Cell Phones Outpace Internet Access in Middle East

by Steve Crabtree

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Recent Gallup Polls in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) highlight the prevalence of wireless and Web-based communication among populations in that region.

Cellular phones are fairly ubiquitous in the MENA region; even in its most poverty-stricken areas such as Yemen and the Palestinian Territories, majorities of residents say they have cell phones. Home Internet access, on the other hand, is prevalent only among citizens of the oil-rich Persian Gulf states (it should be noted that non-Arab expatriates in these countries were not included in the survey) and Israel. However, in many countries, public Internet cafes can often be found in major cities.

Urban Internet cafes also reflect that in many countries, new information technologies are so far more accessible to city dwellers than to rural residents, who also tend to be less affluent on average. Three-fourths of urban Iranians, for example, said they have a cellular phone vs. two-thirds (66%) of those living in small towns and less than half (45%) of those living in rural areas or on farms. Similarly, almost half (48%) of Iranians in urban areas said they had home Internet access vs. 36% of those living in small towns and just 9% of rural residents. Sizable urban/rural divides are seen in several other MENA countries with substantial rural populations.

Bottom Line

New information technologies are creating or reshaping networks of social, economic, and political actors in most of the world, including the MENA region. Previously disconnected communities and interest groups now have more tools to work together in support of common interests.

However, the finding that wireless and Web technologies are often disproportionately accessible to urban populations sounds a cautionary note; in countries characterized by extreme income inequality, lack of access has the potential to further isolate those in poor, rural communities. It will be important to monitor the spread of such technologies, particularly in politically volatile regions and countries, to better understand the role they play in facilitating -- or undermining -- change.

Survey Methods

Results are based on face-to-face interviews with approximately 1,000 adults, aged 15 and older, in each country. Iranian data were collected in May 2008 and Israeli data in October 2008. Surveys in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen were conducted February-April, 2009. Non-Arabs were excluded from the sample in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates; samples in these countries are nationally representative of Arab adults. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error ranged from a low of ±3.3 percentage points in Tunisia to a high of ±3.8 percentage points in Yemen. The margin of error reflects the influence of data weighting. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

Facebook Activism: Lots of Clicks, but Little Sticks

By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 2, 2009

Facebook activism, the trendy process by which we do good by clicking often, was in its full glory last week after the death of Iranian student Neda Agha Soltan, killed by gunfire in the streets of Tehran.

First, Neda showed up in our Twitter feeds, then in our Facebook status updates: "is Neda," we wrote after our own names. And when people started Facebook groups inspired by her death, we quickly joined them, feeling happy that we'd done something, that we'd contributed.

But whether our virtual virtuousness will result in real-world action is unpredictable, and has as much to do with human nature as it does with amassing enough numbers. This is the problem with activism born of social networking sites.

The numbers are impressive. News outlets cited the groups, with names like "Angel of Iran," as examples of public outcry, potential signs of a turning point in the disputed Iranian elections. The largest of these groups, called simply "Neda," currently has nearly 36,000 members; dozens more had 1,000, or 100, or 10.

Click click click. It was so simple to join.

And . . . now what? Are we done? Was clicking an end unto itself? Do our Facebook groups -- which are today often treated as the official barometer for a cause's importance; more members must signify more gravitas -- ever translate into significant change?

(And if not, what are we doing there?)

"I don't have a lot of time for rallies," says Charles Hilton, a Baltimore service technician. That's why he joined "Neda," founded by a Houston real estate agent named Ali Kohan. "I haven't been keeping up with the news a lot lately, but . . . from what I gather, there was no reason to target this woman." What Hilton knew of her story spoke to him. He was touched. So he clicked. It felt like a show of support his schedule could manage. He's not sure what happens now; he hasn't heard whether the Neda group has any actual activities planned, or what he would be able to participate in.

Hilton illustrates what Mary Joyce calls "the pluses and minuses for the low bar of entry" of Facebook groups. Joyce is the co-founder of DigiActive.org, an organization that helps grass-roots activists figure out how to use digital technology to boost their impact.

The low bar of entry means that joining -- or starting -- a cause is easy, and that causes can reach and educate a wide range of people. That's the plus. But that ease also means that well-intentioned groups could balloon to thousands of members, most of whom lack activism experience.

"Commitment levels are opaque," says Joyce, who last year took a leave from DigiActive to work as new-media operations manager for Barack Obama's campaign. "Maybe a maximum of 5 percent are going to take action, and maybe it's closer to 1 percent. . . . In most cases of Facebook groups, members do nothing. I haven't yet seen a case where the Facebook group has led to a sustained movement."

There have, of course, been big examples of single-event success: The Internet-based organization Burma Global Action Network began as one American's Facebook group, formed to support monks' protest. The group coordinated a global "day of action" in 2007 that drew protesters around the world. More measurably, the release of Fouad Mourtada, imprisoned for impersonating a member of Moroccan royalty online, was attributed in part to protests that began on Facebook and Flickr and spread offline. And politically, Obama's campaign was famously driven by social networking participation.

But more often the stories of Facebook activism look like Egypt's April 6 Youth Movement earlier this year, in which a Facebook group calling for a national strike in support of laborers gained a much-publicized 75,000 Facebook members . . . and then fizzled out in real life.

In some ways, it's harder to cite the failures than the successes, because there are simply so many of them, disintegrating before they reach the public's eye. Even some of the success stories are qualified: Participation in the Burma network decreased as coverage of it fell out of the news, Joyce says.

"Click-through activism" is the term used by Chris Csikszentmihályi, the co-director of MIT's Center for Future Civic Media to describe the participants who might excitedly flit into an online group and then flutter away to something else. In some ways, he says, the ease of the medium "reminds me of dispensations the Catholic Church used to give." Worst-case scenario: If people feel they are doing good just by joining something -- or clicking on one of those become a fan of Audi and the company will offset your carbon emissions campaigns, "to what extent are you removing just enough pressure that they're not going to carry on the spark" in real life?

A better scenario for Internet activism, Csikszentmihályi says, would be if causes could break down their needs into discrete tasks, and then farm those tasks out to qualified and willing individuals connected by the power of the Internet.

But plain old Facebook groups? Attention shifts quickly online. How many status updates that read "is Neda" last week read "is Farrah Fawcett" or "is Michael Jackson" just a few days later?

It's still too soon to tell what tangible change the thousands of virtual Neda supporters will effect. Some groups were founded as simply virtual memorials, with no plans for future action, and those groups have already fulfilled their duty. "Neda" is still drawing new members, though not as quickly as last week. Kohan, the founder, says that he hopes the group will turn into a foundation, and he's seeking donations from universities. Founders of other Neda groups, including the 4,000-member "Never Forget Neda," say they never expected their groups to grow so large, and are now considering how -- and whether -- to leverage the numbers further.

But what if we don't want to be leveraged? What if we just want to join?

Anders Colding-Jorgensen, a psychologist and lecturer on social media at the University of Copenhagen, earlier this year challenged his students to a competition for who could create the most-member-drawing Facebook group. Colding-Jorgensen personally founded "No to Demolition of Stork Fountain," a group asserting that it would oppose the transformation of the Copenhagen fountain into an H&M clothing store. Within a few days, 300 people had joined; by the end of the week he had 10,000 members. Not a bad effort for a group supporting an entirely fictitious cause. Stork Fountain was not, and had never been, in any danger of demolition.

Furthermore, anyone who bothered to visit the discussion forum would have seen that; in the forum Colding-Jorgensen had explained that the group was just a social experiment. "But people just went in and joined," Colding-Jorgensen says. "They didn't read anything." The group continued to grow -- at one point at the rate of two new members per minute -- until it reached 27,000 and Colding-Jorgensen decided to end the experiment.

What surprised Colding-Jorgensen about people's behavior on his site was that the group was "in no way useful for horizontal discussions." Users wanted not to educate themselves or figure out how to save the fountain, but to parade their own feelings of outrage around the cyber-public.

Or, as says Sherri Grasmuck, a sociology professor at Temple University who has studied Facebook profiles: "I become the social movement as an affirmation of my identity, rather than choosing the social movement because it matches my identity."

In the Neda groups on Facebook, many of the wall posts are actually links to people's individual YouTube videos, which discuss their anger at Neda's death, or links to other Neda Facebook groups so that visitors can join not just one group, but two or three or four.

Are the groups causes? Or are they accessories -- a piece of virtual flair that members could collect to show off their cultural sensitivity, their political awareness?

