanksgiving, and enjoy the holiday!

Tuesday, November 24

6:00 - 9:00

TweetsGiving Washington, DC: Get in the spirit early this Thanksgiving and come out to this charitable tweetup. The event, along with TweetsGivings being held around the world, will raise money for a Tanzanian school as well as a local women's shelter.

6:00 - 8:00 pm

DCPHP Beverage Subgroup: Come out to this meetup to talk about PHP with other developers over a couple of beers.

Development Seed: Customize Your Managing News

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:22:02 +0000

How to customize the news aggregator or use it to build other applications

In Eric's announcement last month, he emphasized that Managing News is both a product and a platform. In this post, I'll explain what this means in concrete terms and how Managing News can be highly customized or used to build something other than a news aggregator. This post assumes some Drupal site building experience and at times some Drupal coding experience. But even if you're new to Drupal, it will give you a useful glimpse of what's possible with Managing News.

Modular architecture

The package that you can download at ManagingNews.com is the fourth iteration of Managing News. This time we paid special attention to keeping it simple and modular. Managing News consists of Drupal core plus about 20 contrib modules, four custom modules, five Features, and a design that is split into a base theme (Tao) with the actual theme on top of it (Jake).

Features

We have written extensively about Features in the past. If you are new to the concept, the quick explanation is that features are special modules that contain configurations for other modules. Use cases of Features are typically higher-level than those of modules. One example would be an "Event section" feature, consisting of configuration for the Calendar and the Date module. Features can be turned on and off just like any other module, and they have full access to the Drupal API.

You can see all the features in Managing News by going to the Admin section (link on the top left when you're logged in) and clicking on "Features":

We can see five features on this page: MN Core is the base feature. Most importantly, it contains the configuration for aggregation functionality. MN Search provides the search page and the configuration for saving searches and highlighting them on the front page. MN Channels offers a way of collecting single news items into custom lists that can be printed or distributed via RSS. MN About is a very simple about section that basically contains a book node and a menu item. Finally MN World contains the configuration for geo tagging map displays.

Textually.org: Xbox-Based Alerts, in addition to SMS emergency alerts

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:54:10 +0000

According to InformationWeek, State authorities are testing a plan that would see the Emergency Management Office issue alerts over online gaming networks in addition to regular channels.

The goal, said New York State Deputy CIO Rico Singleton, is to reach younger residents who spend more time on the Xbox, PlayStation, or Wii than with television or radio.
Singleton, speaking Thursday at the Interop technology conference in New York City, said the plan makes sense, "considering the amount of time our youth spend on video games."

Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo operate online networks that allow players to compete against each other over the Internet. Under the state's plan, authorities would tap those networks to broadcast warnings about natural or man-made disasters.

Read full article.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution: UK Digital Economy Bill - Moore to think about

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:36:25 +0000

The UK government recently unveiled the Digital Economy Bill, which has prompted Alan Moore to engage in a retrospective regarding 20th Century [old school] politicians, ethics, culture, commerce and copyright law. Moore’s thoughts inspire reflection on how networked [digital] economics is fundamentally different to the “straight lines of a mass media culture” and analogue business models. I encourage you to read the following: Mandleson, ethics, culture, commerce and copyright law | SMLXL - Engagement Marketing and Communication principles from Alan Moore and participate in the ensuing debate.

“And why is this becoming such an important debate? Because, the motivation is ideological – to retard the growing awareness among citizens that they can create a media system superior to the one that currently serves the needs of a handful of media corporations, argues Robert McChesney. In an age of information technology, control of our culture becomes a critical battleground. The arcane ins and outs of today’s copyright battles now mask a much deeper cultural struggle in which the stakes have grown unthinkably high.” - Alan Moore

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution: Would Microsoft get News Corp to delist from Google?

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:36:10 +0000

A FT.com article titled “Microsoft and News Corp eye web pact” describes early discussions of “the media company being paid to ‘de-index’ its news websites from Google.” This one will be fascinating to watch because it would be the software titan (Microsoft) attempting to dethrone the network gorilla (Google) by ripping away a hunk of the gorilla’s emergent network and trying to grow the hunk within in the titan’s separate network garden.

Here is some flavor from the article, which is about the business side, and not mentioning the network laws which will powerfully affect what happens:

The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who warned that talks were at an early stage.

However, the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.

News Corp and Microsoft, which owns the rival Bing search engine, declined to comment.

One website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan “puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them”.

Microsoft’s interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content.

Textually.org: Multi-carrier iPhone in France doubles sales

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:21:54 +0000

The elimination of the iPhone's exclusivity to Orange in France has resulted in "more than double" the sales of the device and dealt a blow to the Blackberry.

[via Electronista]

Textually.org: Samsung Omnia II to launch with Swype's "Genius Texting"

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:34:39 +0000

mocoNews.net reports that the new Samsung Omnia II will include Swype's input method that they are calling “Genius Texting.”

The technology developed by Swype provides a faster and easier way to input text on any screen. With one continuous finger or stylus motion across the screen keyboard, the patented technology enables users to input words faster and easier than other data input methods—at over 50 words per minute.

See Swype demo video her.

Textually.org: Texting Arcade Game Tests Your Texting Speed

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:20:40 +0000

Spotted on Ubergizmo, a Textminator, a coin-operated arcade that lets you put your texting skills to the test.

Development Seed: Aegir Hosting System Moves to Git

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:04:09 +0000

To better meet its unique revision control needs, the Aegir Project goes Git

Originally announced a few months ago alongside the 0.3 release, the Aegir project is in the process of finalizing its migration to git for our revision control needs. For the last few releases, several of our developers have actually been using git for development, and this week we are simply making our preference official. As of today, the official source for the packages that make up the Aegir Hosting System will be git.aegirproject.org. While we do not have an official website up at AegirProject.org, rest assured that is coming too.

