The 2010 FIFA World Cup starts on Friday, which means that football fans across the world have a difficult task this week: determining who to support.

At first glance, this doesn’t seem to be a difficult task – contrarians aside, we support our national sides. But that’s not much help if your nation didn’t qualify… unless, like Ireland, you didn’t qualify in a way that gives you a team to root against throughout the tournament. And even if you have ties to one or more nations who’ll be competing, there are dozens of qualifying matches where you’ve got no direct rooting interest. Assuming you’re neither South African or Mexican, who do you pull for in the opener Friday afternoon?

A Wikipedia map of countries competing in the 2010 Cup. Countries in green will be competing. Countries in red failed to qualify. Laos and the Philippines, in purple, are members of FIFA, but did not compete in this year’s qualifiers. And Western Sahara and Greenland (along with smaller states like San Marino and the Vatican City) aren’t FIFA members.

Poking around on various football discussion boards and on friends’ blogs, I’ve seen several strategies proposed.

Strategic support If the goal of the World Cup is for your national team, – or the team you’re most passionate about – to win, the key is for the rest of the most talented nations to lose. If I’m supporting Ghana (and I am, as well as the US), I’m not just pulling for Ghana to get past Serbia and Australia, I’m supporting Algeria to get through in group C rather than England, in the hopes that I get an easier round of 16 match. Carry this method to its logical extent and you find yourself pulling for New Zealand and North Korea in the hopes for a cakewalk of a final. Not necessarily the prettiest of methods.

Support through spite An excellent strategy for supporters of nations who really should have made it into the tournament. I suspect many Irish fans will support any team playing France in any match… which is likely to give them someone to support through at least the quarterfinals. You can combine this method with strategic support and support teams most likely to defeat the team you most loathe… Still, is it really satisfying to support Germany in the hopes that they’ll smash the hated French/Italians/pick your nemesis?

Non-FIFA support If you support a Champions League club, there’s a good chance you can coast through the tournament supporting national teams that feature your club players. As such, many Barça fans are supporting Spain (a surprise to me, given Catalan nationalism) and Argentina, as a chance to support the sublime Messi. This strategy has obvious flaws, though, when players on your club side are on both sides of a WC match.

Aesthetic considerations Certain teams are just more fun to watch than others. Watching Dutch total football is more enjoyable, in my opinion, than Italian total gridlock. Add in the joy of watching certain players perform and you can add Argentina and Cameroon to aesthetically pleasing teams like Brazil and Spain. The risk of this method? Becoming one of those smug football fans who says, “Oh, I don’t care who wins – I just want to see the most beautiful game possible.” Yeah, right. The most beautiful game is the one in which the team I support unexpectedly trounces an aesthetically superior team.

Outside considerations I suspect this is the method most of us use to decide who to support in matches like Paraguay/Slovakia – are there outside associations with either nation that lead to a rooting interest? If you can’t come up with any associations with either Paraguay or Slovakia, MetroUK has a charming “neutrals” guide that offers largely irrelevant reasons you can use to support or oppose any of the 32 teams. And if you’re an NFL football fan with no connections to global football, there are at least two guides helpfully aligning World Cup teams with NFL teams. Of course, if you’re rooting for South Korea because some blogger thinks their speed and precision parallel the Green Bay Packers, you’ve probably got other problems.

Algorithmic support I’ve always admired systematic thinkers, so I have a certain respect for anyone who’s able to put together a set of rules that allow them to make a decision for who to support in any match. Next Left offers a simple version of an algorithmic strategy – support the teams whose nations have democratic left governments – but realizes that this leads to first round conflicts like Brazil versus Portugal. More sophisticated algorithms have multiple tiers – my friend Alaa once outlined a strategy that involved supporting his native Egypt, then Arab nations, then African nations, then supporting colonies over the colonizers. (Indeed, I’m writing this post in part in the hopes that I can provoke him to outline his full algorithm.)

As for me, I’m an algorithmic sort of guy, with flashes of nationalism and aesthetic concerns. So my football strategy looks something like this:

- Sub-Saharan African teams get my support, especially Ghana, recognizing that it’s looking like a tough tournament for the African sides.
- Developing world over developed.
- Pretty football over ugly – Argentina, Spain, Brazil, Netherlands over Italy, Germany, England.
- Places I’ve been to over those I’ve never visited, with quality of national cuisine as a tiebreaker.
- Bonus points for truly unlikely teams, including NZ and North Korea.
- I’ll root for the US until they face Ghana. At that point, I’ll probably support Ghana, if only so there’s some conflict when watching with US friends.

In other words, I see your arbitrary and raise you ludicrous and illogical. And yes, I’ll be supporting South Africa over Mexico, despite my love for bistec encebollada and distaste for sadza.

If you’re inclined, I’d love to hear how you’re strategizing about who to support, especially if you’d blogged about your personal algorithms. I’m hoping to write a piece for Global Voices on this strategy, so I’m especially interested if you’ve already posted something I can link to…

Nigerian-American blogger/photographer/author Teju Cole was responsible for one of my favorite portraits of the 2006 World Cup – he watched each match, selecting a different restaurant or bar in New York City or New Jersey affiliated with one of the competing sides. This year, he’s repeating the experiment along with blogger Siddhartha Mitter. If you’ve read Cole’s Every Day is For the Thief, you know the wit, insight and poetry you’re in for. I look forward to seeing “the Mundial” through his eyes, and to learning from him where I can find Paraguayan food in the greater New York area.

Micah Sifry, one of the founders of the Personal Democracy Forum conference, asked me to focus my speech at his conference on some of the recent writing I’ve been doing on digital activism and theories of change. Given that provocation, I wrote out a talk that would take me roughly an hour to deliver. And given that I’ve got 7-10 minutes on stage on June 3rd at the end of a long and action-packed day, it seemed wise to post the whole talk here for anyone interested after hearing my abbreviated version.

As it turns out, I just talked to Micah, and this isn’t the talk he was hoping I would give. So I’ll come up with something. In the meantime, here’s this.

Normally, my role at conferences about democracy and digital innovation is to share hopeful news and success stories from sub-Saharan Africa. Fortunately, at PdF, we’ve got Ory Okolloh, one of the pioneers of social media for transparency on the continent and around the world, so I can let her give you the good news and I, for a change, can tell a depressing African story.

Equatorial Guinea probably isn’t the most corrupt nation in the world… though it’s in the bottom 10. It doesn’t have the worst human rights record… though the record is atrocious. It’s not the worst place in the world to be born, though it’s in the bottom twenty, and it’s got the remarkable distinction of having worsening infant mortality despite rapidly rising GDP per capita. Right now, the “average” Equatorial Guinean is wealthier than the average Dane, but a Equoguinean child is more likely to die in infancy than a Haitian child.

Where Equatorial Guinea leads the world is in absurdity. The country’s leader, Teodoro Obiang Mbasogo deposed his uncle in 1979 and has been “elected” with 97% and 95% of the vote in the most recent polls… probably because the opposition politicians who aren’t in prison are in exile in Spain. The main threat to Obiang’s rule isn’t being voted out – it’s a coup… and the country fends off a coup every couple of years, including one planned by British and South African mercenaries, using Zimbabwean guns, and funded in part by Margaret Thatcher’s son. And if that sounds like something out of a spy novel, it was – Frederick Forsyth’s “Dogs of War” was written about a coup in Equatorial Guinea and the attempted coups in 1973 and 2004 both closely followed the plans that Forsyth outlined.

The guy who’ll probably end up leading Equatorial Guinea is Obiang’s son, Teodoro Nguema Obiang – aka Teodorín – who works as the country’s agriculture and forestry minister. This post pays $5,000 a month – not a bad salary, but probably not enough to purchase this $35 million estate in Malibu (by some accounts, the most expensive property in that extraordinarily expensive town) or the $30 million Gulfstream jet that ferries him there.

