• America's Great Passport Divide – Richard Florida – National – The Atlantic
  Richard Florida connects "the passport divide" in the US to a variety of key economic and political statistics, suggesting passport ownership is a proxy for a wide variety of societal divides in the US
  (tags: travel uspolitics globalism internationalism society tourism data sociology)

• Tahrir Documents
  Archive of documents from the Tahrir Square protests.
  (tags: egypt jan25 revolution history archive protest MENA)
• How Tarsnap uses Amazon Web Services
  Tarsnap uses private key encryption to backup data on Amazon's cloud while ensuring privacy. Very smart.
  (tags: amazon backup privacy encryption cloud)

There’s a new, must-watch online video, “The Three Big Pigs”, that uses the wonderfully addictive mobile game Angry Birds to comment on political change in the Middle East… and American involvement in that change. It was featured today on online gamer community Kotaku, and it’s just the sort of clever, funny video that I suspect will go viral.

The Kotaku story doesn’t mention the author of the piece, but it’s brilliant Russian designer Egor Zhgun (Егор Жгун). Zhgun has a long track record of using popular culture remix to address political issues. His LiveJournal site is loaded with remixed movie posters, book covers and other pop culture artifacts. Many of the remixes rely on knowledge of Russian politics that are above my head, while others are more international in scope, like this issue of Kosvopolitan. (If this doesn’t make sense, it may be useful to remember that American enthusiasm for an independent Kosovo wasn’t shared by the whole rest of the world, and particularly upset people in countries with strong ties to Serbia.)

There’s not much available online in English about Zhgun – I was very gratified to discover that Global Voices had run a through article on one of his most famous images: Zoich.

For the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the Russian Olympic committee has involved the general public in designing and choosing the mascots for the game. This process became more than a little political when people began pointing out the similarities between one of the mascots – a polar bear – and the mascot of the 1980 Olympics… and the logo of the ruling United Russia party. Russian president Dmitri Medvedev (whose surname includes the Russian word for “bear”, “medved”), threw his public support behind the bear against competitors like a snow leopard and a hare, and apparently swung the results of the election.

Zhgun decided to design his own mascot, Zoich, and participate in the contest. The name derives from reading the year “2014″ as a mix of Roman and Cyrillic characters and offering an approximate pronunciation. The creature itself is a reworking of the Hypnotoad from Futurama, as is the slogan. You can read this as Zhgun “ripping off” the Futurama character, or as remixing – given Zhgun’s track record of creative remix, and the emergence of Hyptotoad as a remixed internet meme, I think a more charitable reading is warranted.

Zoich was entered in the mascot contest, and quickly became a rallying point for the opposition, who saw the cute polar bear as a clear symbol of the ruling government. He wasn’t selected, but he is clearly visible on the front page of the web page featuring the official Sochi mascots (in a portrait hanging on the wall between the rabbit and snow leopard). Perhaps the contest organizers were happy that Zoich caught favor rather than some of Zhgun’s alternatives – in an interview with Zhgun on Lenta.ru, several other possible mascots make their appearance, including a reworking of Pedobear into a mascot.

There’s something very 2011 about a Russian video using a soundtrack from American cartoons and characters from a Finnish mobile phone game (based on an English fairytale) to satirize North African politics. (Whether Disney will choose to engage in some legal actions across national borders, as Zhgun is using audio from the 1932 short “Three Little Pigs” remains to be seen.)

Clearly, Angry Birds has become a cross-cultural touchstone, a piece of popular culture that you can assume a viewer has familiarity with no matter their national origin. Before seeing Zhgun’s video, my favorite Angry Birds “remix” came from Israeli television show Eretz Nehederet (“It’s a Wonderful Country”), which uses the game to satirize Israeli/Palestinian tensions and endless peace talks.

I’m excited to see the lulz crossing national borders, and happy to see Russian satire getting love from Internet users around the world. But it’s also very 2011 to see cool ideas spread with little credit to their originators. So enjoy Three Big Pigs, and spend a moment or two checking out the rest of Zhgun’s work – it would be exciting to see him get some love outside the Russian blogosphere.

• ART EXHIBITION – The World in One City – By Philippe Sibelly | Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith
  Around the world without leaving London – lovely project photographs Londoners from 202 countries, each holding a Polaroid of the previous person photographed, a chain linking them all together.
  (tags: london photography globalization art xenophilia olympics)
• Around The World in 80 Dishes
  Another clever exploration of the world through food – 80 recipes that cover 60+ countries
  (tags: food world travel cooking serendipity xenophilia)
• burgers here and there | making exotic flavors un-scary, one burger recipe at a time, one country at a time
  My new favorite example of a xenophile blog. Exploring the flavors of 192 UN member nations by cooking burgers influenced by each nation for her family, using easy-to-find ingredients. Great framework for exploration, and pretty impressive results so far (she's up to Azerbaijan as I post this…)
  (tags: food travel blog world xenophilia games exploration)
• A history of the world in 100 seconds
  Fascinating visualization of Wikipedia data, presenting a world map through geo- and chrono-tagged articles, demonstrating what parts of the world Wikipedia covers most thoroughly at different moments in history.
  (tags: history wikipedia visualization mashup data)
• Aalam Wassef on social media in Egypt revolution – storify.com
  Howard Rheingold interviews Aalam Wassef on the role social media played in Egypt's revolution, makes clear that the story starts in 2005, not 2011.
  (tags: twitter egypt interview socialmedia protest tunisia facebook)