I'd like to go through some of the reasons and benefits of this change.

Being able to make sweeping changes without losing history

Because our API is evolving so rapidly, we are not averse to major refactoring of the code base. Because of the inability of CVS to rename files and directories, this has been a thorn in our sides when performing these refactoring tasks. Some of you might remember the period in the Drupal 5.x development cycle when the modules were moved to their own directories instead of just being .module files. It was chaos for awhile.

We are standing at the precipice of another refactoring of this sort, and it is very likely going to be a case where actually getting the changes committed the right way will take longer than making the changes themselves. We would have to compromise and remove the files being renamed and commit them anew, losing several years of important development history.

Textually.org: Apple won't repair Macs if owners are smokers?

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:09:36 +0000

Not related to cell phones, but wild if true. According to TechRadar, Apple is apparently refusing to repair computers that show signs of cigarette smoke.

According to reports from Mac owners seeking repairs under warranty, the company claimed evidence of cigarette smoke inside the machines in question constitutes a "biohazard".

Textually.org: Cell Phones Drive Social Networks

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 09:34:15 +0000

Mobile devices are the preferred tools by social network site (SNS) users over PCs in at least four Asian countries, according to a recent IDC survey reports PC World.

The report, titled "Examining Usage, Perceptions, and Monetization: The Coming of Age for Social Network Sites in Asia/Pacific," said more than 50 per cent of respondents in China, India, South Korea and Thailand access social networks such as Facebook weekly via mobile phones.

Read full article or full IDG report ($5000).

Textually.org: Authorities Warn Iranians Not To Protest -- By SMS

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 09:31:18 +0000

The Iranian news website Tabnak and several bloggers are reporting that authorities are sending text messages to citizens warning them not to take part in antigovernment protests. Spero News reports.

According to Tabnak, the SMS warns recipients that they have been identified as participants in past protests, and that they should stop attending demonstrations.
The reports come ahead of Student Day on December 7, which the opposition has vowed to “turn green” in support of the Green movement backing opposition leader Mir Hossein Musavi.

Read full article.

Textually.org: Spyware Listens In On Cell Phone Calls

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 07:55:17 +0000

KKTV has a news segment on spyware that allows you to listen in on cell phone calls. They don't name the company, but in their video you get a glimpse of a web page of a company called Flexispy which offers this kind of eavesdropping as "a way to catch a cheating spouse or keep tabs on children".

The software downloaded into your cell phone allows someone to eavesdrop, see your text messages and read your e-mails. Every time that target phone receives a call or text, it alerts the phone of the spy.

The best way to protect your phone, according to KKTV, is to never let it out of your sight. The spyware can only be installed if it is physically downloaded onto the phone and it takes about 15 minutes to do so.

Textually.org: SMS Reminders Help people with Eating Disorders

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 07:50:50 +0000

People with an eating disorder may not want to attend a support group or meet with therapists, but a new report raises the prospect that "remote therapies" via e-mail, text messaging or through Web sites could help them recover. US News reports.

-- Text messages may help smokers quit

Textually.org: Africa: Growing Use of Cellphones for Family Planning

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 07:48:53 +0000

Another way cell phones are being used in the developing world, by providing family planning information. allAfrica.com reports.

Textually.org: The secrets on your smartphone

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 07:15:00 +0000

Hang on to your handset ... smartphones are a goldmine of information for thieves, writes The Sydney Morning Herald.

... While many mobile-phone SIM cards might contain contacts and texts deleted from years ago, experts agree that it is the vastly improved data and storage capacity of the new generation of smartphones that presents the most potent risk to their owners.
... “It may not be what's recoverable from the phone that is valuable but what can be further discovered online, by ringing around and using the easily accessible information,” Kim Khor, director of Khor Wills & Associates says.

Mobile phone forensics comprise an important part of crime detection and corporate security, but they are increasingly playing a role for private detectives investigating marital or work disputes.

Read full article.

Related:

-- Mobile forensics turns up heat on suspects - How forensic science is developping new tools to investigate cell phone data - even when deleted - and solve crimes.

-- Fighting Crime With Cellphones' Clues - Extracting clues and leads from mobile electronics is no cakewalk.

-- Cellphone Forensics at Crime Scenes - Logicube has developed a portable kit which can extract data from over 160 handset when needed by the police and forensic staff.

--Digital evidence is increasingly crucial to criminal investigations - Cell phones have become the new "smoking gun" for prosecutors and police in the Twin Cities and around the world.

-- UK police making Gil Grissom jealous... - The Forensic Science Service (FSS) has developed a mobile laboratory which will travel to crime scenes and carry out real-time forensic investigation and analysis.

-- The field of Cell Phone Forensics - Modern detectives are now using cell phone forensics to capture more and more criminals.

-- Police turn forensic skills on handhelds - Handhelds are likelier to lead to handcuffs for techie criminals following the release of a report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

-- Mobile phone forensics 'hole' reported - Police investigations are being hindered by the use of proprietary mobile phone technologies, say forensics experts.

OpenNet Initiative: UAE unblocks access to top Israeli domain ".il"

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:31:22 +0000

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has unblocked access to Web sites on the Israeli country code top-level domain “.il"

ONI noticed earlier this month that .il Web sites have been accessible from the UAE, and has since been testing for filtering of tens of .il Web sites from different categories including government, politics, religion, and entertainment. All sites have been found consistently accessible via the country's two ISPs, Etisalat and du.

It is not clear why the UAE authorities have decided to remove the ban on .il Web sites and whether this unblocking will continue.

Like many Arab countries, the UAE has no official diplomatic relations with Israel.

ONI's technical tests run in 2006-2007 and 2008-2009 found that the entire “.il” top-level domain was blocked in the UAE.