The most absurd thing isn’t the 200 foot yacht that Teodorín is building – complete with on board shark tank – or that his girlfriend, the rapper Eve, broke up with him over rumors that his father is a cannibal… rumors that Teodoro Senior spreads to scare his political rivals. No, the absurd thing is that Equatorial Guinea is a valued ally of the United States.

It wasn’t always this way. In the early 1990s, the Clinton administration began questioning the wisdom of maintaining diplomatic relations with one of the world’s greatest kleptocracies. In 1996, the US closed its embassy. But in the wake of 9/11, it made sense for the US to court one of Africa’s largest oil producers… and in 2006, the US reopened an embassy in Malabo, and Condoleeza Rice declared Obiang “a good friend“.

And lest you think things are different in the Obama administration, let me point out that the couple posing with the President and First Lady are President and First Lady Obiang.

At this point in the talk, you’re likely having one of two reactions. Either you’re deep into MEGO – My Eyes Glaze Over – territory, and glancing at your Blackberry, or you’re ready to start an “Arrest Teodorín Obiang” Facebook group. And actually, those two reactions are what I want to talk about, not the intricacies of Equoguinean politics… though any of you who know me know that I’ll gladly do that as well.

The only reason I know these sordid details about the Obiang family is that the good folks at Global Witness, an NGO focused on exposing corruption and conflict around natural resources, have been churning out piles of research on Equatorial Guinea as part of a campaign to get the US government to put the Obiangs on the list of corrupt government officials who are prevented from traveling to the US, and to name and shame the banks, lawyers and PR firms that allow Equatorial Guinea’s rulers to move money into the US.

Global Witness’s campaign is a classic, old-fashioned advocacy through information campaign. With the help of journalist Ken Silverstein, they compiled a 32-page report – downloadable from their site as a PDF – using information they found by tracing bank accounts and by mining other US goverment reports, including documents from the Justice Department which speculate that the younger Obiang’s assets have primarily been siphoned off from EG public funds. Silverstein wrote pieces in Harpers, the New York Times wrote an article based on the report, and Senator Carl Levin called hearings on corrupt foreign officials, producing a 330-page bipartisan report.

Perhaps that report will lead towards the State Department revoking Teodorín’s visa and to him selling his mansion to someone less corrupt. And perhaps his need to party somewhere other than the Playboy Mansion will lead, in the long run, to democratic elections in EG. In the meantime, there have been small, but symbolic victories, like persuading UNESCO to end a prize for research in the Life Sciences named for Obiang senior.

I picked Global Witness as an example of a traditional advocacy campaign for a couple of reasons. They’re as good as it gets in the field of research-driven advocacy. They’re focused on good, important problems. And they have a strong theory of change.

“Theory of change” is a term I never heard until I started working for foundations. One of the main problems you face working at a foundation is choosing between rival good ideas. You’ve got a pot of money, and nice, well-meaning people come to you with cool, clever ideas for changing the world. It’s worth unpacking the logic behind any project you would consider funding. What do we want to accomplish, in the long run, and how would this project advance those goals?

Global Witness offers a straightforward theory – change is made by government policymakers, who can influence other governments through trade and immigration policy. You influence the targeted policymakers through high-prestige media, and you gain the interest of those media outlets by offering them novel information.

You may have noticed that there’s not much room for participation in Global Witness’s theory of change. If you read the New York Times story on Teodorín’s Malibu mansion, it’s not especially clear what you, personally, could or should do. Visit their website, and while there’s an opportunity for you to give and support Global Witness’s work, there’s no opportunity to sign a petition, write a letter to your congressman, post a tweet or a Facebook update. This might indicate that Global Witness is somehow “behind the times”, doesn’t “get” the web2.0 revolution. Or it might indicate that they don’t see a great value in organizing a popular online movement around their issues, and believe that change comes from people in power, not from ordinary citizens.

This contrasts pretty sharply with how a lot of people in this room likely think about organizing. We’re intrigued by the idea that our hundreds or thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends could be mobilized and help us accomplish the changes we want to see transpire. We believe there’s power to tools that allow us to share ideas, passions and causes with friends and friends of friends. It’s worth asking whether or not we’re right.

So let’s start with a cautionary tale. When Iranian reformers took to the streets to protest rigged elections last year, many people in America showed solidarity and support online. Over a hundred thousand people became Mir Hossein Moussavi’s friend on Facebook. Tens of thousands of people turned their Twitter icons green. Others modified their Twitter settings to make it appear that they were posting from Tehran, in the hopes of making the task of censorship more difficult. Hundreds of people launched proxy servers, which they promoted online. Thousands of people obsessively retweeted news from Iran to their networks.

The net result? Well, online support likely helped ensure that CNN and other news networks covered the protests for longer than they otherwise might have. But US media attention didn’t keep protesters out of jail or prevent Iran from censoring the internet. There’s a case to be made that the actions taken by US supporters of the Green Movement were counterproductive – they added credence to the regime’s case that US and UK forces were attempting to topple the Iranian government and that the Green Movement was an external, not grassroots, domestic force. There’s also a case to be made that there’s nothing online activists could do in the face of a determined repressive government and that we shouldn’t have expected any change to come from online activism.

My friend and copanelist Evgeny Morozov is fond of the term “slacktivism” – he worries that we’ve made it so easy to be an activist (click here to turn your Twitter icon green!) that activism is often little more than a badge of affiliation. His fear is that if affiliative activism is this easy, we may never move on to more serious forms of engagement. I think there’s some justification behind this fear, but I don’t think that’s what happened in this case – I think people were willing to take action as activists: it’s just that the many of the actions people told them to take were somewhere in the spectrum between harmless and useless.

The smart, well-meaning folks who set up tools to allow people to turn their Twitter icons green might have been more focused on tactics than on theories of change. They saw an opportunity to harness the powerful forces of social networks to show affiliation and support. Or their theory of change was that a broad show of support would have an influence on the Iranian regime. Unfortunately, affiliation and support don’t appear to be forces that are particular influential with the Ahmedinejad government.

Let’s assume for a minute that it’s possible to influence the Iranian government. Maybe strong condemnation of the Iranian election by conservative Islamic leaders around the world would have had an influence. It’s not clear that whatever levers would have been effective in Iran are ones that activists in the US could easily move. Even with a good theory of change for promoting reform in Iran, it’s possible that there’s a disconnect between what it’s easy – or perhaps what it’s possible – to do with networks and social media and what would actually be useful in achieving change on the ground.

I think this disconnect happens fairly often. As Evgeny has pointed out, it’s one thing to line up 1.7m Facebook followers to “Save the Children of Africa“. But those followers have raised less than $12,000… and money is one of the currencies nearly all social change organizations need and know how to use, while the power of over a million affiliated members may not be something they’re able to harness.

Does this disconnect – the idea that what social media can do might not be what activist organizations want or need – mean that Global Witness is right to ignore social media in their campaign to change Equatorial Guinea? I don’t think so. It’s much easier to influence people in positions of power when you’ve got a mass of constituents on your side. As Samantha Powers points out in A Problem From Hell, governments don’t act to prevent genocide unless there’s strong constituent pressure. Equatorial Guinea is the US’s third largest African oil supplier – it would take an awful lot of constituent pressure to change the status quo.

So perhaps Global Witness should line up a million Facebook friends who “like” their campaign against Teodorín in the hopes that the Levin hearings will produce tangible results. But they’d likely do better if they could figure out something constructive for those users to do.