2011 has been an exciting year for those of us who usually complain that US audiences don’t encounter enough international news. Since protests in Tunisia succeeded in ousting Ben Ali from power in Tunisia, the news cycle has been dominated with stories of revolution in the Arab world and, tragically, with the destruction caused by earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the drama of possible nuclear disaster as a result. International news very rarely is the dominant story in US media – when the fine folks at Project for Excellence in Journalism noted that the protests in Iran were one of the very few international stories that led a US news cycle, I analyzed a few years of their data and concluded that, aside from coverage of the Olympics, it was virtually the only non-US story in recent years to have led a US news cycle. This year, we’re seeing this trend reversed – interest in the Japan disasters was extremely high in US media, and in protests in Egypt and Libya – perhaps there’s been a shift in public attention, in media coverage, or both.

We (by which I mean the folks actually capable of making it run – Hal Roberts, David Larochelle, Zoe Fraade-Blanar) have been revamping the Media Cloud tool this past year, trying to make it more powerful for media watchers to understand what stories have been receiving mainstream and citizen media attention, and how to characterize that coverage. We’re in a closed beta test of the new tool until May, but will be rolling it out to the general public before all the snow is melted in my native Pittsfield.

The most obvious way Media Cloud helps us understand what’s being covered is via word clouds, visualizations of what terms appear most frequently in news stories or blog posts in a set of media sources. The cloud above is the words that appeared most often in a set of 25 mainstream media sources in a week that ended on March 21st. Our servers subscribe to all the RSS feeds offered on the websites of those 25 MSM sources, and we download the entire text of the stories posted on those sites several times a day. So our word clouds visualize the words most common in the full text of all those stories, minus common words we remove using a stoplist we’ve developed. This is a pretty international word cloud – Japan, Libya, Qaddafi are some of the largest words visible, and prominent terms include Fukushima, a term we’ve probably never seen in a word cloud this broad until the nuclear crisis story broke.

How different is this word cloud from a more typical, less international cloud? Well, here’s the 3/21 MSM cloud next to a cloud of the same sources from late October, 2010, when US media attention was focused on congressional races and not on revolution and natural disaster. While it’s helpful to compare the two side by side, it’s easier to see some differences when we superimpose one on another.

Terms in blue appeared more often in our set of MSM sources in March, while those in red appeared more often in October. Terms in purple were approximately equally prominent in both sets – many represent evergreen topics or terms, figures who are always in the news, like President Obama.

While this is helpful in showing how the foci of coverage changed between November and now, it’s less helpful in helping us understand the magnitude of that change. Just how different is the coverage we saw this past week from the coverage we saw in November? Was November 2010′s coverage more similar to June 2010 than it is to March 2011?

We can actually make a stab at answering this question quantitatively using a cool trick called “cosine similarity“. This is a technique computer scientists use to detect a type of similarity between documents. Basically, a computer program counts the appearances of words in a document (in this case, a week’s worth of media coverage by 25 outlets) and compares that frequency list to that of another document. If those documents are identical in word frequency – both mention Obama 23 times, Libya 5 times and basketball twice – they score a 1. If they’ve got no words in common, they score a zero.

(The actual math behind this is wonderfully cool, if slightly mind-bending. Imagine a set of documents with only two words in them – “Obama” and “NCAA”. In source A, Obama is mentioned 8 times, NCAA 2 times. Put a point on a graph at (8,2) – Obama’s our X axis, NCAA our Y axis, and draw a line that passes through 0,0 and 8,2 – that’s the vector that represents set A. In source B, Obama gets mentioned twice, NCAA 8 times – put the point at 2,8 and draw the vector for source B. The angle between vectors A and B is a measure of how similar the sets are, and taking the cosine of that angle is a simple way to scale the value to be between 0 and 1 for angles between 0 and 90 degrees. The trick, of course, is that documents contain words other than Obama and NCAA, and cosine similarity adds a new dimension to our graph for each new term. So the vectors we’re measuring when we compare all the words in 25 media sources over a week to another comparable week exist in 3000-dimensional space. Don’t bother imagining 3000-dimensional space – it will make your head hurt. Just imagine three dimensional space and think about two vectors that each emerge from 0,0,0 and each pass through an arbitrary point in positive x,y,z space – it’s easy enough to imagine measuring the angle between those two vectors. Then take it on faith that, mathematically, you can do the same thing in many-dimensional space.)

