As many Blogger Buster readers have reported, the links to download my eBooks had become corrupted during my extended hiatus.
Today I have uploaded both The Blogger Template Book and The Cheats' Guide to Customizing Blogger templates to Google Documents, a relocation I hope will prove far more reliable than my previous hosting solution!
I've updated the download links for these eBooks and hope everyone can now read and download these resources without any problems.
It's been a long time since these eBooks were released, so here's a quick overview of both offerings for new readers and those who may have missed the documentation upon their initial releases:
The Blogger Template Book
Choosing and using a new template for your Blogger powered blog can be quite a daunting task. What is the best method for installation? How can you choose the design and layout most suitable for your blog?
The Blogger Template Book is a free complete guide to Blogger templates, from choosing the best layout and design to suit your content, to foolproof installation methods and optimization.
The Cheats' Guide to Customizing Blogger Templates
Originally published back in January 2008, this eBook will offer you many options and examples to customize your existing Blogger template quickly and easily, whichever style of template you are using!
Admittedly some of the techniques described in this eBook are outdated in lieu of Blogger's new Template Designer, though I hope many will still find this useful for learning the basics of Blogger template customization.
I'm currently working on a new premium eBook for Blogger users which I hope to release in the summer.
The Blogger Book will provide a comprehensive guide to using Blogger's publishing service: from initial creation through to designing custom-made templates and hosting an entire website on Blogspot, this guide will help you learn tips and techniques for developing a truly amazing Blogger-based site.
Stay tuned by subscribing to the RSS feed or the new email newsletter and you'll receive updates (plus sneak previews) of the forthcoming book in addition to our regular content.
SAN FRANCISCO — It is an image both shocking and strangely serene: 10 beauty queens, each with a broad smile, sparkling earrings and a beautiful gown. And written across the bottom of the photograph is a simple, stark question.
“Which one,” it reads, “deserves to die?”
The image is part of a provocative advertising campaign by San Francisco Hep B Free, which aims to eradicate the disease with citywide vaccinations against hepatitis B. The campaign debuts here in print and on television this week and is aimed at jarring the city’s large Asian population into confronting the stubborn public health hazard of hepatitis B.
San Francisco health officials estimate that as many as 1 in 10 residents of Asian descent are infected with the virus here, a percentage that contributes to the nation’s highest rate of liver cancer, an unhappy distinction for a city that prides itself on its innovative universal health plan as well as its response to past epidemics like AIDS. In the general population, about 1 in 1,000 people are infected with hepatitis B, which attacks the liver.
A large part of the problem, according to leaders in the Chinese-American community, which is the largest Asian ethnicity here, is the stigma attached to the disease, which is endemic in much of Asia. The advertisements encourage people to get a “simple blood test” because “hepatitis B can be treated, even prevented.”
“We are not a confrontational group,” said Fiona Ma, a state assemblywoman from San Francisco, who is Chinese-American. “No one wants to talk about it. But we know that people care about their families and their friends. And maybe if they know it can affect them, then maybe they’ll talk about it.”
Ms. Ma knows of what she speaks; several years ago, she learned she had hepatitis B, which she apparently contracted from her mother. The virus that causes the disease can be spread through blood or other bodily fluids, said Dr. Edward A. Chow, vice president of the San Francisco Health Commission, who said that the disease often displays few symptoms in its carriers.
“It doesn’t manifest itself until it’s really too late,” said Dr. Chow, who said about 25 percent of patients, if untreated, develop serious ailments like liver failure.
The campaign’s confrontational approach has ruffled some feathers. Vicky M. Wong, the president and chief executive of DAE, the San Francisco firm that developed the ads, said that several of the beauty queen models walked out of the photo sessions because they were worried about its approach.
“There were so many debates as to whether ‘Are we going too far, is this right or not?’ ” said Ms. Wong, whose company specializes in campaigns geared to Asian audiences. “We got a lot of pushback. But there’s a lot of people who loved it.”
Ted Fang, a committee member for Hep B Free, said the high rate of infection among Asians here has been especially frustrating considering that a vaccine for the disease has existed for nearly 30 years.
“We have the medical tools, so long as doctors will test their patients and monitor them,” Mr. Fang said. “We can knock out this disease.”
Mr. Fang and others liken the city’s efforts to the battle against AIDS, which ravaged San Francisco and its gay community in the 1980s and 1990s and also inspired in-your-face tactics. The Hep B Free program began several years ago with a more gentle campaign — the tagline was “B A Hero” — but organizers said it had gone only so far.
“Saying ‘Life is beautiful; get tested,’ doesn’t work,” Ms. Wong said.
For the “Which one deserves to die?” campaign Ms. Wong enlisted volunteers from the Asian community to pose for photographs, depicting families, a basketball team, a group of doctors and office workers.
While the campaign is being published in several languages — including Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese — a target group is English-speaking doctors, outside the Asian community, who might not be aware of the prevalence of the disease.
