One of the great fears as a speakeris that you’re going to give a talk too similar to the person you’re sharing the stage with. Clay Shirky and I gave talks at an event a year or so back, and discovered that we were using two of the same stories in our presentations. (I, unfortunately, found this out by listening to Clay’s talk and frantically editing mine in response.)

That wasn’t a problem today at the seminar on the Information Society in Barcelona I’m participating in. I had the good fortune to share the stage with Carlos Domingo, who runs the R&D unit for Spanish telephone giant, Telefonica. Domingo is working hard to bring some of the most successful tools and techniques of web 2.0 into a large and often conservative telehone company. He’s a classic
early adopter, with a Nabaztag and a Pleo in his office, and a blog that he’s abandoning so he can spend more time Twittering.

Inside Telefonica, Domingo’s hoping to unlock information and increase communication between members of his team by aggresively embracing social media. Rather than trying to dig ideas out of a giant document repository, the knowledge management system that so many large companies have embraced, he’s instituted an internal video sharing service. Researchers working on projects get two minutes to explain their work to their colleagues - some break the rules and run long, but most as well-behaved, and it’s possible to get the gist of most projects with just a few seconds of video, making it far easier to surf through than a huge document repository. (I assume they’re heavily tagged and annotated to make them highly searchable.) Using Yammer, 350 members of his team share ideas on a Twitter-like network that’s closed to the company, and encourages employees to share what they’re working on and what problems they could use help with.

I’d been asked by the organizers to talk about how NGOs and social change organizations innovate, with the special challenge that I wasn’t supposed to celebrate innovative projects so much as I was to talk about the process of innovation. As I thought about this, I realized that I a) didn’t have much understanding of how social entrepreneurs innovate and b) didn’t have much confidence that social entrepreneurs generally did a good job of innovating with social media tools. Generally, I think that social entrepreneurs place far too much faith in social media tools and assume that they’ll be more popular, useful and powerful than they actually turn out to be.

So I offered a talk about some very different types of innovation - African innovations including the zeer pot, William Kamkwamba’s windmill, biomass charcoal, and endless examples of innovation using mobile phones. My argument was that innovation often comes from unusual and difficult circumstances - constraints - and that it’s often wiser to look for innovation in places where people are trying to solve difficult, concrete problems rather than where smart people are sketching ideas on blank canvases.

I offered seven rules that appear to help explain how (some) developing world innovation proceeds:

- innovation (often) comes from constraint (If you’ve got very few resources, you’re forced to be very creative in using and reusing them.)

- don’t fight culture (If people cook by stirring their stews, they’re not going to use a solar oven, no matter what you do to market it. Make them a better stove instead.)

- embrace market mechanisms (Giving stuff away rarely works as well as selling it.)

- innovate on existing platforms (We’ve got bicycles and mobile phones in Africa, plus lots of metal to weld. Innovate using that stuff, rather than bringing in completely new tech.)

- problems are not always obvious from afar (You really have to live for a while in a society where no one has currency larger than a $1 bill to understand the importance of money via mobile phones.)

- what you have matters more than what you lack (If you’ve got a bicycle, consider what you can build based on that, rather than worrying about not having a car, a truck, a metal shop.)

- infrastructure can beget infrastructure (By building mobile phone infrastructure, we may be building power infrastructure for Africa - see my writings on incremental infrastructure.)

The most experimental part of a very experimental talk was applying these seven principles to three ICT4D experiments - One Laptop Per Child, Kiva and Global Voices. Ismael has a review of my talk including the scores I offer for each of the projects on these criteria.

The talk was pretty well received, and it’s great, great fun to try out new ideas on stage. I’m looking forward to thinking through whether these seven rules are the best way to characterise the lessons of the sorts of innovations I watch on sites like Afrigadget, and just what these rules mean for those of us trying to use internet tools for social change - thanks to my friends in Barcelona for a chance to start playing with these ideas, live on stage.

The Economist has an online feature this week on Digital Nomads, people for whom mobile connectivity has become a central part of life. The piece features three videos, with the CEO of Sun Microsystems, Jan Chipchase of Nokia in Tokyo, and a podcaster and IT worker in Mumbai. The last of these is the most interesting - Abhishek Ashok Kumar documents a week in his life via voicemail, photos and video, and presents a picture of modern-day India where mobile communication is essential for everyone from mechanics, taxi drivers to IT workers.