We’re tracking thousands of media sources with Media Cloud, and we’ve organized some into “media sets” for the sake of comparison and analysis. We’ve got a set of 25 “mainstream” sources that include some large US and British newspapers, some TV networks, and the Huffington Post. Another set of hand-chosen US political blogs includes three subsets, hand-coded (by Hal, over a very painful three days) into left, right and center collections. There’s a set of popular blogs, based on the 1000 most-trafficked blogs on Bloglines. These blogs cover topics much broader than just politics – many focus on technology, and a substantial subset cover topics like knitting, quilting and other crafts.

If cosine similarity is a useful way of comparing sources, we’d expect to see high similarity scores for sources that cover similar topics, and lower similarities for those focused on different subjects. And (fortunately) that’s what we see, comparing all sources in these collections for the week of 3/14 – 3/20/2011:

Highly similar collections are coded in red, highly dissimilar in blue, with orange and green as intermediate shades. We see very high similarity between centrist political blogs and political blogs as a whole (we’d expect to see lots of similarity here, since one collection is a subset of the other!), and more surprisingly, between mainstream media and centrist blogs, suggesting that the two sets use much the same language and talk about many of the same topics.

Collection comparisons that show some similarity include left and right political blogs to political blogs as a whole (again, to be expected as they are subsets), political blogs to mainstream media and mainstream media to popular blogs. Perhaps more surprising is the significant similarity between left and right political blogs – one explanation is that the left and right are often talking about the same topics, even if they’re trying to frame stories differently.

We see the least overlap between right-leaning blogs and mainstream media (perhaps consistent with a frequent rightwing complaint that media has a leftwing bias?) and between political blogs of all stripes and popular blogs. This last finding is reassuring – when we began building collections of popular blogs, we were surprised to discover how apolitical most were, and the cosine similarity test suggests that we might see this topical diversity in the lower similarity score.

This form of cross-comparison offers some intriguing directions for future research. We might compare each of the sources within our mainstream media set, for instance, and see what sources are most similar. This might suggest that one is derivative of the other… or that they’ve simply got similar interests and taste in language. Knowing that the New York Times and The Guardian have a high level of similarity, but the BBC is dissimilar to both (just a for instance – I haven’t calculated and don’t know this to be true) might offer instructions on how to focus our reading if we wanted as broad a diversity of stories as possible. Similarity between blogs and mainstream media might suggest clues for how the larger media ecosystem works – we might expect ideas to spread more often from mainstream sources to blogs (or vice versa) when we see similar coverage patterns.

The question raised at the beginning of this post – are we seeing an unusual focus on international news – suggests that we try another type of comparison – comparison over time. While the news cycle has shortened from weekly, to daily, to hourly, it still takes time for the “restless searchlight” to move from one part of the world to another – events like an earthquake or a rebellion tend to generate stories for days and weeks at a time, and even if other important events arise, it takes time for journalists to redeploy and cover other events. So we’d expect to see more similarity between last week’s news and this week’s than between this week’s and six months ago. And again, we do:

Cosine similarity (y-axis) versus weeks from 3/14, Mainstream Media collection

The graph above shows the similarity between the words used in the 3/14-3/20 coverage of our 25 mainstream media sources and collections 1-48 weeks earlier. (I didn’t test all sets, just the first three weeks, then monthly through six months, then another check to 48 weeks prior.) There’s a pretty distinctive pattern – current coverage is quite similar to last week’s coverage, and the similarity rapidly drops off, reaching what seems to be a steady level. (Mean cosine similarity in this set is 0.723, with a standard deviation of 0.06, so the “steady state” line we might draw at 0.68 is within one SD…) We see similar graphs for popular and political blogs.

Week to week comparisons of MSM data sets. Graph shows cosine similarity versus the start date for the earlier data set.

How similar is the news week to week? Walter Lippman famously observed, “The press is… like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision.” Just how restless is that searchlight?

Well, that depends on the week. I ran comparisons between successive weeks for 27 weeks on our mainstream media collection. The mean cosine similarity from one week to the next is 0.905, with a standard deviation of .061. The only weeks that fall outside the standard deviation are the past four weeks, which differ from one another much more sharply.

When data differs from the mean this sharply, it’s a wise idea to go check your findings again. We did, and we’re confident that we’re seeing something truly unusual happening in news coverage this year. The coverage for the past few weeks has been highly discontinuous, and also highly international. Media Cloud draws maps of media coverage based on mentions of nations. This is an imperfect way to measure coverage to some nations – it’s rare that “US”, “USA” or “America” appears in most US-media stories about national or regional issues, for instance – but we generally see significantly more mentions of the US than of any other nation. In the past two weeks, both “Libya” and “Japan” have been mentioned more than “US”, a situation that’s nearly unprecedented in our data set.

The pair of weeks where we see the biggest discontinuity in coverage – the lowest cosine similarity – is between the week from 2/28-3/6/11 and the week from 3/7/11-3/13/11. (See a comparison word cloud above) The catastrophic Japanese earthquake and tsunami occurred on March 11 and radically shifted coverage from protests in North Africa to recovery from the disaster. The other biggest discontinuity is between the week of 2/21-2/27/11 and the preceding week. There the shift may have to do with attention shifting from Egypt to the Libyan protests… but it’s harder to track the shift to a specific event like the Japanese events.

