Bill McKibben has an excellent essay – “All Programs Considered” – in the forthcoming New York Review of Books where he asks why radio doesn’t receive the same critical scrutiny as film, books or even television. Most of his piece focuses on public radio in the US, where McKibben feels certain the good stuff is located: “if you landed in a spaceship someplace in America searching for thoughtful and nonpartisan culture, your first stop would be the public radio stations that usually show up below 92 on the FM dial.” (For those non-US readers out there, lower FM frequencies in the US tend are usually non-commercial, while those above 92 are commercial and advertising-supported.)

McKibben points out that public radio reaches a huge audience – 1 in 10 Americans in any given week – and that NPR’s flagship shows, “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” have audiences larger than cable news networks, and challenges the size of national television news programs. A recent Pew Research study suggests that, while radio listenership is following, Americans spend an average of 15 minutes a day listening to radio, which makes it the second-most consumed news medium after television news.

So why don’t we have a culture of reviewing around it, as we do around books or movies?

McKibben’s explanation is that we tend to think of the medium as a utility, a way to take other media – music, sports, news – and bring them to audiences through a particular channel. As such, we may be missing a revolution taking place: the rise of creative new radio programming that’s breaking new ground in news reporting, civic media and storytelling. McKibben goes on to celebrate some of the stars of this new space: Ira Glass and This American Life, Benjamen Walker, the Radio Lab guys, Brooke Gladstone and On the Media, the Sound Opinion fellas…

I think McKibben is actually celebrating two different sides of public radio in his piece. The public radio with huge reach is the one James Fallows celebrates in a recent post for The Atlantic, where he reflects on the firing of Juan Williams. Fallows points out that NPR isn’t the liberal Fox News – as much some commentators want to make it out to be. This public radio – mostly represented by NPR’s flagship shows – is one of the most powerful and constructive forces in contemporary American journalism. As Fallows points out, in an age where foreign bureaus are being cut to the bone, NPR has a fantastic global preference, a dedication to covering complex stories and the willingness to correct mistakes. It’s an incredible service and when I pay membership dues to my local public radio station (okay, not my local radio station, which is run by an egomaniacal station manager who somehow manages to appear as either guest or host on roughly half the shows – I support the NPR station in the next valley – WFCR/WNNZ), that’s what I’m supporting.

What McKibben’s celebrating, primarily, isn’t radio per se – it’s narrative audio content. Here’s the distinction, as I see it. Radio is live, and highly perishable. In Rick Bass’s “Winter: Notes from Montana” (I believe – I’m on the road and don’t have the book in front of me), the author mentions jonesing for NPR, which doesn’t reach his isolated mountain cabin. Friends offer to tape his favorite shows and he turns down the offer, explaining that it would be too painful – the beauty of radio, for him, is that another person, somewhere, is alive and speaking at that very moment.

That’s a powerful and important function of radio. But it’s not what I get from many of my favorite programs. The Memory Palace, perhaps my favorite new “radio program” is a set of miniature, jewel-like historical narratives, many from 19th century American History. It’s hard to imagine them airing on the airwaves… though any radio station that regularly aired these stories would immediately deserve a preset on my car radio. The only connection I can make between them and conventional public radio is that they’re produced by Nate DiMeo, who has reported some excellent stories for APM’s Marketplace. And since they’re stories from the distant past, there’s no apparent urgency to them, other than the urgency of a great story, the desire to know how it turns out.

Programs like The Memory Palace – along with This American Life, Too Much Information, Radio Lab, the Moth and a precious few others – don’t get filed with “radio” in my head – they get filed alongside The New Yorker, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Granta… other places I encounter long narratives that capture my attention and imagination. I don’t see this new form of audio competing with conventional radio. For me, it takes time from film, television series, novels, online essays. (And, in general, it’s not taking away from other media – it’s narrative that I can encounter when I’m doing something that demands my hands, but not the majority of my mind: mowing the lawn, painting a room, driving.)