"Just like we need stuff to furnish our homes to show who we are," says Colding-Jorgensen, "on Facebook we need cultural objects that put together a version of me that I would like to present to the public."

Last week, we wanted to take action in response to a horrible death. We wanted to show support to her family and to other innocent victims. We wanted to spread knowledge of a terrible incident. Did we mean for our clicking to go somewhere? Or were we presenting versions of ourselves?

These groups were all about Neda. But maybe they were also all about us.

China Delays Order for Green Dam Web-Censoring Software

By MICHAEL WINES

BEIJING — Facing strong resistance at home and abroad, China on Tuesday delayed enforcement of a new rule requiring manufacturers to install Internet filtering software on all new computers.

The delay by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology was announced through Xinhua, the official news agency, one day before the July 1 deadline for the software to be installed on all computers sold in China.

The software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, has caused a torrent of protests from both Chinese computer users and global computer makers, including many in the United States, since the government order became public in early June.

The Obama administration has officially warned China that the requirement could violate free-trade agreements, and sent trade officials to Beijing recently to press the government to rescind the decision. In Beijing on Tuesday, a United States Embassy spokesman said Washington welcomed the announcement.

China has said the software is designed to filter out pornography and violence to protect minors, but many experts say it can also block any other content that the authorities deem subversive.

The ministry said the mandatory installation would be delayed for an indefinite period to give computer producers more time to put the order into effect.

As a practical matter, the abrupt postponement bows to reality because most of China’s computer retailers have large stocks of machines, manufactured months before the decree was announced, that have yet to be sold. Many global computer makers have declined to say how they would comply with the requirement, apparently hoping that the government would delay or reverse its decision under international pressure.

The filtering software has been the object of furious online debate since the requirement to install it was disclosed. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which licensed the technology from two Chinese developers, says the software automatically blocks Web surfers from seeing “unhealthy Internet content.” Updated lists of banned content are automatically downloaded onto users’ computers from the developers’ servers.

But the software’s current list of banned words, posted online by Chinese hackers, is laced with political topics. Businesses have complained that the software is so poorly designed that it opens computers not just to government snooping, but also to hacker attacks by vandals and criminals.

On Friday, the leaders of 22 international business organizations delivered a letter to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao arguing that Green Dam flouted China’s professed goal of building an information-based society, and that it threatened security, privacy and free speech. A day earlier, the European Union protested that the software was clearly designed to limit free speech.

Global computer makers have contended that they are being forced to install untested software for purposes that they may regard as objectionable.

In Washington, the Business Software Alliance, a group representing software makers worldwide, said Tuesday that it was encouraged by the government’s delay and hoped for “a thorough examination of the related technology issues.”

Green Dam works only on computers that use Microsoft’s Windows operating system. So far, no version has been released for Linux and Apple’s Macintosh systems. Nor would the software be required in Hong Kong or Macao, said one expert familiar with the government’s requirement.

The Chinese government has said little about the requirement. Zhang Chenmin, the founder of one Green Dam developer, Jinhui Computer System Engineering, has frequently described the software order as voluntary and innocuous, but he did not respond Tuesday to telephone calls and text messages seeking comment.

It appeared that many computer makers had yet to comply with the directive, not only in the hope that the government would alter its plans, but also because the order gave them scant time to test Green Dam with their machines.

Some did comply. Acer, a Taiwan manufacturer that assembles many of its products in China, has said that it will install Green Dam on its machines. A spokesman for Lenovo, China’s best-selling computer brand, did not respond to a question about its Green Dam policies, although some Beijing vendors said the software had been installed on some Lenovo models.

Hewlett-Packard — the No. 2 computer brand in China, according to IDC, a market-intelligence company — has been silent on its plans, as has Dell, the third-best-selling brand. According to the Web site Rconversation, which has published leaked documents regarding Green Dam, Sony has packaged a Green Dam software CD with some of its computers, along with a warning that it is not responsible for any problems the program may cause.

Major Beijing computer retailers said most computers being sold lacked the software. One of China’s biggest electronics chains, Suning, insisted Tuesday that the order applied only to computers made after July 1, not to those manufactured before that date but sold later at retail.

“Suning is an outlet, so we’re also playing the role of monitor” to ensure that the computers have the required software, said a company spokesman, Min Juanqing. “If the computer doesn’t meet the requirement, we won’t purchase it.”

Several other vendors said Tuesday that their existing stocks of computers were manufactured in April or May, and that computers with Green Dam were unlikely to reach their shelves for several weeks.

One vendor, identifying himself only as Mr. Wu, said some buyers saw little but trouble in the government’s order. “Some of our clients are concerned about the security of the software,” he said. “I myself haven’t tried it yet, but we’ve been paying attention to it. I personally don’t want to install this software, but the government has asked us to install it for our kids’ good.

“But we can help you uninstall it if you want,” he said. “It could be easy to erase it completely from your computer.”

Huang Yuanxi and Zhang Jing contributed research. Sharon Otterman contributed reporting from New York.

Twittergasms

by Alexander Cockburn

How much easier it is to raise three--or 3 million--rousing tweets for the demonstrators in Tehran than to mount any sort of political resistance at home! Here we have a new Democratic president, propelled into office on a magic carpet of progressive pledges, now methodically flouting them one by one, with scarcely a twit or even a tweet raised in protest, aside from the gallant efforts of Medea Benjamin, Russell Mokhiber and their comrades at the healthcare hearings in Congress.

At the end of June US troops will leave Iraq's cities, and many of them will promptly clamber onto military transports and redeploy to Obama's war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There's been no hiccup in this smooth transition from the disastrous invasion of Iraq to Obama's escalation farther east. The Twittering classes are mostly giving Obama a pass on this one or actively supporting it. Where are the mobilizations, actions, civil disobedience? Antiwar coalitions like United for Peace and Justice and Win Without War (with MoveOn also belatedly adopting this craven posture) don't say clearly "US troops out now!" They whine about the "absence of a clear mission" (Win Without War), plead futilely for "an exit strategy" (UFPJ). One letter from the UFPJ coalition (which includes Code Pink) to the Congressional Progressive Caucus in May laconically began a sentence with the astounding words, "To defeat the Taliban and stabilize the country, the U.S. must enable the Afghan people..." These pathetic attempts not to lose "credibility" and thus attain political purchase have met with utter failure, as the recent vote on a supplemental appropriation proved. A realistic estimate seems to be that among the Democrats in Congress there are fewer than forty solid antiwar votes.

Not so long ago Sri Lankan government troops launched a final savage onslaught on the remaining Tamil enclaves. In the discriminate butchery of Tamils, whether civilians or fighters, estimates of the dead prepared by the United Nations ran at 20,000 (the report was suppressed by the current appalling UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon). I don't recall too many tweets in Washington or across this nation about a methodical exercise in carnage. But then, unlike those attractive Iranians, Tamils tend to be small and dark and not beautiful in the contour of poor Neda, who got out of her car at the wrong time in the wrong place, died in view of a cellphone and is now reborn on CNN as the Angel of Iran.

About Alexander Cockburn

Alexander Cockburn has been The Nation's "Beat the Devil" columnist since 1984. He is the author or co-author of several books, including the best-selling collection of essays Corruptions of Empire (1987), and a contributor to many publications, from The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and the Wall Street Journal to alternative publications such as In These Times and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. With Jeffrey St. Clair, he edits the newsletter and radical website CounterPunch, which have a substantial world audience.

The Way We Live Now - The Overextended Family -

By PEGGY ORENSTEIN

I would never have pegged my parents as early adopters. At 79 and 82, they are, like most people their age, blissfully uninterested in technology. To them, a BlackBerry is a late-summer fruit; tweeting is something a bird does. So I was unprepared when they called to tell me about their thrilling new discovery: Skype, an online service we could use to video chat. It’s free, my mom explained, eagerly. All we’d have to do is get something put on our computers (translation: download a program) and they would be able to talk to their 5-year-old granddaughter face to face! We could leave the gizmo on all the time, my dad suggested, and they could watch her go through her day. “Maybe you could bring it to her school,” he added, only half-joking. “We could see her classroom!”

Now, I like my parents. A lot. I really do. That’s why I make the 1,500-mile trip to visit them three or four times a year. I did not, however, spend the bulk of my adult life perfecting the fine art of establishing boundaries only to have them toppled by the click of a mouse. If I wanted them to have unfettered access to my life, I wouldn’t have put the “keep out” sign on my room at age 10. I would have lived at home through college. I would have bought the house next door to them in Minneapolis and made them an extra set of keys.