In addition to .il Web sites, ONI's most recent research on Internet filtering in the UAE ( ONI UAE Country Profile published August 2009) found that the UAE censors a few political and religious Web sites, some sites belonging to Nazis or historical revisionists, and pervasively filters Web sites that contain pornography, content relating to alcohol and drug use, gay and lesbian issues, online dating, gambling, as well as online privacy and circumvention tools.

Center for Democracy and Technology: A New Home for the New CDT Policy Beta

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:04:14 +0000

If you haven’t been to www.cdt.org lately, you’ve been missing a lot, as we’ve launched a whole new website! Policy Beta is now integrated with all the work we do at the Center for Democracy & Technology in an effort to help you find more information on the subjects that matter to you.

Just head to the new Policy Beta and see for yourself! This version of Policy Beta will no longer be updated and will soon disappear, so for all the latest news and commentary, head on over.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution: A chapter of “When the People Speak” is now online

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:51:00 +0000

I have persuaded Jim Fishkin to put the introductory chapter of his important new book, “When The People Speak: Deliberative Democracy & Public Consultation” online. For those who think that the idea of improving the publish sphere by putting together citizens with varying political views in the presence of solid information and polling methodology is crazy idealism, Fishkin offers a wealth of empirical evidence from years of methodologically controlled experimentation with “deliberative polling” — including China, the European Parliament, and groups all over the USA and the world. His most radical idea — that Americans should have a day off before the elections for “deliberation day,” is, in my opinion, the single most empirically solid and hopeful proposal for improving the often sub-standard level of political discourse among citizens.

Conventional polling (3A) uses a randomly selected microcosm to show what (usually) nondeliberative public opinion is like for the whole society. Deliberative Polling (3B) uses a randomly selected microcosm to show what more deliberative public opinion would be like for the whole society. And in the case of 4B the idea is to actually bring it about when it would matter most—in the context of an election. How could such a counterfactual possibility be realized

Our proposal is simple but expensive. We call it “Deliberation Day.”[ The problem for the Deliberative Poll was to motivate a microcosm of the entire population to overcome the incentives for rational ignorance and to engage in enough substantive face to face discussion to arrive at informed judgments—informed about the issues and the main competing arguments about them that other citizens would offer. But it is one thing to imagine doing this for a microcosm; quite another to imagine doing it for the entire population. Gallup’s vision of the mass media turning the entire country into one great room foundered, as we saw earlier, on the lack of a social context that would encourage small group deliberation. If everyone is in “one great room” in the large scale nation state, the room is so big that no one is listening. A different, more decentralized strategy is required.

Our idea is simply to have a national holiday in which all voters would be invited to participate in local, randomly assigned discussion groups as a preparation to the voting process a week later. Candidates for the major parties would make presentations transmitted by national media and local small group discussions would identify key questions that would be directed to local party representatives in relatively small scale town meetings held simultaneously all over the country. A key point is that incentives would be paid for each citizen to participate in this full day’s work of citizenship. The cost ($150 per person), while significant, would make democracy far more meaningful as it would provide for an input from the public that involved most people and that also led to a large mass of citizens becoming informed on the issues and the competing arguments. As shown by Deliberative Polls, some of which are as short as one day, even one day’s serious discussion can have a dramatic effect on ordinary citizens becoming more informed and changing their preferences in significant ways.

Development Seed: Admin 2 + Rubik: Improved UI for Drupal Admins

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:26:36 +0000

Alpha releases available for the reckless

Admin 2 provides a versatile, pluggable UI for administrative tools in Drupal and is complemented by a new theme Rubik that radically reduces visual noise. Alpha releases are available for users interested in testing. This code is very new, so please be prudent using and deploying these projects.

Admin theme accompanied by Rubik

Admin 2: A pluggable framework for admin tools

Admin 2 provides an interface for other developers to leverage when implementing administrative tools. Supporting the administrative tools in modules like devel and localization client required a fresh start but were heavily influenced by

Key contrib projects like Administration menu by Daniel Kudwien and Navigate by Chris Shattuck
The D7UX work of Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt
Feedback from users and my colleagues at Development Seed, including conversations with Eric from years ago over lunch : )

Devel components in Admin 2

The result is a toolbar that offers

Pluggable tools via plain old Drupal blocks. Blocks that declare in hook_block() that they are usable with admin can be added or removed from the toolbar.
Versatile layout and position. The toolbar can be collapsed to any corner of the screen and displayed horizontally or vertically to accommodate different themes and screen sizes.
Inclusion of a variety of sensible defaults in CSS and javascript - traversible menu trees, accordian/tabbed panes depending on the toolbar layout.

Textually.org: Power wheelchair electronics displayed on iPhones

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:07:03 +0000

Dynamics Controls has integrated an iPhone with its power wheelchair electronics - enabling power wheelchair users to enjoy all the benefits of an iPhone or iPod touch.

The solution connects a user's iPhone or iPod touch to the wheelchair system to display speed, battery and other wheelchair information in a great looking and easily visible way.

Lee Kwok, a wheel chair user in Christchurch says it will be fantastic to be able to buy an off the shelf product that has so many features for powered wheelchair users. "Having access to mainstream technology via a wheelchair is a huge advantage," says Lee Kwok.

[via iPhoneFreak]

Textually.org: Twitter available in French

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:55:52 +0000

Earlier this month, Twitter rolled out a Spanish language version of its service. This was the first language to gain native support beyond English and Japanese. Today, it’s announcing French support as well.

[via TechCrunch]

Textually.org: Best of Twitter tunes album released

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:51:17 +0000

Musical twitterers have found a way to condense entire compositions to fit in single, 140-character tweets. New Scientist reports.

The trend started earlier this year when Dan Stowell, a composer and computer scientist at Queen Mary, University of London, encoded the sound of waves crashing on the shore using the programming language SuperCollider and then tweeted the results.
Other users of the micro-blogging site responded by devising and posting their own compositions. Now a free to download, best-of album of 22 Twitter tunes has been released, entitled sc140.

