Just how big is social media? Watch this

Gary Hayes from personalizemedia.com put together this very neat little widget which visualises the hyper-growth in usage of social media.

Socially responsible outsourcing

I posted recently about mobile developments in Africa and how they are being used in a number of imaginative ways - many of which which we're yet to see in the 'West'!

As well as being used to organise day labour they're also used by people to do small jobs such as translations. In Kenya, with its many languages, this is how help resources for mobile companies' customer services are being built - word-by-word



Samasource is a fantastic new San Francisco non-profit that partners with small, talented, tech companies and nonprofit training centers in poor and rural communities (currently Kenya, Cameroon, Uganda, rural India, and Nepal) to find them clients.

It derives its name from the word sama, Sanskrit for “equal”.

Their partners must meet stringent social impact criteria - fewer than 20% of applicant firms are selected - and they specialize in services ranging from data entry to advanced software and website development.

It's about giving work, not aid to people in the world's poorest countries.

Socially Responsible Outsourcing 101

View more Microsoft Word documents from Leila Chirayath.

Here's a profile of Ann Wangui, a graduate with honors from Nairobi's Methodist University. She is an example of the sort of person who is struggling to find a job in Nairobi despite her qualifications and who Samasource aims to help.



This is certainly a much better approach than the one being adopted by the world's large tech companies. Erik Hersman recently posted Microsoft vs the Open Source Community in Africa.

If Microsoft developer communities do emerge in Africa, Erik writes, even with the massive hurdle of paying for expensive access to developer tools, "we’re still left with what one person wrote: …they will be formed from programmers who are completely dependent on American software for the livelihood: it’s neo-colonialism, pure and simple."

In Africa organizations have a lot of hurdles to overcome, not least of which is the straight cost of doing business. Where it might be simple for some organizations in the US and Europe to wave off a couple thousand dollars worth of licensing fees, the same is not true in Africa. The margins are lower, so every cent counts.

In a region where cost is so important, it’s amazing then that the most lucrative deals go to the Western organizations that have high costs for ownership and maintenance. These outside organizations use backdoor methods to gain contracts where in-country options are available, usually with less expense and with greater local support.

Hersman also reports that Microsoft are trying to muscle in on the African-developed Ushahidi crisis reporting social software with a new product called Vine. He says "if they really are about creating emergency and disaster software for use by normal people, then I would encourage them to not charge for it and to make it as open as possible for others to work with it."

Fat chance, I suspect.

HT: Owen Barder

Tech lessons from Africa

Ushahidi, which means ”testimony” in Swahili, is an open source engine. The project was developed in the effort to better map out reports of violence in Kenya. This was after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008.

The aim of Ushahidi is to create a platform that any person or organization can use to set up his or her own platform for collecting and visualizing information. They explain that, ‘the core Ushahidi platform allows for a plug-in and extensions that can be customized for different locales and needs. The tool is open source allowing others to download, implement and use the engine so that they can bring awareness to crises in their own region.’

The core engine is built on the premise that gathering crisis information from the general public provides new insights into events happening in ‘near real-time.’

Ushahidi is also being utilised in the Indian election by Vote Report India.



Users contribute direct SMS, email, and web reports on violations of the Indian Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct (PDF). The platform will then aggregate these direct reports with news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets related to the elections from all relevant sources, in one place, on an interactive map.

Vote Report India aim is to not only increase transparency and accountability in the Indian election process, but also provide the most complete picture of public opinion in India during the elections.

Vote Report India is a non-partisan all-volunteer collaboration between software developers, designers, academics, and other professionals.

Here's Erik Hersman, aka WhiteAfrican, talking to TED about Ushahidi:



Here's a paper on the use of the Ushahidi platform in the Gaza war. Scroll to sec.5 for new media.

Recent research from ResearchICTAfrica reveals that Kenyans are spending incredible amounts on mobile communication as a proportion of income.

Here’s how it breaks down. The average Kenyan spends over 50% of their disposable income on mobile communication. For the bottom 75% of the population, that figure goes up to 63.6%. In terms of total individual income, the average Kenyan spends 16.7% of their income on mobile communication. That figure rises to 26.6% when looking at the bottom 75% of the population.

Africans are paying for mobile communication in spite of how expensive it is, not because of how affordable it is and because access to mobile communication is critical for people. Even if you are digging a ditch by the side of the road, day labour is now organised via SMS.

Nathan Eagle of MIT recently gave a talk to eTech where he explained about the mobile scene in Africa.



Entrepreneurs are constantly finding new uses for the technology.

A Kenyan water pump manufacturer combines an mobile-mPesa-enabled, solar-powered metering system with their water pumps. They give water pumps away for free and then make a profit by selling access to water via Safaricom’s mPesa service. Send the pump 20 Kenyan Shillings and it pumps 20 litres of water for you. This has increased the water pump companies business and made water more accessible to those who need it.

However, as Steve Song points out:

When a single mobile operator is a gatekeeper to water supply, something is wrong. For any village in this situation, [Kenya's largest mobile network]Safaricom can charge whatever they like.

If we accept the premise that, in places like Kenya, no one can afford not to have access to a phone, then one cannot help but feel that something needs to be done. A flour milling company in South Africa was recently fined more than 45 million Rand by the Competition Commission for price fixing and collusion. I think it is time to take a serious look at mobile operators.