Political theorist Benjamin Barber offers the observation that “People are apathetic because they are powerless, not powerless because they are apathetic”. You’re right to be apathetic in the face of the story I just told about Equatorial Guinea, because it’s not clear that there’s anything productive you can do. Basically, by sharing this story, I’ve roused emotions – be they anger, compassion or boredom – but given you nothing you can do. Susan Sontag believed that, “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”

If Global Witness accepts this idea – that it’s not the passionate who get active, so much as it is the active who become passionate – what opportunities should they offer supporters? In other words, what currencies can social media bring to the table… and are those the ones that movement leaders really need?

Here’s what most organizations have learned to use social media for:

- Spread the word to an audience that is less sensitive to broadcast media and has a tendency to believe that “if it’s important, news will find me”. This ability to spread the message comes at the cost of loss of control – the further the message spreads, it’s less likely to be worded precisely the way you’d like it to be.

- Display public support, showing that an issue’s got a constituency. However, people in power are increasingly aware that online affiliation is pretty low-cost… a million Facebook “likes” isn’t equivalent to a million people willing to make a phone call to a legislator, for instance. That discount rate – from affiliated followers to participatory followers – can be quite sharp.

All well and good… but potentially useless if that awareness and public support isn’t harnessed to a theory of change that attempts to influence a decisionmaker, propose a policy change, demand an action. This sort of social media participation runs the risk of being primarily participation for participation’s sake, providing the sense of involvement that’s essential to combat apathy, but not tightly linked to change.

The good news, in my view, is that smarter campaigns are starting to implement deeper, more potent strategies for using social media:

- Filter the truly engaged to the top. If we assume that activism, as with almost everything else online, has a Pareto distribution, we might assume that for every 1000 relatively passive supporters, we might find 10 deeply engaged activists and one emerging movement leader. And if the contention that participation begets passion, this particular long tail might be a slippery slope upwards, yielding more leaders than the average movement.

- Generate feedback… and critique. Jason Sadler’s 1 Million T Shirts for Africa project is a great cautionary tale about getting feedback from social media even if you weren’t seeking it. A well-meaning, if poorly considered, project for aid to Africa was rapidly critiqued by smart Afrophiles who study the pitfalls of the aid industry and pointed out that a large donation of t-shirts would do more economic damage to local manufacturers than it would benefit the poor. Sadler ended up changing his idea entirely and is now trying to figure out how to channel his energies towards more productive forms of aid… which raises the interesting question of how the project could have differed had he begun by engaging with the people who criticized the project via social media.

- Match problems to specific skill sets. For me, this is the most exciting part of Chris Hughes’s Jumo project – not using social media to show affiliation or to try to raise money, but to try to match organization needs and volunteer skill sets. Online volunteering sites like Nabuur.com have figured out that the challenge with this model is that you need to listen hard to the people you’re trying to benefit – in their case, communities in the developing world – as well as to the volunteers. What this implies for many organizations is that they need to define the problems could be addressed by volunteers.

While I’m skeptical of the power of social media to affect change simply by reaching new audiences and encouraging affiliation, I do think there’s a successful strategy that tries to use affiliation and reach to use social media to sustain media interest in issues beyond a specific news event. Equatorial Guinea doesn’t make it into the New York Times all that often – this is a function of the difficulty of reporting from there (a supply issue) and a perception that Africa stories don’t have much of an audience (a demand issue). Were we to launch our own Twitter campaign to call attention to Teodorín – perhaps a shark fin added to our icons – we wouldn’t put much direct pressure on Equatorial Guinea, but we would send a signal to the New York Times that we would read and amplify additional coverage of the country.

We may underestimate this importance of this power. Media coverage is driven in no small part by what editors perceive to be the interests and concerns of the audience. The twittersphere’s embrace of the Iran protests helped the story dominate the newshole in US media for a good part of two weeks… and the story might have dominated media longer had Michael Jackson’s death not refocused the mainstream and citizen media lenses. Demonstrating a demand for in-depth reporting on undercovered stories is a first step in shifting issues out of the shadows and in front of the spotlight.

But it’s only a first step. To channel that attention and push it towards constructive action, we need a plausible theory of change. We need to figure out who we’re asking to make a change, what we’re asking them to do and what will persuade them to change their behavior. And this is where online activism needs to get as smart about organizations like Global Witness as organizations need to get smart about social media.

I believe that the shift towards participation online means that movements that don’t invite our active participation are going to suffer and wither. It’s imperative to enable participation if you want people to react to your cause with anything but apathy. I also believe there’s a danger that the energy we’re capable of summoning through social media will dissipate without impact if we don’t learn from experienced, seasoned activists and build strategies that figure out who to target and why, not just novel new ways to gain attention. My fear is that, until we bridge this gap between what social media can offer for activists, and what activist movements need to create change, we run a risk of letting participation revert to apathy.

Dr. Miriam Meckel is a fellow at the Berkman Center this year, and is Director of the Institute for Media and Communication Management at University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Her lunch talk at Berkman Tuesday looked at the changing relationship between journalism and social media, through a case study of a journalist – Robert Mackey – and his use of Twitter during the Iran revolution. Her interest in the topic is personal as well as academic – as a journalist for fifteen years, she characterizes herself as “frustrated by the discussions around social media and journalism,” which often cover the same, familiar ground.

To contextualize this research, Meckel points to the ongoing interest in the relationship between journalism and social media, citing James Fallows’s “How to Save the News” in the Atlantic, which points out that Google might actually help to save journalism, at least in part because they rely on journalists’ efforts. She references a finding that 70% of journalists use social networks for reporting, and wonders whether journalism can survive a world in which the price for words – referencing a recent Sunday New York Times article – could be as low as $10 for an article.

Meckel’s literature review suggests that academics are hard at work on a discourse of “saving journalism” in a networked future. She quotes papers that assert that online journalists have “not yet received parity” with their traditional peers and that bloggers continue to be heavily reliant on offline reporting. Meckel questions this, arguing that bloggers are now setting the agenda in the online space. She wonders whether this pushback is a reflection of a widespread fear on the part of journalists (and some academics) about the weakening of journalist authority.

What could we empirically prove about journalism and social media, Meckel asks? She and her team decided to examine the use of Twitter by a professional journalist during the Iranian green revolution election protests. This was a period of especially high interest in Twitter, as international news organizations had been banned from covering protests directly. (See my recent article in Daedalus, which argues that this need to embrace citizen media was a turning point in the relationship between traditional journalism and citizen media.) Specifically, she and her team looked closely at Robert Mackey, a freelance journalist who has written for the New York Times and the Guardian, and who maintains a blog for the Times called The Lede. She identifies Mackey as one of a small number of journalists celebrated for their work in “pulling information out of the social media ecosystem.”

Examining Mackey’s role in building links between Twitter and the world of professional journalism allow us to as certain quantifiably-answerable questions:
- How can we frame influence in a social media environment?
- What role do journalists take in a new media ecosystem?
- Is there evidence of an intermediary function of journalists?

The theoretical framework that informs Meckel’s work includes older – Katz and Lazarfeld’s work on the two-step model of influence and newer models from network science, including theories that center on “information brokerage”. Meckel’s work considers Mackey in these terms, asking:

- Which Twitter accounts refer to Iran, in general?
- How is Mackey linked to these accounts?
- How does he forward this information?
- Which readers are interested in Iran?
- How is Mackey connecting sources in Iran to his readership?

Between June 7-26th, 2009, her team collected 2 million Iran-focused tweets from 480,000 accounts. They selected the 200 most active users, and filtered that set down to the 100 most “relevant” users talking about the protests. Their analysis of The Lede suggests that Mackey chose 12 highly relevant Iran sources accessible on Twitter and relied heavily on them as sources. “Almost 60% of (51) iran related blog entries show mentions of Twitter users as sources.”

To determine whether Mackey’s readers were interested in this topic, she analyzed the Twitter streams of his followers, looking for Iran-specific keywords. His followers included a mix of users who were uninterested, interested and extremely interested. What was particularly striking is that the most interested readers didn’t really need Mackey – they were following the sources he cited, and prefered to retweet them directly. But Mackey served as a useful bridge for people with some interest in Iran, but not sufficient interest to find the best sources themselves.

