If you want to know what people around the world are thinking and feeling, you need help from a translator. Recent events in Iran are a reminder that the internet and citizen media aren’t enough to give us access to events throughout the world - we need tools and strategies for bridging language gaps as well, or we limit ourselves to only the voices we can understand.

For those of us who think the Internet is a powerful tool for international understanding, language is a challenge we need to confront, a complex set of problems we need to address. I just had the chance to join a small band of people dedicated to solving these problems, joining in the Open Translation Tools summit, held this week in Amsterdam. I came away hopeful, sobered by the size and complexity of the problems, but thrilled that such a smart, creative and global group was willing to take on these challenges.

The internet has been polyglot since early days, but the rise of read/write technologies has brought issues of linguistic diversity to the fore. In our experience with Global Voices, we saw lots of people blogging in English as a second language until there were lots of their fellow speakers online… then we saw lots more bloggers in local languages. Once you’ve got an audience that speaks your language, it makes sense to blog, twitter or otherwise publish in that language. It’s extremely difficult to accurately estimate how many people are blogging in Chinese - figures from companies like Spinn3r or Technorati aren’t counting most of the China-hosted blogging platforms. The number is somewhere between enormous and freaking huge, and people who want to know what what Chinese netizens are thinking better hope we figure out how to clone Roland Soong sometime soon. (Roland and the EastSouthWestNorth blog are so important to English/Chinese dialog that I know of several folks who refer to plans for massive Chinese/English translation as “the distributed Roland Soong problem”.)

Other languages are moving online as a way to ensure their survival in a digital age. The 27,000+ articles in the Lëtzebuergesch wikipedia don’t reflect the size of the language (spoken by roughly 390,000 people in Luxembourg) but the passion of that community to ensure the language exists in the 21st century. While Jay Walker may predict the rise of English as the globe’s second language, I’m predicting that the internet will make it easier to document, share and keep alive the world’s linguistic diversity. (They’re not incompatible ideas, BTW, though I still think Jay’s overstating the trend.)

In other words, every single day, there’s more content online in languages you don’t speak, and you can read a smaller percentage of the internet. It’s not just a matter of learning Chinese, though that would be a great first step. We’re seeing content in Tagalog, in Malagasy, in Hindi, and it’s not clear how we’re going to read, index, search, amplify and understand all of it.

The folks at the Open Translation Tools summit (OTT09) have been working on this problem for a long time. Allen Gunn - “Gunner” to anyone who knows him - characterized the participants as toolbuilders, translators, and publishers. But the common ground is that the people represented at the gathering are pioneers, people who’ve pushed the boundaries to ensure that languages can be present online, and that we can translate between them.

Some of the folks in the crowd, like Javier Solá, can claim credit for bringing whole languages online. (That Solá, a Spaniard, can claim that credit for Khmer is its own wonderful story.) Dwayne Bailey, who’s done excellent work bringing African languages online through his project, translate.org.za, reminded the crowd of the painstaking steps necessary to bring a language online: one or more fonts to represent the character set, a keyboard map to allow text entry, appropriate unicode representations, support for the language within software like OpenOffice, the creation of utilities like spellcheckers. Internationalization is now part of virtually any open source project, but it still tends to be an afterthought, and several groups at the summit were focused on the painstaking work necessary to bring Indian, Central Asian and African languages online for the first time.

Thanks in part to the Global Voices tendency to occupy other people’s conferences - we don’t have an office, so we simply send a dozen people to cool conferences and hold our meetings before or after - publishers were probably the best represented group at the meeting. Many of the projects I most admire were represented, including Meedan, which bridges between Arabic and English speakers via translation, and Yeeyan, which translates English-language content into Chinese. It’s interesting to see the different models emerging around social translation. Meedan translates everything, first with machine translation, and then with volunteer human translators, to make English/Arabic conversation seamless. Yeeyan invites readers to suggest English-language content they think Chinese readers would benefit from reading - Jiamin Zhao, who leads their Beijing team, says this hasn’t been very popular with their users, and that much of the translation happens around large, established projects like the translation of The Guardian. And Global Voices just lets anything go - each language team gets to pick what content they want to translate and what tools they want to use.

Some of the publishers are toolbuilders as well. Ed Zad showed off dotsub’s lovely platform for subtitling and translating online video. While dotsub hosts thousands of subtitled videos, many of us know it better as the toolkit underlying TED’s ambitious open translation project. This model of hosting subtitled and translated videos for third parties is a major part of dotsub’s business model - Ed shows us subtitled videos from the US Army, allowing the Army to meet legal obligations to make all their content available to the hearing impaired, at lower costs as dotsub’s tools are far more efficient than other technologies available.

Meedan offers a beautiful set of tools to allow volunteer translators to turn machine translations into more readable, human translations, and is working closely with Brian McConnell’s WorldWide Lexicon, which focuses on giving publishers a great deal of control over how their site is translated while embracing the model of social translation. I was excited to get a peek at Traduxio, which is focusing on translating cultural texts, like Balzac and Tchekhov and building complex translation memories in the process.

One of the central questions at the meeting was whether toolbuilders were building the right tools for translators to use. A number of projects focused on building open source translation memories. These are tools that keep track of how a translator has rendered a particular word or phrase in the past and prompts her with past translations in a new document. Many professional translators use Trados, though it’s apparently one of these tools that’s industry standard, though not well-loved. (One of the odd quirks of the translation industry, Ed Zad tells us, is that translation clients own the contents of these translation memories, not the translators.) It’s not clear whether social translation projects are really using translation memories. We’ve talked about the subject a great deal within Global Voices, but none of our translation teams is using one… perhaps because they’re not aware of open source ones available, perhaps because few of those open source ones are very good, or perhaps because it’s not how they’re used to working. Ziamin from Yeeyan made the same confession - perhaps because we’re working with volunteers who are translating, rather than translators who are volunteering their time, there’s not much push from within our communities for translation memory tools.

There might be more traction for tools that helped with translation workflow. Professional translators tend to be closely project-managed, and work in teams, with a translator, an editor and a proofreader. Most of the social translation models use less complex systems - an editor usually reviews a translated text in a Global Voices community, for instance, but the system isn’t as formalized. And there seemed to be great demand for tools that matched potential readers of texts with translators, systems that could allow readers to flag a text they wanted to read in another language or show translators potential readership for a particular text. I moderated a session on “demand” which generated a wide range of ideas, from seeking data from Google Translate on what documents were most requested by users to creating Firefox plugins that automatically translated texts and allowed readers to request human-translated versions. My Global Voices comrades were exploring a set of ideas about rewarding translators, with recognition, with karma ratings that might translate into professional translation work, with micropayments for translations - all these ideas require new tools and working methods.

Google wasn’t present at the conference, but was the unspoken presence in almost every session. While there was widespread agreement that Google’s machine translation tools were far from perfect - and sometimes farcically bad - they’ve been getting lots better and some participants wondered whether we should be putting the effort into building new social translation systems if they’re going to obviate all our work in a few years. Personally, I think it’s a bad mistake to stop work because we think Google might be working on the same issues.