It’s somewhat surprising that the reality Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, shows in his slideshow is somewhat more mundane than the world Kumar shows off - sure, Sun’s got a clever system that allows workers to customize a workstation with a smartcard, but “workplace hotelling” is so 1990s. Roadside repair services that advertise by painting cellphone numbers on the Mumbai streets? That’s exciting.

There’s nothing like the term “cyberwar” to capture a reader’s attention. For those who grew up on “Wargames”, “Sneakers” or William Gibson novels, the term conjures up images of heroic hackers in shadowy basements, frantically tapping on keyboards in a life and death struggle against the enemy on the other side of the glowing CRT screen.

It’s a vision that was compelling to senior people in the US Air Force, including former USAF Secretary Michael Wynne, who was fired earlier this year over the scandal of mishandled nuclear weapons. Before his departure, Wynne launched the Air Forces’s “Cyberspace Command” with a television ad that portrayed the Air Force as the defender of the Pentagon against an onslaught of digital attacks. The Pentagon has stopped funding and now may cancel the initiative.

Wynne argues that the current military faceoff between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia is an instance of cyberwar, saying “The Russians just shot down the government command nets so they could cover their incursion. This was really one of the first aspects of a coordinated military action that had cyber as a lead force, instead of sending in air planes.”

That’s the sort of speculation tech reporters live for. It raises the possibility that, instead of reporting on venture capital deals and the kudzu-like spread of Facebook, they might get the chance to be war reporters without the complication of being shot at. In the past week, in-depth articles on cyberwar have graced the pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Salon.

The best of these articles have a common conclusion: it’s very hard to know what’s actually gone on. Call it “the fog of cyberwar”. Better yet, please don’t. As the dust settles, it’s unclear whether “cyberwar” is even an appropriate term for what’s taken place online as an actual war - the kind with guns and dead people - has transpired in Georgia. It’s worth remembering that in this “cyberwar”, the most serious consequence is that a website becomes temporarily inaccessible to viewers - it’s a war being fought with paintballs, not with live rounds.

Here’s what’s known: many Georgian websites have been difficult or impossible to access for several days. In response, the Georgian government has moved some vital email addresses and websites to Google, and other Georgian websites have sought help from Estonia. Here’s what’s not known: whether these attacks were directed by the Russian military, as Georgia’s Foreign Minister has speculated, by shadowy criminal gangs, or just by kids with a grudge against Georgia and too much free time. The last of these scenarios is looking increasingly likely.

Some of the most dramatic reports of cyberwar have come from an anonymous blog (RBNexploit) that tracks the Russian Business Network. RBN is a source of great concern to many in the computer security community - it’s a very successful producer of tools used for spam, identity theft and malware. The RBNexploit bloggers asserted that RBN hackers - on behalf of the Russian government - had taken control of backbone routers that delivered traffic to Georgia via Turkey, effectively cutting Georgia off from the Internet.

While this would have been dramatic and exciting, it doesn’t appear to be true. Earl Zmijewski, a vice president at internet monitoring company Renesys, has been watching connections into Georgia very closely and reports, “During the hostilities, we’ve seen no significant changes in routing. In particular, we saw no apparent attempts to limit traffic via Russia, but then again, most traffic from Georgia seems to currently transit Turkey. ”

What’s knocked some Georgian websites offline are denial of service attacks. These attacks are the equivalent of harassing a person by calling her on the phone as often as possible and hanging up when she answers. On the web, this involves sending a request to a web server over and over, hoping to overwhelm it and make it incapable of serving pages to legitimate users. In a more sophisticated version of the attack, dozens or hundreds of people call the same number - load the same webpage - which might make even a modest-sized corporation impossible to reach for the duration of the attack. These more complex attacks are called distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), and they have become frustratingly common since CERT (Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Emergency Response Team) first warned of them in 1999.

It requires very little technical expertise to carry out a simple DoS attack - hit reload on your web browser every few seconds and you’ll be carrying out an (ineffective, primitive) attack. Belarussian tech journalist Evgeny Morozov was curious how much technical skill it would require to participate in a more organized attack. In a brilliant article for Slate, he describes visiting sites like StopGeorgia.ru, where he discovered a webpage that, saved to his desktop and opened in a browser, made thousands of requests an hour to 18 Georgian websites. Presto - “cyberwar” for dummies. A bit more poking led him to a set of instructions for DoSHTTP, a utility that can easily be misused to perform efficient denial of service attacks.

