My friend JC Herz spoke at the same State Department event I was attending in Washington yesterday, and came away with the best quote of the event: “For the most part, coverage of technology by journalists doesn’t get beyond ‘Oooh! Shiny!’”. This “shiny bias” means that journalists fall for stories that are “too good to check“, as Clay Shirky describes journalists’ largely uncritical coverage of Second Life.

(”Oooh! Shiny!” is one of the most charming lines uttered by Kaylee Frye, the adorable and spunky engine mechanic who keeps the starship Serenity running in Joss Wheadon’s late, great series, “Firefly”. But it’s a line that you could imagine attributed to Templeton, the crafty but charming rat who shares Wilbur’s pen in Charlotte’s Web. Or to any highly distractible animal who gets misled by flash and motion. You know, like journalists…)

JC argues that the stuff that’s shiny is often the least interesting technology and the tech that looks least shiny can be the most fascinating. She used an example from my talk to illustrate the point: the M-PESA payment via mobile phone system introduced by Safaricom in Kenya is something that is having an impact on millions of people in the real world. M-PESA lets you transfer money between mobile phoines - it’s already so widespread in Kenya that you can use your mobile to pay for your taxi fare. After I explained M-PESA in my talk, one audience member said, “It’s like people in prison using cigarettes for currency, right?” When a pair of speakers showed off Second Life, the audience made analogies to the web in 1994. In other words, Second Life is way shinier than mobile micropayments.

In terms of what distracts me, I think M-PESA and other mobile phone cash systems are pretty much the shiniest things I’ve seen lately. Then again, I thought Dr. Amy Smith’s work on making sustainable charcoal was the shiniest thing at last year’s TED, so perhaps I’ve lost my geeky sense of shiny and adopted some new appropriate technology criteria instead. (”Crunchy”? “Useful”? “Dull”?) But M-PESA makes me want to go out and start businesses, which is a classic shiny response.

Specifically, the business it makes me want to start is a business to allow online payment with mobile phones. If you’re placing an order with Amazon from Nigeria, you may discover that your credit card won’t be accepted. This is pretty common with African credit cards - some merchants are willing to make the tradeoff of refusing legitimate transactions from African nations in fear of chargeback from fraudulent transactions. Furthermore, most Africans don’t have credit cards. Building a network of phone companies who would turn airtime into cash and make payments to venders - a PayPal for the mobile phone set, perhaps - could help open markets for vendors, both local and global, in developing nations.

Of course, another key to this system is making it possible for users who generate a lot of mobile minutes to cash them out - this requires functionality closer to the Wizzit e-banking system being pioneered in South Africa. It’s an interesting opportunity for companies like Safaricom or MTN to start making inroads in banking, and changing the ecosystem in this fashion would open the opportunity for hundreds of other microentrepeneurs in Africa to start selling to local instead of global markets. (An example came up at an A2K panel this afternoon, where a group of literary journal editors mentioned their difficulties selling locally produced journals in Africa. Gary Dauphin of blackplanet.com mentioned that selling subscriptions to African readers using phone payments could change the market for literary content.)

Some of my geek friends seem concerned that I’ve lost my sense of shiny. Talking with friends at South by Southwest, they were concerned that Global Voices wasn’t very appealing to the social software geek. You can’t vote, you can’t edit our articles, you can only read or leave a comment. Not very shiny. “Maybe you should add a digg-like mechanism to let people rank articles? Or add a spinning globe that shows where posts appear around the world in real time and deliver those updates via Twitter?” It felt like an intervention: “Ethan, your lack of shininess has become a problem for you and your friends. We care about you, and we want to make sure that you understand that you seem to be missing the shiny.”

The journalists - the primary audience for Global Voices - doesn’t seem to be complaining about the lack of shiny. And I’ll happily admit that the pretty maps are, at least in part, shiny and designed to meet your shiny needs. But I think there’s something very deep to JC’s diagnosis - there’s a good chance that underneath the shiny is something that isn’t very interesting. (Not always, but often.) And that some of what’s deeply, truly, long-term transformative isn’t shiny at all.

I’m at the Access to Knowledge conference at Yale Law School today - I’ve missed some of the heavy-hitting opening talks (Yochai Benkler, Ronaldo Lemos, Jamie Boyle), but there are panels filled with smart people, including the first session of the morning, which asks about the role of industry in the world of Access to Knowledge.