Personally, I find this discovery – that the agenda’s been shifting more sharply than at other points in our study – to be somewhat reassuring. About six weeks ago, I offered the thought that history appeared to be accelerating in 2011 – there is simply too much happening too quickly for most of us to process and comprehend. The graph above suggests that there may be some validity to that observation. What we’re paying attention to in terms of breaking news is changing much more quickly than it normally does.

It’s worth remembering that cosine similarity is comparing words used in articles, not their meaning. So the shift in focus from popular protests in Egypt to Libya will be very apparent using this metric (less Tahrir and Mubarak, more Ghaddafi and Benghazi), though it’s possible to consider the two stories as part of a larger narrative of public protest. On the other hand, a shift in coverage from Obama and republicans arguing over health care to arguing over deficits might register much less of a difference in cosine similarity, as many of the words involved in stories are going to be identical even with a change in subject of the stories.

There’s a valid and dismissive takeaway one might have to these results – we’ve just statistically proven that revolutions, catastrophic natural disasters and potential nuclear meltdowns are major news stories. Duh. But it’s a good sign that this method can detect huge shifts in media attention. Now we just have to see if it can detect much more subtle shifts.

If we are able to determine that more subtle shifts in cosine similarity really do correspond to relevant shifts in media focus, we might have a useful statistical technique to measure the relative tranquility of the overall media environment, a quantitative definition of the “slow news week”. That would be a useful data point for advocates looking to call attention to a cause – don’t launch a new campaign at a moment of turmoil as you’ll get ignored – or for advertisers promoting a new product. And it might be a helpful tool for those of us trying to understand broader dynamics of the media ecosystem. Is there a natural length of attention to major stories like the Japanese earthquakes or protests in Libya? Do we need additional developments to keep a story in the news beyond that initial period of interest? Do journalists begin looking for “the next thing” at regular intervals, or are they reacting to external factors – what actually happens in the world? I don’t know that we’ll discover satisfying answers to these questions, but it’s exciting to have a new tool we can try.

Martin Feuz, Matthew Fuller and Felix Stadler have a very clever paper in a recent edition of First Monday, titled “Personal Web searching in the age of semantic capitalism: Diagnosing the mechanisms of personalization.” In their study, they create three artificial search profiles on Google based on the topics of interest to three different philosophers (Foucault, Nietzsche and Kant, using terms from the indices of their books) and compare the results these personalized profiles receive to the results an “anonymous” profile – i.e., one without Google’s Web History service turned on – receives.

They see a very high degree of personalization – personalized search results appear in 50% of search queries for some of their profiles – and in the intensity of personalization – in some cases, 64% of results are different in content or rank from an anonymous profile. While there’s apparently lots of personalization going on, and personalized results emerge early in the training process, the authors don’t see the search algorithms reaching deep into the “long tail” of content. When personalized results differ from anonymous search results, 37% of the novel results can be found on the second page of anonymous results, while only 7% of novel results are found between results 100 – 1000 and 13% beyond result 1000. Finally, they are able to demonstrate that personalization is probably not based solely on the content an individual has searched for in the past – they see ample evidence that content on social networking is being heavily personalized for Nietzsche based only on his searches for power, morality and will, for instance.

That last example gives a bit of the flavor for the paper – it’s both a serious and methodologically defensible piece of research as well as a clever prank, demonstrating that Google will try to assign Immanuel Kant to a psycho/demographic group and target content based on those assumptions. This playful tone is accompanied by a willful naïvety that’s slightly frustrating – they start by taking Google’s descriptions of the effects of personalization at face value then offer the surprise that the hypotheses they derive from Google’s PR are invalidated. It’s not especially surprising for the reader, however, to discover that Google’s personalization is at least as much about helping advertisers target audiences as it is about helping users find the best possible content. It’s not a surprise to the authors, either – the term “semantic capitalism“, credited to Cristophe Bruno, implies that we’ve entered a world where words have market prices, with potentially different values to advertisers as to audiences.

While I find the levels of personalization the authors detect to be fascinating, I wonder whether their experiment correctly isolates the factors involved with personalization. Eli Pariser, in his talk last year at PDF and, presumably in his forthcoming book on the power and dangers of personalization, refers to 57 factors that allow Google to personalize results for users who are not using Web History (the “anonymous” users in this experiment.) The authors control for a key variable, conducting all searches from IP addresses in Central London. It’s unclear, though, whether Google is making other extrapolations – perhaps users who execute lots of searches at 3pm are more likely to be middle-aged businessmen than teenage girls, and results are targeted as a result? I’d be very interested to see the authors check to see if their anonymous search results are identical or nearly so – if not, there may be a great deal more personalization going on then they are accounting for outside of the experiment’s parameters.