Textually.org: Cell phones don't ring everyone's bell

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:46:49 +0000

Most of us just can't live without a cell phone and we wonder how we managed all those years without one.

But according to The Houston Chronicle, a small group of die hard folks are surviving just fine without what some describe as a high-tech digital leash.

Although the number of holdouts is dwindling, U.S. Census data released Thursday indicates 29 percent of the nation's homes still do not have cell phones.
Yet Census data show the ubiquitous cell phone is increasingly becoming the communication tool of choice for the majority. Some are even disconnecting their landlines and using cell phones exclusively.

According to the new data, the number of households with cell phones exploded from 36 percent to 71 percent between 1998 and 2005. Landline ownership during this same period fell from 96 percent to 91 percent, with many in their 20s particularly seeing no useful purpose in having a hard-wired phone. Those age 65 and older were the most likely to still have landlines — 98 percent.

Textually.org: Money Transfers to Become Hottest Mobile App, Says Gartner

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:41:54 +0000

Money transfers and payments over mobile phones will be among the top 10 most important mobile applications by 2012, market research company Gartner said on Wednesday, reports PC World.

Mobile money transfers top the list, beating out location-based services, search and browsing.
"It's a way for users who don't have a bank account to get access to financial services," said Sandy Shen, of Gartner's.

Mobile payments came in sixth place on Gartner's list and will be used in both developed and developing markets, according to Shen.

Read full article.

Ethan Zuckerman: From compassion to action, from action to knowledge

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:32:14 +0000

I’ve opened a lot of lectures lately – presentations about our Media Cloud research at Berkman – by complaining about the New York Times’s Africa coverage. I cite the fact that Japan tends to average roughly 8-10 times as many mentions in the paper of record than Nigeria in any given year, which is odd, given their comparable population size and importance. (I also mention that the Times is not alone – all US media outlets I’ve studied closely show this pattern – and that the Africa stories the Times runs are frequently excellent.)

If the Times is undercovering Nigeria, the same can’t be said for their recent coverage of Equatorial Guinea. One of the most fascinating and dysfunctional corners of the African continent, Equatorial Guinea is a couple of tiny islands and stretch of coastline between Gabon and Cameroon slightly smaller than the state of Maryland. The country is occupied by roughly half a million people, most of them extremely poor and a small number who are obscenely wealthy, as the islands of Equatorial Guinea sit atop massive oil fields. Much of Equatorial Guinea’s oil output is exported to the US – 132,000 barrels a day – making Equatorial Guinea the third-largest sub-Saharan exporter of oil to the US (behind Nigeria and Angola).

While oil wealth may help explain the Times’s interest in Equatorial Guinea (six stories this year, as compared to two this year on its vastly larger neighbor, Cameroon) – I’ve made the case in the past that American media attention tracks national GDP more closely than population – the Times’s focus may have more to do with another natural resource: absurdity.

Equatorial Guinea is, simply put, one of the most absurd nations on the planet. It’s not just a kleptocratic dictatorship run by a man who is arguably Africa’s worst ruler – it’s a staggeringly wealthy kleptocratic dictatorship. The CIA’s world factbook estimates per capita income for 2008 at $37,300, making the average Equatorial Guinean wealthier than the average Dane.

This wealth doesn’t seem to make the lives of the nation’s citizens much better. The image above is from Hans Rosling’s amazing Gapminder, and it shows the “development” of the country over the past two decades. The nation’s gotten dramatically wealthier in those years – the GDP per capita has increased by a factor of ten – and infant mortality has increased. Generally speaking, this doesn’t happen – infant mortality is much lower in wealthy nations than in poor nations. But Equatorial Guinea isn’t rich – it’s a nation where most citizens are desperately poor and a very small number are staggeringly rich.

Because there’s so much oil money in Equatorial Guinea, people periodically have the clever idea of overthrowing the government and installing a new one that would, gratefully, share future oil profits. Frederick Forsyth wrote a gripping novel that reads, more or less, as a blueprint for overthrowing Equatorial Guinea with a small force of professional missionaries. Some have alleged that Forsyth’s book was the result of his involvement in planning an attempted coup in 1973 – Forsyth admits he knew the coup plotters and that he passed money to them, but claims that his involvement with the plans were merely “research”. A more recent coup – The Wonga Coup in 2004 – allegedly used Forsyth’s novel as a planning document. The Wonga Coup involved South African mercenaries, Zimbabwean arms dealers and Mark Thatcher, the son of Britain’s former prime minister. It was one of the more absurd stories of the past decade, and it’s possible that we’ll finally get the complete story of the coup attempt now that the organizer, Simon Mann, was released from an Equatorial Guinean jail. (Not all the coups are quite this literary in nature. There’s no evidence that the 16 coup plotters arrested earlier this year were Forsyth fans – more likely, they were members of the Niger Delta resistance movement, MEND.)

A rich country with radical underdevelopment, a country so ripe for plunder that people read novels to plan coups? Not absurd enough for you? Okay, so here’s this – Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue is Britney Spears’s neighbor. Mr. Obiang is the son of the aforementioned kleptocratic dictator, and his shrewd management of his $4000 a month salary as Equatorial Guinea’s minister of agriculture and forests has allowed him to purchase a $35 million estate in Malibu, California, a Gulfstream V jet and a fleet of luxury cars and speedboats. The US Justice department reports that Obiang the younger pilfered an estimated $73 million from the EG treasury between 2005 and 2006 and moved it into the US.