The languages where Google is good are ones where we’ve got huge corpora - sets of documents that exist in two or more languages, which have been “aligned” by algorithms so that it’s possible to see how one phrase has been translated into another. A corpus like the Europarl Corpora - which contains millions of aligned sentences in eleven languages, taken from human translations of European parliament proceedings - can make it fairly easy to build these tools… though one wonders if they’re better at translating bureacratic memos than casual conversations. (Another major corpus, the Acquis Communautaire, offers the whole body of EU law in 23 languages. Sounds like a blast to read.) These statistical machine translation methods get stronger as we get more aligned documents available.

But some languages don’t have large corpora available - I don’t know where we’re going to find a large set of English/Malagasy translations, for instance. In these cases, rule-based machine translation might work better - one of our participants, who studies rule-based systems, argues that they’ve proved their utility in translating between closely related languages like Spanish and Catalan. They parse sentences into parts of speech, or into more complex intermediate representations, then translate word by word, restructuring the sentences into grammatically correct forms. Our friend pointed to a study he’d helped conduct which saw these rule-based systems doubling the efficiency of human translators from 3000 words a day to 6000 words, in closely-related languages.

My sense is that the most exciting potential in the near future may be to use social translation to create corpora that could benefit statistical machine translation. That probably means ensuring that Google - admired and feared at gatherings like this one - has a seat at the table in a future discussion.

It’s a long path from the discussions in Amsterdam to a system that allows me to stumble upon a blogpost in Persian and request (and perhaps offer a bounty for) a translation. But those conversations have to start somewhere, and it was a pleasure to have a ringside seat for them in Amsterdam.

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One of the projects taking place around the OTT summit is a “book sprint“, a five-day project to write a book that outlines the state of the art in open source translation systems. If that sounds crazy… well, it is, but not as nuts as you think. My friend Tomas Krag pioneered the model a few years back with a brilliant book on wireless networking in the developing world, and it’s been adopted by the fine folks at FLOSS Manuals. I’ll link when the book is available… which should be about three days from now!

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You can read notes on each of the sessions on the OTT wiki - it’s a great summary of the discussions that took place.

Chris Csikszentmihayli opens the morning’s session at MIT’s Knight News Challenge conference with an overview of his view of the world - “It’s my view from MIT - MIT wouldn’t endorse it, they’ve been quite specific about that,” he quips, a reference to the university’s unfortunate decision not to grant him tenure. Chris is now focusing on managing the Center for Future Civic Media, and outlines one of the most exciting projects, ExtrAct. The project calls attention to the process of natural gas extraction via fracturing, a process that exposes millions of rural Americans to incredibly toxic chemicals. ExtrAct tries not just to document the practices of fracturing, but to help rural, poor, highly disconnected people organize, get media attention and fight some of the harmful effects of these practices.

What do we, as a society want, Chris wonders. A free and just society. Journalism, openness and transparency and democracy have all emerged as means to that end. Technology, leveraged correctly, can sometimes be a means to that end. Sometimes technology is the enemy of a free and just society. Alan Kay famously said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Some scholars have suggested that tools control what we can do. Yochai Benkler proposes that it’s not just about the tools, but about how we use them. Bruno Latour suggests that “technology is society made durable.”

Last night’s talk, Chris summarizes, was the “rending of garments” about the death of the daily newspaper. He points out that newspapers put another group out of work, “people so dedicated to their work that they took oaths of celibacy.” (He resists the inevitable geek puns.) The press put the monks out of work. But technology isn’t evenly distributed - head to a city in the developing world and you’ll find scribes, often organized around the post office so they can help illiterate people write letters. (I’ve seen scribes in cybercafes in Kigali…) The Media Lab, Chris tells us, makes its money from fear, taking funds fro sponsors who are slowly going out of business, like the recording industry. The implication, I think, is that documenting these changes - and demonstrating their inevitability - is a useful service for helping corporations accept and cope with this change.

To frame the ideas of user innovation and open source software, Chris shows us how “diff” and patching works - the ability to compare two files on a computer system and send the changes between the two. This is the fundamental idea behind the improvability of open source software, and underlies versioning systems like Subversion and Mercurial.

User-driven innovation, as described by Eric Von Hippel, involves motives other than making a profit - users who improve products often just want a specific functionality available to the world. They don’t need to sell it, just to have it be usable. Open source projects are political spaces - they’re like community organizing projects. They need to be optimized to allow lightweight participation and contribution. He shows the structure of Linux versus Mozilla - as Mozilla moved from a commercial product into a community one, the structure had to change so that people could add code without having to learn about thousands of dependencies.

What tools allow uprisings to take place? Chris is interested in SMS and its role in organizing protests in places like the Philippines. “Governments would love it if these tools weren’t around” - that’s why they shut down SMS during elections. But other tools end up being useful, even if they’re less obvious. Planespotting websites allowed researchers to break the CIA torture flights story - the data was never intended to study torture, but it proved useful for another, critical purpose. This leads Chris to emphasize the importance of laws and practices that ensure an open and free press in a digital age. This might mean supporting Open Street Maps instead of Google Maps, so the maps are reusable and reproducible. It might mean supporting edge figures like Richard Stallman - who Chris analogizes to Reverend Elijah Lovejoy, killed in the early 1800s for his support in print for abolition.

Chris closes his talk with remarks on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote not just political philosphy but “bodice-ripper novels”. These novels allowed individuals to “live in the skin of others”, experience the empathy that comes from living for a while as a servant or a noble. The daily paper, he believes, can give a sense of community empathy, the ability to live another’s experience through storytelling. That’s something we need to preserve and cultivate as we move into a digital future.

It’s been an interesting few days for people who study social media. As the protests over election results have continued in Iran, and Iranian authorities have prevented most mainstream journalists from reporting on events, there’s been a great deal of focus on social media tools, which have become very important for sharing events on the ground in Iran with audiences around the world. I, like many of my friends at the Berkman Center and Global Voices, have spent much of the past two days on the phone with reporters, fielding questions about:

- Whether social media is enabling, causing or otherwise driving the protests in Iran
- How Iranian users are managing to access the internet despite widespread filtering
- The ethics (and practice) of distributed denial of service attacks as a form of information warfare
- Whether such online activities are unprecedented

Rather than tell you what I and colleagues have been saying to reporters, I’ll point you to one of the better stories, by Anne-Marie Corley in MIT’s Technology Review - she interviews several of my Berkman and Open Net Initiative colleagues and outlines the argument many of us are making:

- Social media is probably more important as a tool to share the protests with the rest of the world than it is as an organizing tool on the ground.
- Iranians have been accessing social networking sites and blogging platforms despite years of filtering - there’s a cadre of folks who understand how to get around these blocks and are probably teaching others.
- Because so many Iranians use social media tools - often to talk about topics other than politics - they’re a “latent community” that can come to life and have political influence when events on the ground dictate.

