I’m a bad blogger today, but a good conversationalist. Aspen isn’t bloggable in the same way as a conference like TED or Pop!Tech - we’re in a large music hall without wifi or power, and I’ve got the only laptop out in sight. And I’ve been spending less time transcribing sessions and more catching up with old friends.

But fortunately I ducked back into the “tent” to catch the end of a talk I’d really wanted to hear, a dialog between Secretary Madeline Albright and scholar Hernando de Soto. De Soto is a proponent for property rights. He argues that a key towards economic development is ensuring that people in the developing world can document ownership of their houses and land. This is critical for economic development - in the US, most entrepreneurs fund their businesses based on mortgaging their houses. You can’t do this if you can’t document your ownership…

Secretary Albright connects these issues to the problem of failed states. “Failed states come about when we don’t know who owns things, who’s in charge, or who’s responsible.” It sounds absurd to push for property rights in a place like Darfur, she tells us, but that’s how we prevent state failure and a critical piece of recovery from crisis situations.

De Soto observes that much of the world’s agricultural production is being produced by a small set of nations - the US, China, Canada, Australia - the breadbasket of the world. There’s far more space available in Latin America and Africa, and countries like China are now acquiring huge swaths of land in Africa, as are companies like Unilever and Hershey. (Or Daewoo in Madagascar.) People argue that property rights are a right wing concept and that we shouldn’t be emphasizing them in the developing world. But if we don’t, De Soto argues, we’re going to end up with an African continent owned by large corporations with no rights for the current landowners. This may sound like a right-wing movement, but it’s the way we give people sufficient rights that we don’t end up with peasant insurgencies like the Shining Path.

Albright suggests that we need to consider the role of women in property ownership, including inheritance and property rights. The interlocutor (whose name I didn’t catch, alas) references the participation of women in the recent street protests in Iran - they’ve got more at stake and less to lose than the men do.

DeSoto argues that it’s easier to grant property rights than we think. You’re giving poor people what they’ve already got - “Law is already there in a semotic stage.” He tells a story of visiting with the Indonesian government after spending a vacation in Bali. The government asked him, “How do we find out who owns what? We want to avoid another revolution.” DeSoto’s advice - take a walk. Every two hundred yards or so, a different dog barks. “There may be no records, but the Indonesian dogs know where the borders are.”

We might also look towards models that have worked before. In Colorado, in days past, if you cut down enough trees, you’d have a legal claim to the land. DeSoto tells us, “There’s practice, then you codify it.”

There are countless ways to screw up a fragile democracy. Two aspects of the democratic process seem to be especially vulnerable - elections, and term limits. Recent events in Iran have reminded us that elections are surprisingly easy to rig if you’ve got adequate control of electoral commissions. (Ideally, you should never need to rig an election. With state control over media, it should be easy enough to marginalize opponents and consolidate the image of a strong executive. The mistake in the Iran elections may have been the televised debates, which established Moussavi as a credible threat to Ahmedinejad…)

And there are a lot of rigged elections. In Africa, we’ve seen recently seen a thoroughly corrupt Zimbabwean election leading to an uncomfortable power-sharing arrangement, a rigged Kenyan election leading to violence and a bloated power-sharing government, a massively flawed election in Nigeria being accepted largely because it didn’t erupt into violence. Even in Ghana, where the 2008 elections were rightly celebrated for providing a peaceful transfer of power (the rare and celebrated “double alternation“), some of my friends affiliated with the ousted NPP claim that the election was flawed, but their party stood down rather than risk Kenya-style chaos. (I have no way of validating these claims, but I’m fascinated that an election celebrated for its smooth running is being questioned by some participants.)

Recent events suggest that we may need to pay close attention to the moment when leaders realize they’re constitutionally obligated to step down. It’s a legitimate concern in fragile democracies that a leader may be fairly elected, and may then manipulate the levers of power to remain in office indefinitely. (The running African joke about democratically-elected strongmen has the punchline: “One man, one vote, once.”) So many constitutions include strict term limits for executives. And popular leaders often try to ammend constitutions to allow them to rule indefinitely - Hugo Chavez proposed such ammendments to Venezuela’s constitution and was narrowly defeated in a referendum in late 2007.