“Within our ethnic groups, we are all aware of this, because we all have friends and families who have it,” Dr. Chow said. “But if you are a very busy practitioner who has a lot of different types of patients, you may not know to check at first.”
For Ms. Ma, the assemblywoman, who said she discovered she was positive for hepatitis B when she tried to donate blood, her goal was to bring the disease “above ground,” she said. And it is personal: while she is in good health, her mother, who is in her 70s, had part of her liver removed as a result of the disease.
She recovered, Ms. Ma said, but others she knew have not.
Radical Islamist insurgents in Somalia seized one of the country’s most notorious pirate dens on Sunday, raising questions about whether rebels with connections to Al Qaeda will now have a pipeline to tens of millions of dollars — and a new ability to threaten global trade.
Dozens of insurgents stormed into Xarardheere, a pirate cove on the central Somali coast, around noon, but instead of putting up a fight, the pirates sped off. According to witnesses, several pirate bosses raced out of town in luxury four-by-four trucks, with TVs packed in the back and mattresses strapped on top. Islamist fighters in a fleet of heavily armed pickup trucks then occupied the strategic points in town, including the defunct police station and several crossroads.
What will happen next is not clear. Two of Somalia’s biggest problems and its most troubling exports — Islamist extremism and piracy — seem to be crashing into each other.
For several years, an intense civil war has raged in the country between a weak United States-backed government and radical Islamist groups that are trying to overthrow it. The ensuing lawlessness has given rise to a thriving piracy trade, in which Somali thugs in small skiffs have commandeered some of the biggest vessels on the sea, including a 1,000-foot-long oil tanker.
The pirates of Xarardheere currently hold several hijacked ships. But before they fled, they sent the ships further out to sea to prevent Islamist insurgents from capturing their hostages — a worrying prospect for Western diplomats and others, who fear the insurgents could exploit the hostages for political ends.
An insurgent spokesman implied on Sunday that his movement would shut down Xarardheere’s piracy business.
“We have peacefully seized the town and now we will bring Islamic Shariah,” said Sheik Abdinasir Mohamed Afdhuub, a spokesman for the Hizbul Islam insurgent group.
But many people fear that the insurgents were actually attracted to Xarardheere because of its criminal enterprise and that different groups of insurgents will now battle for control of the town.
“Tension is very high,” said Nor Ahmed, a Xarardheere resident. “People are worried about possible Shabab attacks any time soon.”
Hizbul Islam and the Shabab are two of the most powerful insurgent groups in Somalia and were once closely allied. Both espouse a harsh Islamist ideology and have organized public amputations and stonings. American and Somali security officials said that the leaders of both groups have worked closely with wanted terrorists of Al Qaeda.
But recently, the two groups seemed to have turned against each other. On Saturday, a deadly bombing at a mosque in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, was believed to have wounded a top Shabab official. On Sunday, another mosque was bombed, this time in the southern port town of Kismayu, where the Shabab drove out Hizbul Islam in a power struggle last year. At least two people were killed and eight wounded, in a neighborhood controlled by the Shabab.
Under strict Islamic law, piracy is considered haram (forbidden), and in 2006, during a six-month period when an Islamist movement pacified much of Somalia, the Islamists curtailed piracy significantly.
But now that Hizbul Islam and the Shabab desperately need money, the situation may be changing. The insurgents’ draconian rules banning music, television and bras have steadily alienated much of Somali society, making it harder for the insurgents to raise money and find recruits.
Additionally, Hizbul Islam lost access to hundreds of thousands of dollars in port taxes when they were kicked out of Kismayu last year and may have needed to find a new source of cash.
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Mohamed Ibrahim from Djibouti.
SHANGHAI — For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”
Those who have had a bit too much monolithic tree mushroom stem squid could find themselves requiring roomier attire: extra-large sizes sometimes come in “fatso” or “lard bucket” categories. These and other fashions can be had at the clothing chain known as Scat.
Go ahead and snicker, although by last Saturday’s opening of the Expo 2010 in Shanghai, drawing more than 70 million visitors over its six-month run, these and other uniquely Chinese maladaptations of the English language were supposed to have been largely excised.
Well, that at least is what the Shanghai Commission for the Management of Language Use has been trying to accomplish during the past two years.
Fortified by an army of 600 volunteers and a politburo of adroit English speakers, the commission has fixed more than 10,000 public signs (farewell “Teliot” and “urine district”), rewritten English-language historical placards and helped hundreds of restaurants recast offerings.
The campaign is partly modeled on Beijing’s herculean effort to clean up English signage for the 2008 Summer Olympics, which led to the replacement of 400,000 street signs, 1,300 restaurant menus and such exemplars of impropriety as the Dongda Anus Hospital — now known as the Dongda Proctology Hospital. Gone, too, is Racist Park, a cultural attraction that has since been rechristened Minorities Park.
“The purpose of signage is to be useful, not to be amusing,” said Zhao Huimin, the former Chinese ambassador to the United States who, as director general of the capital’s Foreign Affairs Office, has been leading the fight for linguistic standardization and sobriety.