I think that long-form narrative may be as important, in the long run, as the fact-based reporting, though they’ve got utterly different functions. The power of great narrative is that it can get you to pay attention to people, places and ideas that you had no previous interest in. The classic example of this is This American Life’s “The Giant Pool of Money“, which somehow managed to make America’s mortgage securitization crisis both comprehensible and compelling. The example I like to use is “No Island is an Island“, a story by Jack Hitt about the Pacific island of Nauru, and its improbable role in selling off the assets of the Soviet Union in a newly capitalist Russia. I’d never thought of Nauru before the piece – I know find that I’m strangely attuned to it, and perk up every time I catch the rare mention in the news. (The island is a powerhouse in weightlifting, and Yukio Peter just won a gold for the nation in the recent Commonwealth Games…) I find it wholly unsurprising that Hitt at least as well known as a magazine writer and essayist as he is as a radio producer.

Why does this matter? Business models, for one thing. NPR’s news programs are doing okay through a syndication model – public radio stations raise money to support their operations from their local listeners and a chunk of that money goes to NPR to pay for programs like Morning Edition. The threat to defund public radio in revenge for NPR’s firing of Juan Williams is a pretty weak one – federal funding represents around 2% of NPR’s budget. (Jack Shafer makes the case that this figure is an underestimate, and suggests that the figure may be as high as a quarter of a station’s budget if that station is associated with a university.) The money’s important for some small rural stations, but most are supported through a combination of foundation giving and community support.

That’s not the case for the new programs that McKibben celebrates. In many cases, they have a much larger online audience than a broadcast audience. To support a show like On the Media, I’ve generally had to write checks to WNYC, the station that produces it… which is a little irrational, as I can’t tune in WNYC and have no interest in paying for local NYC news when I don’t live there. Many of these shows now invite podcast listeners to donate a modest amount of money, either online or via a text message. Friend and colleague Doc Searls hopes that users of the Public Radio Tuner iphone application will track how much time they spend listening to these shows and donate through the tools his VRM project is building.

My friend Jake Shapiro is helping gain distribution for these programs through PRX.org, Public Radio Exchange. It’s important work, and I’m thrilled every time I travel in the US and catch one of these rare birds on the air. But I wonder whether there’s a need for a model that recognizes that, increasingly, this content isn’t radio. The problem with this idea, of course, is that there’s little evidence for a model that supports long-form narrative distributed digitally, whether it’s written text or audio. Much as I wish audio narrative would be as common on the airwaves as breaking news, for me, the key idea is whether there’s a way to ensure that producers like Chris Lydon and Ben Walker will continue to produce groundbreaking content, reach an audience and make a living.

• traffic-map-wp-1600.jpg (16001200)
  TeleGeography's 2010 map of telephone traffic. Fascinating to look at telephone routes coming into the UK.
  (tags: telephony maps cartography internet phone globalization xenophilia)

• Why restrict immigration at all? / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com
  Pro-immigration op-ed includes an excellent history of US efforts to restrict migration through law, a process that starts by banning prostitutes and convicts, and eventually bans…well, lots of people
  (tags: migration immigration economics labor trade globalization)
• Tech Paper 29: Table 1. Nativity of the Population and Place of Birth of the Native Population: 1850 to 1990
  Stats on immigration to the US from 1850 to 1990, based on census data. Clearly shows migration bulge around 1890, sharp fall off and recent increases.
  (tags: migration immigration globalization trade population uspolitics)
• The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet | Magazine
  Excellent set of paired essays from Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, examining the competitive future of the web versus more closed, but more advertiser-friendly, usable apps. Includes a graph of bandwidth usage that shows the rise of video, the fall of earlier tech like Usenet
  (tags: browser business culture google internet media statistics technology zittrain generativity)
• Why the World Isn't Flat – By Pankaj Ghemawat | Foreign Policy
  Excellent response to Friedman that argues that we're in a partly globalized world, and that most indicators suggest that markets are 10% international, 90% domestic, including investment capital, which we might presume would be the most mobile of forces.
  (tags: globalization friedman flat economics trade networks essay migration immigration india)

Six years ago, early in my tenure at Berkman, I wrote a blog post that tried to calculate the cost of shipping water from a bottling plant in Yaqara, Fiji to Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was interested in unpacking the everyday mystery of container shipping – how is it possible that we can sell a product for a couple of dollars a bottle despite shipping it 8,000 miles around the world – and in the odd idea that atoms might be more mobile than bits, as we get lots more Fiji water in the US than Fijian music, movies or news.