Honduran president Manuel Zelaya is facing the end of his term in office and can’t currently stand for another term due to term limits. He sought a referendum allowing a constitutional change which would allow him to stand again. An hour before polls were scheduled to open, he was seized - in his pajamas - by military officers acting on a Supreme Court order and spirited off to Costa Rica.

That sounds a lot like a coup to me - the military has seized power and ousted an elected leader before the end of his term. On the other hand, the military was acting under court order, which leads to an argument that the presidential ouster was legally mandated. There’s been lively online debate on the topic of coup/no coup - readers on Reddit yesterday morning were greeted with an angry comment, “I am from Honduras. It was NOT a COUP” and a long comment thread debating events. The back and forth on the English-language wikipedia has been fierce enough that the Honduras page is currently protected from future edits (thought the Spanish-language page is not protected at present.)

While the Honduras situation is gaining some media attention - notably because both Hugo Chavez and Barack Obama have protested the events that have transpired - a very similar situation in Niger hasn’t moved beyond the back pages of the newspaper. In Niger, President Mamadou Tandja has been seeking an additional term in office, which has required constitutional changes via a referendum. The constitutional court ruled against his proposed referendum, and earlier this week, he declared he would rule by decree, dissolved the court that ruled against him and appointed 8 ministers who agree with his referendum plans. It’s not technically a military coup, as the military has stayed neutral… but an Nigerois opposition figure has called the situation a coup and been arrested for his troubles.

Mark Leon Goldberg, writing in UN Dispatch, asks “If a coup falls in Niger, does it make a sound?” While Tandja is earning brickbats from ECOWAS and from the EU, the story isn’t getting much play in international media. I can’t find evidence that Obama’s specifically condemned Tandja’s actions (BTW, I do not recommend searching for “obama niger” - it’s depressing, and won’t enlighten you on this story), and there certainly aren’t media pundits demanding an Obama stand on events.

It’s interesting to think about what democratic stresses attract international attention and which fly under radar. Protests in Iran were going to be front-page news, even before demonstrators displayed uncommon persistance and courage. Iran’s a founding member of the “axis of evil” - the Beatles of international media attention - a country that’s always red hot on attention maps. That Iran has a thriving blogosphere and a tech savvy population, many of whom knew how to evade the government firewalls that have been in place most of this decade, helped turn exciting, inspiring political developments into an international media phenomenon.

Other countries can have profoundly strange goings-on and healthy citizen media coverage, and won’t get a fraction of the coverage. See Madagascar, which has been in the throes of a deposed government, where bloggers have emerged as a key alternative to mainstream media. Or Fiji, where the military has been in control since late 2006, the fourth coup in recent years, and where recent restrictions on freedom of the press has been called “coup 4.5″ and turned bloggers into outlaw media outlets. We’ve covered both crises closely at Globa Voices, but we’ve not had the mainstream media interest we’ve received around Iran.

So why does Honduras get the Iran treatment, while Niger is ignored like Madagascar? Proximity? Strategic importance? (though Niger’s got massive uranium reserves - you remember yellowcake, right?) It’s not population - Niger’s roughly twice the size of Honduras. Expectation? Perhaps we’re sufficiently accustomed to African coups (Madagascar, Mauritania and Guinea in the past year) that Niger’s not a surprise.

Or perhaps all the pundits are still trying to figure out which one’s Nigeria and which one’s Niger…

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.

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!

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

(I’m at the 7th China Internet Research Conference at the Annenberg School of Communications. Information on participating is here.)

The second session at the China Internet Research conference is a roundtable on the Global Network Initiative, an association of academic institutions, corporations and nonprofit institutions working on a set of best practices for corporations to follow in engaging with governments on online freedom of expression issues. Hosted by my colleague Rebecca MacKinnon, the round table includes Colin Maclay from the Berkman Center, Leslie Harris from the Center for Democracy and Technology, Bob Boorstin representing Google, internet entrepreneur Isaac Mao, and Ang Pen Hwa from Nanyang Technical University.

Rebecca explains that the GNI is a result, in part, of hearings in US Congress about actions by US corporations in China, emerging in part in reaction to Yahoo’s role in the arrest of Chinese journalist Shi Tao. Corporations wanted advice on best practices working in nations that don’t respect rights of free speech, and NGOs wanted to ensure that companies worked to protect human rights. This created a sense of common interest, which has allowed the companies to meet on common ground and discuss strategies.