(The term “Access to Knowledge” is impossibly broad, and as one of the morning’s panelists points out, seems to be suffering some brand confusion. Evidently Jamie Love argued yesterday that A2K is specifically about the legal and policy challenges associated with making sure that people in the developing world have access to educational, medical and media information. But it’s still, in my mind, a very broad coalition, that attempts to include everything from open press issues, to generic drugs to open models for distributing music…)

Nagla Rizk from the American University in Cairo has been studying open source software and music in Egyot, or as she charmingly puts it, the Penguins and the Larks. Both music and software, she points out are outputs of creativity and huamn talents. Both are labor intensive, digitizable,and subject to economies of scale. By definition, the outputs lend themselves to piracy, and are “granular” enough that they can be built through oeer production.

Egypt is a critical market in the Arab world - it’s both the geographic and conceptual center of the Arab entertainment world. It has a huge audience - more than 50% of population is under 24 years old. But the Open Source movement is a small space - there are only 10 companies that distribute open source software and four that produce F/OSS. There’s roughly 50 active participants in the community, closer to 500 less active members - these folks are a subset of the Egyptian blogosphere, which she identifies as 5,000 strong.

While most Egyptian blogs identify themselves as personal, a strong component of Egyptian blogs are highly political, and there’s a strong overlap between the world of blogs, the open source software world and underground music. She shows us Manal and Alaa’s blog as an example of a leader in the field. The connection between open source and the political movement, she argues, is an obstacle to open source adoption. The government is a very large consumer of IT - they have a strong commercial alliance with the big software players and tend to marginalize the open source developers as “unqualified” to produce software. The open source developers, in turn, point out that there’s no training available for software development.

Moving on to the music scene, Rizk points out that copyright isn’t strongly linked to income in Egypt. Stars make albums and video clips, but gain very little revenue from these activities, in part because piracy is so pervasive. Instead, money comes from live performance, especially at weddings. Top Lebanese pop stars make $40,000 for a wedding performance, an astounding sum in a middle income country. (Egyptian stars make less, closer to $25-35,000.) Some players are choosing to move beyond the middle men and pioneering new models that allow them to sell content and performance directly to their audiences, much as Brazilian musicians have done in the Technobrega scene. The sheer dysfunction of the market, plus the political content of the underground music, is pushing musicians to experiment with creative new models.

Jule Sigall from Microsoft makes the argument that “Access to Knowledge” as we consider it is a bit too broad - it’s probably useful to focus solely around the legal and policy questions around knowledge. Specifically the question Microsoft is interested in is whether there’s a role for copyright and patent in solving A2K issues. While much of the copyright and patent structures around the world are the results of lobbying by companies like Microsoft, he argues that there’s a “grassroots recognition of intellectual property rights”, pointing to European recognition of conventions on human rights as including the right to profit from the creation of intellectual property.

Brad Biddle from Intel is working directly on projects that are probably closer to the heart of most A2K activists than Microsoft’s “grassroots movement”. He explains how Intel became a partner of civil society organizations in lobbying against the WIPO broadcast treaty, which began its life as an awful piece of legislation that gave broadcasters special rights when content they’d aired (open licensed or not) when distributed in other media like the Internet. Biddle credits civil society as being “way ahead” of industry on recognizing the importance of the treaty and the need to oppose it. There was effective cooperation between civil society and corporations, but it required a great deal of overcoming mistrust, and it was very hard to move beyond adhoc cooperation.

Biddle sees some other “low hanging fruit” where corporations and civil society could cooperate around A2K issues. Copyright limitations and exceptions - protections of robust fair use, for one - is to the advantage both of consumer electronics vendors and activists. Patent quality - strongly limiting the number of software patents to ensure that only truly novel ones are issued - is a major activist interest, and also helps release companies from the enormous cost of maintaining patent portfolios and trading them with other companies. Intel’s “debacle” over processor serial numbers has convinced the company that they need to ally with civil society on privacy issues as well.

Brent Woodworth heads IBM’s crisis response team, a group that’s helped provide information and communication support in over seventy disasters in more than forty countries. The team has responded to natural disasters as well as to acts of terror, and works both in countries at peace and at war. The importance of sharing knowledge can be about efficiently allocating resources - he offers an example from Rwanda during the genocide where some agencies had trucks, others had petrol, and the two needed to work together. He points to SAHANA, a system built for relief work in Sri Lanka to match donations with needy recipients, register refugees and map resources in relief situations. The system is open source - which is critical, Woodworth says, because the semi-proprietary systems make reuse difficult - was built by IBM, Microsoft, Accenture and others. They’ve discovered that investments pre-disaster in systems like SAHANA give four times the impact of investments after a disaster.

Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s senior policy counsel (also good friend and former collaborator), argues that we’re at a special moment in terms of the Access to Knowledge “meme” because the Internet is finally starting to realize the democratizing potential we’ve long talked about. Cheap computers and bandwidth lead to a culture of content production. The fact that people are producing videos, remixing, writing blogs and generally producing content challenges existing ideas about access to information. With this shift taking place, the groups that used to be in power - professional content creators - are trying to use the law to calcify the advantages and privleges they’ve had. “The tools of individual production are so widespread, so awesome, so powerful,” and capable of creating content at near zero cost that they’re threatening existing political and commercial relationships.

Andrew points out that in his own world, the last few months have included fighting the Youtube blocks in Thailand, Turkey and Brazil, the challenges to Google Maps and Google Earth in a number of countries, and the Blogger block in Pakistan. While NGOs shouldn’t rely on corporations as allies, sometimes those interests coincide. “Be wary, but be opportunistic.” He points out that some organizations like Electronic Frontier Foundation tip him off on legislation that would impact Google’s bottom line, which tends to create alliances between Google and the civil society groups.

Andrew offers two places where he thinks Google can be very helpful to the A2K movement. One is in creating revenue streams for the digitization of information. In the developing world, there’s a great need to create locally relavent content in the hopes of bringing local users online. This can be a costly process, scanning and indexing documents. But advertising provides a possibility of monetizing this content and supporting the efforts to bring it online. He also argues that Google and A2K are likely to ally on a few fundamental IP issues: reform of the patent system and protection of fair use rights outside of US law. In answering a question about Google’s lobbying of the US government, he notes, “We’re making the argument that Silicon Valley is Detroit, and that in this case what the trade representatives should be working for is robust fair use.” He later makes the point, “Censorship is a trade barrier,” and that as businesses we should consider this issue as part of free trade agreements.

The final presenter is Pam Samuelson from the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, who identifies herself as “fighting the IP wars far before it was called ‘access to knowledge’”. She explains that the alliances between civil society and corporations can be a marriage of convenience. While industry and civil society worked closely together on the WIPO broadcast treaty, she feels like industry left civil society by the roadside in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. She makes the point that we sometimes have to think many steps in advance - letting the entertainment industry get an extension of copyright terms has “whetted their appetite” for further concessions from Congress - we may need to band together and fight battles well before they’re at a critical state so that we continue to protect the rights we have today.

• “Six Questions for Walker Todd on Paul Wolfowitz and the World Bank” by Ken Silverstein (Harper’s Magazine)
  “I don’t think he deserves to be fired because of his role in seeking a raise for his girlfriend, but he is in a situation where, politically, it’s impossible for him to stay”
  (tags: worldbank uspolitics tcs)
• Global Voices Online ? The French Presidential Election: A View From Outside the Metropole
  Amazing Jen Brea roundup of Francophone voices on their opinions on the French election
  (tags: elections france politics globalvoices citizenmedia)

I’m at a State Department event today, giving a talk about technology and activism - the event is under “Chatham House Rules“, which means that the discussion can be reported, but can’t be attributed. But I’ve asked Dr. Nathan Eagle if I can offer a summary of his talk, and he was gracious enough to agree.

Eagle is an MIT Media Lab researcher who’s now basing himself in Kilifi, on the northern coast of Kenya. His research at MIT focused on mining social data from mobile phone networks, a technique he calls “reality mining”. His team gave a set of phones to MIT students which had been specially enabled to track their behavior with highly transparent spyware. (The students were aware that the phones were monitored, and their identities were protected.) The phones logged the location of a user via cell-tower ID, the proximity of the user to other users by bluetooth scans, and all calls and SMS from the phone (but no content of those communications.) The resulting set of data - available on his research site - is the largest set of human behavoral data available in this space.