My estimate then was that a 40′ container filled with Fiji water would cost roughly $5000 to deliver from Suva, Fiji to Cambridge – I came up with the estimate based on a variety of statistics about international shipping that I bent and welded into a Fiji/Massachusetts estimate. At $5000 a container and 24,000 kilograms per 40′ box, it would cost $0.21 for a liter bottle of Fiji water to make the 8,000 mile journey. Not free, but a small fraction of the retail price of a bottle of “premium” imported bottled water.

I had occasion to return to this blogpost today – I’m working on a book, and this Fiji example features in it. So I decided to recalcuate the numbers and see if I could find an answer that’s more defensible and satisfying.

Turns out I got a few details wrong. First, the 24,000kg figure applies to smaller, 20′ containers – the limit for 40-footers is 30,480kg. And the price from Suva to Cambridge for a 40′ container is just slightly higher – $5,540.30. That comes out to $0.18 per liter, three cents less than I calculated six years ago.

These new figures come from my new favorite toy, Maersk’s online shipping rates calculator. The Danish superfirm A.P. Møller – Mærsk Gruppen is the largest shipping group in the world, with offices in 135 countries, 120,000 employees, and roughly 600 container ships, capable of carrying more than 2 million 20′ containers at any given time. They’ve also got a thoroughly badass IT system, which they’ve now made accessible to the general public.

Okay, it’s not exactly Amazon.com, or even Fedex. To use Maersk’s calculator, you need to register with the site, download a client browser certificate and accept three server certificates from Maersk before you can access their secure site. But once you do, it’s just a few short clicks before you can calculate the cost of shipping a 20′ container of “umbrellas, sun umbrellas, walking-sticks, seat-sticks, whips, riding-crops and parts thereof” (yes, that’s one of the available categories, along with “bone and meal”, “ores, slag and ash” and “straw, esparto, other plaiting materials and articles of straw, esparto, other plaiting materials) from Auckland to Dubai: $2451.02

The main thing I’ve found playing with Maersk’s calendar: distance doesn’t matter as much as demand. Americans buy a lot of atoms from China. The Chinese don’t buy nearly as many from the US. A 40′ container filled with household goods, shipped from Shanghai to Houston, TX costs $6169.93. Reverse the trip and ship the same container from Houston to Shanghai and the cost is $3631.07. That’s because 60% of containers on ships coming from the US to China are empty, which means Maersk and other shippers are desperate to sell container space.

(The 2006 New York Times article that offers that 60% empty container statistic suggests that lots of full containers are coming to China from raw-materials rich countries like Australia, Brazil and the Middle East. That suggests we should see the opposite pattern – expensive containers from Sao Paolo to Shanghai and cheap ones in the other direction. Nope. $5101.70 from Shanghai to Sao Paolo, $1930.59 in the other direction. Perhaps containers from China to Brazil are riding the same ships as those to the US and paying the same premiums?)

Maersk also offers a set of maps that help you get a sense for how these trade routes actually work. It’s a four day trip from Suva to Auckland on the Pacific Islands Express, and then the bottles of Fiji water are transfered to OC1, the Oceania Americas Service. The Pacific crossing is a long one – 18 days to the Panama Canal, a quick stop in Cartagena, and we’re in Philadephia 25 days out of Auckland. It’s a truck ride from Philly to Cambridge, and that short hop is responsible for $950 of the total transit cost.

As I poke through these maps, schedules and tariffs, I feel like I’m glimpsing a secret world. Part of it may come from the sheer poetry of the names. Shipping routes include “The Boomerang” and the “The South China/Australia Yo-yo” and connect ports like Tin Can Island (Apapa, Nigeria, the main port for Lagos). And part comes from the sense that these routes and rates, the infrastructure that supports an economy where transPacific bottled water is possible, are the ley lines of globalization, radiating a mysterious and sinister power.

My colleague Hal Roberts, I and friends at Berkman released a paper today that attempts to estimate usage of circumvention tools, tools used to evade internet filtering. We were specifically interested in trying to compare usage of different types of tools – sophisticated blocking-resistant tools like Tor and Ultrasurf, ad-supported web proxies like Proxeasy or HideMyAss, and VPN-based systems like Hotspot Shield and Relakks. Unlike in our previous study of some of these tools, we weren’t trying to compare the functionality of these very different tools, or evaluate their performance – we just wanted to answer the question, “How many people use this tool?”