The technical solutions Morozov found weren’t especially sophisticated - one relied on a dozen lines of Javascript code, the other on a widely available off-the-shelf tool. These attacks can be effective not because they’re using especially sophisticated technology, but because they leverage a “social hack” - they rely on the actions of individual, patriotic Russians organized via sites like StopGeorgia, which hosts a “scoreboard” displaying which Georgian sites are reachable and unreachable. Look too hard for shadowy political forces and esoteric technology and “we risk underestimating the great patriotic rage of many ordinary Russians, who, having been fed too much government propaganda in the last few days, are convinced that they need to crash Georgian Web sites. Many Russians undoubtedly went online to learn how to make mischief, as I did.” (Morozov is very clear that his sympathies don’t lie with the Russians in this conflict, and that his attacks were conducted very briefly, for research purposes.)

The attacks on Georgian websites are probably not just coming from angry Russians hitting reload. Some are likely coming from “botnets”, large sets of computers that have been infected with malware, software that allows a computer to be controlled remotely by a third party. Russian hacker network RBN controls one network, the Storm botnet, but many others exist. It’s now possible to “rent” a botnet - Bill Woodcock of internet research consultancy Packet Clearing House estimates that botnets can be rented to perform DDoS attacks for as little as four cents per machine. It’s possible that some hackers have rented botnets and turned them against Georgian websites, or that some operators have decided to “donate” attacks to the anti-Georgian cause.

The rhetoric of “cyberwarfare” has a reassuring implication: we understand how to fight wars, so surely we can win a cyberwar. Unfortunately, the truth is more complicated. There’s no magic “cyberspace command” solution the USAF can unleash to defeat a botnet. The administrators trying to bring Georgian webservers back online are doing precisely what any sysadmin does confronted with a DDoS - they are blocking traffic from the IP addresses that are launching the attacks, and sharing these blocklists with administrators confronting the same problems. If they can block addresses more quickly than the attackers can recruit more participants, they’ll win. This strategy is known by the complex technical term “Whack-a-Mole”, and it’s roughly as frustrating as the fairground game of the same name.

What’s frightening about the online attacks against Georgia is not that they’re organized by shadowy Krelmin forces, but that they’re coming from a loosely organized group of individuals. In his new book “Here Comes Everybody“, Clay Shirky notes that one of the characteristics of the contemporary internet is that it enables “ridiculously easy group formation.” Once formed, these groups can organize potluck dinners or spread propoganda. Chinese netizens, angered by what they perceived as anti-China bias in western media, organized a campaign to challenge media narratives on sites like Anti-CNN.com. Individuals have flooded YouTube with videos exposing errors in CNN and BBC’s China coverage and arguing that Tibet is a part of a multi-ethnic, federated China. Most western media reports assume this effort is organized by the Chinese government, a charge participants angrily deny.

The shift from a world where power comes solely from governments and militaries to one where power can come from loosely organized, adhoc groups is a hard one to grasp. It’s easy to understand why the press and the military would misunderstand the situation in Georgia as a new type of military attack. The truth may be more intriguing and frightening - we’ve entered an era where individuals can organize their own “cyberwar” campaigns online, in concert with or in opposition to their governments.

Reuters was kind enough to ask me for my thoughts on this matter - a version of the piece is available on their website.

The folks at Pingdom, a company focused on server performance monitoring, posted a fascinating little piece of research based on Google’s Insights for Search tool. I’m interested both in their specific research question - what social network tools are popular in what parts of the world? - and the richness of the data available via this tool from Google. (Basically, I’m feeling boneheaded that I hadn’t realized this data set was available.)

The Pingdom folks tried a simple experiment, using Search Insight to search for information on a dozen social networking sites. The Insight tool reveals how popular searches for particular terms are, and where in the world those searches are coming from. This lets the Pingdom folks conclude:

# Facebook is most popular in Turkey and Canada.
# Friendster and Imeem are most popular in the Philippines.
# LinkedIn is most popular in India.
# Twitter is most popular in Japan.
# LiveJournal is more popular in Russia than it is in the United States.