Boorstin acknowledges that being the representative of a large US corporation at a Chinese internet conference can be “like being the fire hydrant at a dog show”. He explains that Google has much less leverage in China than most people think - if Google threatened to leave, he says, “The Chinese government would say, ‘Bye bye’”. Their market share is small compared to Baidu’s - 22% versus 70% market share - and Boorstin argues that they’ve got less influence than larger Chinese companies would have.

Without disagreeing with him, Isaac Mao points out that his open letter to Google (published over two years ago, and never responded to by Google…) was directed because Google has such a strong reputation for being socially progressive - he hoped Google would choose to do the right thing and engage in China in a way that explicitly promoted freedom of expression.

Ang suggests that GNI not try to get the US first ammendment adopted around the world. Instead, it’s important to celebrate a best practice - immunizing a provider from third-party liability. In other words, individuals are responsible for their speech, not companies. Without this limitation on liability, it’s virtually impossible to run book reviews on Amazon or maintain a site like Trip Advisor. It’s not unreasonable, he argues, to expect regulation of offline media to creep into regulation of online media, but this single principle makes a great deal of free expression possible. Colin Maclay questions whether we want to regulate the internet like media, or like free expression, pointing out that online expression is very different from traditional media: it’s cheap, unlicensed, and yet still persistent, having an impact even after a takedown order.

Leslie Harris responds to criticism that the GNI doesn’t include small companies or non-US companies - it’s based primarily around Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. “When we started, we wondered whether we could get these three companies to sit in a room together… and the answer was initially ‘no’.” In other words, it’s required a great deal of work to get as far as the initiative has gone so far - we may need to be patient in expecting the group to extend any time soon.

Rebecca calls on Michael Anti, reminding us that his blog, hosted on Microsoft’s MSN Spaces (now Windows Live) was censored in 2005, not by China but by the company. He offers the observation that Chinese users are offering “a quiet acceptance of some compromise - without some compromise, we know we’ll lose these key services.” But he suggests that these companies formalize a bargain with their Chinese users: “We want companies to udnerstand that when they do business in China, it’s exchange - we exchange part of our freedom to support you. You should have some special group to help civil society as an exchange for us ignoring your compromise with the government.”

Harris fields a question about whether the US Congress has a seat at the table of GNI. “They’re at the table, but not as a welcome guest,” she quips. While Congress isn’t represented at the table, pressure from congressional committees helped bring participants to the table, and it might require EU pressure for European companies to participate as well.

In response to a question about whether GNI serves as a “fig leaf” for corporations, Boorstin points out that Google added a notice at the bottom of their Chinese search results making clear that filtering is taking place - other engines have caught up and provided a similar notice. “What’s under the figleaf: pretty much the three Ts, and one F - there’s more than that, but I think most Chinese users know what material they can’t get.” (That would be Tibet, Taiwan, Tienenman and Falun Gong, for those not following the Chinese internet closely…)

Isaac Mao and Ang Pen Hwa field a question about setting up an initiative like the GFI in Asia, with Asian stakeholders. Isaac believes GNI could be localized to Asia, because there’s a “cultural history of controlling culture” which leads to attempts to control the internet too closely. This, in turn, means that Asian companies are facing the sorts of pressures that brought US governments to the GFI table. Ang tells us he’s hoping to set up a “committee of internet experts” - “it’ll be like the EFF, but you can’t use the word ‘Freedom’ in Singapore without being misunderstood.” Support for the initiative is more likely to come from small businesses and academia in Singapore, he believes, not from civil society.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hans Rosling, the brilliant Swedish statistician and doctor, has been on a tear lately, publishing a lovely series of short videos on Gapminder.org. The videos are short Rosling lectures, centered on data visualization, designed to dismiss your preconceptions regarding important questions about health and development.

The most recent video in the series focuses on one of my favorite statistics: the death to news ratio. Rosling looks at the 31 deaths from swine flu and the quarter million news stories he was able to find on Google News and compares this to the estimated 63,000 deaths from tuberculosis around the world in the same time period, and the 6 thousand stories about those deaths. There are over 8100 news stories for each death from swine flu, and less than a tenth of a story for each TB death, by Rosling’s calculations.