Even they might have found that a little extreme.

But the mere existence of video chat forces me to lay down a whole new set of rules and to rethink, yet again, the line between inclusive and intrusive, the balance between their yearning to shrink the distance between us and my need for limits — something I thought we resolved decades ago to our mutual satisfaction.

So I did what any sensible adult child would do. I stalled.

“Gee,” I said, “setting that up seems awfully complicated. I’m not sure I’d know how to do it.”

o Skype or not to Skype, that is the question. But answering it invokes a larger conundrum: how to perform triage on the communication technologies that seem to multiply like Tribbles — instant messaging, texting, cellphones, softphones, iChat, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter; how to distinguish among those that will truly enhance intimacy, those that result in T.M.I. and those that, though pitching greater connectedness, in fact further disconnect us from the people we love.

I may curse e-mail for destroying my workday, for turning me into a lab rat on a drug unable to stop clicking on “send-receive.” Yet it has been a godsend in my relationship with my mom: her hearing is severely impaired, much beyond help from aids or amplification, making phone conversations frustrating. E-mail has allowed us to “talk” again more fully, to share complex thoughts and feelings. We sometimes correspond five or six times a day.

Likewise, digital cameras are a boon: the near-instant photos I send to my folks — my daughter’s school play or maiden bicycle voyage — are truly the next-best thing to being there. Each technology strengthens our bond, but each also preserves my privacy. I’m in touch more often than ever before but entirely on my schedule. I manage the flow of information. I set the terms of my self-presentation. Everyone wins.

Apple hints at something similar in one of its “there’s an app for that” iPhone ads, demonstrating how, with the flick of a finger, you can turn an incriminating snapshot into “at least one photo you can show your parents.” The message is that this achieves the elusive balance between access and control in personal communication. But I wonder. Cellphones may be smart, but they’re also tricky. On one hand, you don’t have to answer them if you are, say, in a crowded cafe (and oh so very often, I wish people wouldn’t) but the assumption has become that you will. Depending on your viewpoint, perpetual availability to everyone you know can be a comfort or a shackle, can intensify closeness or subvert it. One of my brothers grabs his cellphone before heading out for his morning run in case his wife or kids want to reach him. My other brother considers that excessive. Let’s just say that it is best to draw the curtain on that dinner-table debate.

The very technology with which we choose to communicate in a relationship has become a barometer of our willingness to reveal ourselves within it. Racy photos, amorous texts and nonstop Skyping may be just the thing for lovers who are separated during the giddy days of new romance. At the same time, all that virtual togetherness may overaccelerate a courtship. There is something to be said for the slow burn, for anticipation over immediacy. I’m relieved not to be single in a time when you can flirt, fall in love, sext and break up with a guy without ever so much as meeting for coffee. And, really, what is more erotic, more personal, more potentially vulnerable than handwriting on a page? My husband won my heart by sending a witty postcard from a film shoot in Hawaii. No return address, no way for me to respond at all, let alone instantly in three platforms. These days, it seems, the only time we put pen to paper is when someone has died.

Every evolution in telecommunication has been greeted with ambivalence. Critics of the early telephone warned that eliminating the physical presence from conversation would increase isolation and undermine the family. Picture phones embody the future in dystopian and utopian sci-fi alike: Heywood Floyd uses one in “2001: A Space Odyssey”; ditto George of “The Jetsons.” When AT&T unveiled a test model at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, visitors lined up for a chance to talk to a stranger at Disneyland. Even Lady Bird Johnson gave it a whirl in Washington. In 1970, the picture phone was introduced for commercial use; the product tanked. Part of it was the expense — a three-minute call between New York and Chicago on the original version cost $27. But there was another reason: Who would want callers to know you were leafing through magazines or never made your bed or were trimming your toenails in the all-together? No one, that’s who.

Video chat, while obviously cheaper, would seem to have the same skewed ratio: too much access, too little control. But that’s speaking from the standpoint of a daughter. My perspective shifts significantly — as it does on so many subjects — when I mull this one over as a mother. It’s one thing to consider how much about me my parents have a right to know; it’s another to contemplate how much about my daughter I have a right to know — or even want to know.

I have friends who scroll through their teenagers’ text messages every night. They say it’s for their children’s protection, but to me it just seems the high-tech equivalent of picking the lock on a diary (something I know my mother never did, because if she had, I’d still be grounded). Their children don’t seem to mind the breach of trust. Maybe that’s because privacy is as foreign to them as analog television. Or because they’ve grown up far more tethered than any previous generation to their parents’ watchful gaze. It’s curious that today’s parents, who in their youth were so adamant about their own independence, are so lousy at fostering it in their progeny, even after the children leave home.

When I took off for college, I called my parents once a week, which was standard. They never saw my dorm room, didn’t meet my friends, had no concept of my schedule. It was My Space — the old-fashioned kind. Has cheaper and more plentiful technology made the difference, or is it something else? According to Quantcast, a service that analyzes Web site traffic, Skype users typically fall into one or more of four groups: white, male, between 18 and 34, and the “less affluent” — which in this case, probably indicates still in school. It could be such lads Skype only one another, but I doubt it. If they’re indeed checking in with Mom, I hope they at least cover up the beer-pong poster first.

Maybe by the time my daughter leaves for college, I, too, will wish for a 24-hour-a-day video feed (or, by then, perhaps, a continuous holograph). Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll be relieved not to see into her room, not to have to tell her for the 832nd time to clean it up. Maybe I’ll remind myself that magic mirrors are best left back in “Romper Room,” that, at some point, she has to figure out how to be her without me. She will need to cut the invisible cord — the phone cord, that is — and I will have to let her.

Doubtless, if circumstance takes her far away from home, my sense of the distance between us will be different from hers. That measure will change yet again — for both of us — should she have children, as it has, since her birth, for my parents and me. The truth is, I consider their tie to my daughter to be as precious as they do; the technology I use, I realize, may no longer reflect that.

So, I agreed to give video chat a try. We downloaded Skype and set a time to connect. They rang. I answered. My daughter waved. And then . . . we stared at each other. Short silences that seem natural on the phone become terribly awkward on video. Suddenly I understood why slumber-party confessions always came after lights were out, why children tend to admit the juicy stuff to the back of your head while you’re driving, why psychoanalysts stay out of a patient’s sightline. There is something exquisitely intimate about the disembodied voice. In my concern over letting my parents too far in, creating a claustrophobic closeness, I hadn’t considered that video chat might do just the opposite.

“Um,” I finally admitted, “I don’t have anything to say.”

That was a few weeks ago; we haven’t tried again since. It looks as if we’ll be among the two-thirds of Skype members who, according to Quantcast estimates, are passers-by who use the service no more than once a month.

“I think I’d rather e-mail,” my mom wrote me.

“Me, too,” I shot back, attaching a few photos of kindergarten graduation before hitting “send.”

Her response, which came instantly, made me smile: “Oh, Pegs,” she wrote. “Thanks so much for the pictures. It was exactly as if we were there with you!”

Peggy Orenstein, a contributing writer, is the author of “Waiting for Daisy,” a memoir.

Recruiting: Enough to Make a Monster Tremble

By Matthew Boyle

Corporate recruiter Elisa Bannon of US Cellular in Chicago used to spend up to $4 million a year to post jobs and screen résumés through the three heavyweights of online job search—Monster (MWW), CareerBuilder, and Yahoo! (YHOO) HotJobs.

But with her 2009 budget slashed to $1 million and 2,500 openings to fill, the wireless carrier's director of talent acquisition ditched the big job boards and instead inked a deal with social networking site LinkedIn. For an annual fee of $60,000, Bannon's team now has access to the network's 42 million members, many of whom are employed—the so-called passive candidates that recruiters covet, since conventional wisdom is the best people already have jobs. Using LinkedIn, Bannon made a hire in 30 days for a position that typically takes six months to fill. "It's a great product at an attractive price," she says.

SHRINKING SHARE

For Monster, a publicly traded online job site with $1 billion in sales and 80 million résumés on file, the growing appeal of LinkedIn to recruiters is just one more headache to contend with. Other social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are also becoming popular destinations for employers. And niche sites such as TheLadders and BlueSteps, both of which target high earners, are gaining followers among recruiters and job seekers alike. While traffic to Monster is up because of the growing ranks of the newly unemployed, its share of job listings among the big three has declined from nearly 40% in December 2007 to 34% in May of this year, according to job market research and analysis firm Wanted Technologies. And the site saw a 31% drop in revenue last quarter. (Monster gets 90% of its revenues from fees it charges recruiters to post jobs and search its résumé database; the rest comes from advertising.) "The big job boards have peaked," says Gerry Crispin of consultancy CareerXroads.

Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi, a Wall Street veteran who in 2007 came to the top job, is trying to fight back. "I've spent a significant part of my career fixing things," he says. He has slashed $400 million in costs over the past year, even eliminating paper cups in the break rooms. Iannuzzi also lowered prices for some key customers and hired 130 salespeople—a 31% increase—to win back business. In January, Monster unveiled a cleaner site that, among other things, reduced the number of steps required to upload a résumé from 20 to 4. A career-mapping feature shows job hunters how they can transfer from one field to another.

PLAYING CATCH-UP?

Iannuzzi is also trying to improve customer service, moving call centers back from India to South Carolina. Those efforts pleased customers such as Michael O'Connell, a recruiter in Los Angeles whose firm works for Disney (DIS) and Toyota (TM). He was close to scrapping Monster last month but stayed on thanks to better service, a monthly payment plan, and a price cut. O'Connell is also a fan of LinkedIn—"I use it all day," he says—but argues that it's not yet big enough to supplant Monster. And he stopped using TheLadders two years ago when the company began charging recruiters. (Originally, TheLadders charged only job seekers.)

Iannuzzi's next step is to address the one-size-fits-all nature of Monster's site, which gets about 12 million unique visitors a month. It's rolling out "contextual search" technology that distinguishes between, say, someone who went to Harvard and someone who lives on Harvard Avenue. Iannuzzi calls the technology "game-changing," but rivals beg to differ. "It's an attempt to catch up," says Matt Ferguson, CEO of CareerBuilder, which saw its North American revenue drop 27% in the first quarter. Meanwhile, on June 25, HotJobs launched a "pay-per-performance" product whereby recruiters pay only for qualified candidates.

Unlike listing jobs on the big boards—a process that one recruiter describes as "post and pray"—companies can now choose sites with more distinct services. Along with specialized sites such as TheLadders and Dice, which focuses on technology and health care, there are job search engines such as SimplyHired and Indeed, which trawl the job boards and corporate employment sites to grab every available posting. The employment sections of corporate Web sites have also become more sophisticated. And craigslist has cornered the market for lower-paying jobs with free postings in most areas. By one estimate, there are now 50,000 job sites in the U.S. alone and an equal amount abroad.

SOUPED-UP SEARCH

Perhaps the biggest threat comes from LinkedIn, a six-year-old social networking site with a distinctly professional bent. In January the privately held Mountain View (Calif.) company consolidated the various tools it had been selling to corporate hiring departments into a suite of services called Talent Advantage, which now boasts more than 1,000 customers, double the number it had last year. For $7,000 per user at a client company, hiring managers get a customized Web site, or "dashboard," and souped-up search capability so they can reach out to qualified candidates, individually or in groups. (Recruiters can also buy job postings.) The network even "pushes" candidates to employers who meet preset criteria. While some LinkedIn members may not want to hear from a recruiter, they'll often send the message along to someone else in their network. "Finding passive candidates—that's our sweet spot," says David Hahn, LinkedIn's director of product management. Recruiters agree. "We could not believe the candidates we got" from LinkedIn, says Scott Morrison, director of global recruiting programs at software giant salesforce.com (CRM). "This is a gold mine for us."

Twitter is also gaining traction in the realm of job search. Kara Nickels got an e-mail one morning from an insurance industry client that needed 40 lawyers immediately for a big document review. The legal recruiter quickly sent a message—or "tweet"—to her 150 followers, which was re-twittered by legal blogs that follow her. By the time she arrived at her Chicago office, Nickels had 10 replies and filled every post by lunch. "With job boards it takes a couple days before people look," she says. "But Twitter is immediate. I'll still use the job boards, but if you don't use social media now, you're behind the curve."

With that kind of competition, analysts are skeptical that Monster can retain its top spot. "I'm not convinced [Monster's] new projects are going to revolutionize its portfolio to the point where users and recruiters think about Monster in a new light," says William Morrison, an analyst at investment bank ThinkEquity Partners. "If the job boards don't innovate more often and more quickly, they are going to have a very difficult time growing their businesses over the next several years."

Iannuzzi knows this. "We are not done," he says, hinting that acquisitions could be forthcoming. But even Monster's architects see the writing on the wall. Bill Warren, the founder of an early job board that morphed into Monster, is now executive director of the DirectEmployers Assn., a consortium of corporate employers. He's partnering with the owner of the ".jobs" domain and will launch job sites under that domain later this year. Says Warren: "The days of the big, expensive job boards are over."

Business Exchange: Read, save, and add content on BW's new Web 2.0 topic network

Your Digital Profile

Paper résumés are passé. According to a June 17 NPR segment, recruiters increasingly are looking for evidence that prospective hires are comfortable living in a digital world. LinkedIn profiles are a must, blogs a plus. But beware of what your e-mail address says about you. No cutesy, joint husband-and-wife e-mail addresses, please. Also, at least one executive looks down on AOL (TWX) addresses: "AOL was so 1998," he says.

To listen to the segment, go to http://bx.businessweek.com/recession-job-search/reference/

Boyle is deputy Corporations editor for BusinessWeek.

China, Cuba, Other Authoritarian Regimes Censor News From Iran

By Ariana Eunjung Cha

Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 27, 2009

BEIJING -- Out of fear that history might repeat itself, the authoritarian governments of China, Cuba and Burma have been selectively censoring the news this month of Iranian crowds braving government militias on the streets of Tehran to demand democratic reforms.

Between 1988 and 1990, amid a lesser global economic slump, pro-democracy protests that appeared to inspire and energize one another broke out in Eastern Europe, Burma, China and elsewhere. Not all evolved into full-fledged revolutions, but communist regimes fell in a broad swath of countries, and the global balance of power shifted.

A similar infectiousness has shown up in subtle acts of defiance by democracy advocates around the world this week.

In China, political commentators tinted their blogs and Twitters green to show their support for Iranians disputing President Ahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection. The deaths of at least 20 people in violent clashes in Tehran have drawn comparisons online to "June 4," the date of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing in 1989. And a pointed joke about how Iranians are luckier than Chinese because sham elections are better than no elections made the rounds on the country's vast network of Internet bulletin boards.

"The Iranian people face the same problems as us: news censorship and no freedom to have their own voices," 28-year-old blogger Zhou Shuguang said in a telephone interview from the inland province of Hunan. Zhou said he and several friends were among those who had colored their online pictures green, the signature color of the Iranian opposition.

In Cuba, President Raúl Castro's government has imposed a complete blackout of news surrounding the Iranian elections. But word of developments is trickling through, anyway.

Havana-based blogger Yoani Sánchez, 33, who e-mails friends outside Cuba to get her entries posted online, said the Iranian protests -- in particular, the reportedly widespread use of Twitter, Facebook and cellphones -- have served as "a lesson for Cuban bloggers."

"Seeing those young Iranians use all the technology to denounce the injustice, I notice everything that we lack to support those who maintain blogs from the island," Sánchez wrote. "The acid test of our incipient virtual community has not yet arrived, but maybe it will surprise us tomorrow."

"Today it's you," she told the Iranian protesters in one posting. "Tomorrow it could well be us."

In Burma, the junta's mouthpiece, the New Light of Myanmar, has drowned out news from Tehran with articles on bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan. But some of the nearly 200 journals published privately in Rangoon and Mandalay have seized on the topic as a way to pass subversive messages to readers.

"What we, the private media, are trying to do was to put in as much stories and pixs of what's going on in Teheran in our papers. So far we were successful," the editor of a Rangoon-based weekly publication said in an e-mail. "The upcoming paper of mine . . . will carry, albeit if it's not censored, news stories of the events in Teheran and a feature on 'Elections and Democracy,' trying to draw some parallels between the one in Iran and the upcoming one here," a reference to elections, scheduled for 2010, that many critics dismiss as a sham.

Unlike in Iran, however, the experience of past failed protests has yielded a measure of pragmatism in Burma. Overtly political opposition groups, such as Generation Wave, and numerous apolitical networks have in recent months focused on a more evolutionary strategy of change, reaching out in particular to Burma's rural masses.

"We cannot go directly to our goal," said a graphic designer who co-founded a group that teaches social management and governance in Rangoon and remote towns under the cover of English classes.