I was struck by the apparent discontinuities in how often personalized search results appeared for the three different profiles. In one training session, there’s a sharp spike in personalization between sessions, a test of results where personalization appears three times as often as in other sessions. In another, there are two, smaller spikes, and in the third, a three-session long spike. With no easy way to explain what’s causing these spikes, it’s possible to speculate that Google’s algorithms for personalization are not just opaque and complex, but adaptive and changing. While the authors are experimenting with Google, it’s reasonable to assume that Google is experimenting with them, changing levels of personalization to see whether Google is able to achieve its desired result: clicks on ads.

I found the authors’ findings about the long tail particularly fascinating, though I’d frame them slightly differently than they do. They see the fact that most personalized results (results that differ between a query from a profiled and an anonymous user) that appear in the top 10 come from the top 100 results delivered to anonymous users as evidence that Google’s personalization is pretty shallow. I see the finding that 13% of personalized results in the top 10 come from outside of the top 1000 as downright remarkable – I’d thought that Google’s algorithm, both in terms of page rank and term relevancy, would resist such large reshufflings of the deck, bringing up pages considered irrelevant for an “anonymous” user to prominence for a profiled user. I see that finding as quite encouraging – even buried deep in the slag heap of low pagerank and low relevancy, personalization might occasionally bring a long-tail web page to the surface.

Of course, there’s another explanation: again, Google’s testing the experimenters as they’re testing the system. Google’s long said that they present different results to users as a way of testing result relevance – if a long-tail page appears in results and is widely clicked, perhaps it’s time to weight it more heavily or to tweak the algorithms that buried it in the first place.

This is the core problem of studying a system like Google. As the authors acknowledge, “How can we study a distributed machinery that is both wilfully opaque and highly dynamic? One which reacts to being studied and takes active steps to prevent such studies from being conducted on the automated, large-scale level required?” That second question is a reference to a methodological challenge the authors had – it’s deeply atypical behavior to click on every possible results page for a search query, which the authors needed to do, and Google periodically blocked their IPs for suspicion that they were bots attempting to scrape or game the search engine.

Google is not willfully opaque just out of spite or a desire to protect its secrets from Microsoft or other search engine builders. The sort of work their authors are conducting is exactly the sort of work search engine “optimizers” do by attempting to help their clients achieve a higher ranking in Google’s results. Were Google’s methods of personalization easy to understand, we would expect SEOfolk to take advantage of their newfound knowledge, as we’d expect them to use any knowledge about Google’s ranking algorithms. The more transparent those algorithms are, generally speaking, the more likely they are to be gamed, and the more gaming occurs, the less useful Google is for most users.

I wonder if there’s a provocative hypothesis the authors haven’t considered in analyzing the behaviors they saw – Google offers different results with a high frequency, in part because they’re trying to obfuscate their algorithms. The faster you poll the engine, the more variability you get, making it harder to profile the engine’s behavior. We can discard this hypothesis if the authors checked results of their anonymous searches against one another and got highly similar results – if not, then it’s possible that some of the hidden variables Eli Pariser talks about are in play… or that there’s an inherent amount of noise in the system, either for purposes of obfuscation or for allowing Google to try A/B tests with live users.

Researchers want to understand how Google works because it’s probably the most important node (at least at the moment) in our online information ecosystem. Whether we’re interested in driving attention or revenue, what Google points us towards becomes more powerful. But the better we understand Google, the more likely we are to break it. Security through obscurity is a dreadful strategy, but I’m hard-pressed to offer a better answer to Google for how they can prevent their engine from being gamed.

Deep in Feuz, Fuller and Stadler’s paper is the sense that there’s something unheimlich about the idea that something as important an influencer as Google being as mercurial as it is. Personalization is disturbing to the extent to which it separates us from the real, true, stable search results, the ur-results Google is withholding from us in the hopes of selling us ads for effectively… but even more disturbing is the idea that there’s no solid ground, no single set of best results Google could deliver, even if it wanted to.

I’m giving a talk this week to a group focused on telecoms in Africa, so I’ve been catching up on my African telco statistics. In the process, I stumbled on Online Africa, a really extraordinary collection of data sets about connectivity, social media and the internet in Africa.

The data’s incredibly well sourced, and in some cases, the site’s administrator has done some interesting pre-analysis. Take, for instance, this graph:

Data comes from Afrigator, a popular aggregator of African blogs, and helps give a sense for why some countries (Kenya, Ghana, Namibia, Nigeria) are better represented on sites like Global Voices than others. In particular, it’s helping me understand why we’ve had such a hard time reporting on current events in Gabon, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso. (In fairness, Afrigator, is probably not the best place to find Francophone blogs, as an English language site. But in general, we know of many more blogs in Anglophone nations than Francophone ones…)

I’m also utterly fascinated by this graph:

It’s a visualization of round-trip ping times between a test server and servers around the world. Basically, it’s a way of testing actual speed, rather than promised speed, of internet connectivity in different corners of the world… and it’s a reminder that there are many countries (at least when this data was generated in 2009) that are connected primarily by satellite, where packets take more than half a second to make the round trip.