As the New York Times reported this weekend, the strong evidence that Obiang is systematically looting his nation’s treasury hasn’t prevented him from getting US visas and visiting his estate several times a year. So why does Obiang get to play in Malibu while Robert Mugabe is forced to live it up in Hong Kong? According to the US State Department officials quoted in Ian Urbina’s New York Times story, the answer is simple: Zimbabwe doesn’t have oil, while Equatorial Guinea does.

Urbina’s story is an example of advocacy journalism at its best. Armed with research conducted by Global Witness, a leading pressure group focused on increasing transparency in resource-rich countries, Urbina points to rules bent or ignored by two US government departments, the possible complicity of two US oil companies and the role played by a prominent Washington PR firm as the EG government’s paid apologists.

So what?

When I started working with Open Society Institute, I was introduced to the phrase “theory of change” by a colleague who persistently (and, usually, very helpfully) insisted we unpack the logic behind any project we were considering funding. What did we want to accomplish, in the long run, and how would this project advance those goals?

So what’s the theory of change behind Urbina’s story? There may not be one – Urbina saw a fascinating and provocative story and used the platform provided by the New York Times to share the tale. Even if that’s true, the folks at Global Witness who provided Urbina with the documents to make this case had a theory of change – a belief that a story in a prominent newspaper would lead towards a policy change in the US government, or increased support for their campaigns for transparency in resource-extracting nations.

Perhaps the US State Department will be sufficiently embarrassed by the Times story to change their visa issuing practices. Perhaps some of the readers of the Times story will be grateful for Global Witness’s research and support their work. (You should – they’re an extremely responsible and credible organization doing important work.) I’m interested in the question of how a New York Times reader, agitated and motivated by Urbina’s story, would take the information she received in the story and move towards constructive action.

Global Witness doesn’t make it especially easy for individuals to involve themselves with campaigns, except as donors. Their webpages on corruption in oil, gas and mining and on banks and corruption include lists of the organization’s laudable achievements, their publications and their partners in advocacy. They don’t include a call or action or participation beyond encouragement to donate.

Would Global Witness benefit from a Facebook group dedicated to convincing Secretary Clinton to deny Obiang a visa? A petition demanding that Equatorial Guinea hold free and open elections? Probably not. They’re making a bet that the way to influence a government like Obiang’s is to operate at intergovernmental levels, providing actors within the State department with information and impetus to act.

Here’s the rub: information alone is insufficient to provoke action. In “A Problem from Hell“, Samantha Power unpacks the history of genocides in the 20th century and the reaction of governments to these systematic mass killings. Pointing out that Clinton administration wasn’t unaware of the genocide taking place in Rwanda, just unwilling to act, Power argues that governments only act to prevent genocide in reaction to consistent, relentless citizen pressure. Given the reasons not to act against Equatorial Guinea (the fear of driving EG to oust US oil companies and invite in Chinese ones, for instance), it’s reasonable to believe that merely informing and embarrassing the State Department won’t accomplish anything, without building accompanying citizen pressure.

So let’s reexamine the idea of the anti-Obieng Facebook group. My friend Evgeny Morozov argues that a great deal of online activism can be best characterized as “slacktivism” – it’s a symbolic gesture, a fashion statement, not an action that could lead towards real change. The examples he offered at a talk at Ars Electronica were, to me, compelling ones – a Facebook group dedicated to “saving the children of Africa” with 1.5 million members and a total of $8,449 in donations; a psychology experiment in Denmark that demonstrated people’s willingness to sign onto an online protest against an imaginary injustice. Evgeny worries that such online activism isn’t just ineffective – it leads to social loafing, where people get less involved with actually saving the children of Africa because they see a group of likeminded individuals and assume the collective effort will solve the problem.

While I find Evgeny’s argument compelling, I’m starting to wonder whether there’s countervailing dynamic at work. During the June 2009 protests over the Iranian elections, there was a burst of online activity as people moved by accounts of the protests looked for ways to offer solidarity and support for the activists on the ground. Twitter users turned their avatars green and changed their location information and time zone to suggest that they were in Tehran. They joined Facebook groups, shared links to the Neda Agha-Soltan video, donated USB keys to load with censorship circumvention software and send to activists, and opened proxy servers to offer Iranians an uncensored path to the internet.

These efforts weren’t effective in overturning the Iranian election results or leading to a popular revolution in the country. That might reflect their ineffectiveness – it’s unclear that the greening of Twitter would strike fear into Ahmedinejad’s heart – or the fact that the current Iranian state is powerful, well-organized, controls an experienced security apparatus, and has support from many Iranian citizens. I’m wondering if they were effective in another way – they allowed people with no personal connection to Iran to feel like they were part of the events. This feeling, in turn, may have encouraged individuals to pay closer attention to the news in Iran than if they’d been non-participants.

I’ve got no data to support this theory, just an anecdote or two about friends who compulsively aggregated Iran information on twitter, and a quote from Susan Sontag’s recent book, Regarding the Pain of Others:

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do – but who is that “we”? – and nothing “they” can do either – and who are “they” – then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.

If the inability to act makes us bored, cynical and apathetic, is it possible that doing something – even something that’s ultimately ineffective – could keep us engaged and compassionate? If so, is there an interplay between action and information-gathering that could turn a story into a movement that builds public will?

I read Urbina’s story. I get pissed off, and start researching other articles on Equatorial Guinea, which I post to Twitter and Facebook under the #eqguin tag. I encourage others to do likewise and to propose actions we might take to persuade the State Department to ban senior Obiang regime officials from traveling to the US. We start online petitions, a postcard campaign to the State Department and keep twittering links to the #eqguin tag… which becomes a trending topic, prompting journalists to declare a Twitter revolution in Equatorial Guinea. Witnessing our vast public will, Secretary Clinton declares that the State Department will enforce anti-corruption legislation and stop issuing visas to Obiang’s family. We promptly start a campaign to pressure CNOOC not to take over the leases that Obiang cancels with Exxon and Marathon in response to Clinton’s decisions.