But while the war on mangled English may be considered a signature achievement of government officials, aficionados of what is known as Chinglish are wringing their hands in despair.
Oliver Lutz Radtke, a former German radio reporter who may well be the world’s foremost authority on Chinglish, said he believed that China should embrace the fanciful melding of English and Chinese as the hallmark of a dynamic, living language. As he sees it, Chinglish is an endangered species that deserves preservation.
“If you standardize all these signs, you not only take away the little giggle you get while strolling in the park but you lose a window into the Chinese mind,” said Mr. Radtke, who is the author of a pair of picture books that feature giggle-worthy Chinglish signs in their natural habitat.
Lest anyone think it is all about laughs, Mr. Radtke is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Chinglish at the University of Heidelberg.
Still, the enemies of Chinglish say the laughter it elicits is humiliating. Wang Xiaoming, an English scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, painfully recalls the guffaws that erupted among her foreign-born colleagues as they flipped through a photographic collection of poorly written signs. “They didn’t mean to insult me but I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable,” said Ms. Wang, who has since become one of Beijing’s leading Chinglish slayers.
Those who study the roots of Chinglish say many examples can be traced to laziness and a flawed but wildly popular translation software. Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, said the computerized dictionary, Jingshan Ciba, had led to sexually oriented vulgarities identifying dried produce in Chinese supermarkets and the regrettable “fried enema” menu selection that should have been rendered as “fried sausage.”
Although improved translation software and a growing zeal for grammatically unassailable English has slowed the output of new Chinglishisms, Mr. Mair said he still received about five new examples a day from people who knew he was good at deciphering what went wrong. “If someone would pay me to do it, I’d spend my life studying these things,” he said.
Among those getting paid to wrestle with Chinglish is Jeffrey Yao, an English translator and teacher at the Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation in Shanghai who is leading the sign exorcism. But even as he eradicates the most egregious examples by government fiat — businesses dare not ignore the commission’s suggested fixes — he has mixed feelings, noting that although some Chinglish phrases sound awkward to Western ears, they can be refreshingly lyrical. “Some of it tends to be expressive, even elegant,” he said, shuffling through an online catalog of signs that were submitted by the volunteers who prowled Shanghai with digital cameras. “They provide a window into how we Chinese think about language.”
He offered the following example: While park signs in the West exhort people to “Keep Off the Grass,” Chinese versions tend to anthropomorphize nature as a way to gently engage the stomping masses. Hence, such admonishments as “The Little Grass Is Sleeping. Please Don’t Disturb It” or “Don’t Hurt Me. I Am Afraid of Pain.”
Mr. Yao read off the Chinese equivalents as if savoring a Shakespearean sonnet. “How lovely,” he said with a sigh.
He pointed out that this linguistic mentality helped create such expressions as “long time no see,” a word-for-word translation of a Chinese expression that became a mainstay of spoken English. But Mr. Yao, who spent nearly two decades working as a translator in Canada, has his limits. He showed a sign from a park designed to provide visitors with the rules for entry, which include prohibitions on washing, “scavenging,” clothes drying and public defecation, all of it rendered in unintelligible — and in the case of the last item — rather salty English. The sign ended with this humdinger: “Because if the tourist does not obey the staff to manage or contrary holds, Does, all consequences are proud.”
Even though he had had the sign corrected recently, Mr. Yao could not help but shake his head in disgust at the memory. And he was irritated to find that a raft of troublesome sign verbiage had slipped past the commission as the expo approached, including a cafeteria sign that read, “The tableware reclaims a place.” (Translation: drop off dirty dishes here.)
“Some Chinglish expressions are nice, but we are not translating literature here,” he said. “I want to see people nodding that they understand the message on these signs. I don’t want to see them laughing.”
Andy Wilson, 11, left, and his brother Evan, 14, go on Facebook in their treehouse in Atlanta.
By HILARY STOUT
“HEY, you’re a dork,” said the girl to the boy with a smile. “Just wanted you to know.”
“Thanks!” said the boy.
“Just kidding,” said the girl with another smile. “You’re only slightly dorky, but other than that, you’re pretty normal — sometimes.”
They both laughed.
“See you tomorrow,” said the boy.
“O.K., see you,” said the girl.
It was a pretty typical pre-teen exchange, one familiar through the generations. Except this one had a distinctly 2010 twist. It was conducted on Facebook. The smiles were colons with brackets. The laughs were typed ha ha’s. “O.K.” was just “K” and “See you” was rendered as “c ya.”
Last week, the Pew Research Center found that half of American teenagers — defined in the study as ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages a day and that one third send more than 100 a day. Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s Internet and American Life Project said they were more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis. The findings came just a few months after the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7 1/2 hours a day using some sort of electronic device, from smart phones to MP3 players to computers — a number that startled many adults, even those who keep their BlackBerrys within arm’s reach during most waking hours.