That’s not an easy question to answer. For blocking resistant tools, we used estimates provided by the tool operators. (Tor is very good about publicly posting usage metrics, and Jacob Appelbaum points out that we’re able to access anonymized logs to conduct our own analysis. We could also, Appelbaum points out, run our own Tor node and extrapolate traffic from that node. I hope we’re able to do so in a later version of the research.) We did much the same for VPN operators, though here we sent a survey out to as many companies as we could find and tried to extrapolate from the responses we got to offer an estimate of tool usage for the whole space. Because web proxies are, at their heart, script-driven websites, we’re able to estimate their usage by building a catalog and using traffic statistics from Google Ad Planner to estimate usage.

There’s a lot of extrapolation in our findings, and we tried to make it clear that we were trying to calculate orders of magnitude of usage, not more granular numbers. With that caveat, the interesting finding were that total usage of the tools we studied was under 19 million users per month. That’s a pretty big number, in absolute terms, but surprisingly small given the large number of people accessing the Internet from countries where internet censorship is widespread. If that 19 million estimate (which represented the high end of our range of estimates) is correct, that number would represent 3% of the 562 million internet users in nations that filter the web aggressively.

Of course, not all proxy users are in nations like China or Iran – some are in an unfiltered country like Mexico, and using proxies to access content that’s been geographically restricted – television shows made available on Hulu.com, for instance. It’s very hard to estimate how many users are in highly censored countries, but it’s worth noting that the economics of simple web proxies (which represent 15 million users in that high-end estimate) mean that their operators prefer to serve American users trying to access Facebook within a filtered high school network rather than Iranian users (as they are more likely to click on English-language banner ads)… and many use geolocation software to prevent users from less-profitable nations from using the tools.

There are a couple of possible conclusions we could draw from these usage statistics. One is that people in censored countries either don’t know enough about these tools, why they might want them or how to find them. That’s the logic behind efforts like the Sesawe project, which is promoting tools, localizing them into appropriate languages and providing guides to circumventing censorship.

Another possibility is that there’s reasonably widespread knowledge of these tools, but less appetite for them than we might hope. While an unfiltered internet is critical for some users – academics, foreign policy experts, activists – for many, a censored internet is a stimulating and diverting space. David Talbot wrote an excellent piece for Technology Review on this phenomenon earlier this year, helping English-speaking readers get a sense for the dynamism and complexity of conversations on China’s heavily censored internet. When countries like China block access to social media sites like Twitter or YouTube, but provide alternatives – censored, but in local languages – those tools tend to gain traction quickly. I’ve seen estimates of Chinese Twitter users as between 50,000 and 100,000 users – Sina.com’s microblogging service claims 20 million users. Given that disparity – and the fact that microblogging is still an early adopter phenomenon – it’s worth asking whether those Sina microbloggers are ignorant of Twitter, or whether they made a decision to user the platform their friends are using rather than a “freer” platform. As Evgeny Morozov commented in a Technology Review piece on our new study, “nothing is irreplaceable online.”

I made the case some months back that circumvention can’t be the only pillar of a US government internet freedom strategy – not everyone wants or needs these tools. That observation – and this paper – aren’t meant to be a case against developing better circumvention tools or promoting these tools. Instead, it’s our way of trying to get more people thinking about the tough challenge we’ve been wrestling with – how do we think about internet censorship if it’s possible – maybe even likely – that many people aren’t interested in making an effort to access an uncensored internet?

• Duncan Watts | Yahoo! Research
  Collection of Watts's papers, available for download as PDF
  (tags: academic network networks research socialmedia watts smallworld)
• Is the Tipping Point Toast? — Duncan Watts — Trendsetting | Fast Company
  Clive Thompson explores Duncan Watts's ideas about small world networks and their implications for advertising
  (tags: advertising analytics networks influence socialmedia trends communication community viral watts smallworld)

I gave a talk on Monday in Salzburg, Austria that expanded slightly on my TED Global talk about imaginary cosmopolitanism. The audience in Salzburg included American, African and European media development experts, and I made the case that groups concerned with media in a digital age needed to look not just at producing media from different corners of the world, but the appetite for this media. We can’t just look at production – we need to look at consumption as well. And we need to be careful not to look at tools that have a global userbase and assume that they’re naturally leading to international interaction – just because there are 500 million Facebook users, it’s not helpful to think of them as a new “nation”, as the Economist and many others suggest.