Of course, that’s not quite what these searches measure. Companies generally keep their traffic data extremely private. (We try to be a bit more transparent, publishing an analysis of Global Voices logs online, but those numbers probably aren’t entirely accurate and we increasingly rely on Google Analytics to track what’s happening on our own servers… and we don’t pubish those numbers.) The Insight data isn’t measuring traffic to those sites, or their number of active members, just the number of folks searching for those sites via Google. That may or may not be an effective proxy for interest in those networks. I’m a Facebook user, and I have the site bookmarked, so I rarely would find myself searching for the site - it’s possible that the search data is a more effective proxy for the strength of a brand in a particular market, or the level of interest from non-participants in a specific site.

On the other hand, the information Pingdom turns up through this proxy looks pretty similar to the results Le Monde published a few months ago, using information from Valleymag Datamonitor, which evidently had access to numbers that measured the users of social networking sites broken down by their national origin.

Google appears willing to share a suprising amount of data with this tool - a search for “red sox” (rapidly becoming my “foobar“) gives a graph of searches for red sox since 2004, marking peaks in the graph with news stories. (The highest peak in the Red Sox graph is assocaited with the 2004 World Series victory… the peak for the 2007 series victory is puny in comparison.) Regional interest shows that while interest in the Sox is highest in the US, there’s substantial interest in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico (baseball-crazy nations with citizens who play for the Sox), and a surprising amount of interest in the team from Ireland. (Okay, given the massive Irish-American population in Boston, perhaps not that surprising.) It’s also possible to graph interest in a topic by nation over time, comparing the rise and fall of Dominican and Pueroriqueño interest in the Sox over time.

Finally, the tool shows ten terms most commonly associated with a search term, and “emerging” terms that have recently been associated with your term. Predictably, the Red Sox are associated with Boston, tickets and the Yankees… less predictably, center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury appears as a “breakout”, a term that’s recently become popular.

I had some fun with another tool designed to reveal this “associated search” data, Overture’s (now unavailable) keyword selector tool. Back in 2004, you could feed the KST a term like “red sox” and discover that there had been 10,068 searches in the previous month for “red sox suck”… in contrast to 30,527 searches for “yankees suck”. I fed my favorite search terms - a list of the world’s nations - into the tool and cranked out an interesting data set that I blogged about as “the Freudian web”, our associations between particular nations and our interest in them. The data that came out of that research suggested that there were some nations where our interests were basically in seeing naked ladies, others where we mostly wanted to buy cheap prescription drugs.

What’s especially nice about the Google tool is that we can look at the interest in a search time from different nations. Search Google Insight for “Sweden” - you’ll discover that “Sweden” is a more popular search in Gambia than in Sweden itself. Why? Click through on Gambia and you’ll get a page tracking searches from the Gambia for Sweden, which reveals that Gambians are searching for universities in Sweden. (So are Nigerians, Ghanaians, Cameroonians and Bengalis.)

I suspect there’s something wonderful that can be done with this data, though I don’t quite know what experiment to run yet. I’m interested in the ways that searches can proxy interest in specific topics, especially in international news. Searching for “Ossetia” reveals a predictable uptick in interest in the past month. And it wasn’t surprising to see the most interest in the term coming from Russia. But why are Finns searching for information about Ossetia? Again, clicking through is interesting - Google tells us that the searches for information about Ossetia aren’t just from Finland, but from the province of Southern Finland, a part of the nation that borders on Russia. Perhaps Finns in that corner of the country are looking anxiously at to the west and wondering whether Russian incursions could come across their own border. Or just that there are a lot of Russians in southwestern Finland. A search for Ghana, classified by US states, reveals the strongest interest in Maryland and DC, an area that’s got a huge Ghanaian expatriate population.

Fun data sets like this have the tendency to ruin my productivity until I can find some interesting way to manipulate them. Thanks, Google, for spoiling my month of August.

Ouch. GMail is down, giving 502 server errors to users around the world. It’s somewhat reassuring to log onto Twitter and find lots of friends griping about it as well.

As much as I’d like to rant about Google’s incompetence and the neccesity of perpetually accessible email… I’ve run email servers before, and I have absolutely no interest in running one again. Yes, it makes me vaguely uneasy that my email’s on a large corporation’s servers. But I’m far less nervous than if I were still running mail on my own box, trying to filter out spam, block DDOS attacks, etc.