He shows an amazing visualization of a slice of this data, watching a hundred individuals move through a map of Cambridge. Watching the interaction between inviduals gives you some fascinating insights into their relationships - two people who are proximate in the lab during the work day doesn’t tell you much about their relationship; two people proximate in downtown Boston on a Saturday evening tells you lots more. The patterns of these interactions can give you some guesses about what events are taking place - finals week at MIT is quite apparent, as was the fact that the Red Sox were in the playoffs and then the World Series in 2004.

One way that Eagle got participation in the study is by answering useful questions for mobile users - How far did I travel last week? When did I last have lunch with John? And Eagle got very good at predicting the locations of people… or at least of some people. Low-entropy individuals - people who follow close routines - were predictable with 90-95% accuracy. Unpredictable, high-entropy individuals include MIT freshmen, who might be out partying at 3am rather than home in bed. In these high-entropy sets, prediction rates were closer to 60%.

The network was also extremely useful in identifying friendships and connections - Eagle compared people’s reported social networks (collected via survey) with the friendships the data seemed to reveal - the data analysis revealed 96% of the friendships and gave a very accurate picture of the topology of the network. The graph produced from the reality mining data was somewhat richer than the reported data as it showed the strength of connections as well - a friend you spend lots of time with versus one you rarely interact with is apparent within the dataset.

One application that emerges from this sort of tool is the possibility of matchmaking - business students participating in the project expressed a strong interest in meeting MIT geeks. The system allowed users to put their phone into a “socially promiscuous” mode, meaning they were willing to accept introductions to other users who were nearby.

One of Eagle’s long-term dreams is to model much larger networks - he points to the possibility of monitoring 250 million mobile users and 12 billion calls in a European nation. Watching how ideas move through a network like that might be similar to watching models of pathogens move through populations of people. Enthusiasm for a particular product is a contagion, not entirely dissimilar to an airborne pathogen.

Eagle points out that 59% of mobile phone users are in the developing world. In Kilifi, he’s able to pay for his cab with his mobile, something he can’t do in the US. Africa is the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world. While there are only 200,000 households with electricity, there are 7 million mobile phone users. He tells us about a trip to “cellphone alley” in Nairobi, where he picked out the innards, a colored case, a keypad and had the phone soldered together, giving him an unlocked GSM phone for $15.

The pervasiveness of these mobiles is having economic impact in Kenya - day laborers no longer have to gather on a particular street corner to seek labor - SMS could disperse the day laborers and make it possible for people to broker their own labor. Who’s going to build these new sorts of applications for the South? Probably not a Finn shivering the winter away at Nokia.

Eagle’s new project - EPROM (entrepreneurial programming and research on mobles) - is trying to encourage people in developing nations to learn how to build applications for mobile phones. This involves building a community of mobile developers and providing curiculum for students to learn how to build applications in this space. EPROM is running an “SMS bootcamp”, encouraging developers to build tools around SMS. There’s a real challenge in teaching this course in Ethiopia, where the local telephone company ETC is blocking most SMS traffic. Teaching in Addis Ababa, he managed to convince ETC to provide a small supply of unlocked SIM cards, which has let students try applications like movie listings, weather information, craig’s list-type applications, and “crush lists” for automated online flirting.

Kilifi, where Eagle lives, has the highest endemic rate of malaria in the world. To try to figure out why the population is so suceptible, there’s an ongoing survey of the population. These surveys are moving from pen and paper to using mobiles to report results to a central server. Phones are computers, he points out, letting you do everything from price fish, to send money to friends, to gain insight into how people live in societies. Excitement over this realization - phones as computers - is sparking international investment in Africa, like the multiple consortia attempting to get fiber into Kenya. “Putting fiber into every Ugandan town might be more effective than driving Landrovers around,” he notes, taking a swipe at the development aid industry.

I talked with a friend a few days ago about the potential to use the rise of mobiles as an opportunity to teach programming in Africa. I was somewhat wary, pointing out that many mobile applications are really just client/server CGI applications, and that development on the handsets themselves is quite tricky, especially in terms of crossplatform issues. But Eagle’s enthusiasm is quite infectious, and I’m looking forward to seeing what sorts of curiculum his project starts putting together.