My friend Onnik Krikorian watched the video of my talk and tweeted a response: “Just want to say that even small connections r more than we otherwise thought. Still, food 4 thought”

Onnik, you may remember, is Global Voices’s regional editor for the Caucuses. A Brit of Armenian descent, he’s had the challenging task of building connections with Azeri bloggers who were initially reluctant to trust him, given the long tensions between the two nations. Onnik is a passionate advocate for connection via Facebook, which has allowed him to build ties with Azeri friends in a way that would probably be impossible offline. While I’ve been critical of the ways in which Facebook is branding itself as a tool for international understanding without much data to support that contention, Onnik’s been reminding me that the connections that get made on networks like Facebook are critically important.

Turns out that Onnik’s not just right in practice – he’s right in theory.

I’ve been reading some of Duncan Watts’s research to get a better understanding of the “small world” hypothesis. You’ve probably encountered this idea as “six degrees of separation”, the idea – promoted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram that social networks in the US connection people through chains of six people. (Milgram’s actual experiment doesn’t provide a lot of evidence that this is actually true – in the most widely discussed experiment, where letters sent from random people in Nebraska reached a specific stockbroker in Massachusetts, only 18 of 96 letters reached their targets. The “six degrees” takeaway was an average of studies including ones where the letter to Boston began in Boston, and an average that doesn’t consider the failed chains.) Watts became fascinated with the problem during his doctoral research and began developing increasingly complex mathematical models to test the properties of “small worlds networks”.

Basically, the small worlds phenomenon is pretty easy to explain if we assume that everyone in the world has a fairly large number of friends who are distributed randomly. If I know 100 people, and they each know 100 people, within two degrees of me, I know 10,000 people. We’re up to a million in three degrees, a hundred million at four and 10 billion at five – and bingo, we’ve spanned the globe.

Of course, that’s not how friendships actually work. I know Onnik, and we both know lots of people the other doesn’t know… but we’ve also got lots of friends in common, via Global Voices. So if Onnik is one of my hundred friends, and twenty of his friends are already my friends, I’m reaching a much smaller set of people through him than I would through a friend who had no overlap with my other friends. Or, as Watts puts it in his book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, “the more your friends know each other, the less use they are to you in getting a message to someone you don’t know.”

This is interesting to me because I’m intrigued – and worried – by information flows through social networks. If we’re getting more (not lots yet, but more) information through social networks and less through curated media like newspapers, do we run the risk of encountering only information that our friends have access to? Are we likely to be overinformed about some conversations and underinformed about others? And could this isolation lead to ideological polarization, as Cass Sunstein and others suggest? And if those fears are true, is there anything we can do to rewire social networks so that we’re getting richer, more diverse information?

Watts has considered these questions from a point of view rooted in graph theory. He explains that networks where friends are highly likely to know each other (i.e., if person A knows person B and person C, B and C are likely to know each other) have a lot of clustering, and few short paths – it may be difficult, or impossible, to find a path that takes you from Nebraska to Massachusetts. In networks where friendships are random and uncorrelated (i.e, A knows B and C, but B and C are no more likely to know each other than any other nodes in the network), paths are very short – remember, with 100 friends distributed randomly, five hops reaches 10 billion people. But these networks appear to be very different from what we experience in reality.

Small world networks are both highly clustered and show short paths, the sorts of paths Milgram’s experiment suggests exist. These networks emerge when participants in networks are highly connected to their near neighbors (i.e., are clustered) and have a few random connections to distant parts of the graph. Watts discovered that, “the first five random rewirings reduce the average path length of the network by one-half, regardless of the size of the network.”

Those “random rewirings” aren’t so random in real life. We know people in different clusters – I know one set of people from Berkman, another from my college days, another from Global Voices, etc. But that fact that individuals are members of multiple clusters is what allows for “shortcuts” in the graph. People who bridge between different, separated communities – as Onnik does with Armenians and Azeris – shrink the world.

It turns out that shrinking the world in this way may be highly profitable, in terms of creativity, compensation and status. Ronald Burt, at the University of Chicago Business School, studied how ideas spread at Raytheon, a large defense contractor. People in the firm who were most widely recognized as having good ideas were those who bridged different social and professional groups within the company. Burt refers to the divisions within the firm as “structural holes” and introduces his paper with the hypothesis that “people who stand near the holes in social structure are at the highest risk of having good ideas.” To the extent that there’s little communication between Armenians and Azeri for reasons of history, language and culture, there’s a structural hole that prevents ideas from spreading. Onnik, and other people who bridge divides, are at risk of being exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking.