To date, much of the concern over all this use of technology has been focused on the implications for kids’ intellectual development. Worry about the social repercussions has centered on the darker side of online interactions, like cyber-bullying or texting sexually explicit messages. But psychologists and other experts are starting to take a look at a less-sensational but potentially more profound phenomenon: whether technology may be changing the very nature of kids’ friendships.
“In general, the worries over cyber-bullying and sexting have overshadowed a look into the really nuanced things about the way technology is affecting the closeness properties of friendship,” said Jeffrey G. Parker, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama, who has been studying children’s friendships since the 1980s. “We’re only beginning to look at those subtle changes.”
The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.
It is far too soon to know the answer. Writing in The Future of Children, a journal produced through a collaboration between the Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton University, Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield, psychologists at California State University, Los Angeles, and U.C.L.A. respectively, noted: “Initial qualitative evidence is that the ease of electronic communication may be making teens less interested in face-to-face communication with their friends. More research is needed to see how widespread this phenomenon is and what it does to the emotional quality of a relationship.”
But the question is important, people who study relationships believe, because close childhood friendships help kids build trust in people outside their families and consequently help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships. “These good, close relationships — we can’t allow them to wilt away. They are essential to allowing kids to develop poise and allowing kids to play with their emotions, express emotions, all the functions of support that go with adult relationships,” Professor Parker said.
“These are things that we talk about all the time,” said Lori Evans, a psychologist at the New York University Child Study Center. “We don’t yet have a huge body of research to confirm what we clinically think is going on.”
What she and many others who work with children see are exchanges that are more superficial and more public than in the past. “When we were younger we would be on the phone for hours at a time with one person,” said Ms. Evans. Today instant messages are often group chats. And, she said, “Facebook is not a conversation.”
One of the concerns is that, unlike their parents — many of whom recall having intense childhood relationships with a bosom buddy with whom they would spend all their time and tell all their secrets — today’s youths may be missing out on experiences that help them develop empathy, understand emotional nuances and read social cues like facial expressions and body language. With children’s technical obsessions starting at ever-younger ages — even kindergartners will play side by side on laptops during play dates — their brains may eventually be rewired and those skills will fade further, some researchers believe.
Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and an author of "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," believes that so-called “digital natives,” a term for the generation that has grown up using computers, are already having a harder time reading social cues. “Even though young digital natives are very good with the tech skills, they are weak with the face-to-face human contact skills,” he said.
Others who study friendships argue that technology is bringing children closer than ever. Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, author of a book published last year called “Making Friends: A Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Child’s Friendships,” believes that technology allows them to be connected to their friends around the clock. “I think it’s possible to say that the electronic media is helping kids to be in touch much more and for longer.”
And some parents agree. Beth Cafferty, a high school Spanish teacher in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., estimates that her 15-year-old daughter sends hundreds of texts each day. “I actually think they’re closer because they’re more in contact with each other — anything that comes to my mind, I’m going to text you right away,” she said.
But Laura Shumaker, a mother of three sons in the Bay Area suburbs, noticed recently that her 17-year-old son, John, “was keeping up with friends so much on Facebook that he has become more withdrawn and skittish about face-to-face interactions.”
Recently when he mentioned that it was a friend’s birthday, she recalled, “I said ‘Great, are you going to give him a call and wish him Happy Birthday?’ He said, ‘No, I’m going to put it on his wall’ ” — the bulletin board on Facebook where friends can post messages that others can see. Ms. Shumaker said she has since begun encouraging her son to get involved in more group activities after school and was pleased that he joined a singing group recently.
To some children, technology is merely a facilitator for an active social life. On a recent Friday, Hannah Kliot, a 15-year-old ninth grader in Manhattan, who had at last count 1,150 Facebook friends, sent a bunch of texts after school to make plans to meet some friends later at a party. The next day she played in two softball games, texting between innings and games about plans to go to a concert the next weekend.
Hannah says she relies on texting to make plans and to pass along things that she thinks are funny or interesting. But she also uses it to check up on friends who may be upset about something — and in those cases she will follow up with a real conversation. “I definitely have conversations but I think the new form of actually talking to someone is video chat because you’re actually seeing them,” she said. “I’ve definitely done phone calls at one time or another but it is considered, maybe, old school.”
Hannah’s mother, Joana Vicente, who has been known to text her children from her bed after 11 p.m. telling them to get offline, is sometimes amazed by the way Hannah and her 14-year-old brother, Anton, communicate. “Sometime they’ll have five conversations going at once” through instant messaging, texts or video chats, she said. “My daughter, with the speed of lightning, just goes from one to the other. I think ‘My God, that is a conversation?’ ”
Some researchers believe that the impersonal nature of texting and online communication may make it easier for shy kids to connect with others. Robert Wilson is the father of Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old sixth grader from Atlanta who was good-naturedly teased over Facebook. (Mr. Wilson quoted from the exchange to illustrate the general “goofy” and innocuous nature of most of his son’s Facebook interactions.) Andy is very athletic and social, but his brother, Evan, who is 14, is more shy and introverted. After watching Andy connect with so many different people on Facebook, Mr. Wilson suggested that Evan sign up and give it a try. The other day he was pleased to find Evan chatting through Facebook with a girl from his former school.