Rosling points out that, if swine flu does become a genuine pandemic, more media attention will be appropriate. In the meantime, he issues a media hype warning regarding the disproportionate attention paid to the disease.

The death to news stories ratio is a favorite topic of international news geeks - discussions usually centers on the question, “How many African kids have to die to make the front page of the New York Times?” The answers tend to be pretty depressing, particularly when cynical reporter friends introduce hierarchies that run from African children through to blond American kids at the bottom of wells, or kidnapped in Mexico.

There’s a slightly more affirmative way to look at these situations, offered by Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge, in their 1965 paper “The Structure of Foreign News“. Galtung and Ruge offer a dozen factors that help explain how a particular story becomes or does not become news. We could throw several of Galtung and Ruge’s factors at Rosling’s implicit question: why are we paying so much more attention to swine flu than to tuberculosis:

F6: The more unexpected the signal, the more probable it will be recorded as worth listening to.
…
F9: The more the event concerns elite nations, the more probable that it will become a news item.
F10: The more the event concerns elite people, the more probable that it will become a news item.

Rosling’s map makes it very clear that cases of TB are concentrated in Africa, especially in southern Africa, and largely affect people who appear to be, culturally and physically, very far away from the readers of many of the northern news sources tracked by Google News. TB has been a crisis for a long, long time, and therefore isn’t a surprise in the way that a new pandemic - potentially affecting the President of the United States, if his aide shook his hand on his visit to Mexico! - is.

And then there’s factor 7: “If one signal has been tuned into the more likely it will continue to be tuned into as worth listening to.” In other words, once you’ve run 100,000 swine flu stories, the next 150,000 may be inevitable.

Unfortunately, Galtung and Ruge weren’t as straightforward about offering solutions to problems of media attention as they were at identifying them. But visualizations like Rosling’s, showing just how big events we manage to ignore are in comparison to those we obsess over, have to be a good start.

Monday night, Rachel and I went to our local movie theatre to watch “Slingshot Hip-Hop“, a documentary on Palestinian hiphop by Palestinian/Syrian/American filmmaker Jackie Reem Salloum. It’s the sort of film where 83 minutes of cinema can lead towards several hours of intense (and perhaps heated) conversation. The film’s stars are a set of Palestinian hiphop crews, including DAM (Da’ Arabian MCs) who are based in Lod, a suburb of Tel Aviv, and PR (The Palestinian Rapperz) who are based in Gaza. The film traces the lifecycle of each crew, the inspirations behind their music, their struggles to be heard and accepted, and their quest to play a show together.

Trailer for “Slingshot Hip-hop” by Jackie Reem Salloum

This aspiration - a DAM/PR joint concert - provides the dramatic structure for the film. It’s extremely difficult for “‘48 Palestinians” - Palestinians living within Israel - and “‘67 Palestinians” - Palestinians living within the West Bank or Gaza - to travel and visit one another. The struggles the two crews go through are a powerful illustration of the circumscribed lifestyle Gazans in particular are living, confined to a small, crowded, tightly controlled territory, and the difficulties of creating a coherent national identity in a “Palestine” that’s split between two disconnected territories and a diaspora.

“Born Here” by DAM

Rachel offers a helpful review of the film, as well as reflections on what is and isn’t covered in the narrative presented. As someone deeply committed to Israeli/Palestinian dialog, she’s a little disappointed that the film didn’t look at spaces - like Hip Hop Sulha - where the Israeli and Palestinian rap communities have been able to come together, connecting on stage.

As someone obsessed with the idea of “connection”, what I found most interesting about the film was the ways in which the kids in these two marginal neighborhoods found ways to connect with each other and with broader hiphop culture. An early scene shows DAM in the bedroom of one of the members in Lod. A set of exterior shots makes it clear that Lod can feel more like a developing nation than a suburb of Israel’s glossiest city. But the DAM boys have an excellent CD collection, featuring the hits of political hiphop, from Public Enemy to Talib Kweli, by way of Tupac. Their early rhymes, showed in enthusiastic but embarrasing footage, are highly derivative gansta rap… ten years later, they’re sharp political statements, which one member of the crew describes as 30% Public Enemy, 30% Palestinian authors like Edward Said and 40% the streets of Lod. The DAM boys are tightly connected to parallel communities - Palestinian intellectuals, and American political hiphop - even though they’re physically distant from many of the conversations.