I’m trying to understand what this might mean in terms of the spread of news and other information from around the world. Most news, I suspect, doesn’t spread primarily through small-world networks. We learn about the Haitian earthquake not because we know a friend who knows a friend who knows a Haitian person who called them – we hear about it from news outlets who are reporting on the story, and if we’ve somehow managed to miss hearing the news, friends send us links to journalistic reports on the situation.

I suspect that small world networks are important, though, in helping us decide what news is important to us. If you have a personal connection to Haiti – a Haitian friend, someone who’s traveled to the country – the story may be one you followed more closely that stories about other natural disasters. If you chose to get active in providing support to people affected by the Haitian quake, your involvement may have inspired friends to pay closer attention to the situation and, perhaps, to get involved themselves. And your attention to a story sends a signal to news outlets (professional and amateur) that this is a topic of interest that they should cover.

I’m interested in modeling how international news spreads in a digital age. I suspect a model needs to do much more than look at who’s reporting what stories – like the models I built years ago for the Global Attention Profiles project – they need to consider user interest in those stories, expressed by which headlines they click online and which URLs they amplify on Twitter, Facebook and via email. Understanding those dynamics, in turn, may rely on understanding how individuals communicate to each other the issues they personally care about. My guess is that people who connect the social graph aren’t just likely to have good ideas – they’re likely they key people who help us pay attention to distant parts of the world.

• Think Tank – Where to Get a Good Idea – Steal It Outside Your Group – NYTimes.com
  "People who live in the intersection of social worlds are at higher risk of having good ideas." An analysis of creativity and structural holes from Ronald Burt seems to make the case for the importance of bridge figures in creativity
  (tags: creativity education ideas innovation stats socialnetworks bridgefigures)
• true-size-of-africa.jpg (24821755)
  Excellent Kai Krause visualization of Africa's size, significantly better than the one hanging in my laundry room. And available to the public domain!
  (tags: africa art images infographics map maps)
• DAWN.COM | Pakistan | Hate on the Internet
  Pakistan filters un-Islamic content online… so why don't they filter sites associated with terrorist organizations? Provocative piece from Huma Imtiaz
  (tags: pakistan filtering censorship terrorism islam freespeech)
• Twitter data lets NPR glimpse a future of app-loving news junkies Nieman Journalism Lab
  Facebook and Twitter now drive 7-8% of traffic to npr.org – a vision of a future where discovery is socially driven?
  (tags: journalism media socialnetworking twitter attention social facebook npr)

I’m in Salzburg today at a Salzburg Global Seminar titled “Strengthening Independent Media“. The event’s being co-organized by the Knight Foundation, the Global Forum for Media Development and SGS, which is an organization I hadn’t encountered before. Since 1947, they’ve been running global seminars in a castle – the castle featured in the Sound of Music (sort of) – in Salzburg.

I gave a version of my TED talk on imaginary cosmopolitanism, somewhat reframed for an audience focused on the development of independent media. I ended up urging the audience to invest in mapping how old and new media cover international news, to map interest in international news and to ask ourselves what the civic function of international media is. I had the good fortune of having Richard Sambrook, formerly the director of BBC’s World Service, and Mirjana Milosevic of the World Association of Newspapers as interlocutors. Our conversation ended up focusing on “the missing middle”, the large number of people who aren’t interested in international news and the possibility that international news might be emerging as a luxury product for the small number of people who feel a need for this information. It’s a good question, one that I think demands solutions beyond journalism, in education and civic engagement as well as in the news reporting sphere.

The second session of the day featured Steve Bratt, the CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation, who titled his talk, “From Whence Killer Apps?” He’s curious what technologies are so desirable that they’ll speed the adoption of the internet and related technologies in the 75% of the world not currently using these tools. The WWW Foundation, founded by Tim Berners-Lee with support from the Knight Foundation, is focused on stimulating development of the internet in emerging economies, which requires building tools that are killer apps for these communities.

Bratt nominates Twitter (citing the controversial example of the Iranian twitter revolution as an example), Ushahidi, M-Pesa and Open Street Maps as possible emerging killer apps. He references competitions taking place to build developing nation-specific applications, which have led to sites like search engine EssentialAfrica.com and Maduqa, a mobile-phone based marketplace. Exciting as these applications have been, their impact on low and middle income countries has been pretty small.