Moe Thway, founder of Generation Wave, said Iran's citizens do not appear to be as depressed or despairing as Burma's. Even the most hard-bitten Burmese activists see little hope in taking to the streets for now.

"About Iran, I can't say whether their current movement will change the political trend or not," he said. "Iran and our Burma are still different."

In Venezuela, a South American country that is increasingly polarized, protests against President Hugo Chávez's administration are common. Juan Mejía, 22, said he found the protests in Iran stirring, partly because he felt that opponents of the government in Tehran want the same thing as protesters in Caracas.

"The fact that people have gone out onto the street, that they demand their rights be respected, means to us that they felt there was no liberty and that they want a different country," said Mejía, a student leader who opposes Chávez. "We believe that if the people of the world raise their voices loudly enough -- in Iran, as we do it here in Venezuela, and hopefully one day in Cuba -- then surely we will have a better world."

Venezuela, as opposed to countries such as Cuba and China, holds frequent elections, and dissent remains a part of the political discourse. But in a decade in power, Chávez has taken control of the Congress, the courts and the state oil company, and his opponents charge that he is a dictator in the making.

In China, the Communist Party's propaganda machine has worked furiously to portray the protests in Iran -- already being dubbed the Green Revolution, after the Rose and Orange revolutions earlier this decade in Georgia and Ukraine -- as orchestrated by the United States and other Western powers, not a grass-roots movement. Unlike Western leaders, who have avoided acknowledging Ahmadinejad's claims of victory, President Hu Jintao joined Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev in meeting with and congratulating the Iranian president.

On online discussion boards this week, tens of thousands of comments about Iran were shown as deleted; most of those allowed to remain took the official party line on the elections.

China's main message has been that this vulnerable period, with the world hit by the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, is no time for a "color revolution."

"Attempts to push the so-called color revolution toward chaos will prove very dangerous," the state-run China Daily said in a recent editorial.

The Chinese government has been especially aggressive this year in cracking down on talk of democracy because 2009 is full of politically sensitive anniversaries. In the most recent move, officials announced Tuesday the formal arrest of Liu Xiaobo, an influential dissident who had helped draft and sign a pro-democracy petition known as Charter 08.

Albert Ho, chairman of the China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group in Hong Kong, said he sees many parallels between the situation in Iran and the atmosphere in China, citing many "hot spots" on the mainland that could explode into violent protests at any time.

"This time, the dark dictatorship has won, but I don't feel hopeless," Ho said of Iran. "On the contrary, I see more clearly that there is hope. I used to think, in such a totalitarian country, people had no hope for democracy. But I can see not only students but people from all different classes, even very low-class men and women, all have such a strong will for democracy, and they fight together for taking down the cheated election."

In contrast, Li Datong, a Beijing-based pro-democracy writer who was fired from his job in China's state media after publishing a piece on censorship on the Internet, said democratic change will come more gradually and peacefully in China.

"Young people might be excited about what happened in Iran now, but not me -- a 57-year-old one who has witnessed dramatic change in China. I think the cultivation of democratic elements within a society is more important and practical," Li said, mentioning the increased acceptance of public accountability and the growth of civil society groups in recent years.

Some democracy advocates in China said that even if the Iranian protesters fail in their calls for legitimate elections this time, their fight will inspire others, as similar uprisings -- in Burma in 1988 and at Tiananmen Square the next year, for example -- have done in the past.

The iconic image of the Iranian protests may be the chilling video, filmed on a cellphone camera, of Neda Agha Soltan, the 26-year-old woman who died on the streets of Tehran minutes after being struck by a bullet.

"Democracy won't come by the charity of the governing class," someone from the city of Suzhou, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, wrote about Agha Soltan on an online message board. "Fighting is the only way to gain democracy. . . . People are doomed to be slaves unless they are willing to sacrifice their blood."

Correspondent Juan Forero in Caracas, special correspondent Karla Adam in London, a staff writer in Washington and researchers Zhang Jie, Wang Juan and Liu Liu in Beijing contributed to this report.

Two New Real-Time Search Engines: Collecta and CrowdEye

From a Search Engine Land Blog post by Greg Sterling:

This morning there are two new entrants in the “real-time” search derby, run by two search veterans. They are CrowdEye and Collecta. CrowdEye is from Ken Moss, who ran search engineering at Microsoft and built the new engine himself. At the helm of Collecta is Gerry Campbell, who was a search executive at AOL and Reuters, as well as an adviser to Summize (now Twitter Search). He recently stepped into the CEO role at the company.

The blog post goes on to offer an in-depth overview of both services.

Direct to Collecta

Direct to Crowd Eye

Source: Search Engine Land

AOL’s Truveo Relaunches As Improved Video Search Destination

Jun 25, 2009 at 10:10am ET by Greg Sterling - click on above title for full posting and links

According to comScore the average watcher of online video in the US took in 385 minutes-worth in April. And according to Nielsen, in May, “year-over-year, unique viewers, total streams, streams per viewer and time per viewer were up, led by a 49 percent growth in time per viewer.” The leading video site is Google/YouTube by a large margin with almost double the unique users of Fox Interactive Media, the next ranking US online video provider. After that it becomes much more competitive.

Against that backdrop of intense competition and increasing consumer demand for online video, AOL’s video search engine Truveo has relaunched on a global basis (17 countries).

Truveo began as a video search technology platform and was acquired by AOL in January, 2006. In August of 2007 it became a consumer destination site. The previous version of the site had a number of virtues (depth, global scope, organization) but also serious problems with usability. I wrote at the time:

The single biggest drawback to the site (esp. vs. YouTube) is the fact that many (though not all) of Truveo’s content partners contractually require that videos be served on their sites rather than on Truveo. Consequently a pop-up appears and you watch the desired video (and pre-rolls ads) on the partner sites (about 50% of the time in my quick testing). That creates a variable experience, which YouTube avoids by having everything play in a single, uniform player on its site.

Those problems have largely remedied with the new user experience though there’s still some unevenness. Yet one can watch many more videos on the Truveo site itself today; and where the engine is compelled to link to third party sites (i.e., no video embed code) Truveo frames the experience. There are two viewing modes.

Among the improvements, there are also new user controls and filters to search or browse video by source or sort by popularity, ranking and recency.

There are also myriad full-length shows on the site. Overall this is a dramatically improved user experience and Truveo should see its traffic increase accordingly.

Truveo itself says that its global reach and the comprehensiveness of its video index — all the video is being crawled, there are no feeds or deals here — are what differentiate the site from competitors. AOL video remains a separate site with a different look and feel, though they share technology.

As part of the announcement this morning Truveo announced a deal to power video search on Univision Interactive Media’s online portal.

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and writes a personal blog Screenwerk, examining the broader world of media and advertising. He also posts at a Local Mobile Search, which is focused on the mobile Internet.

Some Professors Losing Their Twitter Jitters

By Susan Kinzie
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 26, 2009

Mary Knudson requires students in her medical writing class to Twitter from a scientific conference and to write narratives in no more than 140 characters -- academia in disposable snippets.

Not only does Twitter teach students to write concisely with its strict limit on the length of posts, she said, but it also enables them to share valuable information -- links to stories about scientific discoveries, Web sites with new research and other material she never would have come across on her own.

Before she adopted Twitter, Knudson had to overcome her own reservations about the technology. It destroys the ability to spell, she said, as vowels are dropped or numerals used in place of words. She doesn't want her students to write online from conferences about medical discoveries, preferring they take time to consider the studies and discuss them with other researchers.

Adapting their teaching to take advantage of new technology, a small but growing number of college professors are using Twitter to keep discussions going long after class is over, share research, pose questions and gather information. Some use it to keep students engaged in large lecture halls by fostering a running online dialogue during class.

Some employ it to show students how technology is changing their field or changing history. Some, like Knudson, who teaches writing to graduate students at Johns Hopkins University, are using it as a writing tool -- encouraging students to write concisely and in a way that's engaging enough to retain readers.

Although many professors initially dismissed Twitter as another contributor to information overload, the site has gradually gained credibility as academics recognize how it can cultivate ideas and help gain knowledge from the crowd.

But the effort still baffles some, who know the site best for its cramped syntax and constant babble of thoughts posted by users ("stale bagel this morning," "2 tired 2 mow lawn"). They see it as the antithesis of intellectual discourse.

"Twitter is really about instantaneous notification. Class is supposed to be about deliberation and depth," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. "It's beyond me to imagine a valuable use for it in the classroom."