Gaurav Mishra rounds up dozens of blog and MSM articles and offers an excellent overview of arguments around these questions (with a strong dose of his own interpretation, much of which I share.) He references Evgeny Morozov, who’s got a thorough denunciation of DDOS as a strategy for protest, correctly pointing out that it mostly functions to make participants feel better about themselves by giving them a way to feel involved with the protests. Unfortunately, unlike positive online gestures of solidarity (retweeting reports from Iran, turning Twitter or Facebook pictures green), this one does little more than piss off sysadmins, helps Iranian authorities make the case that forces outside Iran are “attacking the country” and encourage user-driven censorship as a response to unwanted speech.

So, given the wealth of commentary on the questions above by folks smarter than me, let me weigh in on some of the questions I haven’t heard asked.

Biases and social media - One of the reasons MSM outlets are so focused on social media is that they’re not able to deploy reporters to cover these protests. In some cases, the majority of reporting from the ground is coming from social media. It’s worth asking what the biases might be in amplifying those social media reports. Ahmedinejad’s supporters tend to be poorer, more rural, less educated and more likely to speak Farsi than Mousavi’s supporters - a picture of the protests via social media runs the danger of overstating Mousavi support or minimizing Ahmedinejad support. We’ve been trying to counterbalance this a bit at Global Voices - Hamid Tehrani, our Iran editor, did a brief roundup last night of bloggers supporting Ahmedinejad. It’s worth noting that the posts he quotes are all in Farsi: language may well be a barrier that is influencing coverage as well, if voices for reform are easily quoted in English and voices for the status quo are in Farsi.

My friend and colleague David Sasaki reminded GV editors that bloggers had predicted a Rafsanjani victory in 2005, and suffered their “Howard Dean” moment when it became clear that their candidate had little support outside the most liberal bloggers. That’s a very different situation than what’s happening now - the hundreds of thousands of peple in the streets points to profound support for Mousavi - but reminds us that the online voices from Iran, especially the English-speaking ones, probably aren’t representative of mainstream opinion.

An Iran story, not a social media story - Iran is one of the countries American and British media pay closest attention to. The use of social media for protest - especially to promote a protest to international audiences - is far from unique. But because there’s such strong media focus on Iran, and such interest in the use of social media for protest, this is a perfect storm for interest in this topic.

I’ve been asking some of the reporters I’ve spoken with where they were on other recent social media and protest stories. Citizen media has emerged as one of the key spaces for journalism in Fiji in the wake of a coup government that’s censoring mainstream media. It’s been a key source of information in Madagascar as that country’s suffered through a violent change of government. (One reporter who I mentioned this to remarked that Madagascar was “just a speck of an island somewhere”. That speck is twice the size of Great Britain and has the population of Australia…) In Guatemala, online media publicized the assasination of a lawyer by forces close to the president… and government authorities began arresting people for twittering the story to amplify it. These weren’t huge stories for most newspapers - the Iran story is huge not because of the social media aspect, but because protests in Iran are a huge story independent of citizen media.

Flock - I’ve written at some length about homophily, the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together. Turns out that reporters flock, too. It’s somewhat amazing to me the extent to which reporters from really good newspapers are all asking the same questions. I’m glad that people are taking a close look at the phenomenon of social media in the Iranian protests - it’s an important, fascinating and worthwhile topic. But there’s a lot of topics out there, and I wonder whether we benefit from a thousand well-researched stories on this phenomenon rather than a hundred, and nine hundred other stories.

I’ve written in the past about my friend and colleague John Kelly’s excellent work visualising connections in different blogospheres. His best known research is on the Persian-language blogosphere, where his analysis of linking behavior showed clusters around liberal and conservative politics, but also around poetry. Subsequent analyses have seen clustering around different factors. Russian blogs appear to cluster around platforms - Livejournal users link primarily to other Livejournal users, and so the Russian “blogosphere” is a mess of disconnected communities. The Arabic blogosphere clusters based on location, rather than on interest - Egyptians tend to link to Egyptians, Saudis to Saudis.

The Chinese internet, Kelly tells us, has a complex and hybrid form. It has aspects of clustering via platform, but there are also “trading zones”, where people group by interest and mix content across platforms. He’s looking at techniques of “attentive clustering”, joining people together based on sites they’re paying attention to, rather than on direct links to one another. The research is in an early state, but it looks like Kelly’s techniques will be able to release some interesting information.

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Roger Dingledine of Tor offers some insights into his unique and exciting platform for censorship circumvention and anonymity. He reminds us that it’s free software - you’re encouraged to build your own Tor network, though you might have a hard time replicating the 1500 active relays and 200,000 users he’s got on his network. Tor has the most users in China, followed by the US and Germany.

Tor is now a “real live 501c3″ non-profit organization, and it’s been funded by an amazing variety of organizations: the US Department of Defense, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Voice of America, Human Rights Watch and Google. Speaking to all these funders requires using different language. “When I talk to Walmart, I talk about communications security. Talking to my family, I mention privacy tools. To the military, it’s ‘traffic-analysis resistant communications networks’. It’s the same tool, but I phrase it in terms of the characteristics people care about.”

All these users, Roger reminds us, are needed to keep the network robust and anonymous. Good cryptography isn’t sufficient to provide anonymity - you need to disguise who’s talking to whom, which means Tor benefits from being a network used by privacy freaks, online gambling fans and human rights activists. “Nobody tries to break crypto anymore - they just do social network analysis, find the hub, then break into your house.” Tor helps with one aspect of this problem - it disguises a great deal of communication between people who could otherwise be linked via traffic analysis. On the other hand, Roger remembers a training he and I gave a few years back, where our clients explained were being surveiled both electronically and in the physical world, with parabolic microphones intercepting conversations. Online security can only take you so far.

Roger notes that groups like Tor can help control the pace of the censorship and circumvention arms race. The more publicity tools get, the more likely they are to get blocked - Roger’s very interested in building a tool that’s useful for Chinese internet users, but not aiming at overthrowing or somehow overcoming the Chinese government, because that’s almost guaranteed to make the tool a target for blocking and censorship.

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Zhang Lei, the founder of Chinese translation community Yeeyan, starts his talk with a story about his last name. While Zhang is the world’s most popular last name, it’s generally considered exotic in the US, and most Americans can’t pronounce it correctly (”Jong”, not “Zang” or “Zeng”.) He sees this as an illustration of the difficulties people have in understanding one another when separated by barriers of language.

While 18-20% of world’s internet users are Chinese, it’s unlikely that Chinese is as well represented linguistically on the net. Zhang points out that there’s really no accurate data on what languages are represented online - he references an old and probably bad cite on Wikipedia that suggests that 80% of web content is in English, followed by German and Japanese. If this is true, there’s a massive imbalance between users and the content available to them. A simple experiment confirms this suspicion. A search for “breast cancer” on Google reveals 38 million pages - a search for the Chinese equivalent yields only 6 million, and the quality of content is much lower.