But the data set I’m most enjoying is this one: the number of Facebook Friends various African leaders can claim. Some leaders have official pages, some private, personal pages. A large number simply have fan pages, put together by a community of supporters. Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan leads the pack – by a lot – with 341,759 friends in December 2010. He’s embraced Facebook rather aggressively, going as far as to announce his candidacy for the presidency on the site, probably to preempt the announcement of a rival.

A close look at African leaders with lots of Facebook friends might offer a caution for Jonathan. Here are the top leaders, in terms of followers, as of December 2010″

341,759 Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria
232,424 Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia
61,510 Mwai Kibaki, Kenya
59,744 King Mohamed VI, Morocco
57,072 Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe (Prime Minister to Robert Mugabe)
21,306 Jakaya Kikwete, Tanzania
15,723 Hosni Mubarak, Egypt
15,377 Laurent Gbagbo, Ivory Coast
14,714 Jacob Zuma, South Africa
12,658 Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Algeria

In that top ten, we’ve got two leaders who’ve been forced out of power (Ben Ali, Mubarak), one struggling to retain power after losing an election (Gbagbo), one facing protests like the ones that toppled his neighbor (Bouteflika) and one in danger of arrest from opponents within his coalition government (Tsvangirai.) In other words, there doesn’t seem to be a strong correlation between Facebook friends and staying power of a regime.

Very grateful that Online Africa is collecting this data, and hope to meet the person(s) behind the project some time soon.

• Updated: African leaders on Facebook (December 2010) oAfrica: Tracking ICT Progress
  A list of African leaders who are popular on Facebook. Odd correlation between leaders who've been forced out and Facebook popularity
  (tags: africa facebook data statistics)
• Data & Numbers oAfrica: Tracking ICT Progress
  Really phenomenal collection of Africa internet data – penetration, usage, cost, etc., including some wacky stuff like leaders on Facebook, blogs per capita 
  (tags: africa internet data statistics ict4d)

• The Like Log Study – Yury Lifshits – Yahoo! Labs
  Yury Lifshits study on what stories got "liked" on top 45 news sites. For me, methodology at least as interesting as results…
  (tags: facebook socialmedia statistics news yahoo journalism data)

PJ Crowley is the U.S. Department of State Spokesman and Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs. In other words, as he explains to the audience at “MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, where he stopped by on March 10th for an “informal conversation”, he’s a representative of “the old model of media, the one where I stand in front of a podium and answer questions from around the world.” Crowley, a veteran of the Clinton administration, where he advised the president on national security issues, is an enthusiastic fan of the idea that new media is transforming how the US government communicates, and is wrestling with questions of how to communicate to people in countries like Libya, armed with cellphones but far removed from the media channels the State Department has traditionally tried to use.

Crowley explains that the primary emphasis is his job is communicating with the American people, as distinguished from communicating American policy to international audiences. That distinction was put in place via the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibited the US government from propagandizing the American people. The state department’s Bureau of International Information Programs is responsible for communications to the rest of the world… but Crowley acknowledges that this separation is increasingly irrelevant in a digital age. Sure, State.gov exists for a US audience, warning us that we should never go to North Korea under any circumstances (or we may need to dispatch a former President to rescue you, he quips), but that warning is now visible to anyone online, inside or outside the US, as is America.gov, a global-facing State department website. Controlling the flow of information to a specific audience is no longer possible in a digital age, Crowley explains: “Information flows person to person.”

The changes brought about by new media can be deeply unfamiliar to seasoned diplomats – there’s a much broader audience for what State has to say than in past ages. Crowley explains that the US has been trying to figure out how to deal diplomatically with Libya since Libya’s ambassador to the US has defected. The state department received a fax from Libya stating that the ambassador no longer represented the nation, but no formal note from the ministry of foreign affairs has been received. Under the obligations of the Vienna Convention, the US State department needs to contact the Libyan foreign ministry, but they haven’t been able to get them to answer the phone. Crowley explained this to the press on Thursday and by Friday, had a call from the Libyan foreign minister saying, “I hear you were trying to reach me?” New media and broadcast channels end up becoming diplomatic channels. This can get very awkward. Commenting on a Saudi ruling that public protest contravenes sharia law, Crowley expressed support for Saudi citizens to organize and present grievances to a government… which resulted in the Saudi deputy foreign minister contacting the Secretary as saying, “I guess your spokesman is now an expert on sharia law?”

When he took the job in the State Department, Crowley’s daughter asked him, “Will you tweet?” to which he responded, “Will I what?” But he’s taken to the practice in a serious way. “Two years and 23,000 followers later, I’m only 75,000 followers behind Castro. I’m even further behind Lady Gaga, but the game goes on.” Roughly 15,000 of those followers are in the Middle East, especially in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. This new audience would clearly like him to be closely focused on issues in their part of the world. When Crowley tweeted about attacks on US environmental policy by Republicans, a Libyan reader responded, “We admire your environmental consciousness, but they’re killing us here in Tripoli.”