The helpful folks on this Google group suggest that you may be able to access your mail via the AJAX-free gmail interface. I find that I’m able to read messages through it, though not send new mail.

Oddly, I’ve only received four messages in the past 90 minutes, which is roughly the time I’ve not been able to access GMail. It makes me wonder just how many of the people I regularly correspond with are also using GMail… (All of Global Voices, for instance.)

One of the best parts of this gathering at Microsoft is not the cool new toys coming from Microsoft research, but the ideas presented by nine design schools who’ve been invited to the event. In a two-hour session this afternoon, the teams present their work for critique by a group of MS and other design experts.

Ennea, a project from students at the Eindhoven University of Technology is one of the cooler things I’ve seen in a long time, developed during a six week design class. The students focused on an interesting problem - the problems incoming Dutch high-school students have in building socialization skills. The Dutch education system doesn’t have middle schools, so students go directly from an elementary school to high school, a transition that can be difficult and stressful. Schools assign “tutors” to groups of pupils, and they meet for an hour a week to work on socialization skills. The designers talked with tutors and realized they had very little information about how their students were doing, and designed a fascinating social tool that works as a very clever form of surveillance and behavior tracking.

The designers produced a set of small, cute, wireless-aware objects that students carried with them for a few weeks. The objects measured interactions between children, timing the interactions each child had, and whether they were with individuals or groups. This information allows the designers to describe each child’s interactions in a two-dimensional matrix based on interaction diversity and intensity. (Meet a lot of people and you’re more diverse. Spend a long time with a person, and it’s more intense.)

Rather than scoring the children on good or bad types of interaction, the device characterizes a user as one of nine animals: Lions are very diverse and very intense in their interactions. Their opposites are Polar Bears, who interact infrequently and briefly. Users can change roles over time - the device vibrates when your state changes, but you can only see what role you’ve taken on by “mating” your device with another person’s device, giving the opportunity for conversation and interaction. For “complementary” roles, the animal icons will glow gold.

While the students only see what animal currently represents them, the tutors get rich data on student interactions and can see how individual students are doing. Both have evidently found it useful in prototype - I can imagine scenarios in which tutor “surveillance” becomes worrisome, especially if certain behavioral patterns lead to interventions from the tutors. But it’s a lovely way to generate useful feedback data from wireless social interaction, and it’s possible that this will become used within Dutch schools. (The devices are quite clever from an engineering point, including an Arduino mini controller and an XBee wireless module - those aren’t hugely expensive devices, and it’s concievable that these devices could be mass produced.)

Undergrad students at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing has build a truly beautiful system called “Tai Chi Master“, designed to teach the martial art and meditation to a new generation of Chinese people. The students observe that the abstract ideas of Yi, Li and Chi are extremely difficult for masters to help students visualize. And they’ve noticed that office workers are often not able to practice in public parks, as a previous generation did.

Find more videos like this on DESIGN CHALLENGE PROJECT

Tai Chi Master is designed as a system to allow individuals to practice Tai Chi in their apartments with feedback from Tai Chi masters. The system is gestural and opens when the student makes a Tai Chi gesture, the motion of opening a fan. It’s designed to be an immersive environment and films the activity of the user, while providing a wide-screen demonstration of the motions as performed by a master, entered into the system by motion capture. What’s especially striking are the gorgeous visuals the system uses - the team dropped ink into water to create smoke-like clouds that emenate from the master’s hands and feet as he creates movements. It’s a lovely way to visualize the sorts of energy channeled within the Tai Chi movements.

Two projects from US universities focus on the thorny problem of personal finance. A team at Carnegie Mellon wants to introduce a credit card that monitors and stores your spending via a very pretty interface. Called current.c, the system lets users make budgets that are available visually on the card, showing how much one has spent towards each month budget, and lets them monitor their spending, assigning funds from one budget to another in the case of an impulse purchase. The card continuously monitors progress towards larger spending goals. It’s hard to imagine credit card companies issuing one, but it’s easier to image an iPhone ap that spoke to a web service that uses credit card information. The system doesn’t nag or mother - it just shows the current situation in a powerful visual way.