“I’m thinking Facebook has for the most part been beneficial to my sons,” Mr. Wilson said. “For Evan, the No. 1 reason is it’s helping him come out of his shell and develop social skills that he wasn’t learning because he’s so shy. I couldn’t just push him out of the house and say ‘Find someone.’”
BANGKOK — Viewers of Thai soap operas now have a choice: they can follow the over-dramatized acting and weepy plot lines of shows like “The Glass Around the Diamond” or they can read pro-government political messages scrolling on the bottom of the screen.
“The Thai people love peace but when we go to war, we are not fearful,” reads one of the dozens of messages broadcast on two government channels exhorting people to oppose the protest movement that has paralyzed parts of Bangkok for more than seven weeks.
“Sometimes the Thai people have to fight bad Thai people,” says another.
Thailand’s political crisis is playing out on the streets here, where antigovernment protesters, who are demanding new elections, are defending their fortified encampment in the commercial heart of the city. But political battles are also being waged through television, Facebook, community radio stations and Internet chat rooms.
After a failed crackdown on the so-called red-shirt protesters last month, the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva is leading a two-pronged campaign it hopes will strangle support for the protest movement. The government is sharpening its public relations message while trying to shut down the opposition’s media, a plan that in some parts of the country appears to be backfiring.
A constant crawl at the bottom of television screens, which started running in March on two government-owned stations, makes the case that “malevolent” protesters are hurting the country and should go home. And an advertisement implores: “Thais should love each other because we all live in the same country.”
At the same time the government has shut down an opposition television station and at least 420 Web sites affiliated with the red shirt movement.
Officials are also accusing red shirts of trying to overthrow the monarchy, an incendiary charge that protest leaders reject.
In an interview with foreign correspondents on Sunday, Mr. Abhisit suggested that the government would try to shut down community radio stations, which have multiplied throughout the country in recent months, especially in the populous red-shirt stronghold of the northeast.
He accused the radio stations of being “command centers” for the red shirts and playing a “coordinating role” in the unrest.
“We are trying to restore order,” he said. “I’m not going to say that no media is allowed to attack or comment on the other side. But certainly no media should be allowed to play the role of inciting violence.”
The prime minister also said he had not ruled out using force to end the standoff in Bangkok. “We are now in the process of cutting off support and sealing the area off before we actually move in,” he said.
But a crackdown does not appear imminent, especially after 25 people died and 800 were injured in the botched attempt to clear protesters on April 10.
Mr. Abhisit said Sunday that he remained patient and that the “best solution is one that does not involve violence or confrontation or conflicts.” An aide said the prime minister would soon release a “political roadmap” that could bring reconciliation to the country after four years of turmoil.
The overarching strategy for the government appears to be demonizing the protesters and hoping that public opinion swings against them, a process that could take months. Mr. Abhisit and his advisers warn of “terrorists” among the protesters.
So far, the public relations campaign has had mixed results. In Bangkok there is growing anger at the red shirts over the barricaded streets and their incursion last week into a hospital, which caused panic in the wards. But there is also deepening frustration over the government’s inability to drive out the protesters.
“The government is good at building up their image from these messages on television, but no one is taking any action to solve the problem,” said Yont Klomkleaw, a manager for a market research company in Bangkok.
On Sunday, the prime minister’s Facebook page had about 600 comments, many of them supportive; “fight! fight!” was a common refrain. But there were also critical postings. “Sometimes, words alone may not be enough,” wrote one commenter, Anyarporn Tansirikongkol.
In the provinces, especially the red shirts’ base in the north and northeast, the government’s efforts may be backfiring, with many villagers rejecting the messages as spin and propaganda, a view encouraged by the movement’s leaders.
“The government is just lying to the people,” said Jarungkiat Chatchawat, who runs a food stall in the northeastern city of Khon Kaen. “It doesn’t have any influence on me.”
One military intelligence officer described the red shirt movement as spreading “like a virus” in the northeast.
The red shirts broadcast their message using community radio stations and, until recently, the satellite television station PTV, which was shut down by the government last month.
Their public-relations campaign has focused on a few key words, notably the “double standards” in Thai society applied to the poor compared with the rich and well-connected. They also call the Abhisit government illegitimate because it came after court decisions that barred two prime ministers from the opposition camp.
The red shirts say they want to bring genuine democracy to Thailand, a message that sells well in the north and northeast, where many farmers and villagers feel their voice was muted by the 2006 military coup.
In Bangkok there is more skepticism about the protesters’ motives.
“This is not about democracy, it’s about thuggery,” Voranai Vanijaka, a columnist for The Bangkok Post, wrote in the Sunday edition of the newspaper. “It’s about nothing less than forcing the government to bend to their every whim and every will.”
Mr. Voranai suggested the red shirt movement was a vendetta by Thaksin Shinawatra, the billionaire who was removed as prime minister in the 2006 coup, after a court in February ordered a large share of his assets seized by the state.