Machine translation isn’t a satisfactory solution. A simple paragraph of text, translated from English into Chinese via cutting edge technology, yield about one third readable text, two thirds gibberish. There’s a ton of content that would be worth translating from English to Chinese, and we’re not going to be able to do it automatically.

Zhang’s project, Yeeyan.com, wants to be “wikipedia for translation”. His community involves 8,000 volunteer translators, who’ve created 40,000 translations. The community includes 80,000 participants, who are able to comment on or improve translations. Perhaps the most exciting new project is a collaboration with The Guardian, to translate the newspaper into Chinese on a regular basis, producing an official, sanctioned edition - this is an interesting contrast to ECOTeam, which translates The Economist via an informal understanding with the publisher.

The motivation for Zheng’s project is to build understanding across gaps of language. He explains that terms can mean something very different, even in translation: “The term ‘conservative’ in relation to economic policy means ‘anti-freemarket, pro-government control’ - the opposite of what it means in the US.” These misunderstandings get in the way of dialog and understanding. In 2008, we saw major understanding gaps built on language gaps, centered on Tibet and Chinese nationalism. “I can’t solve these problems, but I can translate,” Zheng tells us. “Translation is the first step and a must to bridge the divide.”

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Isaac Mao has been blogging since 2002, and he’d be the first to tell you that blogging has changed how he sees the world. His work now is on developing a theory called “shareism”, based on the idea that humans are inclined to share with one another, but that cultural barriers have emerged to restrict sharing, and that losses and absences in our society arise, in part, from our failure to share. Isaac sees the hierarchical system of Chinese society, and several thousands of years of history of top-down control, as providing an especially challenging environment for shareism.

Chinese people, he believes, are being separated into two groups - those who are connected and those who are disconnected. Bloggers spend a lot of time sharing, subscribing to other bloggers, and connecting with one another. They have more authentic relationships to one another, he believes, based on their willingness to share and connect. The unconnected are influenced primarily by mainstream media - the connected can influence each other, can access information that’s hidden from the unconnected and circumvent censorship. Ideally, they’ll connect via social media, access important information, and share information with the unconnected people, empowering them. “This could be the hope and the future of the Chinese community.”

It’s not reasonable to posit the elimination of China’s hierarchical systems - it needs to be replaced with something, and Isaac believes the sorts of connection he’s talking about could offer that necessary structure. He sees this change already happening in small ways - communities that have access to alternative media stop being as dependent on highly controlled mainstream media. As attention switches to these new spaces, business and political leaders need to pay attention to these new spaces, as do foreign journalists. He notes that journalists covering China are now paying close attention to bloggers, not just to established media sources.

I’m at the 2009 Chinese Internet Research Conference at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. My colleague Hal Roberts and I are presenting some of our research on circumvention tools this afternoon, and I’m enjoying the chance to catch up on research in a field I don’t know a ton about - the Chinese internet. The conference is organized in part by my good friend Lokman Tsui, who apparently hasn’t slept in weeks.

Michael Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School, oints out that study of the Chinese internet reminds us that “the internet means very different things in very different settings.” Studying the Internet in China means moving back and forth between understanding the medium itself and understanding the cultures and economic and political settings in which it is placed. The conference, which focuses on the Chinese internet and civil society, includes talks on the public sphere and deliberation, censorship, surveillance, civil society, women and minorities, panics, nationalism and grassroot cultures. Delli Carpini warns us, “Let’s not pretend we understand the internet in the US on these issues” - we’re still figuring out how these online spaces work everywhere in the world.

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Min Jiang of UNC Charlotte used to work for CCTV in Beijing, so she’s well positioned to study Chinese media, propoganda and citizen participation. In a talk titled, “Spaces of Authoritarian Deliberation”, she explains that we need to moderate our understanding of the Chinese internet. It’s not a controlled space punctuated by bursts of protest, as usually portrayed in the Western media. Nor is it the emerging deliberative public sphere as Chinese authorities like to claim - it’s somewhere in between.

The online space in China is huge, with 298 million internet users. 2/3rds of these users are under 30, and lots of them are bloggers. (She uses the figure of 162 million, which seems very high to me, but would be interesting to see the number sourced.) 700 million Chinese have mobile phones, and 117 have phones with internet access. This, she suggests, creates an unprecedenced ability for users to engage in collective action.

There’s an impression, she suggests, that “if we bring down the great firewall, China will be free” - in truth, it’s a lot more compicated. China’s not as simple as a repressive dictatorship - it’s a complex authoritarian state, evolving over time, especially in online spaces. She offers the example of a comment by Jackie Chan in a public forum: “We Chinese need to be controlled.” Chan was offered the opportunity to respond, saying “I was quoted out of context.” Chinese netizens didn’t buy it - some suggested that perhaps Chan should be sent to North Korea to see what it’s like to be controlled. “Modern authoritianism is deliberative - it listens and responds to the people.”

She looks closely at four kinds of spaces:

Central propoganda spaces, where the government controls the message. Despite the control of these spaces, there’s a surprising amount of open discussion, including complaints posted about local government and discussions of issues like the global financial crisis.

Government-controlled commercial spaces are even more lively - while the spaces are centered on topics like music, news and messaging, there’s a great deal of discussion on political topics. When these spaces get too frisky, they can get shut down until they tone down - some spaces, after being shut down, reopen overseas. They’re emerging as increasingly important spaces to discuss public issues.

A small number of new spaces are emerging as civic forums. They’re sometimes explicitly focused on defending rights. As a result, these sites are generally asked to register their presence with the government. But other civic spaces are emerging, sometimes on sites like a Facebook clone - these are platforms for self-organizing.

Finally, she considers international deliberative spaces, a category that ranges from international media sites like China Radio International and CCTV online, which try to shape the image of China online, to spaces built by overseas bloggers and translators, like the ECOTeam (which translates The Economist into Chinese), or groups that translate entertainment content like Desperate Housewives.

The open questions Min Jiang is interested in focus on how we can engage emergent civil society in China, engage with reformist bureacrats, and engage the digital generation.

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Yuan Le presents a paper that she and Boxu Yang at Peking University developed from studying two Chinese bulletin board communities - Qiangguo Forum and
Maoyan Kanfren Forum. The former is a long-established forum, online since 1999, and seen as an officially sanctioned space. The latter is more associated with the right. Yuan and Yang develop a sophisticated political model that divides Chinese political culture into “old left”, “new left”, “nationalist” and “neoconfucian”. They’re interested in studying what debates emerge between these groups - some are ideological questions, while others are debates over the language used, particularly between old Marxist language and more modern language of the social sciences.

Analyzing 398 threads and 1243 replies, handcoding posts for political opinion, the researchers discovered a clear left/right break between the two studied forums. They also saw evidence of very different agendas between the spaces - on Qiangguo, conversations often centered on issues of social welfare, while discussions of liberal democracy and individual freedom dominated on Maoyan Kanfren.