Some have privacy concerns, saying that students should be able to explore ideas in college without a public digital record. Such services as Blackboard allow professors to communicate privately online with a class of students.

Others believe that the experimentation with Twitter is the latest sign of a real shift in education, away from a professor lecturing students to a more democratic and wide-ranging exchange of information.

"It changes the dynamic of the way people teach and the way people learn," said Monte Lutz, a visiting professor at Hopkins. "It encourages people to connect with each other. It can be almost a Socratic dialogue, in real time, in the class."

The effort comes as the technology has gained enough users to become a force for change. Just look at the way things are unfolding in Iran, Lutz said, where people around the world have been using Twitter to protest the recent election results. "People realize how quickly this has changed the way people communicate," he said.

At its best, professors said, Twitter creates a virtual collective stream of consciousness, a real-time flow of sometimes funny, sometimes newsy, sometimes thought-provoking observations, photos, conversations, documents, questions, videos and links. Because Twitter is public and searchable, people can find information and share it with others, spreading it virally.

Twitter makes it easy for a chemist at Johns Hopkins to share ideas, for Harvard University to broadcast updates about research and for scores of people to tweet their way through academic conferences. Those online conversations are often more interesting than the forums, several professors said, and continue long afterward.

Danna Walker, who teaches at American University, wants to use Twitter next semester to let students ask questions or give feedback during class. "I thought, 'I'll hit 'em where they live.' They're used to communicating this way -- via text-message and Facebook -- so this would be a great way to get them engaged in class. At least, that's my theory."

Students at Duke University were required to tweet and upload clips of movies they watched over a weekend after reading books about film theory, said Negar Mottahedeh, an associate professor. "They were constantly engaged in the work of the class," she said.

In a large introductory class, it is difficult to give each student individual attention, but online comments meant they could challenge and support one another, too, making learning less top-down, more collaborative. Mottahedeh was thrilled with the result, concluding that because their class work was public, they were much more conscious of what they were writing, more serious and more engaged than previous classes.

Twitter has reached into elementary school classrooms as well. Students at the British School of Washington have been sending out tweets at the end of many of their classes, giving them a chance to reflect on what they just learned and creating a concise archive of their lessons.

"Romeo and Juliet meet and kiss for the first time -- do we believe in love at first sight?" a recent tweet asked.

At Hopkins, Knudson uses Twitter as an extension of the classroom, asking students to raise questions, hold discussions online, keep up with breaking news and share links to interesting stories. She believes the limited number of characters allowed is a useful way to remember to choose words carefully, cut clutter and realize how much can be said in a small space, like a haiku.

There are people known for their writing on Twitter. As one example, she pointed to Arjun Basu, who has thousands of followers for his short-story tweets: "The marriage ended somewhere on a two lane road south of Cleveland. The kids in the backseat sensed it too. The kid in the trunk had no idea."

"As a child he delivered newspapers. As an adult he delivered bad news daily. Because he was a negative person. And the world's worst surgeon."

Matt Dozier, a graduate student of Knudson's, was surprised by her assignment but likes that his classmates then talk about class even after it's over. He tweeted updates from a symposium on ocean science and conservation on Capitol Hill recently, finding it intimidating at first to write about complex topics within the length constraints. And without the luxury of listening to an entire presentation, it was hard to decide what to highlight.

"It was good practice to pick out interesting things that are happening live and try to get them across as quickly -- with the most impact -- as you possibly could."

He enjoys watching Twitter evolve as people keep finding new uses for it and is surprised it has taken hold. "It's not something that would have occurred to anybody that this would be useful at all," he said.

Beijing Adds Curbs on Access to Internet

By KEITH BRADSHER

HONG KONG, June 26 — The Chinese Health Ministry on Thursday ordered sharp restrictions on Internet access to medical research papers on sexual subjects. It is the latest move in what the ministry calls an antipornography campaign that many China experts see as a harbinger of a broader crackdown on freedom of expression and dissent.

In the past month, central government officials have cited a need to control pornography in ordering that filtering software be preinstalled on all new computers sold in China starting July 1.

They have also forced Google to disable a function that lets the search engine suggest terms and on Wednesday night even briefly blocked access nationwide to Google’s main search engine and other services like Gmail. Some users were still having problems accessing Google sites on Thursday night.

In addition, Chinese bloggers say they have detected evidence of a concerted effort to stain Google’s image. They say that someone in Beijing manipulated Google’s software to make it more likely to suggest a pornographic search term during a state television broadcast.

At the same time, the government seems to have stepped up harassment of human rights advocates.

Liu Xiaobo, one of China’s best-known dissidents, was formally arrested Tuesday on suspicion of subversion, six months after he was detained for joining other intellectuals in signing a document calling for democracy. This month, the authorities refused to renew the licenses of more than a dozen lawyers after they agreed to represent clients in human rights cases.

The same public security agencies charged with fighting pornography are responsible for suppressing illegal political activity, said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch. The government’s statistics for seizures of illegal publications tend to include both pornographic and political documents, he noted.

“The two are closely associated,” Mr. Bequelin said. “These campaigns work hand in hand.”

The emphasis on pornography echoes a similar crackdown in late 2005 and early 2006, rights advocates say.

At the time, seeking to allay official Chinese concerns about pornography, Google designed a new search engine for Google.cn, its Chinese service, that would not pull up references to politically delicate subjects like Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement, or the 1989 killings in and around Tiananmen Square.

While denouncing pornography, propaganda officials reined in publications that were challenging government policies. This included the closing of Freezing Point, a popular journal of news and opinion, and the replacement of top editors at three other publications.

The Health Ministry posted regulations this week requiring medical information providers to restrict access to articles on sexual subjects. The penalty for violations is up to $4,400, with the potential for criminal prosecution for a pattern of uncorrected offenses.

At a news conference on Thursday, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, was quick to criticize Google for allowing too many links to unseemly sites, saying, “It is every government’s responsibility to protect their teenagers from porn and vulgar information on the Internet.”

On Wednesday, the American commerce secretary, Gary F. Locke, and Ron Kirk, the United States trade representative, sent a letter to Chinese officials protesting the country’s proposal that all computers sold in the country be equipped with filtering software.

“China is putting companies in an untenable position by requiring them, with virtually no public notice, to preinstall software that appears to have broad-based censorship implications and network security issues,” Mr. Locke said in a statement. The United States government did not release the text of the letter.

Asked about the complaint on Thursday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said only that he had previously defended the decision to require the software.

Google said Thursday that it was trying to limit access to pornography.

“Google has been working to remove pornography from our search results in China, in accordance with our operating license there,” the company said.

“This has been a major engineering effort,” the company said, “and we believe we have addressed many of the problems identified by the government.”

The government began stepping up pressure on Google last week. CCTV, the state-owned television monopoly, broadcast an interview in which the announcer typed the word “son” into a Google search engine and was dismayed that one of the search terms suggested in Chinese was an “abnormal relationship between son and mother.”

Google’s software makes it possible to analyze the frequency and source of search terms. In a check on Thursday, Google’s Web site showed that no one had entered the phrase “abnormal relationship between son and mother” in Chinese for months until it suddenly became a popular phrase entered only in Beijing in the days before the show, making it more likely that it would pop up as a suggested search term.

The same CCTV show included an interview with a young man, identified as a college student, who expressed horror at pornography on the Internet. Chinese bloggers have since identified the man as an intern for CCTV.

Many Chinese regulations ostensibly aimed at controlling illicit sexual activity could also be used to restrict political activity unacceptable to the authorities.

For example, Chinese law requires that karaoke bars, nightclubs and Internet cafes be monitored 24 hours a day by closed-circuit television cameras on the grounds that prostitutes may try to find clients at such locations. But according to security industry executives, China’s anti-prostitution surveillance regulations are stricter on the Internet cafes.

While nightclubs and karaoke bars are required to store their video records on their premises, Internet cafes must be wired to the nearest police station and provide a continuous, instantaneous record of who is using which computer. If an e-mail message from a cafe’s computer later catches the attention of investigators, the police can review the video records to see who was using the computer.

The last major crackdown on pornography and political expression lasted several months and began to ebb in February 2006, after a dozen former Communist Party officials and senior scholars issued a public letter denouncing the closing of a prominent news journal.