• Andrew Lih ? Blog Archive ? Pew report on Wikipedia use
  Interesting Wikipedia usage stats - correlation between youth and wikipedia use, as well as between high levels of education and wikipedia usage…
  (tags: wikipedia)
• Lunch over IP: BondyBlog: covering the French election via videophone
  Bruno’s thoughts on BondyBlogs coverage of the elections from a banlieu (high-density suburb, immigrant, youth) perspective
  (tags: france journalism citizenmedia)

This is one of the busier weeks in recent memory. I’ve slept in different cities each of the last four nights, given two talks, and have two more talks and another city ahead before the week’s over. I was griping about my schedule to David Weinberger at Berkman yesterday and he just laughed - he’s about to start a speaking tour for his (brilliant, must-read) new book Everything is Miscellaneous, which will make my current perambulations look like a walk around the block.

Today’s talk was at the World Bank, part of a conference on the role of the private sector in international development. I felt like I was in a bit of a time warp giving my talk - the issues on the table were ones I thought about nearly every day when I worked on Geekcorps, but they’re much less present now that I’m working more on Global Voices. The topic for our panel was “does connectivity matter to development?” It’s a surprisingly tough question to ask, even ten years into World Bank funding for connectivity-centric projects.

My counterpart on the panel was Professor Joel Mokyr from Northwestern, an economic historian who pushed the conversation in a wonderful direction, looking at the Internet from the perspective of the 18th century. Stepping back in time lets him frame the questions of the value of access to knowledge in abstract, non-technical terms, rather than getting tangled in the world of satellite connectivity and undersea cables that my work frequently inhabits.

Mokyr’s basic thesis is that increased connectivity in the 18th century - through scientific journals, postal mail, the advent of the encyclopedia and other reference works - is an increased connection between two different types of knowledge, “propositional” and “prescriptive”. Propositional knowledge is scientific knowledge, knowledge about the world. Prescriptive knowledge is procedural knowledge, how to make something or carry out a process. He points out that the two types of knowledge are tightly connected in today’s world - we create new processes because we understand the underlying physics, chemistry or biology. But in the 18th century, there were lots of things we knew how to do - fertilizing fields or making steel, for instance - but didn’t know why it worked.

It wasn’t that people were stupid, Mokyr reminds us - brilliant work in physics and mathematics was done in ancient Greece, for instance. But there was a profound separation between the “savants” - the people who knew things - and the “fabricants” - the people who built things and did things. In the 18th century, the fabricants began putting questions to the savants and getting answers that allowed for techological innovation and invention. “The 18th century’s greatest insight was that reducing access costs to human knowledge is critical to human progress.” The flourishing of scientific publications, the standardization of scientific language and of measurement, the rise of scientific societies and of the encyclopedia were all ways to reduce the cost of access to knowledge and push forward scientific progress.

A great talk, though it threw me off my stride a bit, as I’d come in prepared to argue about open access models for access to fiberoptic cables. I focused my remarks on a more recent period in history - the past decade of attempts to bring economic development to the South through ICT, and the successes and failures we’ve experienced thus far. I argued that two areas where we’ve been less successful than expected - outsourcing technology jobs to developing nations, and selling via ecommerce from the developing to the developed world - are both cases where non-digital limitations come into play. Basic infrastructure is an obstacle to the rise of ecommerce, while education, management training and language skills are a huge obstacle to entering the outsourcing business.

In two areas where there’s been an unexpected degree of success - mobile telephony and alternative financial systems - there’s a clear correlation to market competition and deregulation. Two areas where I argue the jury’s still out - the role of technology in education via projects like OLPC, and the importance of citizen media - are both areas where we’ll probably still be asking questions about the precise connection of technology to development a decade in the future.

The audience was almost solely World Bank and IFC folks, which means that everyone asking a question knows more about the country they’re speaking about than you do. One respondent was upset with my explanation of the “India fallacy”. I used the term to refer to the fact that many governments I talked with a few years back had ambitions of becoming “the next India” and becoming major players in outsourcing in ten years. I argued that India’s outsourcing success had a great deal to do with investment in tertiary education (training skilled scientists, mathematicians and engineers who were good candidates to become programmers), the Indian diaspora (Indians in the tech industry in the US were able to bridge cultural gaps in working with programmers in India) and the importance of the English language. One respondent, who spoke about his experiences in Andhra Pradesh, argued that I was overstating the importance of both the diaspora and education and understating the importance of government outreach to large corporations. Another respondent wondered why the Carribean, with an English-speaking population and huge diaspora, hadn’t become a major center for outsourcing.