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Sarah Cook of Freedom House presents their recent report, Freedom on the Net. It’s an attempt to rank fifteen countries in terms of internet freedom, using 19 indicators in three thematic areas: obstacles to access, limits on content and violation of user rights.

China comes up as “not free” under the Freedom House methodology, grouped with Cuba, Tunisia and Iran. She posits a paradox - China is aggresively embracing the internet, and is one of six countries they considered where internet penetration has recently doubled, but there’s sophisticated and multi-layered apparatus of control.

Cook points out that there are several phenomena which are unique to China, including strong pre-publication controls (which Rebecca MacKinnon has studied at length). Other controls, like paid manipulators of public opinion, like the 50 cent party, are seen in other venues like Russia and Tunisia.

Freedom House uses a similar points-based methodology to score press freedom, and Cook compares press and online freedom. While there’s not a large difference in highly-controled countries, there is a big gap in partially free countries - there’s more freedom online, though Cook worries that gap is closing.

(I’m not especially thrilled with Freedom House’s decision to try to rank internet freedom on a single hundred-point scale. Comparing Tunisia and China, which have utterly different filtering methodologies and social implications, feels like comparing apples and oranges to me. And trying to correlate two indexes which both measure factors that are very hard to quantify strikes me as potentially very misleading. Then again, I’ve worked closely with colleages at the OpenNet Initiative, and feel like the Freedom House work doesn’t add much to the work they’ve done over the past several years.)

SI USTED ESTA LEYENDO ESTE MENSAGE ES QUE YO RODRIGO ROSENBERG MARZANO FUI ASESINADO por el Secretario Privado de La Presidencia GUSTAVO ALEJOS Y SU SOCIO GREGORIO VALDEZ, CON LA APROBACION DEL SEÑOR ALVARO COLOM Y DE SANDRA DE COLOM.

That’s the beginning of a three-page letter written and signed by lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg on May 9th. “If you are reading this message, it’s because I, Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano, was assasinated by the private secretary to the President, Gustavo Alejos, and his associate Gregorio Valdez, with the approval of President Alvaro Colom and of (the President’s wife) Sandra De Colom.” (A translation of the full statement is available here.)

The following day, Rosenberg was shot while bicycing in Guatemala City. In the letter - and the accompanying video, above - Rosenberg tells his audience that, if he is killed, it’s because he represented a prominent Lebanese businessman, Khalil Musa, and his daugher Marjorie Musa. The elder Musa had been involved with complex dealings with state-controlled bank, Banrural - he’d been offered a board seat and then later had it withdrawn, and believed his involvement with the bank was being used to assuage concerns that the bank was engaged in corrupt practices, including laundering drug money. Earlier this month, the elder and younger Musa were killed - while the police report that the Musas were killed by workers in one of their factories, Rosenberg believed that they were killed because they threatened to expose government corruption. The Guatemalan government strenuously denies Rosenberg’s posthumous charges.

The release of Rosenberg’s written statement and video have led to street protests as well as a great deal of online organizing. Xeni Jardin - who’s covered this story very closely on BoingBoing - reports that these protests have been streamed live on the internet via Ustream.tv, with the broadcast periodically interrupted by police harrasment. Guatemalans and others following the situation are organizing groups on Facebook and tagging their posts on Twitter with the #escandalogt tag.

In one of her posts, Xeni notes that the young people organizing online to protest Rosenberg’s murder are taking a great deal of personal risk. That was a prescient warning on her part - today, Guatemalan police arrested Jean Ramses Anleu Fernández, who was twittering under the handle @jeanfer.

The tweet that got Anleu into trouble read as follows: “Primera accion real ’sacar el pisto de Banrural’ quebrar al banco de los corruptos. #escandalogt” - which (very roughly) translates as “The first thing to do is to withdraw money from Banrural to break the naks of the corrupt”. While many of Anleu’s tweets may have annoyed the government, authorities argue that this one constituted inciting a financial panic. (Xeni’s translation of the previous link, a story in Prensa Libre, is here.)

Now #freejeanfer and #jeanfer are joining #escandalogt as popular tags in the Guatemalan twittersphere. Needless to say, I’m setting up scripts to track all these tags and will release data here as it comes in. I’m intrigued to see whether we see pro-Colom voices in the tagstream as well as those protesting against the government, as we did with the #pman tag in Moldova.

Anleu’s arrest is a reminder of the very real dangers associated with online protest in repressive nations. Marc Lynch offered his concerns about Egyptian activists protesting on Facebook in a recent talk in New York - he worried that the ease of organizing online protests would motivate people to confront the Mubarak government without understanding the possible consequences. If the Colom government is willing to kill whistleblowers - which they strenuously deny - and arrest people for twittering in protest, it’s reasonable to assume that online activist carries some real risks in Guatelama. But Guatemalans aren’t running away from the medium - in the past couple of hours, dozens of people have reposted the tweet that led to Anleu’s arrest as a sign of solidarity and as a challenge to authorities.

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Xeni’s all over this story on BoingBoing. Wikipedia’s got a good overview of Rosenberg’s death and the surrounding circumstances. Prensa Libre in Guatemala City is covering these interrelated stories very closely, for Spanish speakers. We’re late to the story on Global Voices, but I hope we’ll be covering it soon.

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I ran a little tool I developed a few weeks back to check the frequency with which phrases and hashtags appear on Twitter. #escandalogt isn’t hugely frequent, registering at 0.052% - compared to #swineflu, for instance, which was running at over 2% at the height of hype/hysteria. What’s interesting is that #escandalogt is about as frequent as several of the tags listed on Twitter’s “Trending Topics”, getting more use than #fixreplies, #GoogleFail and #theoffice, all currently featured on the right sidebar. It’ll be interesting to see whether #escandalogt emerges there… or whether this is a sign that those topics aren’t entirely algorithmically generated and some human curation is involved.

One of the best things about being an academic (or even, like me, a psuedo-academic) is how easy it’s become to collaborate with people you don’t know well… or at all.

I posted some data a few weeks back about the use of the #pman twitter tag to organize, report on and debate a set of anti-communist protests in Chisinau, Moldova. Two weeks later, a post on social media guru Beth Kanter’s blog sent me over to Michael Edwards’s post about studying the use of Twitter tags during the NTEN nonprofit technology conference.

What Edwards did was scrape Twitter looking for mentions of #09ntc, the tag used to report on the technology conference. He looked closely at the use of the @ tag, which in Twitter syntax is generally used to address another individual or to credit a comment to the individual. Looking at @ tags turns a set of tweets into a directed graph - when I tweet “Hey @cshirky, did you see that brilliant post by @kanter”, I’ve created links to two other nodes in the graph. (You’re right to note that those links probably shouldn’t be considered to be equivalent - I’m directing Clay to look at Beth, which could imply different relationships to both parties. And it certainly implies a difference in information - I’m telling Clay that Beth has information he might be interested in… and there’s no guarantee that the inverse is true. But those are the challenges of analyzing graphs and not parsing content.)