Mackey also served as a broker connecting his fellow journalists at the New York Times to Iran voices on Twitter. Meckel found at least two other Times journalists who served similar roles. Essentially, journalists appeared to work on the assumption that Mackey and colleagues were able to collect the most relevant information from Twitter and package it for use in more traditional journalistic stories.

Meckel acknowledges limitations of the research she’s done. There’s not much software developed to document webs of relationships in Twitter, and her team ended up doing a good bit of original development. The single case of Robert Mackey might be an interesting exemplar, or could be an outlier – she’s hoping to repeat the work, looking at a wider set of “Twitter brokers”. And she acknowledges that this research might document a moment in time, not necessarily a longer trend.

Still, she hopes the work support some larger ideas:

- Journalists have a different audience and can link between a social media audience and a news audience, serve as intermediaries and connectors between these spaces. The size of their online audience might not be as relevant as we think, because they’re most powerful as connectors.

- Journalists need to be interactive and involved with their online sources, and their readers, on social networking platforms. Their value comes from linking and amplifying information – applying value judgements to what they analyze – and their influence can be traced by retweets.

- Journalists draw on the reputation of their media institution. But this may change in a social media network. Instead, they need to develop an independent, individual reputation aside from their publication – a personal brand.

I was fascinated by Meckel’s talk, in part because I’m interested in brokerage as a model for bridging information imbalances – Global Voices can be thought of as a brokerage, bringing knowledge about the Ghanaian blogosphere, for instance, to a wider media audience.

But I also remembered that Robert Mackey and I crossed swords over his decision to amplify a rumor emerging from some Iranian bloggers that imprisoned blogger and activist Hossein Derakshan was cooperating with Iranian authorities. I wrote an angry post on my blog, accusing Mackey of violating journalistic ethics in amplifying an unverified (and untrue) rumor. He was gracious about engaging with me, and though we disagreed about his actions, the exchange we had in the comment thread was one of the most honest, transparent and civil exchanges I’ve had in criticizing a journalist’s work, and I’m grateful to Mackey for his willingness to engage.

Meckel’s work suggests that figures like Mackey are extremely powerful, not just in linking less-engaged readers to online content, but in bridging between social media and the journalists within the New York Times. Her analysis suggests that Mackey may be working with a small set of sources – she suggests 12 key figures – and that his source selection is extremely important in determining what gets covered.

I’ve observed – in my recent article and elsewhere – that the picture one takes of the Green Revolution protests can look very different depending on what languages you speak. The movement leaders communicate very well in English, and the diasporans who support the movement tend to be English speakers, while Ahmedinejad’s supporters tend to be more comfortable writing in Persian. Meckel confirmed that Mackey’s sources were writing in English. Was he getting a sufficiently diverse view of the opinions on the ground? Is it possible to get a diverse view without reading Persian? The source who accused Derakshan of collaborating the government was writing in English from Switzerland – some of Mackey’s sources were in the diaspora, removed from events on the ground by the need to avoid arrest in Tehran. Is the picture we’re getting through a broker like Mackey systematically biased?

I should note – this isn’t a question about Mackey personally. (While we haven’t met, I admire the man’s work and appreciate his willingness to engage online.) It’s a question about the biases that come from citizen media, from brokerage and from journalism as an enterprise. For instance – Global Voices is covering the Red Shirt protests in Thailand right now. While I think Mong Palatino is doing an excellent job, he’s constrained by the fact that the Reds tend to be poorer and more rural than the Yellows, and are less likely to use citizen media… much like the pro-Ahmedinejad forces in Iran.

The hope is that citizen media is complementing experienced correspondents on the ground who speak the language and understand the culture. The discussion at Berkman in the wake of Meckel’s talk centered on the role of the foreign correspondent – I offered my friend Solana Larsen’s contention that foreign correspondents are going to disappear, and we’re going to learn to rely on domestic correspondents writing for a global audience. I don’t know that this will happen quickly, and I worry that these voices may draw less attention than traditional foreign correspondents, but I think simple economics means Solana’s right in the mid to long term.

Mackey, essentially, is acting as a foreign correspondent with Twitter as his beat. He’s not deeply rooted in Iran – he’s deeply rooted in the new world of social media. I think this is a transitional phenomena – in a few years, whoever’s writing about Iran for the New York Times will simply use Twitter and blogs as another input into their work. In the meantime, this bridging function is likely quite useful. But it’s extremely powerful, and potentially distorting, and we need to look at all these brokers – including the one I’ve helped build and run – closely and carefully.

I just heard from Thomas Plotkowiak, the PhD student who’s been doing much of the work on analysing Twitter discussed in this post. He’s got an excellent blog focused on the challenges of data mining Twitter – very interesting reading for anyone interested in making sense out of the data available.

Moving across the UTexas campus, I’m now at the International Symposium on Online Journalism, hosted by my friend Rosental Alves. The presenters I’ve seen so far are primarily academic researchers conducting experiments to increase the understanding of the relationship between online and offline journalism. Tomorrow includes more practicioners and may have something of a different tone. (I think I’m here more as a practicioner than as an academic, but at this point, in this crazy month, who knows?)

Joshua Braun, a PhD student in communications at Cornell, is studying the adoption of blogging software by network news sites. He traces this trend back to 2002, when ABC News started “The Note” and MSNBC started “Cosmic Log”. As news organizations started these new sites, they talked about “unprecedented transparency” about news decisions of the network – CBS’s new blog promised (somewhat disturbingly) “personal, intimate contact with news consumers”.

If the promise of these blogs was more transparency and interactivity, the results have been disappointing. “There’s been no lifting of the veil,” he tells us. Instead, they’re just new venues for broadcasting video repurposed from their channels.

As such, “what journalists do with blogs is different from what the rest of us do with it.” One of his interview subjects tells him, “I don’t know what a blog is now,” except that they seem to enable less formal speech. Some value blogs because they allow for faster publication of news – one informant tells him “we put stories in blog form to keep up.”

Braun suggests that we’re seeing a publicly presented finished product, produced through an idealized procedure, but readers have very little ability to actually examine the deliberations that go into production. (He offers a comparison to jury trials, which he sees as similarly idealized and practically opaque.) The “stage management” of comments through moderation might be necessary for a medium to maintain credibility, but it’s hardly transparent. He asks, “Should we be critical of this enclosure, or recognize that it’s essential for journalism?”

Pinar Gurleyen and Perrin Ogun Emre have been carrying out research on Turkish media and the emergence of blogs as a space for journalism. They point out that the Turkisn media is controlled by four major groups since the end of the state monopoly on broadcasting in the late 1990s. A recent economic crisis has caused these media giants to lay off many journalists, and some journalists have responded by starting websites and, more recently, by starting blogs.

They believe there are roughly 1 million Turkish bloggers, but it’s unclear which are bloggers. The researchers see the spaces of blogging and journalism as deeply different – they posit a democratic deficit that arises from ownership structures and wonder whether bloggers can create a paradigm shift for greater justice.

They interviewed nine journalists who’ve embraced blogs and used them for five years or longer. Two work in alternative media, and seven for mainstream programs or publications. They were interviewed on their motivations for blogging, the differences between conventional media and blogs in terms of content and workflow and their thoughts on liberatory potential of blogs.

The journalists they spoke to saw blogs as little more than an online platform to reuse original material produced for mainstream media, forming online porfolios or dossiers. While they saw the lack of editorial control as a benefit, they didn’t identify as members of the blogging community but as professionals, they rejected the informal tone of the blogosphere, and sometimes rejected user-created content like comments. Whatever these journalists were doing, it was different from Turkish blogging as we know it.