Imagine an alternate reality where Africans paid less than 5% percent of their income on mobile communications and all phones operated on an IP-based network so that any new African innovation might be unlimited in terms of scope. Then we would see mobile-enabled social and economic innovation taking off in Africa.

As Nathan explains, African colleges and universities are turning out a lot of entrepreneurial tech talent. Unfortunately, much of this then migrates. Things like his work and the establishment of companies like Google Kenya is helping to stem this flow. Barcamp's have been held in Kenya and are coming up in Nigeria.

London is hosting a chance for sponsors and African innovators to meet up this weekend at Africa Gathering.

WhiteAfrican's blog is full of tales of tech innovation in Africa. Here he talks about the problems facing the next generation of techies in Liberia. Here's his list of African tech events.

Here Jonathan Gosier explains about his work in developing a tech hub in Uganda.

The rest of the world has a lot to learn from Africa, most obviously in developments around mobile phones.

HT: Kenya Pundit, WhiteAfrican

Changing paradigms with UI for mobiles

An excellent article by Christian Lindholm, formally of Nokia and now working for Fjord, neatly wraps up where mobile design has come from, where we are and where we might go.

He says that there are three levels to the user experience of mobiles:

• The highest level I call Bling (this is because, it caters to the visual senses) it contains the visuals, colours, content density and partly motion.
• The next level below it is Control (This caters to the mind or rationale) This is where the efficiency is created, where one gets stuff done, one navigates into applications, within applications and between applications. It is where services should be integrated. It is much more than functionality, more than an application.
• The lowest level of a user experience is the Utility level. In this level one experiences such thing as application installation, network control, power management. It is where latency is managed. This level of user experience is almost totally provided by engineering, except when operating at world class level, when UE designers and Engineers co-operate deeply.

He says that most of the current innovation is in the top two layers with only Google doing much with the utility layer - and this makes sense because "they are a utility". What they're doing reminds him of the early days of GMail, which wasn't different to Yahoo or MSN four years ago (except for the space) but has now "becoming a cloud based content platform integrating core elements of your digital life".

He cites the most recent second layer paradigm shifts following on from iPhone's 'bling' touchscreen as pinching, flicking, flipping "into 'back' of application like in iPhone Weather or flipping below, like in the Maps app. In the PalmPre there are the cards and their shuffling, the Chucking, meaning closing the app".

These shifts every phone maker takes up as they operate like 'search, top-right' on websites or other new design 'norms': "they cannot be customised from customer to customer". Fortunately we have yet to see commodification of these new paradigms, through patent enforcement, to the detriment of users.

Where he sees next development is in smarter keys: "Text input on touch screens are simply too bad. People like moving keys and the sensory feeling they provide".

This rings true for me as it's what I went for with my new phone, which is a new one from Hewlett Packard. It has a great slide out keyboard which doesn't just have slightly bigger keys but also gives that slight finger feedback which I found absent on others.

One other area which he doesn't mention is in learning. It occurred to me that my supplier was missing a trick by not offering paid lessons on how to get the most out of your phone. Am I missing something here as I have yet to see a site which does this job (or does everyone not want to admit there's some stuff they just can't work out?)

Lost and frightened

Is there blood on your mobile phone?

Congo harbors the biggest world reserves. The coltan, a mix of niobite and tantalite, is also found in 6 other African countries. Children work in the coltan mines (only they can reach the narrowest galleries) and also Hutu prisoners and adults. They all must face semi-slavery conditions. On the ground, women cook and prostitute. The benefits from the coltran smuggling are directed to financing armies and guerilla forces of the confronting countries.

Congo also harbors 70 % of the world's cobalt reserves, 30 % of diamonds, and 10 % of copper.

Seven foreign armies were attracted in the civil war by the treasures of a country as big as Western Europe, the third in Africa. On one side, there is the Republic of Congo, supported by Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe; on the other side Rwanda, Uganda and the Congolese rebels, in a conflict qualified by some as "the First African World War".

Source.

Want to do something? Support Amnesty International's actions for the Congo.

Scrapbook clips catch up

Shockingly slow catch-up ... so sue me!

Danny Finkelstein likes the new Conservative website and, er, so do I. It doesn't actually just adopt the US template (like Paddick did) and has some innovations. Like Danny I fancied the Conservative Wall with its pop out voters.

And two thumbs up for a strong accessibility statement.

Via arstechnica: Fake popup study sadly confirms most users are idiots

Via techpresident: Tracking a Political Meme: McCain vs Paris Hilton. This has some fab animated 'maps' showing the meme's spread across the blogosphere.

Via fivethirtyeight:Intrade Betting is Suspicious. Very interesting post about how some partisans are - apparently - gaming this major online betting shop, one which is often reported on as an impartial predictor.

HT: Tom Watson: Election 08 on Twitter. V. Useful pull-together of related twitter feeds.

These tools were also used to great effect during the Republican convention, where mass arrests, including of many journalists, and 'pre-emptive' raids occurred.



Andy Burnham threatened web regulation in a recent speech, which contained the following daft quote:

"The internet as a whole is an excellent source of casual opinion. TV is where people often look for expert or authoritative opinion."