What’s interesting to me is that, over a decade into the field of ICT for development, there are lots of conflicting theories about why India has had success in outsourcing and why other nations have had a harder time. You can have a productive and useful argument on the topic despite numerous papers written by people much smarter than me (you know, people who’ve actually taken a class in economics.) If the issues weren’t so damned important, it would be great intellectual fun - instead, it’s the sort of fun that leaves you with a nagging sense of doubt about whether any of the projects you’ve worked on will have positive impact on the world.

Talking with friends after the session, we took an elevator to the top floor of the bank, believing that the conference party was on the thirteenth floor. We headed towards a room that was promisingly laid out with chafing dishes and a bar, but was curiously quiet. As we entered the room, a gentleman in a suit quickly intercepted us and said, “What are you doing?”

“Just looking for the private sector conference party.”

“There’s a board meeting taking place. You can’t be here.”

Oh. That board meeting. One of my friends was wearing a blue ribbon - she speculated that the guard probably thought we were on our way to burst into the board meeting and issue our demands for Wolfowitz’s resignation…

We slunk out and found the party a floor below. Probably not the best week to be aimlessly wandering the halls of the World Bank, just in case you had any plans to do so…

• Zimbabwe | A rogue state with charm | Economist.com
  The Economist’s online editor is blogging from within ZImbabwe.
  (tags: africa zimbabwe failedstate freespeech censorship)
• Blogs As the New Frontier in Human Rights by Evgeny Morozov - The Globalist > > Global Justice
  Evgeny uses the story of released Belarussian activist Denis Denisov and the bloggers who made his bail as a way of exploring how the world of web2.0 technology is being used - and often advanced - by human rights activists
  (tags: belarus blogs globalvoices freespeech activism)
• Distributed Boing Boing
  Mark Christian’s program to create distributed mirrors of BoingBoing. Would be interesting to use the same codebase to replicated sites of blocked bloggers…
  (tags: activism blog boingboing censorship)
• Nigerian Candidates Reject Poll Results - Forbes.com
  Opposition candidates, monitors declare the Nigerian presidential elections fatally flawed. The failures in Nigeria give an interesting sense for how incredible the DRC elections actually were…
  (tags: africa nigeria elections)
• Nigeria election ‘worst ever seen’ - World - smh.com.au
  Okay, well it’s the opposition who calls it the “worst ever seen”. But local monitors call it a charade and the EU calls it unacceptable…
  (tags: nigeria elections)
• Joho the Blog: [berkman] Open Net Initiative
  David’s notes on John Palfrey and Rob Faris’s talk at Berkman on the Open Net Initiative
  (tags: oni filtering censorship internet freespeech)
• ALA TechSource | IT and Sympathy
  Much of the technology libraries (NGOs, activists) end up using is free as in kittens - it costs nothing to get it, and a huge amount of effort to maintain and support it…
  (tags: technology libraries ngo activism FOSS)

My friend Marc Lynch offered a challenging and provocative post ten days ago about “selective indignation”. He pointed out that Kareem Amer Soliman - a blogger sentenced to four years in prison for his online writings about the Egyptian government and about Islam - was receiving a great deal of attention in the global blogosphere, including a well-organized campaign to lobby for his release. Marc has argued that support for a blogger whose views happen to align with western critiques of Islam and failure to lobby for the free speech rights of other Egyptian activists sends a complex and contradictory message from the northern blogosphere to bloggers in the Middle East. Are we advocating for free speech, or for speech we’re inclined to agree with?

Marc’s question got an interesting test when blogger Adb al-Monem Mahmoud was arrested by Egyptian security forces. Monem is one of the key figures behind the Muslim Brotherhood’s embrace of blogging, including their English-language website, Ikhwanweb. Marc, Alaa and other friends believe that Monem is being held because his profile is rising in the international media and because the Brotherhood is beginning to use blogs very effectively as an organizing tool.

It’s really worth listening to Alaa Adbel Fateh, focus of the Free Alaa campaign last year, as he writes about Monem. Alaa’s an organizer of Kefaya, and his politics are far, far to the left of Monem’s. But the two have appeared together to highlight the problems of police brutality against activists in Egypt, and the two share a deep passion for the way technology can help enable social change. In a post titled “Free Monem”, Alaa writes:

When I got arrested back in May 2006, thousands of people across the globe joined in an international campaign of solidarity asking for my release. I’m forever grateful to every single person who participated in that campaign, while it did not actually result in my immediate release it ensured I wasn’t tortured or maltreated in prison and it helped the cause of freedom and democracy in Egypt by bringing it to the attention of millions through blogs and main stream media.

and today I ask you to show the same solidarity for my friend and fellow blogger Abdol Monem Mahmoud. while we blong to different political ideologies we shared the same vision and in fact Monem did more for the cause of democracy in Egypt that I would ever hope to achieve.