Directed graphs are pretty common in social network analysis, and there are good tools developed to enable their analysis. The web is a directed graph, with hyperlinks as edges connected pages as nodes - some of our favorite tools, including most search engines, are based around analysis of these graphs. So Mike took an algorithm called HITS - developed by John Kleinberg at Cornell and used in the ask.com search engine - to look at the #09ntc tags. HITS identifies two types of nodes - hubs and authorities. Authorities are nodes in the graph - pages in the web, twitter users in the set of twitterers - likely to be authoritative on a particular topic. Hubs are nodes that have a high chance of pointing to authoritative pages.

Running HITS on the #09ntc conference shows lots of people pointing to Clay Shirky’s keynote. That’s not because Clay is especially active in the local Twitter community, Edwards speculates - Clay doesn’t actually use the #09ntc tag, so “he is, for the purposes of this conference, only a source of information, not a reporter of it.” The leading hubs are Kanter, Rachel Ann Yes and Steve MacLaughlin - Kanter and Yes are both high-ranking authorities, which suggests that while MacLaughlin is doing a lot of reporting, Kanter and Yes are reporting, but also responding to a lot of tweets, and are tightly integrated into the conversations taking place.

I thought Edwards’s analysis was a badass little piece of work, so I dropped him a note and asked whether he’d like to look at the data I’d scraped on #pman. He told me that the #pman work had gotten him thinking about scraping Twitter, and offered to run the data through his scripts. And a couple of days later, with no meetings, no grant applications, no travel between New York and the Berkshires, we found ourselves looking at an intriguing data set - the HITS ranking of the 1979 users of the #pman tag.

Looking at the “authorities” the HITS algorithm found in the #pman data, I noticed something interesting and strange. The two most “authoritative” sources - mixman2009 and mediamtv - were two figures I’d noticed using the #pman tag not in support of the Moldova protests, but to critique, argue with and sometimes mock protesters. In the sense of search engine “authority”, they’re the last people you’d want to point to as “authoritative” voices on the #pman tag. But setting aside the names and thinking about the function the two had within the network, the analysis makes sense. mixman2009 and mediamtv said a lot of provocative things, and other users of the tag felt compelled to respond to them… frequently, and repeatedly. Since a tweet that reads “@mixman2009 is an idiot. Ignore everything he says” has the same weight in a directed graph as “read @mixman2009 to understand what’s going on in moldova”, the HITS algorithm turns out to be very sensitive to identifying people starting flamewars, not just those speaking authoritatively.

(From an email from Mike to me, responding to some of my questions about the analysis: “The fact that mixman2009 is an authority makes sense if he posted provocative tweets that the pro-protest tweeters replied to. Posting whatever he did caught the eye of other people who had also linked to other high-ranking ‘authorities’. It kind of seems like a high-volume, highly visible flame war between two sides might quickly create hubs and authorities in Twitter.”)

Many of the people who’ve got high authority scores were using their twitter feeds to support the protesters, and several of these folks have high hub scores as well - it’s possible that some combination of hub and authority score might help us identify the most “important” nodes in a Twitter conversation on a particular tag… and they also might not. One result that I found very interesting - of the eight twitter users with the highest authority scores (putting aside mixman2009 and mediamtv for the moment), none were involved with the conversation on the actual day of the Moldovan protests. Most of the “authoritative” voices are commenters who join the conversation two or more days later, to cheer on the protesters. The voices who appear to be reporting from Chisinau don’t show up as authorities in the set, despite the fact that by a human definition of “authority”, they’re the eyewitnesses we’d expect to be most authoritative. We’re looking more closely at the data to try to figure out whether there’s a way to identify these individuals (other than my method of scraping all tag mentions and looking through early posts to see who appears to be reporting from an event rather than commenting on it, which is hardly scaleable or believable.)

Which is to say that graph analysis looks promising and interesting, but is hardly a silver bullet for analyzing these sorts of conversations. I suspect that doing this sort of graph analysis well is going to require playing with some hard problems, like sentiment analysis, and perhaps finding some way to parse the grammar of tweets to better understand who’s pointing to whom and why when they use the @ sign.

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Mike’s work is based around the NetworkX framework, a very powerful set of libraries in Python for analyzing graphs. He’s continuing to play with networks around different Twitter conversations and is documenting results on his blog - if there are graph theory geeks out there, especially experts on the HITS algorithm, he and I would both love to get your help thinking through some interesting research questions.

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I’m of two minds about spending time analyzing conversation dynamics in Twitter. Part of me wants to make the case that Twitter is a pretty small community, representing pretty sophisticated users in comparison to other online media tools. (Focusing on the use of #hashtags and of @directed messages restricts that set even further, to more sophisticated users.) Is it valid to make generalizations about the spread of ideas in online networks based on analysis of a small, specific subset?

On the other hand, Twitter’s starting to have some real power in influencing mainstream media’s interest in some topics - stories like #pman and #amazonfail appear to have crossed into mainstream attention in part through Twitter, and smart activists are looking for ways to generate sufficient buzz on Twitter, Facebook, or other closely watched social media services as ways of “breaking” stories.

Beyond that, Twitter is a fantastic environment for reseachers, because it allows us to get comprehensive data. It’s virtually impossible to answer the question of how many newspaper stories or blogposts in the past month mentioned Swine Flu - Google News tracks about 14,000 news sources, but that’s far from all the possible sources we could track, and none of the blog search engines are especially comprehensive. It is possible to get an answer to the question on Twitter - it takes some work, but the tools I wrote a couple of weeks ago should make it possible to get a precise count.

This sort of comprehensive data lets us ask some different types of questions about how ideas spread in a medium. One of the questions I’d most like to answer is “How successful are bloggers/citizen journalists/twitterers in introducing new stories to mainstream media?” In other words, how often do we see memorable events like “Rathergate” or “Trent Lott at Strom Thurmond’s birthday” emerge from citizen media and gain traction in mainstream news sources? Without an ability to follow hundreds of thousands of sources - what we’re trying to do with Media Cloud - any answer to this question is going to miss lots of failed attempts to get traction for a story.

We might be able to try something different in a closed Twitter universe. Grab every single #hashtag over the course of a month. How many of these are used once, or used by a small group of people, in comparison to #hashtags that gain wide usage? Are #hashtags introduced by people with lots of followers more popular? Does it matter how many #hashtags you try to introduce? How often you post? How viral are these mediums, really?

It’s not an experiment I can run yet - it would require access to all tweets, not just the search engine scraping I’m doing - but it seems like it would be feasible. As for whether learning how viral #hashtags are in Twitter and whether that tells us anything about the relationship between blogs and newspapers, I don’t have a good answer, but it’s a fun question to think about.

(Notes from a talk by my friend Marc Lynch, in dialog with Mohammed Bazzi from NYU’s journalism school at Open Society Institute, Tuesday night. Not only am I late to posting these notes, I had to duck out early. But I found Marc’s ideas fascinating and provocative, so wanted to post a quick write-up.)