Half world's population 'will have mobile phone by end of year', apparently. Speaking at a conference, Hamadoun Touré, secretary general of the International Telecom Union, said:

"The fact that 4 billion subscribers have been registered worldwide indicates that it is technically feasible to connect the world to the benefits of information communications technology."

You'd have to think that much of the innovation will not come from the first world in this area (e.g. micropayments). Google has some good ideas though in this recent official blog post.

Two egov 'production' blogs - ones like the BBC's where the team feeds back and sources comment. Parliament and Aberdeenshire.

Very neat website add-on tool. odiogo converts text to speech for download or playing right there.

Another bit of political blogosphere content attracting shut-down notices and legal action, this time in Scotland.

An SNP councillor suing a Labour blogger for mentioning something that was already in the public domain is going to do more harm to the councillor and his party than ignoring it would have done. I hope that Alex Salmond has the sense to publicly distance the party from the individual actions of the councillor, otherwise the SNP will be open to attack for using the law to silence its critics.

Matt Wardman has more detail on blogger Christopher Glamorganshire's sacking from the Welsh Assembly and more from Wales. Plus a Welsh LibDem confirms that the recently worked out civil service blogging guidance doesn't apply to Wales (as they're writing their own)

Search text advertising has taken off big time in 08 election: Our Brand Is Crisis: Prez Candidates Buy Words To Brand Each Other Online.

Electronic voting machines are going to be extensively deployed in the election and a lot of people don't trust them. So a campaign is being organised to get tekkies to sign-up as supervisors - citizen undercover monitoring.

FT on how Google doesn't rule all of the world: It's mainly to do with language.

New York becomes first city to accept photos and video from computers and cell phones for emergency services (they already handle text).

“Internet optimists” versus “Internet Pessimists”: TLF groups recent books.

Adherents & Their Books / Writings

Internet Optimist	Internet Pessimists
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks	Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur
Chris Anderson, The Long Tail and “Free!”	Lee Siegel, Against the Machine
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody	Nick Carr, The Big Switch
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia	Cass Sunstein, Republic.com
Don Tapscott, Wikinomics	Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited
Kevin Kelly & Wired mag in general	Alex Iskold, “The Danger of Free”
Mike Masnick & TechDirt blog	Mark Cuban

And here’s a rough sketch of the major beliefs or key themes that separate these two schools of thinking about the impact of the Internet on our culture and economy:

Beliefs / Themes

Internet Optimists	Internet Pessimists
Culture / Social
Net is Participatory	Net is Polarizing
Net yields Personalization	Net yields Fragmentation
a “Global village”	Balkanization
Heterogeneity / Diversity of Thought	Homogeneity / Close-mindedness
Net breeds pro-democratic tendencies	Net breeds anti-democratic tendencies
Tool of liberation & empowerment	Tool of frequent misuse & abuse
Economics / Business
Benefits of “free” (“Free” = future of media / business)	Costs of “free” (“Free” = end of media / business)
Increasing importance of “Gift economy”	Continuing importance of property rights, profits, firms
“Wiki” model = wisdom of crowds; power of collective intelligence	“Wiki” model = stupidity of crowds; errors of collective intelligence
Mass collaboration	Individual effort

Academics need guidance on how to make best use of web 2.0 technologies, according to a report from the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA).

UCISA also says that higher education institutions need dedicated local champions to promote and develop the new methods. It calls for academics to be given the time to learn and develop the skills to use technology based tools.

More iPhonic madness

iPhonic madness

50 reasons not to buy an iPhone!

2. Compare these prices with say T-mobile’s Flext 35 Web n Walk max tariff. For £32.50 a month, you get 450 free calls and 900 texts a month as well as “unlimited” internet surfing. You also get the feature rich Nokia N95 handset for free – costing you a total of £610.98 over 18 months. Don’t just take my word for it. Check out the analysis here by the technology website Cnet.
# 35. Celebs with iPhones 3: Paris Hilton has one.
# 47. If something goes wrong with your iPhone, you'll be sent an Official iPhone Tool, otherwise known as a paperclip.

Scrapbook clips catch up

Quickie job this week ;]

Will highlight a comment left with Off with the pixies from Dan McQuillan.

As the guy with the job of delivering the UK Catalyst Awards, I'd of course prefer to take more optimistic view.

But I agree that the critical thing is to move from excited blah blah to real impact. I'm trying to bring to catalyst as much grit as I can from my experience in co-founding social innovation camp.

We'll have to wait and see whether catalyst phase two can produce the kind of mentoring, incubating and financing that will deliver dynamic social startups.

Gerry McGovern, always worth reading, has started a series on What is the role of government on the Web?

For the government to truly serve its customers on the Web it needs to address the following issues:
1. Get away from a technology obsession
2. Manage customer top tasks, not government websites
3. Get politicians off government websites
4. Stop government vanity publishing
5. Develop a government archive

Federal Times has a very interesting piece on Gov’t. 2.0: Wikis, blogs and more - use in the US government.

The blog is a bold move for TSA [Transportation Security Administration | U.S. Department of Homeland Security] because it fully embraces public comments on what the agency is doing wrong, said Stephen Goldsmith, director of Harvard University’s Innovations in American Government program.