A blueprint for turning knowledge into action and into will, or a fantasy? I’m not sure. (I am sure that it’s a blueprint that smart advocacy organizations are starting to try to implement, which makes the efficacy of the strategy an important topic to study.) I’m watching a debate between Evgeny and academic/activist Patrick Philippe Meier on this topic, centering around Evgeny’s recent article in Prospect magazine, “How dictators watch us on the web“. Evgeny makes the case that the rise of participatory web technologies has benefitted repressive governments as much as activists, who often aren’t able to use these technologies effectively; Patrick respondsby repeatedly asking “so what?”, arguing that Evgeny doesn’t have the data to prove that online activism is effective or ineffective. (Evgeny’s response to Patrick seems to agree on only one point – no one’s got the data to answer these questions effectively.)

Here’s my question: does it matter if action is effective or ineffective if we can demonstrate that action leads to more interest in a topic and more knowledge acquisition? I’ve been making the case for years that Americans (and likely people in many developed nations) don’t get enough information about the developing world, and that this lack of attention has consequences for developed and developing nations. If Americans don’t hear about an economic boom in Ghana, they don’t invest… which slows the boom, costing Ghanaians growth and costing Americans business opportunities in a growing economy. Similar dynamics apply around aid, humanitarian and security intervention, export of physical and cultural products.

A couple of years back, I realized that this was a supply problem, as much as a demand problem – journalists want to write about the developing world, but they and their publications have little evidence that their audience wants to hear these stories. Without evidence of reader interest in the developing world, it’s hard for most publications to support the research and travel that goes into creating these stories. If action (useful or otherwise) and newsseeking behaviors are linked, starting a movement may be a way to aggregate demand for a story, and encourage more reporting like Urbina’s story.

So get pissed off and start a Facebook group. Launch a Twitter hashtag. Translate compassion into action. But realize that the most effective action probably involves aggregating and disseminating information, building knowledge and awareness that’s an asset even if it doesn’t lead directly to political change.

And help us – me, Evgeny, Patrick, the Berkman Center, and everyone else studying this phenomenon – think about how we can bring data to the table and test some of these questions. Is online activism effective in bringing about political change? What mechanisms and tools are effective? Does the ability to take action increase and sustain interest in a topic? Does action need to have political effect to sustain interest? Does increased interest lead to increased media attention, and does that attention lead to real-world change? What sort of data and experiments do we need to move these questions beyond anecdote and theory and into testable propositions?

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution: Will citizen curators be next?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:45:51 +0000

A MacArthur Foundation article titled Selling Museums to a Tough Audience: Teens describes a meeting where 23 leading museum people commiserated about the rejection of museums by the youth:

Even though this group was hardly the ostriches, they all grappled with the constraints of the current system—from physical structures to limited budgets. What happens to intellectual copyrights? How do you digitize three-dimensional objects? And who’s the boss here? Do we really want 14-year-olds telling us what to exhibit and how?

Lurking behind many of these questions is an issue that crops up a lot in this digital world—who is the expert, who is the editor, who is the curator? How much democracy do we really want?

“Some say, ‘no, we need curators,’” says Elizabeth Babcock, vice president of education and library collections at Chicago’s Field Museum. “Others say, ‘no, that’s what’s wrong with curating. It presumes to know what is interesting. They’re delivering what they think people want.’”

This latter approach, says Michael Edson, director of web and new media strategy at the Smithsonian, risks making museums obsolete. Millennials—those born between the late 1970s and the early 1990s—recently told a focus group that the Smithsonian “is not an institution that understands me.”

This generation demands a lot more. It’s no longer about the Smithsonian saying, “We’re great. Come and love us,” says Edson. Instead, museums must come to terms with opening up their collections for wider access and creating more citizen curators. . . .

The article continues by describing some curating projects integrating the digital world. These projects were demonstrated when teens entered the meeting. This connecting as curating was called “cool” by some teens who participated in the demos.

Ethan Zuckerman: Bridging with Brian Lehrer

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:29:05 +0000

Brian Lehrer, the moderator of WNYC’s excellent morning show, has been kind enough to invite me onto his show all month long, appearing every Thursday morning. It’s been a somewhat insane month for me to participate. As Rachel explained on her blog, the last few weeks of her pregnancy have been a little tricky and scary, and I ended up doing one of our interviews from the parking lot of the local hospital. Rachel’s well and home today, and I have high hopes of broadcasting shows with Brian today and this coming Wednesday before she goes into labor!

When we discussed what we might want to cover in our segments, we outlined half a dozen topics in international development. But as we’ve started talking on air, we’re hovering around my topic du jour – how the Internet can help make the world a smaller place. After looking at Meedan, a wonderful project designed to enable conversation between English and Arabic speakers (disclosure – I’m an advisor to the project) during last week’s show, we’re going to look closely at Roland Soong’s EastSouthWestNorth blog today and how Obama’s visit to China was covered in the Chinese blogosphere.

Eldoret, Kenya at night. Photo by Joshua Wanyama

Brian has asked me to give his listeners homework assignments, asking them to look at sites before the next show. Next week’s conversation is going to be about dialogs regarding rebranding Africa, and the homework assignment will be Joseph Wanyama and Sheila Ochugboju’s remarkable site, AfricaKnows.com. Joseph is a brilliant photojournalist and many of his photos of contemporary life in Kenya are complemented with poems from Sheila. Collectively they give a picture of Africa that’s likely to surprise and challenge people who don’t know the continent well.

Hope you’ll tune in. And thanks for the opportunity to engage with your listeners, Brian.

Textually.org: Conde Nast releases 'virtual magazine' iPhone app

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:49:34 +0000

Conde Nast released a brand-new iPhone app Wednesday in conjunction with GQ's Men of the Year issue that provides readers with a replica of the magazine on their iPhone or iPod touch. New York Daily News reports.