Students at the University of Washington have tried a different model. They’re building a cellphone plan for teenagers called Emu. The system has a weekly limit of minutes. Those minutes can be saved week to week, and they earn interest if saved. If a user gets good at saving minutes, they end up with excess minutes they can spend on wallpaper or ring tones. If they run out of minutes, they move into restricted modes, where the phone might only be able to call parents or make emergency calls. Parents don’t have to play the bad cop - the phone attempts to persuade the users to behave differently and to learn about money - minutes - management on their own. If they can persuade a phone company to offer the plan, they’d like to get increasingly sophisticated, including the ability to make loans of minutes or to invest them in some sort of a stock exchange. I love the recognition that cell minutes have become money (something true throughout the developing world) and wonder whether this would actually provide helpful feedback to kids who are just learning how to manage money.

Lots of beautiful and interesting ideas here. It’s always encouraging when the projects from the design students are more impressive than those from the established computer scientists…

I wrote a bit last year about the idea of “incremental infrastructure“. Basically, the idea is that there might be a future for infrastructure projects in Africa that build small pieces of infrastructure and either join them together, or simply make a profit serving a local community. One of the major vectors proposed was working with mobile phone companies to build power infrastructure, an idea stolen shamelessly from the brilliant Russell Southwood.

Russell gets credit for tipping me off to today’s incrementalism link: an announcement by Indian telecoms vendor VNL that they’ve developed a solar-powered, battery back up low power GSM tower. These towers won’t provide enough excess power that they can sell energy to local villages - which is what Russell and I had proposed companies might start doing with diesel generators, but they’ll certainly be more environmentally friendly than diesel generators, and they point to both the increasing practicality of photovoltaic generation in sub-Saharan Africa, and the value of designing products specifically for difficult infrastructure markets.

Kristen Taylor, the online community manager for the Knight Foundation, is a seasoned videoblogger with a focus on foodblogging. (Here she is, telling you what to do with scallops, mangos and bacon.) As such, she’s a great person to give the room full of journalists an intro to what tey might do with hosting and sharing video online.

YouTube is a must, says Kristen, if only because it’s got huge mindshare and audience… but it’s probably the least friendly and appealing for the video authors. For serious, serial videobloggers, she prefers blip.tv, which allows people to create shows with a consistent intro, outro, logo and branding, encouraging creators to make a commitment to producing series, not just individual posts. Kristen uses Vimeo, a tool designed to let people share HD video and believes it has the best picture quality, but she’s intrigued by Viddler, which allows comments on specific moments within a video. (While cool, she points out that this can be a moderation challenge.)

Kristen tells us that, today, she’s vlogging using Flickr. While Flickr allows you to post very quickly, it has size limits that limit the length of your video, making the clips more like “a long photo” than a traditional video segment. With this many places to post, Kristen recommends Tube Mogul, a free service that allows you to upload a video once and publish it on multiple platforms.

She offers a useful set of tips for incorporating video in blogposts (some of which I’m bad about following):

- Contextualize video as you would a blockquote
- Indicate the file size and format of the video
- Link to HD versions of the video - they’re usually too bit to incorporate them online
- Explain the player functionality to your readers
- Plan for comment moderation, as you’re going to need to moderate.

The discussion afterwards raises the issue of subtitling, where Kristen recommends dot.sub, which allows you not just to publish videos with subtitles, but let anyone add subtitles in their language to your video. Seesmic also comes up as a suggestion for quick and easy videoblogging, pointing out that Seesmic allows video recording through a flash application, rather than a standalone application.

As I was putting these notes together, I came across a post from Afrigadget, telling me that they’ve moved their hosted video to Zoopy, a social media site based in South Africa. Worth checking out as well…

My friend Kevin Donovan has an interesting post today, wondering about the size of the Arabic-language wikipedia. As he observes, it’s smaller than the Esperanto wikipedia despite the fact that it’s likely the fifth most spoken language in the world, at least in terms of native speakers. (Esperanto, for the curious, is not the fourth most spoken language in the world.) Kevin is suspicious of attempts to pay people to contribute to small wikipedias, and wonders what sort of incentives in a gift economy might encourage people to author content for small Wikipedias.