Marc Lynch has a unique perspective on the Arab blogosphere. He’s a leading expert on Arab media, the author of an influential book on Arab satellite television, and will be the director of a new center of Middle East Studies at George Washington University beginning next year. But his understanding of Arab blogs comes from being an “Arab blogger”, a role he describes as “an honorary status”.

Marc’s influential blog, Abu Aardvark, was begun in the fall of 2002 and rapidly found itself incorporated within the Arabic blogosphere, added to aggregators like iToot. This made sense - Marc was linking to a large number of Arabic bloggers and participating in these discussions. And at that moment, the phenomenon of “bridgeblogging” was a dominant force in the conversations. Arab bloggers saw themselves as part of a global conversation, and often wrote in English so they’d be more widely read and understood. While these conversations were interesting, they weren’t especially influential in terms of local politics.

Marc began to take blogs more seriously as a space for political discourse when they became one of the key tools for political activists. The Kefaya movement in Egypt flocked to blogs, building aggregators and using digital media both as a space to plan offline actions and a tool for promoting and amplifying their views. In this second wave, Marc feels the interesting bloggers were activists first, and users of online tools second. “If the internet were cut off, they’d find another way to organize and act.”

The Kefaya activists, a coalition of diverse anti-Mubarak voices in Egypt, including students, leftists and sometimes moderate members of the Muslim Brotherhood, were able to use a wide range of digital tools to exert a disproportionate influence over Egyptian politics. “Kefaya punched way above their weight in 2004 and 2005″ - they organized protests that gained international attention, were covered by Al Jazeera and managed to drive the Egyptian political agenda for a time. The party was over, Marc argues, when candidates supported by Kefaya failed in elections, suggesting that the movement didn’t have widespread political support and was getting disproportionate amounts of attention because they were simply better at using digital media than anyone else in Egyptian politics.

“One intepretation is that Kefaya really was punching above their weight and couldn’t get sustained political change because they weren’t a big enough movement. Another is that they managed to do things they had no earthly reason to be able to do. They were fighting against extremely high odds, no reasonable reason to believe they could have succeeded in changing” one of the world’s most repressive regimes.

Marc sees parallel movements in Bahrain and Kuwait during this same period, where blogospheres became highly politicized. But he’s unconvinced that the internet was the independent variable in these equations. “There were other changes, openings in the political culture” that made the activist use of the internet possible.

A third wave of political blogging, often focused on organizing protests via Facebook, is less impressive and more worrisome to Marc. He notes that recent “Facebook strikes” in Egypt weren’t actually led by Facebook activists - they were conventional labor-led protests, with a small, parallel online effort. Marc’s concern is that the people participating in Facebook protests may not fully undertand the risks they’re taking.

This concern extends to citizen journalists as well. “Some people are getting involved in doing what the local press should do but don’t,” focusing on urban issues, schools and plight of the poor. But Marc worries that they’re “trying to do this in political systems with no legal protections, and no way to avoid consequences - formal journalists have few protections, and independents are even more vulnerable.” As friends have gotten involved with citizen media in countries like Egypt, Marc has gotten increasingly scared for them, and seen several get into serious trouble.

“I’m worried about things that seem like a good game to a 23-year old, who think that their western connections will spare them the vengence of an authoritarian state.” He worries that it may be a bad idea to train citizen journalists when we haven’t taken steps to protect them through making changes in the the legal environment that surrounds them.

This doesn’t mean he believes that all bloggers are ineffective in the Middle East. He’s particularly optimistic about “public sphere bloggers”, a group who’ve written in Arabic, not about politics but about social issues. Their work, he tells us, is about the play of ideas and the shattering of taboos - it was aimed locally, not at a foreign audience, and didn’t attempt to directly engage politics or journalism. “These blogs are ways of engaging in a society that had no place for the authors.” Marc expects to see the impact of these blogs not on media or elections, but on the bloggers themselves - in the long run, this form of expression will change expectations about the societies the bloggers live in. That said, we might not see the impact for ten to fifteen years, and even when we do, their impact will be subtle. “This sort of change is not very sexy - you don’t see it in the streets, you don’t see revolutions or changes in government. We want to see immediate payoff - I don’t think we should. We’re talking about groups of 100-200 young people with very little social and political capital, confronting some of the most authoritarian regimes in the world.”

When we consider the role of new media in the Middle East, Marc argues that politics have to come first. “It’s easy to be overly impressed with impact of media technologies, used for their own sake.” We can lead ourselves astray if we don’t pay attention to underlying political structures, especially in authoritarian regimes like Egypt. The failure of Facebook activism in Egypt shouldn’t have been a surprise - it would have been a surprise if those protests succeeded.

Again, I missed most of the questions put to Marc - friends tell me that over an hour’s worth of discussion followed his talk. But the first couple focused on the role of organizations like OSI, which have been interested in finding ways to support activists in countries like Egypt. Marc recommends that we focus not on training users on particular tools and strategies. Instead, “we should pressure governments to respect basic human rights, freedom of speech, freedom not to be tortured. We should create a framework to enable all sorts of protest.” But we should be wary of starting either from a particular set of individuals we want to support, or from a technical perspective. And most of all, we need to be patient: “Mubarak is never going to get voted out, but we might be able to change the speech environment in the country.”

On Sunday, April 5th, the governing Communist party won over 50% of the vote in Parliamentary elections. This was decidedly a surprise, as Communists had lost the last round of municipal elections, and as an organized anti-Communist movement had been warning that elections might be rigged. More than 10,000 young activists took to the streets of Chisinau on Tuesday, occupying Chisinau’s central square, the Piata Marii Adunari Nationale. The protests turned violent in the evening: government buildings burned and dozens of protesters were injured.

Now, two days later, another battle is raging, a far less serious one. Inquiring internet users want to know: Was this a twitter-driven revolution? My friend and colleague Evgeny Morozov appears to have started the Twitter meme, with a thoughtful post in his new blog on ForeignPolicy.com, net.effect. The post, titled “Moldova’s Twitter Revolution“, observes that the tag #pman (short for Piata Marii Adunari Nationale, the square where protests unfolded) had been one of the most active on Twitter on Tuesday. Evgeny’s post is more careful than the headline - he notes that Moldovan friends tell him there’s little mobile phone coverage in the square, and notes that many social networking tools were likely used to organize protests, not just Twitter. (Global Voices has excellent coverage of both the protests and the social tools used.)

But it’s the Twitter headline that stuck. Yesterday’s story on the protests in the New York Times was titled “Protests in Moldova Explode, With Help of Twitter“. The meme has legs, and stories with titles like “Twitter 1, communism 0” are appearing in English-language newsapers: “A victorious moment. Technology over tyranny. A youth united tapping Twitter in the name of democracy.”

It seems unlikely, though, that Twitter was the key tool in a victory of “technology over tyranny”, if that is, in fact, what happened. For one thing, the Communist party in Moldova doesn’t have much in common with the Communists of old - Moldovan communist favor foreign direct investment and promoting entreprenership, though they’d like closer involvement with Russia and less with Romania. But to the extent that this was a technological “triumph”, it may have more to do with other social network tools - including blogs, LiveJournal and Facebook - than with Twitter.