In explaining his reasons for embracing new media, Crowley describes himself as a disciple of Alec Ross, Secretary Clinton’s special advisor for technology. “We do know there’s power in the availability of information” to people in closed societies, he explains. As such, Crowley’s particularly interested in the influence of technology on countries like China, which aggressively filter the internet. “I posted something the other day to tweak China – Our ambassador is leaving, but China has made him disappear,” a reference to the fact that the US ambassador’s name is blocked from appearing on Chinese webpages. Confronted with web filtering, Crowley believes the State department needs to become a powerful advocate for the open availability of information to empower people.

The State Department is changing how it communicates, he explains, not just from Washington, but through our diplomatic posts. ”
State is a hidebound bureaucracy,” he notes, and it’s not easy convincing staid diplomats that their ability to communicate through new technology is also a requirement to communicate directly with populations, not just with counterparts in governments. State is starting this process, but it will Starting the process, but culturally, it will take a decade or more to convince diplomats to use these tools to greatest possible effect.

A lively dialog with the C4 crew ensued. (I’m new, so I don’t know the names of all my colleagues – apologies that some questions aren’t attached to the questioner.

?: A recent article in a Chinese newspaper accuses the US of neocolonialism through control of information, suggesting that American influence over services like Google represents a new form of political control. How does the State department respond to this sort of accusation?

PJC: We’re currently talking about obtaining a UN security council resolution to permit a no-fly zone over Libya, and we know that China’s vote will the hardest one to get. By policy and by culture, China tends to be strongly opposed to external interventions in internal challenges. That question about information policy seems very consistent with that cultural stance in opposition to external influence.

Chris Csikzentmihalyi: A recent article in the London Review of Books talked about former State Department technology specialists Jared Cohen and Katie Stanton making moves from government service into working for new media companies (Google and Twitter, respectively.) Is there a new back door from the State Department into the new media industry?

PJC: The Gates Foundation is transforming the world of development assistance, a space where there used to be a public monopoly on those services. It’s not a bad thing that we’re seeing some of these government functions move into partnerships with private industry, and the relationship between State and Silicon Valley is very important. Jared Cohen was the guy who called up Twitter and asked them to reschedule their maintenance window as the tool was being used by Iranian protesters. It’s very helpful that we have someone who can jump the wall between State and private industry and interpret our concerns to the business world.

Csik: So, no caveats then? No concerns about conflicts of interest?

PJC: Our policy to to promote technology useful for access to information. Open information is already a threat to certain governments – they don’t need a Google to make them aware of the risk of open access to information to their citizens. As for the question about going back and forth between government and the private sector, I ask students to consider a lifetime of doing good by moving between the public and private sectors.

Ian Condry: You referenced the hidebound culture of state – what has to change? In the old model of communication, as you describe it, there was a website and an assumption that people will find it. In the new model, there’s information and we bring it to people. Isn’t that still the old model – the idea that there’s information and it needs spreading? Wouldn’t a new model center on relationships of trust, building communities of interest? Aren’t we seeing something new going on in the communities that took over Tahrir Square?

PJC: In Tahrir, we saw a Google executive, Wael Ghonim, emerge as a major figure in transforming Egyptian society. In Libya, we’re trying to figure out who’s emerging as people we can talk to and work with. We know a few of the players, but we don’t know if they’re the right players. “I have to be careful how I say this – we do pay attention to what’s going on in social media, learning how to interpret it, and how to compare it to other sources of intelligence.” The CIA’s Open Source Center used to specialize in reading newspapers from around the globe (btw, see World News Connection to look at what that model looks like) – now it tracks how tweets move around the world.

Chris Peterson: How have states and public policy practitioners responded to the idea that you can get information from the ground, from lots of people? How does this shift change how they operate?

PJC: Judith McHale (undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs) showed me a map (probably this one) of social networks talking about Egypt – it’s a vast universe and I’m a tiny spot three galaxies from the center. I suspect Langley is greatly advancing in learning how to monitor these universes. “In a white world” – i.e., outside the intelligence community, in the world of diplomacy – we’re learning how to engage with the influencers in these networks in a transparent, open way.

? (Jim Paradis, perhaps): How do you structure your information groups? How do you stay abreast of what’s happening technologically? And what sort of assistance do you expect from the universities?

PJC: I primarily monitor conventional media, and get feedback day to day about whether my messages have been well received. This gives me a limited picture and it’s very labor intensive. And it certainly doesn’t always tell me what’s next, or what should be done. But the most important thing I do every day is read the New York Times – it’s the national paper of record. If Bill Keller decides to print something, that has meaning and impact. Judith McHale comes from Discovery Communication (she’s the former CEO of the company behind the Discovery Channel) – she’s experienced in looking for data and trends about what people think. While it’s important to know what people think, it doesn’t always tell us what to do. We know the US is down to a 5% popularity rating, but we don’t know what to do to reverse that trend.

?: All organizations have forms of institutional resistance. How is that resistance manifesting within the State Department?