Although the references are often oblique, Mr. Thaksin and his allies appear to be the target of many of the government’s messages. One message running on the bottom of television screens warns:
“Don’t become a tool, don’t be naive and don’t hurt the country for the sake of only one person.”
TWITTER users now broadcast about 55 million Tweets a day. In just four years, about 10 billion of these brief messages have accumulated.
Not a few are pure drivel. But, taken together, they are likely to be of considerable value to future historians. They contain more observations, recorded at the same times by more people, than ever preserved in any medium before.
“Twitter is tens of millions of active users. There is no archive with tens of millions of diaries,” said Daniel J. Cohen, an associate professor of history at George Mason University and co-author of a 2006 book, “Digital History.” What’s more, he said, “Twitter is of the moment; it’s where people are the most honest.”
Last month, Twitter announced that it would donate its archive of public messages to the Library of Congress, and supply it with continuous updates.
Several historians said the bequest had tremendous potential. “My initial reaction was, ‘When you look at it Tweet by Tweet, it looks like junk,’ said Amy Murrell Taylor, an associate professor of history at the State University of New York, Albany. “But it could be really valuable if looked through collectively.”
Ms. Taylor is working on a book about slave runaways during the Civil War; the project involves mountains of paper documents. “I don’t have a search engine to sift through it,” she said.
The Twitter archive, which was “born digital,” as archivists say, will be easily searchable by machine — unlike family letters and diaries gathering dust in attics.
As a written record, Tweets are very close to the originating thoughts. “Most of our sources are written after the fact, mediated by memory — sometimes false memory,” Ms. Taylor said. “And newspapers are mediated by editors. Tweets take you right into the moment in a way that no other sources do. That’s what is so exciting.”
Twitter messages preserve witness accounts of an extraordinary variety of events all over the planet. “In the past, some people were able on site to write about, or sketch, as a witness to an event like the hanging of John Brown,” said William G. Thomas III, a professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “But that’s a very rare, exceptional historical record.”
Ten billion Twitter messages take up little storage space: about five terabytes of data. (A two-terabyte hard drive can be found for less than $150.) And Twitter says the archive will be a bit smaller when it is sent to the library. Before transferring it, the company will remove the messages of users who opted to designate their account “protected,” so that only people who obtain their explicit permission can follow them.
A Twitter user can also elect to use a pseudonym and not share any personally identifying information. Twitter does not add identity tags that match its users to real people.
Each message is accompanied by some tidbits of supplemental information, like the number of followers that the author had at the time and how many users the author was following. While Mr. Cohen said it would be useful for a historian to know who the followers and the followed are, this information is not included in the Tweet itself.
But there’s nothing private about who follows whom among users of Twitter’s unprotected, public accounts. This information is displayed both at Twitter’s own site and in applications developed by third parties whom Twitter welcomes to tap its database.
Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel, said, “From the beginning, Twitter has been a public and open service.” Twitter’s privacy policy states: “Our services are primarily designed to help you share information with the world. Most of the information you provide to us is information you are asking us to make public.”
Mr. Macgillivray added, “That’s why, when we were revising our privacy policy, we toyed with the idea of calling it our ‘public policy.’ ” He said the company would have done so but California law required that it have a “privacy policy” labeled as such.
Even though public Tweets were always intended for everyone’s eyes, the Library of Congress is skittish about stepping anywhere in the vicinity of a controversy. Martha Anderson, director of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the library, said, “There’s concern about privacy issues in the near term and we’re sensitive to these concerns.”
The library will embargo messages for six months after their original transmission. If that is not enough to put privacy issues to rest, she said, “We may have to filter certain things or wait longer to make them available.” The library plans to dole out its access to its Twitter archive only to those whom Ms. Anderson called “qualified researchers.”
BUT the library’ s restrictions on access will not matter. Mr. Macgillivray at Twitter said his company would be turning over copies of its public archive to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, too. These companies already receive instantaneously the stream of current Twitter messages. When the archive of older Tweets is added to their data storehouses, they will have a complete, constantly updated, set, and users won’t encounter a six-month embargo.
Google already offers its users Replay, the option of restricting a keyword search only to Tweets and to particular periods. It’s quickly reached from a search results page. (Click on “Show options,” then “Updates,” then a particular place on the timeline.)
A tool like Google Replay is helpful in focusing on one topic. But it displays only 10 Tweets at a time. To browse 10 billion — let’s see, figuring six seconds for a quick scan of each screen — would require about 190 sleepless years.
Mr. Cohen encourages historians to find new tools and methods for mining the “staggeringly large historical record” of Tweets. This will require a different approach, he said, one that lets go of straightforward “anecdotal history.”
In the end, perhaps quality will emerge from sheer quantity.
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.
Cameras that can follow you from the minute you enter a store to the moment you hit the checkout counter, recording every T-shirt you touch, every mannequin you ogle, every time you blow your nose or stop to tie your shoelaces.
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Web coupons embedded with bar codes that can identify, and alert retailers to, the search terms you used to find them and, in some cases, even your Facebook information and your name.