But by then, the government had won some major concessions. Not only had Google agreed to remove considerable political content from its Chinese service, but Microsoft had disabled some blogging activity critical of China, and Yahoo had handed over the identity of an e-mail user who had shared a propaganda directive; the user was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Edward Wong contributed reporting from Beijing. Zhang Jing and Huang Yuanxi contributed research from Beijing, and Hilda Wang from Hong Kong.

Internet Resources, June 25, 2009

Blog Tips - On entering the blog, you might try first going to the bottom of the page. This is where a bunch of gadgets which 'push' news to you are located. There are also a few which let you select from a new menu of news daily, or, in some cases, just as the news appears on the net. The top two are the 'breaking news' gadgets, one looking like a map which you can manipulate to get news from almost every country in the world. The one immediately below the map presents only breaking news programmed to reflect the six topics covered by the blog. Hit any stiry of interest to see the full-text behind the moving headline. In researching contemporary events, gadgets like these make your work easier, faster, and more complete.


Today's Readings

GetDocs

CitizenTube

YouTube Video Volunteers

Wayback Machine

Web Pioneers


Wiki Resources

Internet Archive

Volunteering

Google News Experimenting with Links to Wikipedia on Its Homepage

Source - Nieman Journalism Lab

By Zachary M. Seward / June 9 / 2:51 p.m.

The discrete news article, it has been said, is a framework that worked well in print but doesn’t make much sense on the web. News sites can offer context in a variety of ways that explode the story model, from visualizations to comment threads to what might be called the Wikipedia model of news. No, not collaborative editing, although that has its own advantages, but merely the structure of a Wikipedia article: one page devoted to an ongoing topic that’s updated throughout with new developments but can always be read, from top to bottom, as a thorough primer. Compared to a folder of chronological news clippings, well, I would always prefer the Wikipedia model.

So, too, would readers. Wikipedia became the Internet’s most popular news-and-information site in 2007, and its dominance in search results attests to the demand for authoritative topic pages over individual articles. Now, in a small but potentially crucial moment for the evolution of storytelling, Google News has quietly begun experimenting with links to Wikipedia on its homepage.

“Currently, we’re showing a small number of users links to Wikipedia topic pages that serve as a reference on current events,” Gabriel Stricker, a spokesman for Google, told me in an email this afternoon.

Sadly, I’m not one of those users, but I was alerted to this development by blogger Michael Gray, who viewed Wikipedia’s presence on Google News in a more-sinister light but helpfully provided screenshots. I grabbed the one above from Gray, highlighting a link to the Wikipedia page for the mysterious disappearance of Air France Flight 447. As is typically the case, there is no single page on the Internet with a more thorough, helpful, or informative synopsis of the crash.

Google News redesigned its homepage last month and began integrating YouTube clips from news organizations. Its cluster pages for individual news stories also got a makeover that more closely resembles a topic page than the old list of articles.

In his email to me, Stricker called the links to Wikipedia an experiment, which it is, but Google has made clear that it prefers the Wikipedia model of storytelling over discrete articles. In her testimony to Congress last month, Google vice president Marissa Mayer (that’s a link to Wikipedia, natch) said, “The atomic unit of consumption for existing media is almost always disrupted by emerging media.” She continued:

Today, in online news, publishers frequently publish several articles on the same topic, sometimes with identical or closely related content, each at their own URL. The result is parallel Web pages that compete against each other in terms of authority, and in terms of placement in links and search results.

Consider instead how the authoritativeness of news articles might grow if an evolving story were published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity. We see this practice today in Wikipedia’s entries and in the topic pages at NYTimes.com. The result is a single authoritative page with a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time.

It’s not a new concept, and news organizations like The New York Times have been working on it for years. (Kevin Sablan recently summarized the latest literature on all this — a topic page for topic pages.) And yet, the article and its close cousin, the blog post, remain the dominant frameworks for news reporting on the web. Radical reinventions of storytelling are, surprisingly, few and far between: Matt Thompson, the leading thinker on this subject, is trying “a completely different type of news site” in Columbia, Missouri, that’s worth keeping an eye on. And, now, Google News is toying with links to Wikipedia. Here’s hoping for more developments like this.

In U.S., Iranians See Country And Countrymen in a New Light

By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 20, 2009

For the past week, young members of the Iranian diaspora have been able to assume a few things about each other: They spend all day glued to the Internet, and they're suddenly experts on a handful of bearded men they may not have cared much about before.

With huge crowds taking to Iran's streets to protest a presidential election they say was rigged, Iranians outside the country have been staying up late into the night, watching the drama unfold online, in tweets and status updates and shaky video clips. They are jittery and excited, consumed by a passion many did not know they had, for a country some have never even visited.

Hussein Banai, 28, a graduate student at Brown University, had so little faith in the Iranian system that he didn't vote last week for the president of the country he left 13 years ago. Like many, though, he has been swept up by what followed. "I've never seen so many people outside the country being so viscerally engaged with the political process," he said. "I'm hoping this will result in a major shakeup of the regime."

Some scenes are disturbing, such as those of protesters being beaten or shot. But there are also human moments, such as demonstrators surrounding a policeman and asking whether he speaks Arabic or Farsi -- evidently in response to rumors that militias were brought into Iran from Arab countries to replace police who might not fire on crowds.

In the clip, the policeman cracks a smile and says, "Farsi," prompting delighted demonstrators to ask for whom he voted. And observers abroad have been prompted to add their own delighted comments.

"It's amazing. It's like watching the Berlin Wall come down," said Nika Khanjani, 34, a filmmaker who lives in Montreal. "I really feel like something's changing."

Like many, she said she can hardly stand not to be in Iran now. "I feel sorry for myself that I'm alone here, and I realize that there is this incredibly strong desire to feel connected, and that is my answer to myself as to why I'm on the computer all the time," she said. "I just need to be around people who care about this."

That feeling has prompted many in the Iranian diaspora, which numbers about 1 million people in the United States, to join forces in a way they never have before. Almost every day since the disputed June 12 election, they have participated in vigils and marches in cities around the world.



They are taking their cues from people in Iran, said Babak Talebi, 29, of McLean, an organizer of the grass-roots group Whereismyvote.org. "We were just like, 'Damn, the Islamic Republic did it again,' " he said. But then, "When it became clear that people inside Iran were not letting this go without dissent, we were just like, 'We have to do something.' "

Many people around the world have replaced their online photos with the words "Where Is My Vote?" against a green backdrop, the color of defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi's campaign. But many abroad say they are uniting not around a specific political leader so much as around their support for Iranians they see as taking huge risks in the name of democracy.

Such risk-taking is not unprecedented: Student protests in 1999 raised hopes but resulted in a crackdown and did not spark the same level of involvement abroad. This time, technological advances have allowed for wider dissemination of the events. But there is more to it than that, said Jahanshah Javid, who runs a diaspora Web site, Iranian.com.

"The student movement was more radical," he said, noting that this time some of Iran's establishment clerics have joined the protests, emboldening usually apolitical Iranians to participate. "This fear of the security forces, of the Islamic Republic in general, has melted away."

So far, the demonstrators' demands include a new election and the release of those arrested but not a new system, and most expatriates are echoing that, Talebi said. "This is the consensus -- that we're going to create change in Iran without a revolution, with internal reform."

Not all have united around this idea. Shouting matches have broken out at demonstrations in Los Angeles and Washington between middle-aged Iranians carrying the lion-and-sun flags of the shah's era and mostly younger Iranians, who fear that such flags will allow Tehran to link the protests with monarchists seeking to overturn the government.

In fact, many protesters have adopted slogans and imagery of the 1979 revolution, such as shouting "Allahu akbar" from rooftops and sharing video clips of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini speaking about blood spilled for the country and a rising wave of protest around the world.

Mindful that the Iranian government could seek to discredit the protests as foreign-backed, some in the diaspora are also arguing over how much the Obama administration should get involved. In an informal poll put out this week by the Washington-based National Iranian American Council, 60 percent of respondents said that U.S. involvement would be counterproductive but that human rights violations must be condemned; 19 percent said the United States should not get involved at all.

The House of Representatives voted 405 to 1 yesterday to condemn Tehran's crackdown on demonstrators. The Senate voted unanimously to condemn censorship and intimidation of the press in Iran.

Iranians in the United States say they are hearing from friends interested in Iran for the first time, and some are amused by comments from non-Iranians who are struck by the images of hip young Tehran protesters after so many years of seeing clerics as the face of Iran. There is a newfound sense of pride, they say, a sense of wanting to wear an "Iran" T-shirt or carry an "Iran" book in public, to show off a heritage many were more used to hiding.