“They’re going to insult you whether you have a blog or not,” Goldsmith said. “You might as well learn from what they’re saying.”

Using discussion boards and e-mails, [Environment Protection Agency] EPA’s new social Web site, called National Dialogue on Access to Environmental Information, has pulled comments from across government and the country to help [EPA’s chief information officer, Molly] O’Neill as she fashions a new information-sharing policy.

Since O’Neill came on board last year, EPA has embarked on four such projects that integrate blogs, wikis, discussion boards and other social networking Web tools, which are collectively referred to as Web 2.0, into EPA’s business.

“The technology is not complicated, it’s just a different way of doing business. And getting people to do business in a different way is culture change and that’s a challenge,” O’Neill said.

New Canadian survey on the public's attitudes to use of web 2.0 in government.

When asked to consider specific ways that government might use social media, the respondents showed strongest support for:

1. Websites where government scientists or experts could answer the public’s questions
2. Websites that would allow Canadians to express their views on different issues
3. Audio tours or pod casts of historical and natural sites across Canada that could be downloaded.

Jakob Nielsen updates his guidance on Writing Style for Print vs. Web

Summary: Linear vs. non-linear. Author-driven vs. reader-driven. Storytelling vs. ruthless pursuit of actionable content. Anecdotal examples vs. comprehensive data. Sentences vs. fragments.

We should accept that the Web is too fast-paced for big-picture learning. No problem; we have other media, and each has its strengths. At the same time, the Web is perfect for narrow, just-in-time learning of information nuggets — so long as the learner already has the conceptual framework in place to make sense of the facts.

For example, I dated "learning around the campfire" to 32,000 years ago to coincide with the emergence of high culture and the Cro-Magnons. Not that the Neanderthals didn't have campfires — they simply didn't have the cultural depth of modern humans, so I don't think their storytelling was equal to my seminars. So, did I actually remember that Cro-Magnon culture started 32,000 years ago with the Lascaux cave paintings? No, I looked that little fact up online.

Now where do you think this clip is from?

More than 10 new e-Government services will be launched in the next six months, while more than 15 e-Government services will come online within two years, Secretary for Commerce & Economic Development Frederick Ma says.

He told the Legislative Council today the e-Government services include the transport information system and the electronic health record system.

The bureau will also launch a geographical user interface to help users locate information and implement a unified identity management framework to verify their identity and safeguard their personal data.

A pilot scheme in forming district cyber centres will be conducted to provide hardware and technical support for children in low-income families and needy residents to access online resources.

Mr Ma added all Government bureaux and departments have revamped their websites to comply with Internet accessibility standards stated in the internal guidelines for information dissemination since 2003.

An inter-departmental committee regularly reviews the guidelines and released the latest version early this year.

Guessed? Hong Kong.

Facebook over? Only in Islington says Rory Cellan-Jones on BBC/dot.life

The social networking scene is settling down into separate camps. The very young are with Bebo. The music crowd are still on MySpace. The obsessive technophiles are on Twitter - latest Tweet from one sad West Coast blogger: "I have 3,500 unanswered direct messages. Please do not send more." But the mass of students and young professionals seem to be gravitating towards Facebook.

Is the Daily Mail editing the government too?

"In the same way that there are standards that are essential to broadcasting, in this converging world I believe there should be a set of standards online".

That's culture secretary, Andy Burnham. Sweetheart, talk to some Aussies about the 'issues' of going down this road. Pa-leaze!

Worth a read on cyber-censorship is Seth Finkelsten.

Also worth pointing out that repeated testing has shown the failures of censorware (filters), including one done earlier this year for San Jose libraries, plus, of course, that anyone can find out how to Bypass Internet Censorship.

House of Lords two-up now on the Commons as they launch a YouTube Channel.

The five videos aim to explain the "role, impact and relevance" of the House of Lords and "reach out to young people and other audiences who may not be involved in politics or well informed about the role of parliament".

Wired's Thomas Goetz makes a great point about Obama's FightTheSmears.com.

By putting their own website out there front-and-center, and then getting everybody to link to it (starting with all the media covering the launch of the site), the result will be to drive fightthesmears.com towards the top of a Google search on, say, "obama muslim" or "michelle obama whitey". Ideally, if enough of the pro-Obama network links to fightthesmears.com, it'll drive the sites that peddle in the rumor-mongering, which are now the first results on said searches, off the top of the results list. Ideal long term result: any curious low-information voter who eventually bothers to google these pesky rumors will immediately be led to the debunking rather than the rumor.

And this is coming over here too. The disgusting Melanie Philips repeats the dirt for The Spectator.

Eric Schmidt thinks Google should extend a helping hand to 'old media'. He "hopes its recently acquired advertising service DoubleClick will aid newspapers as they struggle to corral more online revenue".

Bob Ostertag has some warnings about Obama's Internet Money Machine and the Future.

Yes, this is a wonderful thing that the Internet has democratized political financing in an unprecedented way. What is even better, the fact that the progressive guy figured out the new money regime first may catapult him from freshman senator to the White House, opening one of the most exciting chapters in American political history.

But it is not insignificant that in the process, vast sums of money are flooding into the political arena.

Worth something in twenty years will be ... McCain condoms! (Barack ones too).