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Mobile marketers that can find you near a store clothing rack, and send ads to your cellphone based on your past preferences and behavior.
To be sure, such retail innovations help companies identify their most profitable client segments, better predict the deals shoppers will pursue, fine-tune customer service down to a person and foster brand loyalty. (My colleagues Stephanie Rosenbloom and Stephanie Clifford have written in detail about the tracking prowess of store cameras and Web coupons.)
But these and other surveillance techniques are also reminders that advances in data collection are far outpacing personal data protection.
Enter the post-privacy society, where we have lost track of how many entities are tracking us. Not to mention what they are doing with our personal information, how they are storing it, whom they might be selling our dossiers to and, yes, how much money they are making from them.
On the way out, consumer advocates say, is that quaint old notion of informed consent, in which a company clearly notifies you of its policies and gives you the choice of whether to opt in (rather than having you opt out once you discover your behavior is being tracked).
“How does notice and choice work when you don’t even interface with the company that has your data?” says Jessica Rich, a deputy director of the bureau of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission.
The commission has brought several dozen complaints against companies about possibly deceptive or unfair data collection and nearly 30 complaints over data security issues. In 2009, the commission proposed new guidelines for Web advertising that is tailored to user behavior.
The problem is, the F.T.C.’s guidelines are merely recommendations. Corporations can choose to follow them — or not. And the online advertising standards don’t apply to off-line techniques like observation in stores.
Mike Zaneis, vice president for public policy at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association based in Manhattan, says the advertising industry is not generally collecting personally identifiable data.
His group has worked closely with the F.T.C. on industry self-regulation, he says, and is developing new industry standards to alert consumers as they encounter ads based on their online behavior.
In the meantime, Mr. Zaneis says, consumers can use an industry program if they want to opt out of some behavior-based ads. As for mobile marketing, he says, consumers are always asked if they want to opt in to ads related to their cellphone location.
The larger issue here is not the invasion of any one person’s privacy as much as the explosive growth of a collective industry in behavioral information, says Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group that works to safeguard user privacy.
“The whole business model is unfettered data collection of all your activities online and off,” Mr. Chester says. For example, he says that when consumers opt into cellphone ads, they may not understand that marketers may link their locations with information from third-party databases. The result, he says, is mobile dossiers about individual consumers.
As contradictory as it might sound, we need new strategies for transparent consumer surveillance.
In a country where we have a comprehensive federal law — the Fair Credit Reporting Act — giving us the right to obtain and correct financial data collected about us, no general federal statute requires behavioral data marketers to show us our files, says Ms. Rich of the F.T.C.
So, is the European model, involving independent government agencies called Data Protection Commissions that are charged with safeguarding people’s personal information, better than ours?
Europe’s privacy commissioners have generally been more forward-looking, examining potential privacy intrusions like biometric tracking, while the F.T.C. is still trying to understand the magnitude and the implications of the Web, says Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research group in Washington.
“The U.S. system with regard to privacy is not working,” Mr. Rotenberg says.
By early fall, the F.T.C. plans to propose comprehensive new privacy guidelines intended to provide greater tools for transparency and better consumer control of personal information, Ms. Rich says.
In the meantime, what if consumers take a more active interest in who is collecting information about them?
In a recent documentary called “Erasing David,” the London-based filmmaker David Bond attempts to disappear from Britain’s surveillance grid, hiring experts from the security firm Cerberus to track him using all the information they can glean about him while he tries to outrun them. In the course of the film, the detectives even obtain a copy of the birth certificate of his daughter, then 18 months old.
But the real shocker is the information Mr. Bond is able to obtain about himself — by taking advantage of a data protection law in Britain that requires public agencies and private businesses to release a person’s data file upon his or her written request.
In one scene, Mr. Bond receives a phonebook-thick printout from Amazon.com listing everything he ever bought on the site; the addresses of every person to whom he ever sent a gift; and even the products he perused but did not ultimately buy.
He also receives a file from his bank, including a transcript of an irate phone call he once made after the bank lost one of his checks. The transcript noted that he seemed angry and raised his voice.
“It read like a mini-Stasi file,” Mr. Bond said when I called him last week. When recorded messages inform us that we may be taped “for training or quality assurance purposes,” he reminded me, we should remember that our conversation may end up in our dossiers.
INSPIRED by Mr. Bond’s odyssey, I called some companies with whom I do business.
A customer service representative at a bookstore chain where I have a discount card told me that the company maintains a list of the amount each member spends on each transaction so that the store can tell people how much money they saved at the end of the year. But a loyalty cardholder is not permitted to obtain his or her own purchase history.
Then I called an online travel agency and asked if I could get copies of my flight history and phone transcripts. I was regretting a disgruntled call I made to the agency a few months ago after being stranded at an airport in a blizzard. The customer care rep said clients couldn’t obtain their own transcripts unless it was for legal purposes.
Was I being taped this time, too? They always tape, he said.