"You're seeing for the first time the Iranian coming out in you, whether you're full Iranian or half or a quarter," said Goli Fassihian, a NIAC spokeswoman. "Most people feel that this is the beginning of a long-term thing."

For those old enough to remember the animosity unleashed on Iranians during the hostage crisis, the transformation can be liberating. "All my formative years, I dreaded the reaction when people would find out I was Iranian," said Khanjani, who grew up in Texas. "It was so vilified, and it's like vindication right now. Would we feel so proud of our country if it hadn't gone through 30 years of being demonized?

"Especially when I read about the silent marches and the integrity with which these people are organizing, and the courage," she added. "Yeah, these are Iranians -- full of passion, full of moxie, intelligent. It's just so cool that the whole world is watching."

Twitter Is a Player In Iran's Drama

By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The State Department asked social-networking site Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance earlier this week to avoid disrupting communications among tech-savvy Iranian citizens as they took to the streets to protest Friday's reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The move illustrates the growing influence of online social-networking services as a communications media. Foreign news coverage of the unfolding drama, meanwhile, was limited by Iranian government restrictions barring journalists from "unauthorized" demonstrations.

"One of the areas where people are able to get out the word is through Twitter," a senior State Department official said in a conversation with reporters, on condition of anonymity. "They announced they were going to shut down their system for maintenance and we asked them not to."

A White House official said "this wasn't a directive from Secretary of State, but rather was a low-level contact from someone who often talks to Twitter staff." The official said Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted, according to news reports. "Twitter is simply a medium that all Iranians can use to communicate," the official said.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment yesterday.

It is hard to say how much twittering is actually going on inside Iran. The tweets circulated by expatriates in the United States tend to be in English -- the Twitter interface does not support the use of Farsi. And though many people may be sending tweets out of Iran, their use inside Iran may be low, some say.

"Twitter's impact inside Iran is zero," said Mehdi Yahyanejad, manager of a Farsi-language news site based in Los Angeles. "Here, there is lots of buzz, but once you look . . . you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves."

However, an Iranian-American activist in Washington said that tweets from a handful of students have been instrumental in getting information to people outside Iran. She spoke on condition of anonymity citing concern that authorities in Tehran could block her from receiving transmissions.

"The predominant information is coming from Twitter" since foreign reporters' movement has been limited, she said. "They are relying on Iranians and others who are Twittering to get this information out to the mainstream media. A lot of people are coining what is happening in Iran as a Twitter revolution."

Users around the world following the election drama in Tehran found that it was listed as the most popular discussion topic on Twitter yesterday and Monday. Many users, logging on from outside Iran, said they changed their account's location listing to Tehran, in a move to confuse government censors who might be trying to shut down communications from Iran.

Since Friday, Iranian expatriates have kept one another apprised of events by forwarding to Facebook "tweets" containing information that often appeared to have originated in Iran.

"My friends are being held against their will in the university," wrote one. "Rasoul Akram hospital has medics outside, go there for help," advised another. Some uploaded pictures and videos of police violence against protesters to sites such as Flickr and YouTube.

Some information tweeted about planned gatherings, or about the shooting of a protester, has been confirmed by mainstream media. Other reports have been debunked or have proven impossible to verify.

Though Twitter wasn't the only Web service used by supporters of defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi as Iran's election strife played out, Iranian government officials were more successful in shutting out access to Web sites such as Facebook than they were with Twitter, where entries are limited to 140 characters or less.

Tech industry analyst Rob Enderle said Twitter might be more resistant to the Iranian government's attempts to block access because users can post updates via a cellphone's text-messaging service, or SMS.

"Twitter is a unique property because it works easily with SMS," Enderle said. "That gives it a resiliency that isn't shared by other online-only sites," such as Facebook, he said. To block Twitter use, he said, Iran would either have to shut down text messaging on a one-to-one basis, a tedious and time-intensive process, or shut down text messaging throughout the country.

In a blog entry posted Monday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone cited users in Iran as a reason for delaying "a critical network upgrade" but did not mention any contact from State Department officials. The maintenance, as originally scheduled, would have disrupted Twitter service for users in Tehran yesterday morning.

The State Department's request contrasts with recent comments from President Obama saying that the United States would not get involved in the matter. Obama said earlier this week that he and other world leaders have "deep concerns" about the Iranian election, but that he did not want the United States to be seen as meddling.

Protesters have often used new technologies to evade government attempts to stifle dissent, said Tim Bajarin, with the Silicon Valley research firm Creative Strategies. In the last days of the Soviet Union, dissenters used underground fax services to spread information, he said.

This is not the first time Twitter users have employed the service toward serious ends. Last year, an American journalism student was arrested in Egypt for taking photographs at a protest. After typing a single word -- "arrested" -- into his cellphone, which relayed it to his Twitter account, the student's friends and family contacted the State Department in the hopes of pressuring the Egyptian government for his release.

Staff writers Tara Bahrampour, Liz Heron, Glenn Kessler and Scott Wilson contributed to this report.

HOW TO: Track Iran Election with Twitter and Social Media

Source - http://mashable.com/2009/06/14/new-media-iran/

Mashable, Ben Parr, June 14 - On June 12th, Iran held its presidential elections between incumbent Ahmadinejad and rival Mousavi. The result, a landslide for Ahmadinejad, has led to violent riots across Iran, charges of voting fraud, and protests worldwide. How can you best keep up with what’s happening in real-time, and what web tools can help us make sense of the information available?

This guide breaks down the best new media sources for real-time information, photos, and videos of the Iran situation, as well as ways to organize and share it with others.

If you have suggestions for additional online news sources and tools related to the Iranian election, please do leave a comment.

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1. Track Iran-related hashtags and keywords on Twitter

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Twitter is, far and away, the best social media tool for second-by-second information on what’s happening in Iran. People on-the-ground and across the globe are chatting about every breaking update, every news item, and every story they find. However, all this chatter can be overwhelming – here are some tips to help organize the noise:

Know your hashtags: The top hashtags and keywords being used by people talking about the Iran situation are #IranElection, Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, and Tehran. Track these keywords first.

Twitter Search: You can go to the source and search Twitter for keywords.

Monitter: One of our favorite tools, Monitter goes a step beyond Twitter search and allows you to watch the Twitter conversation around keywords in real-time. Create multiple columns or even embed them with a widget. This makes it much easier to consume all the information at once.

Please note that while Twitter is the fastest source of breaking news, it’s also sometimes a source of misinformation, and has a poor signal-to-noise ratio.

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2. YouTube is your ally

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Everybody’s favorite social video site YouTube () has been a central distribution medium for the Iran riots. Iranians have been posting videos nonstop of what’s happening on the ground. This really is the best way to see what’s happening without any filters.

Now, how to find the videos? We’ve picked out key YouTube accounts and search terms to track for the latest videos out of Iran:

- Iran Riots

- Associated Press YouTube Channel

- Iran Protests (sorted by newest videos)

- Irandoost09’s channel

- Iran Election 2009 (sorted by newest videos)

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3. Blogs moving faster than the news

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While most news sources are now picking up on the Iran situation, the blogosphere has been far quicker with news and multimedia from Iran. Thus, your best bet for organizing all of this blog chatter is via Google Blog Search. Compliment this with Google News and you’ll have a fuller picture of the situation on the ground. Google ()’s algorithms have already pushed Iran election stories to the top of the pile, but you can dig deeper with specific searches for the Iran Riots, Ahmadinejad and Mousavi.

Extra Note: One blog stands out for its Iran coverage: Revolutionary Road has been bringing constant updates on the Iran Riots from the front lines. We rely on citizens like these to get us news from the ground.

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4. Flickr images really tell the story

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Image Credit: TheStyx via Flickr

The social media photo site Flickr () is brimming with some eye-popping and gut-wrenching imagery from the ground. Beatings, protests, military photos from the election…it’s all there, in full color.

Once again, search terms like Iran Elections and Iran Riots 2009 will help you pinpoint the most relevant images.

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5. Final notes

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Social media comes fast, and because of that, the information can be overwhelming. Use filters and tools to help you understand what’s happening in real-time. If you’re looking for background on the situation, get yourself up-to-speed using Wikipedia () (Iranian presidential elections 2009 and 2009 Iranian election protests are being constantly updated).

Finally, if you want to help bring awareness to the situation, then share! Share the videos you find via Twitter (), blog about the situation, email your friends: everybody can play a part in this new media ecosystem.