Christopher Ciccone, brother to Madonna Ritchie (nee Ciccone), is writing a book. Met them both (if by meet you can count 'hello, this is ...' 'hello, goodbye') in my gossip column days. Some daft queen thought she'd enjoy a tacky drag troupe and being showered by glitter at a not-that-glamorous 'do' and birthday bash for Chris by the harbour in Sydney. As I recall, they didn't enjoy Oz very much .. wonder if that'll make his book ... ?

Quote of the week from GC Weekly:

Earls Court, location of this week's GC 2008 Expo, was replete with [sic] beautiful people and futuristic technology.

The fact that the venue was also hosting Graduate Fashion Week and a Doctor Who exhibition may have contributed in some small way to these qualities. But you could not beat Kable's conference when it came to threatening behaviour from chairpeople.

Brian Derry of Assist said he would expel people from the session he chaired if they violated the no-mobile policy - dancing to the tunes of their ringtones. Alternatively, they could pay £10 to the charity of his choice.

Mark Logsdon of Barclays, speaking at a session on security, revealed that his organisation charges £50 for rogue mobile vocalisations. But after adjusting for banking salaries, that works out around a hafpenny.

It might not have been appropriate for Dave Mitchell of BT, chairing a session on the NHS National Programme for IT, to have punished the use of telephones. But he did threaten a collective punishment for the audience, if it failed to show suitable interest: a video nasty on the auditorium's big screen.

Luckily, Mitchell decided it was necessary to deploy a video of former National Programme guvnor Richard Granger on his holidays. The threat was enough.

Who's supporting Mugabe?

Despite inflation now estimated at 500,000%, some people are making money in Zimbabwe.

News came out at the weekend that the Chinese arms had arrived in Harare, via Angola and via UK based charter airline Avient Airlines, based in Salisbury (Wiltshire) and currently under investigation for arms smuggling in the DRC. And allegedly through refueling support sanctioned by Thabo Mbeki.

A German company, Giesecke & Devrient (G&D), based in Munich, is flying in new banknotes every week - the German government has refused to intervene.

Barclays is the bank for the Zimbabwean leadership's stolen money. Standard Chartered Bank and the insurance firm Old Mutual have funded the regime.

Also at the weekend came this.

Zimbabwe Threatens to Prosecute Abusers of Mobile Phone Text Messages

APA-Harare (Zimbabwe) Zimbabwe’s telecommunications regular says it will monitor mobile phone messages to fight what it sees as abuse of the short-message-service (SMS), state radio reported here Sunday.

The acting chief executive of Postal and Telecommunications Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ), Charles Sibanda told the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation that his organization would prosecute subscribers found abusing the SMS service.

Zimbabweans have relied on the SMS service to communicate political messages, particularly after the disputed March 29 general election which was won by the opposition.

Individuals and civic organizations have used text messages to communicate news headlines, election updates or political jokes about President Robert Mugabe.

Sibanda warned that POTRAZ could trace the source of any abusive message and bring offenders to book.

Zimbabwe already monitors Internet traffic following the passing last year of legislation allowing President Mugabe’s government to eavesdrop on telecommunications.

POTRAZ is a statutory body established in 2001 to licence and regulate players in the telecommunications industry.

This sounds more like an empty threat than anything as sophisticated as the Chinese manage. Nevertheless, some 'Western' company undoubtedly supplied and is supporting the equipment enabling them to make the threat — haven't found out who they might be, any ideas?

What's interesting is the dictatorship recognising the power of SMS in Africa - it played a very important role in the Kenyan crisis and this recognition also occurred there. What's terrifying and needs exposing is who is undermining this power from the ordinary Africans by giving the tyrants the tools to close this power down.

Google Reader clips catch up

• V2 Day - how social media is helping roil Italian politics
  Colin McKay plugs a new movement in Italy to change their dire politics and media. Featuring the fabulous Beppe Grillo ("Imagine Robin Williams, but with a lot more impact on the electorate."). and numerous links.
• CellBazaar: A SMS Marketplace in Bangladesh
  Imagine you're in Bangladesh and you want to buy a cow [I know, just so easy to imagine]. You pull your mobile phone out of your pocket and start sending text messages to 3838, the shortcode for CellBazaar, a mobile phone marketplace which some have called the "Craigslist of Bangladesh." You look through the relevant ads and look at the ages, locations, and number of teeth of the 187 cows that are currently for sale. After another SMS, you are connected with the phone number of the the seller, ready to make your new purchase.
• BBC Homepage Two Months On
  Widgets are a'coming. Better not be endless Gavin'n'Stacey promos ...
  
• The Best Copyright-Free and Government Video Libraries
  From the US, quality variable but some of very high production values. They seem to have some sort of corporate deal with RealPlayer though and nothing's embeddable (except Condi's greatest hits), or copied to YouTube ... they're behind Gordon Brown!
  
• Customer insight and technology
  The eGov Minister puts his size 12 in it by pushing NHS choices and ignoring PatientOpinion. At least he's blogging about it so he can told. That's progress.
  