Kevin references an old post of mine, where I tried to figure out the ratio of native speakers of a language to the number of wikipedia entries, and offer some speculation about the motivations of people who contribute to wikipedia in their mother tongues versus contributing in English. I suggested that some wikipedians might be contributing to the English-language wikipedia rather than their native wikipedias because they’ll have a much broader reach and influence, as the English-language wikipedia is one of the world’s most popular sites, while smaller wikipedias often have small audiences.

The question is a timely one, as the Wikimania conference just took place in Alexandria and may serve as a major impetus to encourage contributions to the Arabic Wikipedia. Kevin’s post speculates that there may be a form of “social permission” that lets people know that it’s okay to contribute to a project like wikipedia, even in absence of formal reward mechanisms. As I was reading this post (serendipity!), I got an email summarizing the results of an Egyptian government study on blogs from a friend who works with Jeeran.com. My friend was pleased by results that suggested that more than 70% of Egyptian bloggers were using Jeeran. I was staggered by the size of the Egyptian blogosphere:

- The total number of Arabic blogs is 450.000 blogs with a percentage of 0.7 % of the total number of blogs in the world. And the Egyptian blogs form 30.7 % of the Arabic blogs.
- 76.8 % of the Egyptian blogs use the Arabic language, 9.6 % are written in English, and 20.8 % are mixed.
- 73 % of the Egyptian bloggers are males, and 27 % are females.
- 53.1 % of the Egyptian bloggers are between 20 – 30 years old.

(I’m quoting my friend’s translation - the original report is in Arabic, and is available here as a pdf.)

Egypt is a big place, with over 80 million people. But net penetration is around 10%, and broadband penetration is much lower, with ITU estimates of only about 430,000 subscribers. In other words, there are roughly as many Egyptian bloggers as broadband subscribers, and roughly one of twenty Egyptian net users is a blogger, which isn’t a bad participation rate.

The mixed language nature of Egyptian blogs is particularly interesting - since the vast majority of Egyptians speak Arabic, this suggests roughly 30% of Egyptian bloggers - more than 100,000 people - have the linguistic skills neccesary to translate content from the English wikipedia into Arabic. And the whole mass of bloggers have the technical means to contribute to the Arabic wikiedia, should they be interested in doing so.

Which brings me to Kevin’s question about cultural “permission” to participate in a project. Blogging has gotten a lot of press in Egypt, much of it characterizing blogging as a highly political activity. A number of Egyptian bloggers have been imprisoned, either for their online writing or their offline activism, and it’s likely that some Egyptians think of blogging as a dangerous activity. That hasn’t stopped hundreds of thousands of young Egyptians from getting online. Here’s hoping that Wikimania and the press attention surrounding it helps recruit thousands of new authors to the Arabic wikipedia in the near future.

Bonus content:

Noam Cohen in the New York Times Bits blog talks in detail about the conversation about low participation in the Arabic Wikipedia at Wikimania.

I’m at MIT this week at the Center for Future Civic Media Conference, a conference that’s bringing together two years of winners of the Knight News Challenge for discussions about innovation in journalism. The host is the Center for Future Civic Media, a collaboration between MIT professors Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Henry Jenkins and Mitchel Resnick. Their joint project, supported by Knight through the news challenge, is a new academic study center that serves as a space for experimentation, largely by students, in the very wide topic of “civic media”.

In my last visit to the Center, I got a sense for just how broad the definition the MIT folks are using for “civic media”. Jenkins, offering a framing talk for the opening discussions, offers examples that range from remix culture in American politics (using an example of a meme he may have helped launch - Obama as Spock - and the online manifestations of that idea) through pageants small American communities held to replicate the history of their founding. He implicitly makes the point that civic media is much, much larger than journalism by avoiding journalistic examples, and he explicitly makes the point that civic media isn’t about technology, but about personal relationships.

That’s likely a good reminder, as we’re surrounded by an amazing amount of technology to mediate the relationships between the hundred or so people at this event. There is, of course, a conference wiki, an IRC channel, and a twitter feed. Plus there’s a pretty cool tool called Backchan, which invites attendees to post questions and vote on each other’s questions - one users of the tool commented (via the tool) “turning real life into Digg… This can’t end well!”