(A side note: It’s interesting to rethink some of the rhetoric of late 1980s hiphop in regards to these Palestinian rappers. Public Enemy’s lyrics made it clear that Chuck D saw America as a war zone with black Americans targeted by the white majority. I heard those lyrics as poetic, not literal, part of the same atmosphere produced by the air raid sirens that punctuated live PE shows - songs like “Don’t Believe the Hype” seemed to caution against taking PE’s lyrics too literally. But the same phrases in the mouths of Palestinian rappers, especially those in Gaza, have a very different resonance. Parts of New York City may have felt like a war zone when PE was spitting tracks, but the same lyrics sound very different in a literal war zone.)

The internet is a major reason why these connections are possible. In discussing DAM’s first hit, the filmmaker doesn’t talk about record sales, but about “over a million downloads”. In interviews in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, all the kids talk about discovering Arabic rap online and downloading as much as they could. Every shot of a rapper’s bedroom features a computer, usually a beat-up tower lying on its side, case off, innards cooled by a room fan. The computers are where rappers make or find beats, record tracks, and send their music out to the masses.

Despite my obsession with digital connection, it took my breath away when the filmmakers made it possible for PR and DAM to connect for the first time… via mobile phone. Salloum and her crew filmed PR’s first public show at the Red Crescent Society in Gaza, and brought the footage to show Palestinian rappers in Israel. We see the members of DAM call the PR crew on their mobile phones and congratulate them on a great first show. Abeer, a Palestinian rapper and R&B singer, gives one of the PR guys her IM handle, and we watch him blush beet red on the other end of the phone in Gaza.

I’ve written a bit about the ways in which the Internet can create a virtual nation that maps only partially onto a physical nation. When Kenya exploded in violent protest after the 2007 elections, a virtual Kenya, including Kenyans in South Africa, the UK and America, as well as those in the physical nation, sprang into action, building efforts to counter the violence.

From Birmingham, Alabama David Kobie decided to disable the increasingly tense Mashada forum and put up I Have No Tribe in its place, urging Kenyans to confirm that their national identity was more important that tribal tensions. Kenyans used services like Mama Mike’s to send phone minutes, petrol and food aid home - and bloggers like Juliana Rotich rode shotgun on the resulting aid convoys, documenting the distribution of food aid to those who needed it. Shuttling between the US and Kenya, Binyavanga Wainaina penned “No Country for Old Hatreds“, a plea in the New York Times to understand the Kenyan conflict as a political, not ethnic one. And a team of Kenyans in Eldoret, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Alabama and Florida came together to build Ushahidi, a platform to document Kenyan violence, which has gone on to be a popular platform for distributed reporting now in use around the world.

Digital Kenya is bigger than physical Kenya - it includes expatriate Kenyans and people who love the nation, even if they’re not Kenyan. So I wasn’t surprised by the existence of a digital Palestine… but I was blown away by the realization that digital Palestine exists in part because it’s impossible to exist in physical Palestine. The guys from DAM dismiss the idea of travelling to Gaza to give a concert as being roughly as fanciful as planning a concert on Venus - the difficulty PR has in leading Gaza to travel to the West Bank appears to confirm their skepticism. This virtual, digital Palestine beats no common ground at all, as far as the rappers are concerned - it lets them follow each other’s work and cheer each other’s successes - but the longing on both sides to connect in person feels almost Shakesperian. My guess is that Romeo and Juliet wouldn’t have been content IM’ing each other, and the separation between DAM and PR becomes yet another factor fueling the anger and passion that infuses much of the men’s work.

I wish there were some way to make “Slingshot Hip-Hop” required watching for aspiring MCs around the world. There’s a lot of guys out there who’ve got a lot of style but not much to say. You may find what DAM, PR and the others have to say uncomfortable or inspiring, but you can’t say that they’re talking a lot and saying nothing.

I wrote an earlier post on this film as it was still in production, before the storyline about DAM and PR emerged. It generated a very productive comment thread, including some pointers to collaborations between Israeli and Palestinian youth around hiphop.

Three stories on Global Voices will help you catch up on some interesting stories around the world if you, like me, have been distracted by #amazonfail, Susan Boyle and teabagging tea parties. Collectively, they’re an interesting reminder for me of just how much is taking place at the intersection of new media and political change, a field I try to follow closely, and frequently miss important developments in.