But its more than just a replica: You can click on a product and be taken right to the product's Web site, you can touch a link in a music review and download that song right to your phone, you can watch video of interviews, and so much more.

Textually.org: Bangladeshis rush to learn English by mobile

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:59:57 +0000

In an ambitious new project, the BBC World Service Trust is harnessing the latest communications technology to provide English language learning for over 50 million mobile users in Bangladesh.

The first of its kind in the world, this project will provide high quality English learning tools using mobile, television and the internet to millions of people, many of whom live on less than £2 a day.

Central to the project is BBC Janala (“Window”) which uses the mobile phone as a powerful low-cost learning device by offering over 250 audio and SMS lessons to the growing 50.4 million mobile users in Bangladesh.

To make the lessons affordable, the BBC has teamed up with all six of Bangladesh’s mobile operators who have agreed to cut the cost of calls to the service by up to 75%. Each lesson is a three-minute phone call, costing about 3 taka (2.6p).

According to The Financial Times,

More than 300,000 people in Bangladesh have rushed to sign up to learn English over their mobile phones, threatening to swamp the service even before its official launch on Friday.
Part of a UK government initiative to help develop English skills in Bangladesh, it marks the first time that mobile phones have been used as an educational tool on this scale.

[via Switched]

Textually.org: AT&T Releases New Commercial Targeting Verizon

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:05:01 +0000

Spotted on Apple iPhone School, AT&T's new commercial targeting targets Verizon.

It's a reply to the Verizon's ads that compared coverage between the two networks.

Textually.org: App lets your iPhone blow out candles

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:59:34 +0000

Spotted on Gizmodo, a new iPhone app called Blower that uses its speaker to blow air. No peripherals. No attachments. Check the video for yourself.

The developers say that you can use it to "blow out candles, herbs, and refresh your skin during hot summer nights."

Textually.org: PCMag Unveils its First iPhone App

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:54:19 +0000

PCMag launched a mobile version of our online Tech Encyclopedia, which give users quick access to more than 25,000 tech terms.

In their own words: PCMag has, in collaboration with Computer Language Company, launched its inaugural iPhone app, a mobile version of its popular online Tech Encyclopedia. That's right, 25,000 tech terms, all searchable by name, in an easy-to-browse alphabetical format. Just as in the Web version, there are extensive entries, cross links to relevant terms and images that you can expand to investigate.

Textually.org: Thieves steal iPhones in rooftop heist

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:36:34 +0000

Thieves have made off with millions of dollars worth of iPhones in a daring heist from a Belgian warehouse. The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

The thieves climbed a fire ladder to the roof of the warehouse, Belgium's De Standaard said.
They then entered the building through a hole cut directly above where the 4000 phones, which had a market value of about $3.2 million, were being stored.

The iPhones were destined for mobile operator Mobistar, which had a long waiting list for the popular handsets.

.. According to Patti Verdoodt of Mobistar: "We have blocked the serial numbers of the stolen iPhones so they can not be used."

Thieves have made off with millions of dollars worth of iPhones in a daring heist from a Belgian warehouse. The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

The thieves climbed a fire ladder to the roof of the warehouse, Belgium's De Standaard said.
They then entered the building through a hole cut directly above where the 4000 phones, which had a market value of about $3.2 million, were being stored.

The iPhones were destined for mobile operator Mobistar, which had a long waiting list for the popular handsets.

Textually.org: GSMA Unveils Mobile's Green Manifesto

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:27:06 +0000

The GSM Association announced recently at the Mobile Asia Congress the launch of Mobile's Green Manifesto, which has been developed in collaboration with The Climate Group.

This manifesto sets out how the mobile industry plans to lower its greenhouse gas emissions per connection, and demonstrates the key role that mobile communications can play in lowering emissions in other sectors and industries. It also makes specific policy recommendations for governments and the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP15), December 7-18.

Developed with the support of The Climate Group, the Green Manifesto shows that, with the right public policies in place, mobile can make a major contribution to the fight against global warming.

[via Softpedia]

Textually.org: Mobile Ads: Wait Until Next Year

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:54:55 +0000

Adweek on why mobile advertising still has some way to go. The year of mobile has been predicted virtually annually for the past decade. There is compelling evidence that this time it's different. Overall, there are now more mobile phones...

Development Seed: Videos of Presentations on WhiteHouse.gov, Managing News, and OpenPublish

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:26:22 +0000

Presentations from Monday’s Drupal meetup in Washington, DC

At Monday's Drupal meetup in Washington, DC we had a stellar line up of presentations, and thanks to Will White were able to record them all. Below are videos of each presentation.

Dave Cole, Macon Phillips, and Nick LoBue from the White House New Media team talked about moving WhiteHouse.gov to Drupal, what's coming next with the website, and how they'll be contributing to the Drupal community.

Development Seed: Open Data Talk at Web 2.0 Expo New York

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:05:44 +0000

What open data looks like to the rest of us: Examples of government data in use

Tomorrow Eric is presenting on open data at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, focusing on "What Open Data Looks Like to the Rest of Us: Examples of Government Data in Use". His presentation will span from our developers perspective on working with government data in Washington, DC's Apps for Democracy contest to our experience working with really large government data sets - like the U.S. Census TIGER data that we worked with Amazon.com to host in their cloud. He'll also go into some technical details, explaining the difference between open and accessible and discussing preferred data formats and ways to promote the usage of open data.

The second half of his presentation will focus on what it means to work with sensitive pubic data, using the example of election monitoring data to highlight specific strategies. During this portion of the presentation, Eric will give a sneak peak at a private site developed for the National Democratic Inistitute that visualizes election results from the recent presidential election in Afghanistan, which was heavily marred by fraud. He'll also discuss the challenges of working with data sets that are actively changing and about how to use open data sets for making maps, which were a key part of this project. Eric will end the presentation by talking about how open source tools help to open up data, and why PDFs are the anti-open data format.