Nagwa A. Salam Fahmy, professor of journalism in the Mass Communication Department at Ain Shams University in Cairo looks at Egyptian blogs to study one of the most difficult phenomena in communications to document: agenda-cutting. Agenda-cutting occurs when a news story isn’t reported because powerful forces – government, corporate or otherwise – prevent its publication through influence, threats or direct intervention. It’s a pretty common occurance in Egypt, where the country has been under “emergency rule” since 1981, giving the government powers to restrict freedoms of the press. But it’s hard to document – how do you study news stories that never emerged?

Fahmy posits that blogs – which are plentiful in Egypt and often politically active – represent an alternative space to fight the government’s restrictions on flow of information. Of the 160,000 blogs in the country, she focused on a particularly fascinating one - Wael Abbas’s “Al Wa’y El Masry“. Abbas is an important Egyptian human rights activist who’s experienced police harrasment for his work, and his blog is often able to break stories that don’t make it into mainstream media.

Fahmy studies whether blogs are able to report stories that are restricted by the government and asks whether readers will see these stories as credible. She further wonders whether the comment threads around these stories can emerge as spaces for public debate. Her interest is based on the fact that no laws govern blogging in Egypt, and that blogs like Abbas’s include detailed descriptions of street protests and video footage. She believes that spaces like Abbas’s blog can serve to inject stories into mainstream media as well as – potentialy – covering stories that are cut from the news agenda.

Her analysis revealed seven stories on the blog that didn’t receive media coverage. Four focused on torture and police abuse, and another cluster were on the tapping of the phones of a key opposition political figure. She found evidence that readers found these stories very credible, but she was disappointed by the possibility of using the comments for debate, noting “the language is very vulgar”. Overall, she’s hopeful that this reveals the possibility that blogs can function as an alternative space in an otherwise closed media environment.

(I follow Egyptian media as closely as I can with my lack of Arabic, and I know Wael, so I was particularly interested in this talk. I just skimmed Fahmy’s paper which is excellent, and doubly impressive as this is the first time she’s written an academic work in English.)

Norwegian media scholar Arne Krumsvik offers an analysis of Norwegian online newspapers. Before jumping into his research, he needs to explain that Norwegians are a bit different than Americans when it comes to media. The country’s got the second highest newspaper consumption in the world, behind only Japan, and possibly the highest online penetration. In Norwegians 50 and under, 90% use the internet daily, and in 35 and under, 90% use mobile data services daily. Norway’s media environment encourages freedom of expression and public debate, and provides press subsidy and public support for newspaper production to encourage debate.

It’s no surprise then that Norwegians started a serious online (only?) newspaper in 1996. Krumsvik studies how online and offline editions of newspapers are regarded by Norwegians of different ages. Both are regarded as very important by readers, regardless of age. But online editions are regarded as more important for people who reported they valued freedom of expression heavily. Oddly, the more a group spends on producing online content, the more skeptical readers appear to be. But while user skepticism increases with production cost, journalist skepticism of the value of online products is high across the board. And editors report that they hate moderating user activities, and would favor much heavier moderation. (Users who favor online editions for their freedom of expression uses don’t favor such moderation.)

His conclusion – there’s a serious disconnect between online media producers and users, and the main motivation for most online publishing is image – appearing to be open and participatory, even if the publication resents the activity.

We’re nearing the end of our first week at home with a newborn, and he’s survived largely unscathed thus far. With a house full of extended family and nights spent sleeping in ninety minute intervals, it hasn’t exactly been the most restful or focused week in recent memory. Much as I’ve wanted to write a couple of long blog posts this week, the best I can do is offer a few links towards the pieces I’ve wanted to write about.

David Sasaki has an excellent post on MediaShift Idea Lab about the importance of mapping in marginalized communities. Referencing a number of projects designed to produce open source maps of favelas and slums, he quotes Mikel Maron, an evangelist of Open Street : “Without basic knowledge of the geography and resources of [a community] it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents.”

Sasaki links to an excellent post from Mark Graham which raises another facet of geographic information – the amount of information available online about different communities and countries. Using geodata from Wikipedia, Graham makes a set of maps that display how many (English Wikipedia) articles about places are located in each of the world’s countries. Unsurprisingly, there’s much more content about North America and Western Europe than about sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia or Latin America. This isn’t a new issue – I wrote about attempts to address undercoverage in Wikipedia five years ago – but it’s extremely helpful to have Graham visualizing these disparities and challenging us to bridge some of these gaps. (Hanan Cohen was kind enough to point me towards Graham’s excellent post as well.)

I’ve been following proposed anti-gay legislation in Uganda, largely through Haute Haiku’s excellent reporting on Global Voices. It’s an absurdly ugly bill – not only does it criminalize homosexuality (which is the case in several sub-Saharan African nations), but it creates a crime of “aggravated homosexuality” that’s punishable by death and broad enough to include anyone who’s both gay and HIV+.

I hadn’t seen much coverage of the Ugandan legislation outside gay-oriented media and my faith community, which tends to follow gay issues very closely. So I was thrilled – and somewhat stunned – to hear a discussion of the Ugandan legislation on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air. Gross was interviewing Jeff Sharlet, author of a book about a fundamentalist political movement in the US congress called The Family. According to Sharlet, The Family practices a strange branch of Christianity which celebrates strong, charismatic leadership (including that of reprehensible dictators) and recruits adherents from the corridors of power.

In his interview with Gross, Sharlet reports that there’s a Ugandan branch of The Family and that they appear to be the core organizers of the anti-gay legislation. This isn’t quite as strange as it might sound – Uganda’s been a battlefield for American religious politics in the past. The ABC (“Abstain, Be Faithful or Use a Condom”) approach to AIDS prevention, heavily favored by US religious conservatives, was celebrated as reducing Uganda’s HIV prevalence rate. In truth, a number of different approaches were used in Uganda, and reductions in HIV prevalence may have been linked to a reduction in coffee exports, not to any particular practices. But Yoweri Museveni – the Ugandan leader, who the Family has embraced (according to Sharlet) – is a committed evangelical Christian and gave advocates of a faith-rooted approach to HIV reduction a leader to embrace and a laboratory to experiment in.

Sharlet’s connection of The Family to the proposed Ugandan legislation raises the chances that we might see a coordinated push from activists in Uganda and the US against this ugly and discriminatory legislation – see change.org for some thoughts for what people in the US could do.

One of the first thing Bektour Iskender, co-founder of Kyrgyz blogging community Kloop.kg, said when we met was, “I read your book.” That surprised me, as I haven’t written any books. But then I realized he was talking about a guide I’d written about anonymous blogging. He went on: “I was translating that guide at the same time as David Sasaki’s book on citizen media, so the two of you tend to blur in my head.” As we talked about how Bektour got interested in citizen media, he mentioned a transformative trip he’d taken to Prague to study with Evgeny Morozov at Transitions Online.

As we sat in Porter Exchange in Cambridge yesterday, I realized I was having dinner with the next generation. Friends like Evgeny, David and I have been working since 2004 to ensure that citizen media is a revolution that doesn’t just include North Americans and Western Europeans. Here, slurping noodle soup with me, was a blogger trained by my generation of bloggers, who’d read the guides we’d put out into the world and now busily cultivating another generation of bloggers.

What made it especially cool was discovering just how impressive Kloop’s success has been so far. In a country where internet access is expensive and doesn’t extend far outside the capital, Bishkek, Kloop now hosts more than 1100 blogs on an installation of WordPress MU. Kloop provides these blogs for free, and they’re “freer” than blogs provided by LiveJournal or other international blogging platforms, as Kyrgyz bandwidth is so expensive that cybercafes and ISPs charge more for accessing international sites than local ones. Kloop also maintains a citizen media portal, an edited news site that draws on contributions from Kloop bloggers. That site has become increasingly important in the Kyrgyz media space – Bektour tells me that Kloop reporters wrote many of the most linked stories on a Kazakstan block of Livejournal last year.