Supporters of exiled former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, called “the red shirts” managed to shut down the ASEAN summit, embarrasing the army-supported Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. But the red shirt movement has appeared confused and disorganized after that succesful protest, and now faces accusations that the movement is being paid to protest by Thaksin.

The evidence for those charges? Thaksin has been communicating with supporters via videophone, and a recent speech transmitted by videophone included the phrase, “And you don’t need to go to queue up for 500 baht” (roughly $14). Based on the translation offered by Jonathan of Jot ASEAN, it seems like it could have been a reference to pensioners lining up for government assistance. But critics of Thaksin are jumping on the statement as an admission of guilt by Thaksin that he’s been paying protesters. The Thai version of the video has nearly half a million YouTube views, and an English-subtitled version is circulating as well.

Mong Palatino’s got lots of context for the controversial video, including bloggers who’ve sought advice from their personal astrologers in understanding the situation in Thailand. As for me - the sight of an exiled prime minister giving marching orders via videophone and being ridiculed on YouTube is sufficient proof that we’re living in the future.

Jen Brea is watching the reactions of Congolese bloggers to an interview DRCongo president Joseph Kabila gave with Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times. It’s a weird interview - Kabila seems to forget that the interview is going to be read widely, at home as well as in the US. And bloggers rip him apart, critiquing his statements about DRC’s strife with Rwanda, his tendency to blame problems on Mobutu, and his provocative statement that there aren’t enough people in his government who can help him transform the country:

You don’t need a thousand people to transform a country. No, you need 3,4, 10, 15 people with the necessary convictions, determined and resolute. Do I have those 15 people? Probably 5, 6, 7, not yet 15.

Bloggers like Congoliberte wonder why, if in a government with dozens of ministers and thousands of officials, has only seven worthwhile people in it, why doesn’t Kabila clean house? Brea’s post is an excellent overview of insightful and pointed media criticism coming from Congolese bloggers, who aim their barbs not just at the president’s strange statements, but the New York Times’s apparent ignorance of the controversy behind these statements and a willingness to let them go unchallenged.

Finally, in news I wish I’d been following more closely - John Liebhart looks at the situation in Fiji, where a military coup leader basically ignored a supreme court decision which ordered him to step down. The mechanics are pretty complicated - told to step down by the court, the Prime Minister (the head of the army) had the president fire the judiciary, abrogate the constitution and swear him in again as Prime Minister. Elections aren’t likely to be held before 2014, and Fiji is coming under increasing pressure from the community of nations, who threaten to isolate it if it continues down the path of military rule.

The climate of military government is extremely hostile to free expression, Liebhart reports. The government has instructed media outlets to report “pro-Fiji” news and instructed that news shouldn’t contain “negativity”. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s man in Fiji has been deported, and a Fijian journalist was arrested for reporting on his deportation. However, the military government has reassured the global community that foreign journalists are always welcome - they just need to apply to the ministry of information, who will review their past coverage and ensure they’re sufficiently pro-Fiji before issuing a permit.

In this sort of media environment, it’s not surprising that some blogs are going dark. What’s impressive, Liebhart argues, is how many blogs continue to report news, and how essential this reporting is:

Getting reliable news from inside Fiji – even for those living in the country – has been difficult. By most accounts, all foreign journalists have left the country. With the local media mostly quiet regarding political issues, Fiji’s political bloggers have been publishing nearly non-stop.

He goes on to offer a selection of coverage from local bloggers. People hungry for news are looking to the online newspaper Fiji Times (whose photographer was recently detained and questioned) and blogs like Coup Four and a Half and Raw Fiji News. Soli Vakasama is hosting lively political discussions, and Loyal Fijian has published a passionate post about the importance of an open and free media.

It’s worth watching Fiji very, very closely to see how these independent voices will fare in the wake of a government which appears to be consolidating control, and appears insensitive to international pressure. New Zealand-based journalists are already offering to publish news from Fiji based on email reports from Fijians… a situation very familiar to those of us who follow Zimbabwe closely via reports from South Africa.

All of which is my way of saying, I should read Global Voices more often and more closely. It’s a good reminder that the hot stories about the internet and politics aren’t always the only ones out there.

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.

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!”