  
• Pentagon Suspends Military Media Analysts Program
  The power of the New York Times when it girds its loins.
• A paper to sum up the discussion on this blog
  Not the best title in the universe but interesting stuff on Benchmarking in gov 2.0.
• Murdoch The Google Monger?
  "There's a very interesting dynamic going on there in that world where Google is going forward, marching forward, with tremendous momentum," Murdoch said.
• Obama Supporters Using Wiki to Reach Superdelegates, Text Messages to Reach Your Momma
  
  
• A Google Prototype for a Precision Image Search
  They're throwing a lot at it but it appears to be an unreachable goal.
• Press releases: spin and propaganda
  HT: Mr Gould. The public aren't fools, most PR assumes they are.
• Answers to the judge’s questions
  James Ball re-asks a Judge's questions to journalists on how they understand the real nature of crime in the UK - it's usually widely wrong.
• Google Maps Now Offers Traffic Predictions
• What the world (and his dog) is thinking about the London Mayoral elections
  Really good but very late tool from Delib which is tracking blog opinion - a UK first I think?
  OpinionTracker
  
  
  
  

Not on Reader

• Bill Vs Barack
  Really bitchy yet oddly touching overview from the New Yorker on the spousest with the leastest who's 'out of time' in a 15' soundbite era.
• Last week's Jeremiah Wright interview on Bill Moyers (PBS) (part 1 of six, other parts)
  Gives a proper context and background. The more I see, the more I like. Wonderful line to Moyers about 'you go to Nigeria and they're wearing a tie in 140 degree Fahrenheit weather because they think that's what it means to be a Christian' - take that (Nigerian Anglican Bishop) Peter Akinola. He also says there have been death threats and bomb threats (which I haven't read).
• Wright At National Press Club This I didn't like. Neither did previous Wright defenders.
  
• Linden Labs is developing a hands free interface (inspired by the Segway. yes, I laughed) and Ren Reynolds sees sexual implications. The dirty bastard. HT. J. Gould.
• Chinese execute Tibetans - "they're shooting them like dogs". NSFW video.
  
  
• Also NSFW video, Amnesty International's new anti-waterboarding advert
• World Leaders. From FirstPost. Far, far funnier 3D than Headcases.
• TES: Liberate and disseminate. How Parliament is handling access to Hansard - you must pay! HT: Radio 4.
  
• Among the archives: America does it bigger and better Guardian reviews Photography museum websites.
  'In the Science Museum, for example, you will find the best selection of photographs online in the Science and Society Photo Library under the heading Doing Business with Us.'
  
• How children’s rights are violated on Facebook Mail & Guardian (CapeTown) - just one form letter after another. Crap customer service kills companies in the end.
  
  
• Remaining posts from TechPresident from the Politics Web 2.0 conference in London (all fascinating):

The Rise of Trickle-Up Politics

Lessons from Dean, John Kerry and Beppe Grillo

Visibility Reach, Participation, & Peer Production

Facebook and Clustering of Ideological Types

Rating Candidate Sites, Dealing with Communication Overload

• And finally, is this not the classic example of a Moral Panic? From the Daily Mail: 'How the web stole our children: Chilling report reveals under-16s spend more than 20 hours a week online'

Newspaper journalism's House of Cards starts toppling

Amy Gahran is a content specialist who I've been reading off and on for years. I starred a post of hers asking the question:

Is journalism a smart career path in 2008?

Short answer from her is yes, but not how you'd think.

Betting that you’ll spend your career working for mainstream news orgs is a losing proposition in most cases.

Given this reality, it "bugs" her that most journalism schools aren't preparing their students for the future of journalism.

Schools are not teaching the sorts of skills which they'll need to compete. These include

• content management systems (including blogging tools)
• mobile tools and mobile media strategies
• social media
• business skills
• management skills
• economics and business models
• marketing
• SEO
• community management,

She explains more about just how they could be taught these skills in a follow-up.

Students think that:

Their career path will lead them to writing big investigative or literary features for major magazines or newspapers.

She finds that most don't have a clue - unlike many of their non-aspiring journo peers - about how to establish their personal brand or how to create opportunities outside of mainstream news organisations.

This is the sort of thing the Andrew Keen's and other King Canute's don't talk about (doesn't pay I'd guess) but the New York Times highlights one 'investigative journalism' - Keen thinks this sort of journalism is doomed - website which is booming, The Smoking Gun.

Says NYT reporter David Carr :

Much has been said, here and elsewhere, about how the emerging digital economy has decimated the business model of journalism. But the same digital technology has made each remaining journalist several times more powerful.

As working reporters, we are able to get information — through the public and government Web databases and proprietary digital sources — that our ancestors in the business would not have dared dream of. I know because I’m one of the ancestors.

And that:

The Smoking Gun has demonstrated that if you obey the metabolism of the Web, not the journalist, you can land with significant impact in a hurry.

This impact is happening in the US Presidential elections, where some newspapers (Mainstream Media - MSM) have adapted and are in the conversation, online.

Arianna Huffington, part-owner of Huffpost, which just cruised past Drudge as the top news site, and has both broken news and run 'investigative journalism' said in an interesting roundtable (The New Media Moguls Talk Politics) at NYU this week:

What is happening online is actually reducing the power of the mainstream media to set the narrative. The New York Times and the Washington Post are doing great things, but they are doing them online.