PJC: We were receiving explicit demands from protesters in Tahrir – get off the fence and support us! How do we balance that impetus with a thirty year relationship with a leader, who’s had strong positives and negatives. The force of popular protest toppled a brittle regime – we had to be open to possibilities in either direction. Knowing and having understanding of what the group in Tahrir represents and having some insight into the pressures that created on the government we had relations with informed our policies. In more restrictive nations, we’ve got the additional challenge that engaging with the opposition tends to impact the formal dialog. We’re inherently a conservative organization – we tend to side with what we know rather than with uncertainty. But I think you can see some of the future of engagement by watching the Secretary, one of the most famous women on earth. She uses that celebrity to engage a broad cross-section of people in the countries she visits. We’re trying to take that model and bring it to scale.

Charlie deTar: There’s an elephant in the room during this discussion: Wikileaks. The US government is torturing a whistleblower in prison right now. How do we resolve a conversation about the future of new media in diplomacy with the government’s actions regarding Wikileaks?

PJC: “I spent 26 years in the air force. What is happening to Manning is ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid, and I don’t know why the DoD is doing it. Nevertheless, Manning is in the right place.” There are leaks everywhere in Washington – it’s a town that can’t keep a secret. But the scale is different. It was a colossal failure by the DoD to allow this mass of documents to be transported outside the network. Historically, someone has picked up a file of papers and passed it around – the information exposed is on one country or one subject. But this is a scale we’ve never seen before. If Julian Assange is right and we’re in an era where there are no secrets, do we expect that people will release Google’s search engine algorithms? The formula for Coca Cola? Some things are best kept secret. If we’re negotiating between the Israelis and the Palestinians, there will be compromises that are hard for each side to sell to their people – there’s a need for secrets.

Chris Csikzentmihayli – Is there a need for whistleblowers?

PJC: From a State Department perspective, we’re not really embarrassed by what came out. A British colleague observed that his opinion of US diplomacy went up as a result of reading the cables. But it’s an embarrassment and a risk for people who’ve spoken to us. We’ve moved a small number – and I don’t want to exaggerate, it’s a small number – of people from countries where we thought they could be jailed or killed. If you have a cable from Beijing with a date, time and name, even if the name is redacted, we assume the Chinese government can identify the person who spoke to us based on following people who come into our embassy. We’re likely to have to move a few ambassadors because governments will no longer work with them. It’s not clear to me what’s the societal benefit of this release of data – the New York Times now has a searchable database where people can see how many cables mentioned Boeing. Should it be a surprise that the US State Department is promoting an American company abroad? That’s what we do.

Jing Wang: As new media technology becomes more important, how does it affect human rights policy? Is it State’s perception that information access is a basic human right? If so, isn’t that a significant change in how we think through human rights?

PJC: It’s useful to refer to Secretary Clinton’s two speeches on internet freedom. We do see the internet through a human rights frame. There’s an interesting debate over “freedom to connect”, a phrase used in both speeches. It’s one thing to say that people should have access to a free flow of information, and we acknowledge that technology is critical in having access to this information. Whether or not we have a right of access to that technology is a debate that’s still undergoing.

Jing Wang: Is that debate confined within the US, or is it including the rest of the world?

PJC: That’s a very good question. You can think of it in terms of our national industrial policy – i.e., do we emphasize access to high speed internet within the US. But we understand that authoritarian regimes sometimes intrude and prevent access. Is it about access to information or to the technology that can help you reach that information? No one within State disputes the right and need for access to the free flow of information.

? Do you write your own tweets?
PJC: Yes, I do. And while it’s often hard to translate policy into 140 characters, I sometimes realize they’ve got more impact than I might have though. Mubarak ordered a cabinet shift in response to protest, but hadn’t yet left office. I tweeted something like “President Mubarak can’t just reshuffle the deck – he has to take action to meet the needs of his people.” That tweet might have had greater impact than high level officials thought was prudent – it certainly was a tweet heard round the world.

my question: Is it possible that State’s enthusiastic embrace of new media might lead towards tools like Facebook and Twitter being viewed with increasing suspicion from governments that are on the fence about blocking them? Could the Internet Freedom agenda have the unintended consequence of making it harder for citizens around the world to access these tools?

PJC: I’m confident about the dispersal of technology despite the best efforts of authoritarian regimes. In North Korea, they’ve done everything within their power to prevent the advance of technology – they distribute radios that can only be tuned into certain frequencies. But gradually, cellphones are getting smuggled in. Information can even leak in via official channels. When South Korea had some sort of industrial disaster, newspapers in North Korea prominently featured the destruction. But citizens were looking at the buildings in the background, which helped indicate just how much more advanced the standards of living are in South Korea. Even with North Korea’s level of xenophobia, citizens are getting access to information. They’re not yet acting on this information – that might take 10 to 15 years. But the technology cannot be completely controlled. It will eventually create a fissure that will force North Korea to change. It doesn’t dictate how the state will change – it might fragment into warlordism, which would be very scary as the country has nuclear weapons. But if knowledge can penetrate the last Stalinist regime on earth, if it can threaten the ability of the Kim family to control and dominate its population, the days for that regime are numbered and technology can contribute to that regime’s downfall.