Unfortunately, we’ve not yet seen this international outpouring of support for Monem’s release. Marc points out that the only two English blogs that seem to be covering Monem’s arrest are his site and Global Voices, where our amazing Middle East and advocacy teams have been covering the story at length. There’s a strong campaign for his release, but the campaign is almost entirely in Arabic and is primarily drawing regional support, not global support.

Amira al-Hussani, our Middle East editor, and Sami ben Gharbia, our advocacy director have both been concerned with the question of what bloggers in trouble do and don’t get coverage in the international blogosphere. Amira tracks the conversation in several Egyptian blogs to show that there’s mutual support between Monem and Kareem’s supporters, and that Monem explicitly showed support for Kareem’s cause some weeks ago, saying:

I disagree with Abdul Kareem Amer’s views. However, I do not disagree, at all, that this security practice is unjust towards a youth in the prime of his life. Punishing him, or punishing others having their opinions, will not succeed in changing their ideas.

Sami, who is currently translating an interview he did with Monem at the Al Jazeera forum in Doha shortly before Monem’s arrest, looks at the disparity in blogosphere coverage on a variety of bloggers who’ve been imprisoned, threatened or otherwise silenced. It’s an amazing overview of cases that deserve the support and attention of the international blogosphere.

Egyptian security forces announced today that they’d be extending Monem’s detention at least 15 more days - we can expect this detention to continue, especially in the absence of international attention and pressure. I’ve been speaking about Monem’s situation in every talk I’ve given the past two weeks, arguing that we’re at a critical juncture in blogging, where activists are discovering the power of the medium and governments are looking for ways to silence these activists. Anyone who wants the blogosphere to remain a space useful for advocates needs to stand up and advocate for everyone who is being persecuted for exercising their rights to free speech online.

Free Monem. Free Kareem. The right to free speech, online and offline, is an absolute. If we care about defending these rights, we have to speak up for everyone whose rights are violated and threatened, especially those we don’t always agree with…

• Novatium
  A thin-client model for low cost computing, developed by Rajesh Jain and others. Possible Indian answer to OLPC, though using a radically different model
  (tags: india olpc)
• Carpooling gets a new dash of green - The Boston Globe
  Can Robin Chase, the founder of ZipCar, make carpooling sexy? GoLoco promises environmental, social, financial benefits from sharing car rides.
  (tags: green environment business)
• Foreign Policy: Expert Sitings: Ethan Zuckerman
  Foreign Policy lists some of my favorite blogs in a “Expert Sitings” column
  (tags: blogs globalvoices media)

One of the challenges FON - a wireless-sharing company that I’ve been on the US advisory board of for the past year (see my disclosure policy) - has been convincing internet service providers that the company is an ally, not a competitor. FON works by allowing you to open your wireless access point to users, who can pay a small fee ($3 a day, $2 for additional days) to access your connectivity - in exchange for opening your WAP, you gain the ability to roam freely on other FON hotspots. US ISPs generally have user agreements that prevent you from reselling your bandwidth in this way - some have agreements that prohibit you from sharing your bandwidth, period.

Time Warner Cable announced a partnership today where they’re allowing, and actively encouraging, their subscribers to become Foneros. The logic? Competitors to Time Warner are looking for solutions to allow users of their broadband to roam when they’re away from home, some by using cellular data services, others by using closed wireless networks owned by the company. Time Warner can now fight back without having to build its own wireless network. I’m hopeful that this is the first of many ISPs to try leveraging the FON network - more users on the network means more access points. Despite the fact that FON has the largest number of access points in the US, you’re less likely to find a FON router than a T-Mobile one, for instance, in a city cafe as FON access points are run from people’s homes and less often in commercial establishments.

Congrats to the FON folks - it’s been a huge barrier to convince US ISPs of the advantages of working with FON rather than fighting the model - I hope this is the first of many similar announcements, and that this helps start a trend of more flexible user agreements for broadband internet service, whether people share it commercially through FON or non-commercially through open wireless access points or community networks.