Talking about the MSM's supposed objectivity and why online news users are flocking to sites like HuffPost (and Drudge), as well as a slew of blogs (fully half of all Americans now read some sort of blog), she said:

People are now beginning to accept, increasingly, that not everything is a mixed bag. Part of it has been the coverage of the war in Iraq, with all the [MSM] people following the John McCains, like John King on CNN talking about soccer games, and good things going on.

How can you call this a mixed bag? It's like going to the doctor and the doctor says: "It's a little of a mixed bag, on one hand your acne has improved, but on the other hand you have a brain tumor." That's not a mixed bag.

There is a soccer game going on, while the whole world is falling apart and 4 million Iraqis have left the country, and there is less electricity than during Saddam. Where is the mixed bag?

That is changing, different blogs have different passions, our passion is Iraq so we choose every day to put on our top page what we believe is the truth about Iraq.

Just who is ignoring that 'web metabolism' remains a lot of MSM, particularly late coming newspapers like The Mirror and Daily Express.

And just how badly they're all doing running their web presence was shown in a piece on journalism.co.uk. Research by Ernst & Young said bluntly to newspapers change your ad model and be more like Google (or die).

Their report looked at the potential wealth that could be created by newspapers online and concluded the CPM (cost per thousand impressions) ad model they commonly used wasn't generating 'the necessary growth'.

The report suggested that if top newspaper websites generated the same revenue per UK unique user in 2007 as Google, which uses a Cost per Click (CPC) ad model, they could have expected ad revenues of between £120 million and £250 million each from their domestic traffic.

Instead the report suggested that many nationals total online revenues barely reaching 'one fifth of this amount'.

They calculated that the top newspaper websites generated £15m to £20m in ad revenue in 2007, compared to Google's UK ad revenue of £1.26bn for the same year.

The report went on to criticise CD and other give-aways as having "only a short-term effect" and suggested that despite spending time and money upgrading the look and feel of newspapers, publishers were still struggling to attract young readers to their paid-for titles.

Given how much ad revenue they've already lost from print, particularly classifieds, and especially given print's declining political influence, the major loss making slow movers are just going to become too much of a burden for their influence-seeking owners. I reckon The Express will be the first to go.

Postscript: James Ball writes on his blog about 'what should journalism students learn?' in the UK. Quotes Bill Thompson.

Another wow: mobile calls without voice - seriously

Via New Scientist comes this staggering demo of a new voiceless communication technology.

One application: shuts up loud people talking to themselves on trains.

All about it.

The demo.



And here uses for people who have lost or degraded speech:

30th Sydney Mardi Gras? I must be old

It was the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras on Saturday night. For those who've never heard of it (must be a few), around 700,000 watch the parade for a mile and a bit up one of Sydney's main drags, ending at the Showgrounds where the party's held. Several thousand participate and there are over 100 floats and marching groups.

The parade assembles in the city centre then turns into the main drag, Oxford Street — 'Dykes on bikes' lead, doing teaser runs up and down, warming people up— that moment when you hit the drag is like hitting a wall of ecstasy. The next two hours is a continuous rush.

Lots and lots of straight people both participate and watch — it's truly an event for all Sydney. The party had to introduce 'prove you're gay' measures one year because the party was so popular.

I was in a dozen parades, so have a few memories :]

There was the 'indigenous' year, when local Aboriginal elders led the parade in a very fancy old sports car. We made thousands of 'healing hands' and the reception was astonishing. Some of the national Aboriginal leaders participated, very butch blokes, but they had a wail of a time alongside Aboriginal drag queens. People always do. Politicians often come and I suspect it's for the good time rather than the votes. Seeing how they dress for the occasion is often fun. Even the evangelicals who pitch up with their banners have smiles on their faces.

There was the year we did a 'live' broadcast, which amounted to using phone boxes along the way (this was pre-mobiles!). At the party, where we took the DJ feed, around 4am I had a break and one nutty volunteer came on and ranted about the organisation - a Sydney tradition. I didn't find out until a pugnacious Board member complained :[

There was the year I pushed a very heavy robot all the way (not recommended). One year I watched from a prime spot and that year it poured down. Rain doesn't stop it because it's so warm and the spirit so high.

There was the year Julian Clary MC'd and spoilt things by being a bitch (maybe he was jetlagged). Rural groups always participate and they weren't quite as polished: doesn't matter, Clary totally missed the spirit of the thing. You rarely see these mobs in the pictures which go around the world, but they're the heart of it in many ways. It's wonderful to see 'community' in action: Muscle Marys alongside fat old queens alongside elder lesbians alongside asian drag queens: all encouraging each other.

What else? Imelda Marcos' shoes was a classic which everyone who saw it remembers. One hundred shoes on poles chased by a giant papier-mâché head of Imelda. That was the genius of David McDiamid and Peter Tully, gay artists lost to AIDS. David was inspired by the Mexican 'day of the dead' and did a very edgy but successful entry in the height of the crisis with "Dance of Death" puppets.

Then there was their giant Fred's Head on a giant platter — this was the local evangelical state senator, with a perchant for leather from his biker days, who protested every year. David and Peter's genius inspired a later float which spiked Pauline Hanson's monoculturalism. 'Fred's Head' actually survived and was brought out for the 20th Parade.

