-
Lovely post from George at Meedan about one of the central problems with the polyglot internet - how do we know what we want to read if it hasn't been translated yet?
-
Eric Raymond is fronting a group of hackers, calling themselves NedaNet, and attempting to put up proxies and Tor nodes to help people within Iran
-
Limits on professional journalists reporting from Iran are forcing a rapid change in what material is amplified from social media into mainstream media.
-
Website for Channel One TV, Iranian dissident TV from Los Angeles
-
Shahram Homayoun of Channel One TV (Iranian satellite TV, broadcast from Los Angeles) explains that his team has been supplying miniature video cameras to Iranian contacts for the past year in the hopes of getting footage of the Iran elections.
-
The New York times worked hard to keep the kidnapping of David Rohde out of the news. It required some serious work to keep it out of Wikipedia, including Jimmy's personal intervention.
-
Linked In tries to use social translation/crowdsourcing to make its interface available in other languages. The community reacts angrily. Is it appropriate for a for-profit company to use unpaid translation for interface elements? It certainly alienates professional translators
-
Colleagues at Berkman analyze the first 18 days of data from tweets about the iranian elections. It's a much bigger phenomenon than the Moldova data set, with many more participants, but has a similar Pareto distribution. Fascinating to see how common retweeting was within the set of data. People are raising concerns about the decision to publish the most prominent tweeters, fearing Iranian government retaliation… a real challenge in working on publicly available data like this.
-
An analysis of email from Enron suggests a signature pattern for a failing organization, a shift from organization-wide communications to smaller, trusted groups
-
Excellent frontline/world story on the eWaste industry, and how recycling contractors are dumping waste on developing nations, causing environmental damage and exposing customers to identity theft at the hands of crafty Ghanaians.
-
A radio show by an Iranian jew in Israel shows the power of old media in a digital age - shortwave radio
-
A small study suggests that tweets that appear to come out of Iran are getting amplified to a great degree, retweeted an average of 57.8 times. Unclear how this compares to existing retweeting patterns, but strikes me as a very large number, implying a community very interested in amplifying any information they can get from Iran… or people representing themselves as being in Iran
-
A Chinese blogger, translated by Roland Soong, reflects on the complex changes China's gone through and why it's so hard for Westerners to understand Chinese opinions and views on politics and reform
-
Environmental refugees aren't just island dwellers whose lands are swallowed by the sea - they're farmers around the world on marginal land which becomes less productive as the environment changes. Excellent, in depth piece from Sam Knight about Nandom, Ghana, a farming town in the remote northwest which has seen its population cut in half as farmers' children have sought an easier life in cities like Accra and Kumasi
-
Not in my name! An online campaign against far-right views and politics in Hungary, the site invites Hungarians to post their names and photos in order to demonstrate that extreme and nationalist voices don't speak for the whole state.
-
The fine folks at anonymous - the people who brought you those scientology protests - offer online bulletin boards and messaging services for Iranian activists. Points for solidarity, but unclear if these will remain accessible to Iranian dissidents very long.
-
Very smart analysis from Renesys on the blocking of proxies within Iran. Renesys saw over 2,000 proxies posted on Twitter and other services - they're getting blocked very, very quickly.
-
Noam Cohen deserves some sort of award for getting that cute cat photo to run in the NYTimes. He and I talk cute cat theory and its implications for the Iranian protests
-
Tom Watson warns of the dangers of viewing the Iranian protests via a lens of US politics and suggests that Andrew Sullivan and others are overemphasizing the social media role in these events.
-
Goje Sabz offers reasons why the Iran DDOS attacks should continue (and accuses everyone who thinks otherwise of being ignorant, ill-informed and racist)
-
Tim O'Brien looks at the rise of interest in Iran's elections on Twitter, and offers well-thought out reasons not to participate in DDOS attacks against Iranian government targets
-
New York Times on CNNFail, twitter-based criticism of CNN's failure to cover Iranian protests in depth and on the ground
-
David Sasaki's beautiful, imaginative, hopefull and more than slightly cyberutopian post about cloud intelligence, the theme of the Ars Electronica conference he's curating with Isaac Mao
-
Premiering tonight on PBS, an intriguing-looking documentary about a Muslim community in West Virginia and a controversy about whether women and men can pray together. Looks like a fascinating look at a corner of American culture very few Americans know anything about.
-
Pulitzer Center is taking a close look at Somaliland and the stresses that are arising due to an unrecognized government. It's a key issue, and good to see Pulizter taking a close look, though there's not much reporting here yet.
-
Maker Faire Africa will feature amazing hackers, programmers, builders and tinkerers from around the continent. Think of it as Afrigadget brought to life. Should be an amazing time.
-
Powerful article about a photo series, focusing on the children of rape in Rwanda. The mothers photographed had been raped by Hutu militamen during the genocide, and the photographer interviewed them away from their children, then photographed the two together. A powerful reminder of consequences of war that continue a generation after a conflict ends
-
"Tajik Jimmy", actually an ethnic Uzbek named Baimurat Allaberiyev, is Russia's newest YouTube sensation - he's an amazingly faithful reproducer of Bollywood hits, singing the male and female parts and accompanying himself tapping on a bucket. Interesting piece about the internet, mobile phone video, fame and race in contemporary Russia