If you're at the Web 2.0 Expo, stop by to see the presentation or look for Eric afterward to discuss open data in more detail.

OpenNet Initiative: Is Vietnam Blocking Facebook?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:30:27 +0000

According to an AP report, access to Facebook in Vietnam has been intermittent over the past week, with many users fearing a government block.

Facebook has over 1 million users in Vietnam, a considerable amount in a country with 22 million Internet users total, or about 25% of the total population.

The social media site is among the most filtered sites in the world; Syria, Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia all currently block Facebook.

The ban in Vietnam was reported on Twitter as early as November 10:

danah boyd: Call for descriptions: online safety programs

zephoria-blog@zephoria.org (zephoria) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:03:37 +0000

The Risky Behaviors and Online Safety track of the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is creating a Compendium of youth-based Internet safety programs and interventions. We are requesting organizations, institutions, and individuals working in online youth safety to share descriptions of their effective programs and interventions that address risky behavior by youth online. We are particularly interested in endeavors that involve educators, social services, mentors and coaches, youth workers, religious leaders, law enforcement, mental health professionals, and those working in the field of public or adolescent health.

More information can be found at: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/digitalnatives/policy/safetycfp
Submission Deadline: December 21, 2009
Submission Length: 2-5 pages
Send Submission to: ymps-submissions@cyber.law.harvard.edu

Program descriptions will be made publicly available. Exemplary programs will be spotlighted to policy makers, educators, and the public so that they too can learn about different approaches being tried and tested. Submissions also will be used to inform recommendations for future research and program opportunities.
Submissions should be documentations of solutions, projects, or initiatives that address at least one of the following four areas being addressed:

Sexual solicitation of and sex crimes involving minors
Bullying or harassment of minors
Access to problematic or illegal content (including pornographic and violent content)
Youth-generated problematic or illegal content (including sexting and self-harm sites)

We are especially keen to highlight projects that focus on underlying problems, risky youth behavior, and settings where parents cannot be relied upon to help youth. The ideal solution, project, or initiative will be grounded in research-driven knowledge about the risks youth face rather than generalized beliefs about online risks. Successful endeavors will most likely recognize that youth cannot simply be protected, but must be engaged as active agents in any endeavor that seeks to help youth.

Please forward this call along to any organizations and individuals you think would be able to share information about their successful experiences and programs.

Should you have any questions, please contact us: ymps-submissions@cyber.law.harvard.edu.

safety youth internet bullying harassment

Textually.org: Guide to iPhone GPS Navigation Apps

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:37:44 +0000

Art of the iPhone has published a (very useful) Guide to iPhone GPS Navigation Apps, including their expert opinion on which two are the best: Navigon MobileNavigator and MotionX GPS Drive.

In their own words:

The App Store is cluttered with iPhone GPS apps, and sorting through them is a daunting task. This guide is designed to cut through the clutter, gather all relevant info in one place, and aid you in making the best choice. We also take a look at the strengths and weaknesses of iPhone GPS vs personal navigation devices, and examine the new elephant in the room, Google Maps Navigation.

Textually.org: Using cellphones to fight noise pollution

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:44:31 +0000

According to New Scientist, cellphones could soon be used to fight noise pollution.

In a bid to make cities quieter, the European Union requires member states to create noise maps of their urban areas once every five years. Rather than deploying costly sensors all over a city, the maps are often created using computer models that predict how various sources of noise, such as airports and railway stations, affect the areas around them.
Nicolas Maisonneuve of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, France, says that those maps are not an accurate reflection of residents' exposure to noise. To get a more precise picture, Maisonneuve's team has developed NoiseTube, a downloadable software app which uses people's smartphones to monitor noise pollution. "The goal was to turn the mobile phone into an environmental sensor," says Maisonneuve.

The app records any sound picked up by the phone's microphone, along with its the GPS location. Users can label the data with extra information, such as the source of the noise, before it is transmitted to NoiseTube's server.

Read full article and more about NoiseTube on their website.

Related, sort of:

-- Cell phones to sense our environment and its pollutants (2009)

-- Cyclists' cellphones help monitor air pollution (2008)

-- Cellphone masts can measure rainfall (2006)

-- Aero Phone measures air pollution (2004)

-- Saving the World With Cell Phones (2005)

-- Cell phones could warn of gas leaks (2003)

-- Phones that detect terrorist attacks (2003)

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution: Library in a Pocket

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:30:05 +0000

A New York Times Technology report today titled Library in a Pocket takes a look at the how smartphones are being used to read books. This trend is so strong that one out of every five new iPhone apps released last month was a book. From the article:

Many people who want to read electronic books are discovering that they can do so on the smartphones that are already in their pockets — bringing a whole new meaning to “phone book.” And they like that they can save the $250 to $350 that they would otherwise spend on yet another gadget.

“These e-readers that cost a lot of money only do one thing,” said Keishon Tutt, a 37-year-old pharmacist in Texas who buys 10 to 12 books a month to read on her iPhone, from Apple. “I like to have a multifunctional device. I watch movies and listen to my songs.”

Over the last eight months, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and a range of smaller companies have released book-reading software for the iPhone and other mobile devices. One out of every five new applications introduced for the iPhone last month was a book, according to Flurry, a research firm that studies mobile trends.

Textually.org: An App for Crossing the Border

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:57:28 +0000

A new tool to assist Mexican migrant workers safely cross over the border into the United States has been developed by Ricardo Dominguez of the University of California in San Diego, reports Viceland via PSFK.

Dominguez, an activist/hacker and performance artist cobbled together a cheap mobile phone and a free GPS application to make the “Transborder Immigrant Tool”.