BERLIN — With the majority of Internet traffic expected to shift to congestion-prone mobile networks, there is growing debate on both sides of the Atlantic about whether operators of the networks should be allowed to treat Web users differently, based on the users’ consumption.
Proponents of the current system — called network neutrality — see that principle as a kind of civil rights declaration of the digital age, one that requires the gatekeepers of the global Internet to treat all users equally, regardless of application, source or download limit.
While operators have never been required to maintain neutrality, the industry has created that expectation largely by charging users a flat rate for unlimited Internet access.
But there is a big flaw in the concept, according to the operators: Networks have never been neutral. They have always been actively managed to some extent since their inception in the 1980s to ensure that all customers get a basic “best effort” level of service.
If an operator could not restrain bandwidth hogs, who typically make up 15 percent of customers but who generate 80 percent of the traffic, most Internet users would experience poor service.
“The Internet has never been a neutral environment left to develop freely on a first-come, first-serve basis,” said Stuart Orr, the head of the telecommunications group in Europe, Africa and Latin America for Accenture, a U.S. software services consultant.
The arcane issue of network management, and the free speech and competition issues it raises, has taken on broader political importance as operators have increasingly micromanaged the flow of data, favoring some users over others as they have sought to handle exploding levels of traffic or deliver premium broadband service at guaranteed speeds to heavy users and businesses.
In the United States, users of the BitTorrent file-sharing service, a large generator of broadband traffic, last year challenged a cable operator, Comcast, that had blocked the service by identifying and disabling a common protocol used by BitTorrent users.
The Federal Communications Commission ordered Comcast to stop the blocking. Comcast challenged the ruling. On April 6, an appeals court in Washington sided with the operator, saying the F.C.C. could not tell Comcast how to manage its network.
In Brussels, the European commissioner for the digital agenda, Neelie Kroes, plans to hold a public consultation on net neutrality this summer, which could lead to a push for new laws or regulations for operators.
Earlier this year, Ms. Kroes warned mobile operators not to block or hinder Internet voice services like Skype from their networks.
Operators are worried that any rigid legal mandate that forced them to observe net neutrality standards would be unworkable and make the economics of high-speed wireless broadband less attractive, which could limit future investment and improvement to the networks.
“We have no interest as an industry in policing individual surfing habits or acting as the gatekeeper for information,” said Frederic Gastaldo, the head of strategy and innovation at Swisscom. “Historically, our industry has resisted attempts to force operators to act as the personal gatekeepers of information. That would be a very negative marketing approach. However, customers who do excessively use our data network are a big challenge for us.”
Congestion is more problematic for mobile than landline broadband operators because wireless broadband capacity is limited by the ability of individual base stations to process the Web activities of hundreds of users simultaneously. The more users per station, the less performance for each user.
To avoid bottlenecks, operators use techniques like “traffic shaping,” which sorts traffic to ensure basic service for all, or “throttling,” which applies a general brake on large streams of data.
Kabel Deutschland, the largest German cable TV operator, has one million broadband customers. Its coaxial and glass-fiber network is so far able to satisfy all customers without restrictions, said Georg Merdian, director of the company’s infrastructure regulation.
But he said that the number of its broadband customers was doubling each year. “We anticipate we will soon have to use some kind of management techniques,” Mr. Merdian said.
For most mobile operators, traffic management is a fact of life.
Vodafone, one of the largest mobile operators in Europe and a part owner of Verizon Wireless, the No.1 wireless operator in America, routinely alerts its customers when they exceed the download limits of their service packages.Like all other operators, Vodafone uses sophisticated software that can pluck users or applications from the digital clamor.
“We use a form of network management to say, ‘I’m sorry, you are not going to be able to get the same level of service unless you decide to top up,”’ said Richard Feasey, Vodafone’s public policy director in London.
Web businesses, which depend on fast Internet paid for by individual customers, oppose the idea and have been pushing lawmakers in Brussels and Washington to adopt restrictions preventing operators from making deals with content providers.
Prohibitions like that would make an operator’s business untenable, eventually reducing cable and phone networks to unprofitable, crowded data freeways, said Robert Mourik, the director of Telefónica’s regulatory policy in Europe.
“We have an explosion of traffic, but our revenues have not been growing at the same pace or staying flat,” Mr. Mourik said. “We are not looking at content on the Internet. We are not trying to police the network. What we are looking to do are commercial deals.”
Whether operators can successfully sell preferred Internet access to big Web businesses remains to be seen. Such a move would drastically alter the economics of the Internet, forcing content providers, in effect, to pay a toll, and perhaps a heavy toll, for access.
Naturally, none of the big Web sites are interested in doing that.
In February at an industry convention in Barcelona, Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, was asked to comment on statements made by Mr. Colao of Vodafone, who had called for the right to clinch commercial deals with big Web businesses like Google.
Mr. Schmidt, who during a speech that day had stressed Google’s role in helping network operators build their wireless broadband businesses by attracting consumers to the mobile Web, declined to comment, adding that Mr. Colao was a friend.
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