And we’re all wearing 1990s-cellphone-sized electric name tags from nTAG, a company that spun out of the Media Lab based on research that began in 1995. (Indeed, I remember wearing one of these things in 1998 when I was trying to convince Lycos to join the Media Lab as a sponsor.) They talk to each other, wirelessly exchanging personal data, and generally appear to make the geeks in the crowd very, very nervous. (They’re supposed to be an easy way to exchange digital business cards… something my Palm Pilot was supposed to do as well, but I never found myself using.)

And while I’m not hugely excited about my digital nametag, I can’t deny that a visualization the company founder Rick Borovoy showed is incredibly cool. His system was used at a technology conference involving a lot of Asian attendees. The visualization showed the percent of interactions between people from different countries as relates to a predictive model based on purely random interactions. For instance, you’d expect to see a few hundred conversations between Chinese and Taiwanese attendees - actually, the visualization showed almost none. At the center of the visualization is what we might think of as the “homophily line” - a huge tendency for people from the same nation to interact far more than a random interaction model would predict.

A different visualization from the nTAG folks. I would love to get my hands on the national interaction map Borovoy referred to here. Please see more on Rick Borovoy’s blog

So, yes. As much as I grouse about “shiny for shiny’s sake”, there’s something to be said for technologies that can produce cool datasets like this one. And I suspect that some of the tools we’ll see later tonight, in a classic Media Lab show and tell, will have important implications for the future of human interactions, while some will merely be really cool.

Many of the folks here are more firmly rooted in the world of journalism than in the tech community. Jenkins introduces a panel that includes Jay Rosen, Lisa Williams and Dan Gillmor, three of the luminaries of citizen media. Rosen offers a historical perspective on the press, tracing the rise of journalism to reports on parliamentary debates in Britian. The journalists, he tells us, were the ones who had the skills to communicate the discussion “inside” to “the people outside” - this new institution meant that “the people out of doors grew up, became the public.” This doesn’t mean that journalists are essential to democracy, he tells us, “but that democracy is essential to journalism.”

Much of the discussion focuses on crowdsourcing. Gillmor offers an example from a local mailing list, where people in a community ask each other about local water quality until one is willing to call the town, get the research on the water issues and informs the rest of the list. Rosen makes an argument that crowdsourcing may require the sort of motivation than comes from strong ideological belief - when readers of Talking Points Memo get as incensed as Josh Marshall about the Bush Justice Department, they’re willing to do the work to sort through huge masses of data. In many cases, though, only 1% of people are willing to do the hard work involved with investigating a story, while 10% will be sufficiently involved to participate in crowdsourcing, while others will simply serve as readers. Rosen speculates that the key to crowdsourced citizen media is to identify that precious 1& and turn them loose… and to figure out how to break up reporting tasks to leverage that 10%, but not spend too much time worrying about the 89% who will just read.

The key towards using crowdsourcing well - and perhaps the key in citizen media as a whole - is not exploiting the participants. Gillmor points out that the Huffington Post appears to be using a model where everyone contributes and no one gets paid… very profitable, but unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. Referring to her work with smalltown journalism project h2otown, she notes that she knew the project was going somewhere when participants threw themselves a birthday party… and almost as an afterthought, invited her.

Right. Sorry about that.

A large number of my readers haven’t been getting updates from this blog for a month or so. I upgraded my installation of WordPress to 2.5.1 shortly before I took most of a month off to heal from eye surgery. That latest edition of WordPress software has an error in it that caused people who’ve been subscribed to my blog for a long time - or subscribed using LiveJournal and other feedreaders - to get no new posts from me for, oh, a month or so.

For those who missed me… thanks, and welcome back. It should be fixed now. If you’re subscribing to this site through an aggregator, you might want to make sure you’re subscribed to the feed at http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/feed/ - older URLs like http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/wp-rss2.php are now “depricated”… which basically means that WP may not support them much longer and you should really stop using them.

All of which is fine, but WP screwed up pretty badly in not supporting those old URLs for those of us who’ve been using them for a long, long time. If you’re a Wordpress blogger and people have complained they’re not getting your updates, or if you’ve seen your traffic fall off, you may want to check what feeds people are subscribed to. If you’ve upgraded to 2.5.1 and folks are using this old style of URL, there’s a decent chance your feeds are blank and not registering new stories.

If that’s the case, the fix is over here - it involves patching two files and rebuilding your database. According to a conversation on support forums, the bug will be fixed in 2.5.2…