Kloop is developing a track record for training young journalists in what Bektour refers to as “the Anglo-American model of journalism”, a style that focuses on facts rather than opinions. (I think this must be the dying Anglo-American model, perhaps killed off by Jan Moir, but Bektour reassures me that there’s a lot to be said for “just the facts, ma’am” in countries where Soviet propoganda shaped many journalists’ conception of themselves.) An early success story is Timur Toktonaliyev, a sixteen year old reporter who’s been credentialled to report on Parliament, and who now is a paid freelancer for an international news agency.

The long-term plan for Kloop is to achieve sustainability by teaching classes in journalism and new media. Bektour outlines a curiculum for me that involves classes that will help NGOs use social media, as well as training bloggers and journalists in media ethics, and offering workshops on basic programming for social media users (customizing stylesheets, installing WordPress, etc.) Tutors for these workshops will likely come from outside Kyrgyzstan initially, but over time, the goal is to train a set of social media experts who can help spread social media through the region. It makes sense for Kyrgystan to act as a hub for social media as the media climate is more free in Kyrgyzstan than in any of the other Central Asian nations.

The idea of Kyrgyz bloggers supporting their bretheren in Uzbekistan isn’t as strange as it might sound. Bektour tells me that much of the success Kloop has had so far has come from the broader community of former Soviet states. Bektour was one of the organizers of a BarCamp in Riga, Latvia last February. Much of the technical support for Kloop comes from people he met at the BarCamp, and Bektour points to collaborations happening between bloggers in Central Asia and the Baltics.

Most of Kloop’s blogs are in Russian, but the Chess photoblog, maintained by a filmmaker, is a nice introduction to those of us who don’t read the language. A 2007 interview with Bektour on Global Voices, conducted by Ben Paarman, gives a sense for how far the project has come in a short time.

An interview with Bektour by Chris Schuepp of Young People’s Media Network.

A couple of years back, Technorati dropped out of my life. It was a sudden break, though I didn’t notice it at first. I blog using the WordPress platform, and WordPress relied on Technorati’s API to track mentions of my blog in other blogs, which I saw daily on my blog’s dashboard. And then WordPress began using Google Blog Search instead. I didn’t notice the difference for a while, and when I did, I didn’t really care. Google Blog Search, at that point, was pretty good, and it met my needs – it gave the the reassurance that people were reading and commenting on my words and that I wasn’t just wasting time talking to the ether.

And then Google Blog Search got less usable – first it got spammy, and then it got sparse. I turned back to Technorati and to Blogpulse and discovered that neither was especially satisfying. Talking with friends who blog, we agreed that it was strange and sad that there was no worthy blog search engine. In a meeting at Berkman yesterday, we were bemoaning the fact that Technorati had disabled their API, wondering whether this was a sign that the company was heading towards extinction.

I realized I hadn’t actually looked at the Technorati site for quite a while. I was surprised to discover that Technorati is back. It’s very different from what it was, and in some ways, much better. And, in one way that’s critical to me, it’s much, much worse. The site’s return raises some fascinating questions about the nature of the blogosphere, its influence and importance.

Self-obsessive that I am (a trait shared by the vast majority of bloggers), I checked Technorati to see how this blog ranked. When I checked Technorati regularly, this blog usually squeaked into the top 5000 blogs tracked by the site – in the past couple of years, I’ve slipped in influence (I’m sure you’ve noticed – thanks for not mentioning it) down to roughly 7,000. But I’ve now vaulted back to prominence with a ranking of #1116. Woo hoo! Except that I’m no longer 7,000 of 133 million – I’m 1,116 of 825,402.

Say what?

Technorati have historically been the cheerleaders of the blogosphere, pointing to an increase from four million blogs in 2004 to 70 million in 2007 and 133 million in 2008. Behind the scenes, people familiar with the challenges of indexing blogs knew that these numbers were suspect, in at least two directions. They were inflated, because the pingservers that aggregators like Technorati used to build their catalogs were riddled with spam. And they were undercounting the blogosphere, because many bloggers around the world – particularly those in China – use blogging platforms that don’t talk to pingservers, rendering those blogs invisible to ping-based catalogs. Dave Sifry would announce that there were 30 million blogs and proud internationalists like me would announce that the number was surely undercounting Chinese blogs, where the China Internet Network Information Center reported 47 million bloggers with 72 million blogs.

So what happened? Well, first, Technorati kicked out the non-English speakers. A quick tour through the top 100 sites indexed by Technorati reveals no non-English blogs. That top 100 list used to be quite diverse. I published a paper in Public Choice using data from Technorati in September 2005 that saw 15 of the top 100 weblog authors writing from outside the US, in Chinese, Italian, Portguese, Japanese and German. Some of those blogs have died, while others continue to be active and influential. Blog de Beppe Grillo is an incredibly important site to Italian political discussion – Alexa ranks it as 5,016 in the world in terms of traffic, 135 in Italy, and Google Ad Planner estimates 840,000 visitors a day, generating 11 million pageviews. That makes sense – Grillo is, in a very inexact analogy, Italy’s blogging Jon Stewart.

Technorati knows about Beppe Grillo. They just don’t think he’s very important. He gets a 1 in influence, the lowest rating on a scale from 1 to 1000. (I get a 611. Take that, you protest-leading, profanity-spewing, politically influential funnyman. That’ll teach you to actually reach an audience of millions!)

Other influential internationalists don’t make the index at all. My friend Harinjaka – one of the leaders of a blogging campaign in Madagascar, sufficiently influential to get invited to the TED conference – doesn’t appear at all. Others appear with a surprisingly low rank. Roland Soong’s indispensible EastSouthWestNorth – the most important blog for English-speakers trying to understand China – ranks 59,101, with an influence of 113. The “influence” score isn’t easy to understand anymore – it used to measure incoming links in the past six month. Now, “Authority is calculated based on a site’s linking behavior, categorization and other associated data over a short, finite period of time. A site’s authority may rapidly rise and fall depending on what the blogosphere is discussing at the moment, and how often a site produces content being referenced by other sites.”

In other words, links and some other stuff. Fair enough. But an algorithm that doesn’t see Beppe Grillo or Roland Soong’s influence has got something badly wrong with it. Or simply refuses to consider pages with substantial non-English content. (Soong’s blog is so important because it translates large volumes of text between English and Chinese, helping each group understand China-focused conversations happening in the other language.)

Technorati may have a very good reason for shrinking their catalog and kicking out the non-English speakers – it lets them build a carefully classified, hand-edited catalog. That blog directory is an extremely helpful resource, both to people who want to explore (English-language) blogs and to internet researchers. On the other hand, it’s hard to believe that the universe features only 88 basketball blogs, given that I can name 10 sumo blogs off the top of my head.

My guess is that Technorati’s good reason has to do with repositioning advertisers’ understanding of what blogs are and aren’t. In the early years of blogging, the goal was to convince tech pundits and financial markets that blogging was a real, important and growing phenomenon, so that investing in a blogging search engine sounded like a good idea. Now the goal is convincing advertisers that bloggers are creating highly-targeted, advertiser friendly content. That would explain why this year’s State of the Blogosphere doesn’t feature statistics about the growing population of bloggers (Now up to 830,000! Down from 133 million!), their geographic distribution (More bloggers in Japan than the US! And we don’t index them!) and focuses instead on a survey of 2,828 bloggers, asking them about their motivations for blogging.

Technorati classifies the new, advertiser-friendly 2009 blogosphere into four camps:
• Hobbyists (72%)
• Part-Timers (15%)
• Corporate (4%)
• Self Employeds (9%)

In other words, the criterion for classification is blogger’s financial motives. Part-timers blog to supplement their income, corporate bloggers sling bits for an employer, while self-employed’s labor in the bit mines on their own. Those of us, like me, who don’t actually make money from our blogs are “hobbyists”. We are evidently on the wane, due to “an increase of work and family commitments”, making those professional bloggers ever more important.