He references a recent trip to Burkina Faso where the WWW Foundation tried to learn about the local information environment, discovering the importance of the mobile phone and building alliances with local agricultural agents, who they see as critical information brokers for these communities. These emerging relationships are the first step towards a “web alliance for regreening Africa”.

Mobile phones, Bratt tells us, are a much bigger revolution than the web. If we look at graphs of ICT penetration worldwide, we’ll see that there’s a massive gap between mobile phone penetration and internet penetration, both of which are growing rapidly. It’s worth noting that mobile broadband is now outpacing fixed broadband. He suggests we take seriously interactive voice response systems, which work on all phones without data access or broadband subscriptions and help bridge barriers of language. (And there’s a brief shoutout to the semantic web, but Bratt also admits that the issues are hard to communicate to a non-technical audience.)

Bratt suggests that we need to take seriously barriers to the adoption of the internet. This means not just considering electricity and connectivity – we need to think about local content, technology gaps and research gaps. Without local content, there are few good reasons for users to come online. Tecnology barriers include obstacles that prevent people with disabilities, with challenges due to aging, or problems accessing the web due to language gaps. Research gaps refers to the ways in which we don’t understand what the web is or how it works, a field that’s emerging as “web science”.

In these conversations, the developing world is rarely represented. Meetings of the w3c consortium generally feature people from wealthy nations working through these issues. WWW Foundation is trying to focus on affordable connectivity, assistive technology and the integration of the web with other technologies, like community radio. Projects fit under three general headers:
- Web and society – finding ways to sponsor development of critical local content
- Web standards – advancing one web that works for all
- Web science – understanding the web and exploring new ideas
This work focuses on the areas of agriculture, open government and entrepreneurship and will begin with a focus on Africa.

Bratt suggests that “web science” will emerge as a field like cognitive science, inviting scholars from multiple disciplines to explore questions about the web’s evolution, its fragilities, causes and effects of change online, ways in which the web can lead towards transparency and accountability, and difficult questions like privacy and ownership of information.

One major project the Foundation will take on is a Global Web Index… “because what the world needs is another index,” he quips. This will track the number of people creating and consuming content, numbers of websites and applications, the volume of data, the use of open and safe web technologies, questions of social and economic values of the web, and the messy question of “web freedom”.

Around content creation, the Foundation will be building global guidelines, trainings and tools to enable content creation that focuses on people with low reading skills, people who communication in languages that are not well supported, people with little computer experience and with disabilities. The goal is to stimulate the growht of this content by the “creation of life-critical web projects that become shining examples worth copying
training and tools.”

Another focus is on opening government data in low and middle income countries. This means taking inspiration from projects like data.gov and data.gov.uk and figuring out how open data could come to pass in countries like Ghana and Chile, opening the raw material of data to the general public. And the Web Foundation also wants to focus on inspiring entrepreneurship, working with Ushahidi in Kenya with support from the World Bank’s Infodev program to sponsor startups and collaboration between innovators around the iHub in Nairobi.

Bratt closes with a great observation from Tim Berners-Lee: The web is not technology, the web is humanity connected by technology.

• How News Happens | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)
  PEJ analysis of journalism in Baltimore suggests that most stories have very little original reporting – 80% of stories were rehashes of existing reporting, often from the (rapidly shrinking) local newspaper
  (tags: blogs content future hyperlocal journalism local media newspapers pej socialmedia research baltimore reporting)
• "Smart editorial, smart readers, and smart ad solutions": Slate makes a …
  Slate discovers a large audience for long, in-depth features… and that writing these features is a joy of the journalists who get to produce them
  (tags: journalism digital future engagement longform media slate stats)
• "The news we get is McDonald's": Communications scholar Pablo …
  Recent work from Northwestern U professor Pablo Boczkowski makes the case that increasing the pace of the newsroom is tightly correlated with a pattern of homogenization, where competing newsrooms copy each other and cover the same stories. His analysis relies mostly on a close comparison of Clarin and La Nacion in Argentina, but he's got findings that suggest a similar pattern during US 2008 elections. Fascinating, dispiriting stuff
  (tags: journalism news online flock homogeneity argentina uspolitics newsroom ethnography)