Mentioning Twitter is currently the best way to pick a fight in geek communities. My friend David Weinberger tells me that his recent essay, “4.5 lessons from Twitter” is one of the most controversial pieces he’s written recently, observing that positive and negative reactions have both been surprisingly strong. I find that reactions to Twitter are roughly as strong (and usually as ill-informed) as debates about Second Life 18 months ago - this may simply be the pattern for any new technology that becomes this month’s media darling.

But it’s certainly no surprise that there are now commentators arguing that Moldova’s protests aren’t and couldn’t be a Twitter revolution. One of the better arguments I’ve read comes from Daniel Bennett on the Frontline Club’s blog site. His essay, “The myth of the Moldova ‘Twitter revolution’” makes the case that there’s little evidence that Twitter was actually used to organize the Moldovan protests. He cites Morozov’s observation that there was little cellphone coverage in the square as evidence that Twitter wasn’t the main tool for coordination, and notes that Moldova’s twitter community appears to be very small, likely fewer than 200 users. Cezar Maroti, writing from Rotterdam, uses a clever Google search to suggest that there are fewer than 100 twitter users in Moldova, an observation that Morozov agrees with in a follow-up article to his original post.

Here’s my guess at what happened as regards the use of social networking tools and the recent Chisinau protests:

- The ThinkMoldova and HydePark used a variety of social media tools to organize and publicize their actions. Both groups maintain websites and use blogs and LiveJournal accounts to disseminate ideas and publicize events. An active and growing Facebook group, “Support Moldova“, points to organizers skill with that toolset. And Deutsche Welle reports that protests were organized in part via SMS.

There’s nothing unusual about this. Media-savvy organizers understand that different communication tools are useful for achieving different goals - when I run trainings for activists on new media tools, I try very hard to ensure that activists don’t get attached to any one particular tool - the right tool is one that the community you’re trying to mobilize is using, one that works at the same speed you do (if you’re writing political manifestos and essays, don’t do so on Twitter) and the one that helps you gain the most attention.

- Twitter is a genuinely great tool for offering short reports about breaking news. During the Malagasy coup, those of us following the situation from off the island clung to Twitter for current information - though much of the information we got was from broadcasts on radio or television within the country, that information wasn’t available outside Madagascar, and Twitter made it possible to get updated information, rather than daily wire reports.

Moldova has a huge diaspora - an estimated quarter of the population lives abroad, and reports suggest that a similar number are applying for Romanian passports. It’s quite possible that Moldovans living abroad, hungry for news about the demonstrations, looked online and ended up flocking to Twitter.

- Twitter is a great way to get attention, if only because it’s the flavor of the month in social media. Morozov notes that Moldovan organizer Oleg Brega has a great deal of facility with social media, noting “a typical Brega stunt: provoking the Moldovan police to arrest him and have someone capture this on video and then republish to YouTube.” It’s fair to assume that Brega and colleagues either knew that the Twitter community would be fascinated by protest-related tweets (as they were with breaking news tweets from the Bombay bombings and, to a lesser extent, the Malagasy coup), or that organizers were able to embrace the tool when it became clear there was the potential for international attention via Twitter.

It’s also frustratingly predictable that mentioning cool new tech is a great way to get journalists to cover an event they might otherwise miss. Moldovan youth protests make for a good story if they succeed and lead towards an Orange Revolution-esque change in government. But the failure of the Demin revoluion in Belarus suggest that these comparisons be made carefully. Even if the protests don’t lead to a change in government, a story that confirms our sense that new technologies are inherently democratizing is likely to be amplified and argued about. Everyone likes evidence that they’re living in the future, where tyrants quake at the power of our mobile phones.

- It’s going to be very hard to figure out what actually happened on Twitter during the past few days. Twitter leaves fewer traces than many other online media - its transiency is one of its strengths, but it makes life very difficult for scholars. A search for #pman on Twitter reveals 1500 tweets in the past four hours… and no ability to search beyond those recent tweets, even through the API.

(There is a way, I suspect - currently banging on Twitter’s search engine and will report back if I have any success. If you know of a good tool that tracks the incidence of a tag on Twitter over time, or lets you do searches on Twitter that go deeper than 1500 results, please let me know. Hashtags.org is close to what I need, but I’d like something that gives me numbers and dates as well as the pretty graphs.)

Smart researchers would start recording Twitter behavior by subscribing to Twitter feeds as soon as it becomes clear which ones to follow. In the meantime, aggregators that follow the key tags may prove to be very useful for researchers. But I suspect the definitive answer about whether Twitter was or wasn’t core to the Moldovan protests will come from interviews with the demonstration organizers, not from technical forensics.

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As the debate about Moldova and Twitter unfolded yesterday, I was watching another blame game unfold: the Moldovan government blaming the riots on Romania. I posted the following to Twitter: “NYTimes argues Twitter leads to Moldova riots. Moldovan gov’t blames Romania. Romania = Twitter? #pman”

I got two interesting responses almost immediately.

Dinu Popa noted: “@EthanZ #pman moldovan govenrment blames everybody: the West, Romania, Jesus, even Russia(!). The real cause is fraudulent elections.”

But my favorite was from Bigubax, who tweeted, “#pman @EthanZ NYTimes argues Twitter leads to Moldova riots. Moldovan gov’t blames Romania. Romania = Twitter? -> Twitter=Freedom. So: Yes!”

My friend Evgeny Morozov has ascended to the Pantheon of bloggers writing for Foreign Policy’s excellent website. Foreign Policy’s Passport blog is my first read every morning, and the site features some of the most knowledgeable bloggers on international affairs, including Dan Drezner, Marc Lynch, and several other folks you absolutely, positively should be reading.

Evgeny’s new blog is titled net.effect, and it focuses on the intersection of the internet, media, free speech, politics and security in a globalized world. I’m thrilled to see Evgeny blogging again - he’s lately been focused on explaining breaking issues in cybersecurity, digital nationalism and online warfare in publications like Newsweek and the International Herald Tribune. But his mind is so hungry, and his gift for contextualizing is so great, blogging is the natural medium for him. I’ve long looked to Evgeny to explain Russia’s role on the internet to me - I’m thrilled that he’s now taking on the challenge of reporting from everywhere from Sri Lanka to Egypt.

I am sad about one thing. My favorite of Evgeny’s projects - Polymeme - is on hiatus as of the beginning of this month. Polymeme is an amazing service - using a combination of human and algorithmic intelligence, the site looks at media that’s being discussed by smart bloggers, and identifies the pieces in online media that are sparking the most discussion. Evgeny explains that the social media space is changing so quickly that it makes sense to think about how the project includes information sources like Facebook and Twitter. Fair enough. But there’s an incredible value to isolating the stories that are sparking discussion online - I really hope Polymeme will continue in some form, and I’m tempted to put together a movement to keep the current project going while Evgeny and friends figure out new directions.