However loathsome you find this categorization, it helps explain where Technorati’s trying to go. Their business isn’t a comprehensive blog directory – it’s the hub of an advertising network that now ranks fifth in the universe of social media, managing ad inventory on 450 web properties. Persuading advertisers that bloggers are “are a highly educated and affluent group,” not to mention mannerly, neat and well scrubbed, recently helped the company raise another $2 million in venture capital funding.

And Technorati’s right – there has been a significant move towards professionalization in the blogosphere. Many of the top sites Technorati is tracking are highly professional, multiple-author ad supported newsrooms. Some of the bloggers who were primarily interested in sharing links or status updates have moved to Twitter or other tools better suited towards brief updates. Blogs have moved into longer-form essays and journalistic stories… though the hobbyists in the crowd, like me, might point out that they’ve also become platforms for academic publication and collaboration, for political organization in the US and elsewhere, for citizen media, whether or not those activities directly yield advertising dollars.

So here’s the new Technorati. It works better than it used to, and there are clean, well-lit pathways to almost a million blogs. What’s wrong with that?

Nothing, so long as people understand that Techorati doesn’t index the blogosphere. It indexes the blogs that it indexes, excluding those that don’t make sense in its new paradigm. And that’s got consequences. You may never have clicked over to Beppe Grillo when he ranked high in the top 100, assuming that since you didn’t read Italian or follow Italian politics, there was nothing for you on his site. In the process, you would have dicovered that virtually every post is translated into English, and that Italian political culture has a playful and performative quality that US politics would really benefit from understanding, if not embracing. At the very least, the presence of non-English blogs in that top 100 were a reminder that the Internet isn’t an English-only space, and that citizen media isn’t just a North American/Western European phenomenon. Technorati used to remind us that the Internet was a crowded, complicated, multiligual, multicultural place – now it tells us that the Internet speaks English and is safe for advertisers.

Perhaps the Technorati we’re seeing today is a preview of a larger transformation. Perhaps we’ll see language and culture-focused Technoratis, indexing Japanese, Chinese, Persian, Portuguese and Malagasy blogs. Maybe days four and five of this year’s state of the blogosphere will remind us of the global import of blogging, not just for advertising electronic gadgets, but for challenging coups and dictators.

And maybe not. We’ve got a little website called Global Voices that tries to make the rest of the blogosphere accessible to English readers… and, in turn, we now make that website accessible in dozens of other languages. We used to rely heavily on sites like Technorati to help us find bloggers in other parts of the world. Now we’ve got hundreds of dedicated new media people from Kyrgyzstan to Kiribati who’ll help you understand what people are talking about in those countries… whether or not Technorati chooses to include them.

I’m reading Paul Collier’s controversial new “Wars, Guns and Votes” (NYTimes review), where the brilliant development economist addresses the uncomfortable question, “What if democracy doesn’t bring prosperity to very poor nations?” Collier’s research suggests that autocracies are more likely to protect citizens from political violence up to an income level of $2700 per capita, at which point democracies function better. I’m not deep enough into Collier’s book to address concerns about his thesis or suggested interventions – though I’m looking forward to reading these responses from Mutuma Ruteere in Kenya and from a team of development economists writing in the Boston Review - but I’m already struck by the power of Collier’s core argument.

Collier posits that what we see in many underdeveloped nations isn’t democracy but “democrazy”, an adoption of some of the most visible trappings of democracy (most notably elections) without the underlying structures (free press, independent electoral commissions, educated electorate, post-ethnic political structures) that make it possible to have functional elections. By overemphasizing the importance of elections (remember the Bush administration’s drive towards elections in Iraq, or the Obama administration’s push towards the deeply flawed Afghan election?), we may nurture political structures that aren’t democratic and which reward certain types of electoral fraud and abuse.

I was thinking of this as I looked at a project launched by my friend and colleague, Sami ben Gharbia. Sami is the head of Global Voices Advocacy, the free speech arm of Global Voices, and he’s a passionate advocate for political and human rights reform in his homeland, which he’s been exiled from. In anticipation of Tunisia’s presidential and parliamentary elections on October 25th, he’s launched Babtounes.com, a lovely tool to aggregate and visualize online conversations – most notably Twitter conversations – about the Tunisian elections. The tool uses a WordPress blog and Juitter to aggregate several searches against the Twitter database and give a one-stop shop for watching that online conversation.

Sami knows full well who’s going to win the election. President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has held power since 1987, when as prime minister, he impeached Habib Bourguiba, the first president of an independent Tunisia. (Wikipedia uses the wonderful term “a medico-legal coup,” as Ben Ali had Bourguiba declared medically unfit to serve.) Ben Ali has “won” “elections” in 1999 and 2004, with margins of 99.66% and 94.48% of the vote, and his victory in 2009 will likely be by a similar majority.

An essay in the Arab Reform Bulletin by Hamadi Redissi helps explain why the election outcome isn’t much in doubt. The country’s electoral system gives 75% of parliamentary seats to a party that wins a simple majority in elections. Since Presidential and parliamentary elections are held simultaneously, you need only rig one election every five years and you’ve got unrivalled control of the country. You can use that control to limit candidate lists (Socialist challenger Dr. Mustapha Benjaafar was excluded from the 2009 election through interpretation of a requirement that a candidate be the elected leader of his party for two years before elections) – there are only three candidates running against Ben Ali, and two have made it clear that they’re not interested in being president, simply in demonstrating support for the electoral system. Being in power also gives you control of the state media, and allows you to oversee the election through the Interior Ministry – there is no independent electoral commission.

So, if the election is fait acompli, why watch? My guess is that Sami is watching so that we understand precisely how the election was stolen, so that activists can challenge the legitimacy of Ben Ali for another five years, and so that they can demand a reform before Ben Ali’s successor runs in 2014, or the old man changes the constitution to allow a sixth term. But the other reason might be to try to maintain interest in politics in the face of an electorate that has become – understandably – cynical and disinterested. Magharebia writes about the use of Facebook in Tunisian elections – that Ben Ali’s Facebook group has received only 6,000 members seems remarkably low to me. Perhaps it reflects the sort of disinterest expressed in this (deeply sarcastic) poem by Nakhlet Oued el-Bey (Translation by Mona Yahia for Magharebia):

The nation cast their votes transparently and with freedom of speech
Having discussed programs and issues of destiny.
Results were soon announced with no cheating or forgery.
Having gone through ballots,
It turns out that people’s main concern is bills
And their only wish is to save some dinars.
They are after a life with no thought or debate,
Except about the championship and who the Cup will go to.

Fair enough. There’s a lot more drama in the World Cup than there will be in the upcoming Tunisian elections. But that doesn’t excuse people who care about the future of human rights and democracy in North Africa from watching.

My friend and former business partner, Bo Peabody, has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post titled “Twitter.org?” He argues that social media is extremely difficult to support via advertising, unlikely to make profits for venture capital investors, and is sufficiently important that we should try to build non-profit models to support emerging infrastructures like Twitter.

Bo’s got some experience to draw from in offering these observations. He was the founding CEO of Tripod, which provided free homepages for over 15 million users in the pre-history of the web (1998) and peaked as the 8th most trafficked site on the web. While Bo, I and other Tripodians did just fine selling our baby to Lycos, the site never came within spitting range of profitability while we ran it. As Bo points out in his op-ed, advertisers were just never that excited about putting ads on a webpage displaying someone’s condom collection. And Bo’s been working in the venture capital space ever since as one of the co-founders of Village Ventures, and has had many an opportunity to turn a skeptical eye towards countless business plans for social media startups.