Individuals could make just as much of an impact. 'Miss New Zealand' achieved this with a floral print dress, flowery hat and a 'New Zealand' sign. Very Antipodean 1950s. My friend Brenton Heath-Kerr did this at the party with the most astonishing, inventive costumes I have ever seen such as his famous Tom Of Finland, the classic butch cartoon fantasy figure. He 'wore' the cartoon and was completely covered. He looked exactly like a cartoon. He also did Imelda. And Liza. And 'Wood Woman', a bizarre woodland creature, completely ... wood.

The party's is 20,000 or so past dawn. The Showgrounds ("where the country comes to town") is now sound stages for film but in the 80s you could wander into the pig stalls and the rest. Much shenanigans (or so I've heard ;] ) The party goes on until Monday. There's a tradition of the morning after gathering behind a pub which I don't know still goes on but the 'after parties' are legendary.

After 2000 there was a year when it was thought under threat. A giant Arts Festival had grown up around February, with massive corporate sponsorship. This ended up collapsing and possibly taking the parade with it. Mass 'no! ways!' stopped that. The show will go on.

I did a London Pride parade when I came back in 2000. Depressing. Very little music, the fun stuff was spotty and subdued. I did a version of Fred's head on a platter with friends. We made a papier-mache Tony Blair and posters of Blair as Pinocchio - this was before he'd got around to gay law reform. But it was all a bit sad after Sydney.

• Postscript: The 2008 party featured Olivia Newton-John finally taking to the Mardi Gras stage to perform Xanadu. Cyndi Lauper closed the party with Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Other legends tickling my memories were Kings Cross drag queen Carlotta and DJing from Paul Goodyear. Out of 700,000 parade watchers there were 25 arrests made. One arrest was for a man who attempted to set fire to the tail of a police horse. Parade hits included the marching together of Jewish and Arab groups who were met with a huge cheer, as were the 100 Reverends, a group of church members apologising for the past treatment of gay and lesbian Christians. A school also organised a parade entry.
  
  
• Surviving webpage about the 1998 Aboriginal float and parade entry
  

This is Web power · Pervs meet their match

This is the last of a few posts I've done on 'web power' — ways in which the Web is helping to change the world around us for the better. This last one is a little bit more complicated in its implications than either Italians fighting Mafia or Kenyans developing democracy online.

MANHATTAN — Dan Hoyt is a 'raw food guru' and subway masturbator in New York who met his match in a Camera-phone wielded by a woman fighting back.

The Daily News cover expose

Thao Nguyen, a Web designer, uploaded the photo of Dan and his dick to the girl-power site Laundromatic.net, hoping someone would identify her flasher. After many women responded she brought the image in August 2006 to the Daily News after the NYPD dismissed her complaint.

It ran on the paper’s front page, Hoyt was caught and she inspired the grassroots group Holla Back NYC, which later launched a Web site encouraging women to post photos of men who make uninvited or inappropriate comments and gestures. There are now sites for other US and Canadian cities.

Holla Back's motto is "If you can't slap 'em, snap 'em!"

There are quite a few reports from London too. Including a few pics - like this young dickhead 'reading' porn on the 17.45 from Manchester Piccadilly all the way to London Euston.

There's another pic of a man openly masturbating on the London Underground.

The idea doesn't seem to have caught on outside North America, perhaps because of libel laws. It had a rave reception from British feminists when launched but there's nothing like it in the UK and I can only assume the law or fear of the law has stopped women from copying it.

It's also potentially open to abuse in more ways than one. The site, for example, has gone out of its way to ensure that the photos are not a parade of 'scary black men'.

As well, it fits an evolving American niche where sites exist to do allegedly useful social tasks like 'expose' nannies having a fag break. Sites which hit first and answer questions later, all in the name of 'free speech'.

The bottom line though is that HollaBack lives up to its name - women hollering back to men that they won't take this crap. Only through the web can this sort of daily dose served up to women in public space be literally shown for what it is.

This is Web Power and, on balance, it's brilliant. Far better to be aggressive like this than passively accepting with 'women-only' carriages on the Tube (Brian Paddick's solution, neither Ken or Boris have one).

Kenya Crisis - Online response flourishing

More inspiring online responses.

SMS as Information Channel in Post-Election Kenya

"Kenya IndyMedia solicits contributions of either cash or airtime minutes from not only within East Africa but from around the globe. Text messages with sufficient minutes attached are sent out to potential interview subjects, who then ring up one of IndyMedia's reporters. With the interview recorded, either John or a fellow activist then trudges over to one of Nairobi's cyber cafes. Paying about $1 an hour for Internet access, they're interviews are posting posted online for all the world to hear. Some of these SMS-enabled recordings have appeared on the Kenya IndyMedia website. Others are now airing on international radio."

Naburr is connecting with villages connected to NGOs by SMS.

Twitter is the only channel which can connect back to mobiles, allowing users to view posts without an Internet connection. Kenyan Twitter channels: KenyaNews - afromusing

Peace for Kenya and Kenya’s Post Election Humanitarian Crisis Facebook Groups.

Worknets Wiki.

Google comments on Kenyan use of YouTube.

While Kenya's future is uncertain, YouTube remains a window into the challenges the country faces – in other words, you don't need expensive satellite TV to catch the news from the region or footage of the chaos.

Hat-tip: NetSquared.

Previous posts with more links:

• Kenya bloggers postscript
• This is Web power · Kenyans need blogs