I enjoy arguing with my old friend, so we got together for coffee today to talk through his ideas at more length. The idea that advertising is unlikely to support social networks sounds right to me. I observed earlier this year that the internet is helping us realize that the value of an ad impression is much, much lower than we believed they were in the age of newspapers. Clay Shirky has sharpened that argument and used it to make the case that newspapers will fail as a model before we’re able to invent a sufficient alternative.

I asked Bo whether targetting would save us – given that Facebook knows where I live, how old I am, what music I listen to, can’t it sell hypertargeted, premium ads to me? Bo points out that Google is rapidly accumulating as much information about me, and has the advantage that I’m searching for something when I use it… while when I’m on Facebook, I’m looking for human contact and interaction, which may not be when I’m most susceptible to being redirected to an advertiser’s homepage. His take? Niche content can support itself via advertising, and search engines will continue to divert us to advertisers as we search for useful content… but social networks aren’t content, they’re communication tools. (This reminds me a great deal of Andrew Odlyzko’s “Content Is Not King“, a paper that’s wrong in many ways, and right in lots of important ones…)

So what? Facebook’s a communication business – lots of people make money on communication businesses. Wouldn’t people pay for Facebook if that was the only way to keep the service running? Bo and I batted this idea around for a while and came up with this theorem – When a major value of a service is its ubiquity, it needs to be free. Let’s imagine Facebook starts charging. Some percentage of users – possibly a significant one – start paying, while the others leave. The tool’s significanty less useful than before. What’s great about Facebook – the reasonable assumption that someone from a previous chapter of your life will be findable online – would be crippled by a more exclusive, paywalled Facebook.

The corollary to this, of course, is that you cam wall off and charge for a network where exclusivity is a feature. My friends at Dopplr just sold their excellent social network to Nokia – congratulations, guys! Dopplr didn’t have am enormous userbase… but the users of the service include a lot of high net-worth individuals and ludicrously frequent travellers, the sort of targetted community that’s excellent for advertisers, or just for Nokia to market to. Dopplr, which allows frequent travellers to share their jet-setting schedules with a controlled list of friends (and yes, I’m a satisfied user), probably doesn’t benefit from supporting millions of users – it’s probably most valuable serving an exclusive niche community.

(In economic terms, this has an interesting parallel to a point Clay made in a talk at Shorentein last week. There’s a real market for financial information, and companies like the Wall Street Journal and The Economist aren’t in trouble in the same way most newspapers are. But that’s in part because financial information is more valuable the more scarce it is – if everyone knows about Uzbekistan’s emergence as a center for hydropower innovation (that’s a joke, folks) they’d all rush into the market and remove the first-mover advantage. It’s possible that the most valuable networks are the hugely expensive, highly selective ones around conferences like TED or WEF, which charge thousands of dollars for access to some content and to a very exclusive network.)

Okay, so maybe the problem is financing social networks which function as communications tools and have strength connected to their ubiquity. This describes Facebook, journaling communities like LiveJournal and may well describe Twitter. Should we simply short their stocks? (Another joke. These companies are privately held, and it’s unclear that any would ever be able to IPO. Instead, they tend to be bought by larger dot.com businesses, seeking to broaden their userbases. Public companies need significant and verifiable revenues, at least to IPO.)

Bo argues that Wikipedia may demonstrate the possibility of running a critical service as a non-profit community effort. I’m not convinced that running Wikipedia is really as hard as running Facebook. (Communications businesses are cursed by the fact that people need them to have 100% uptime as well as preferring zero cost… And given Metcalfe’s law, you can end up with a lot more traffic in a communications service than in a content publishing one.) I’d broaden that argument somewhat – services like Facebook and Twitter are emerging as critical pieces of social infrastructure. It may be worth thinking of them as public goods. We know a lot of different ways to provision public goods – states maintain them using taxation, private entities build them and charge access fees, communities build them and rely on user support, NGOs provide services and use a hybrid of user fees, donations and foundation support. I don’t think it’s crazy to think that this might be how we choose to build social networks in the future… or perhaps if any of the tools we rely on becomes less reliable.

I’m fascinated by the story of Dreamwidth, a socially-conscious for-profit that’s been started to help address some of the struggles LiveJournal has had under new ownership. Some LiveJournal users have been unhappy about SUP’s purchase of the company and worry about the future of their content and networks. Dreamwidth has worked very closely with heavy LJ users to build an open-source product designed to meet the needs of these dedicated users. They’re willing to pay, which could allow Dreamwidth to turn a profit, but they’re interacting closely with company founders and management, trying to ensure that their community remains their community.

I think the forcing function for some future experiments in social network media models is likely to be the spread of these tools into the developing world. You think it’s hard to sell ad inventory targetted to American college students – now Facebook’s got to sell ads targetted to Nigerian cybercafe users. (I’ve long argued that you might be able to make money at this if it were central, not peripheral, to your model.) There are early indications that some firms may be trying to restrict their offerings in developing nations, offering “lite” versions as a way of reducing costs to users less likely to generate revenues. But the real potential of these tools may be in organizing political and social movements in places where other media is closed off. I can imagine a future in which a foundation offers some grant money to seed social media communities designed to provide ubiquity in developing nations for reasons of protecting and encouraging free speech… and I can even imagine these communities becoming more useful and vital than the tools we’ve so rapidly come to rely on in our current social media universe.

A fascinating story you might have missed. Noam Cohen of the New York Times looks at The Budget, a newspaper in Sugar Creek, Ohio that serves a large Amish community as well as an “English” (non-Amish) community. The story appears to be inspired by Jessica Best, a Welsh journalist who had the opportunity to study the paper on a summer fellowship. She blogged about her experiences and wrote an excellent piece for Journalism.co.uk about the experience, and the interesting compromises the paper’s taken in a digital age.

The Budget, Best explains, has two editions – a local and a national edition. The local is a weekly ten-page paper that covers events in Sugar Creek and environs. It includes news on the Amish community – a large presence in Sugar Creek – but the focus is on “English” news… and Best explains that the paper is quite careful about local sensibilities, describing the paper’s decision to downplay news of a murder in the Amish community. The local edition wraps around a much larger national, which is compiled from reports from 400 Amish “scribes” from 41 states. Scribes write reports on community news – who hosted church, the weather, harvests, births and deaths – and mail, fax or, in a few cases, email their reports to the Budget, which compiles reports into a 40+ page national edition.

When The Budget decided to go online, there was a great deal of fear in the Amish community that their news would go online – the community had legitimate fear about privacy, being targetted by scams, or simply opening the Amish lifestyle to online ridicule. (Wait, how’d they hear about 4chan…? Actually, before you go to far down the “An Amish website? Impossible!” line, read Kevin Kelly’s excellent essay, “Amish Hackers“, about the complex conversations in Amish communities about what technology to adopt and which to eschew.) The Budget decided to put the local edition online, but has kept the national edition offline.

While this is probably the right decision, it’s a loss for those who share Best and Cohen’s sense that The Budget’s national edition is one of the longest-standing citizen journalism projects in the world. The sort of hyperlocality that friends like Lisa Williams have been studying (see her Placeblogger project) has a long track record via The Budget, and the constancy of this record has some interesting social implications. The archives of The Budget become a search engine for the Amish community. Cohen reports that people in the Amish community are able to use reports from the Budget to obtain birth certificates for home births that weren’t reported to local authorities.

Benedict Anderson’s brilliant “Imagined Communities” makes the argument that a community’s identity is shaped, in part, by a shared media. He offers the image of a British empire, where citizens in Bombay, Cape Town and London might have imagined a nation united by little, day to day, but the Times of London… and speculates that the ability to imagine these other readers is a way of imagining a nation. It’s intriguing (for me at least) to think of The Budget in this context, and in the context of an archive of data that might serve as an Amish internet.