Yesterday, Google announced a major change in their policy in engaging with China – they will no longer censor search results on Google.cn to comply with Chinese policy. This almost certainly means that Google.cn will be blocked by the Great Firewall and that Google will no longer be able to operate in China.

While this aspect of Google’s announcement is sparking a great deal of conversation online, it comes at the end of a bombshell of an announcement – Google’s decision follows what appears to be a coordinated act of espionage aimed at its servers by Chinese attackers. The attack resulted, Google reports, in a theft of their intellectual property. They also report that a goal of the attack was to access the GMail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and supporters of Chinese human rights around the world. MacWorld reports that the attack targeted an internal system that Google had built to comply with search warrant requests for information on users. When it became clear that this internal system – evidently set up for the benefit of Chinese authorities – was being attacked and used to compromise Google’s internal networks, Google began discussions about disengaging from the world’s largest internet market.

There’s at least four ways to read Google’s decision:

Google decided to stop being evil.
Google has received reams of bad press from their decision to comply with Chinese government regulations and censor search results for Chinese users. It’s never been entirely clear to me why Google’s received more criticism than Microsoft – who admit they censored Chinese bloggers, and whose Chinese-language tools prevent posting of articles about human rights and democracy – or Yahoo, who turned over information on user Shi Tao to Chinese authorities that led to ten years imprisonment for “leaking state secrets”. I suspect we want to hold Google to a higher standard because they’ve put forth an informal motto: “Don’t be evil”, and compromising with the Chinese government looks like a violation of that stance.

Google’s taken steps to minimize the exposure of user data in China – services like Gmail, which contain sensitive personal data, or which permit publishing, like Blogger, are hosted in the US, not China. (This has made it harder for these tools to achieve market share against Chinese competitiors.) They censored in a more transparent fashion than some of their competitors, displaying a message at the bottom of each page, stating that sites had been removed from the results to comply with regulations. Google is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a partnership between industry, academia and the nonprofit community designed to develop best practices for engaging in closed societies like China.

In my opinion – shaped, no doubt, by the fact that I’ve got a lot of friends within Google and have worked closely with the company in a couple of contexts – Google was a lot less evil than some of its competitors. But continued involvement in China continued to be a thorn in the side of Google on the PR front, and I know many people within the company questioned whether engaging in China was worth the compromises it entailed. The move to leave the Chinese market may be an example of Google returning to its core values and demonstrating an unwillingness to compromise.

Google retreated from a very tough market.
Google wasn’t doing all that well in the Chinese search market – they were a distant second to Baidu, and faced extreme challenges in gaining market share. Google’s main properties – google.com and related sites – are frequently inaccesible through the Great Firewall, and Google’s Chinese site – google.cn – was subject to a great deal of scrutiny from the Chinese press and from regulators. CCTV ran an “exposé” on Google.cn, demonstrating – horror of horrors! – that the internet includes links to pornography – this story led to increased oversight of Google’s Chinese site. Friends within Google tell me that it was a constant struggle to respond to complaints from Chinese regulators, and that they believed competitors like Baidu were reporting Google’s alleged violations to regulators, increasing scrutiny on the company.

The situation within Google China was already quite complicated. Kai-Fu Lee, Google’s China chief, quit in September, giving no clear reasons for his departure. His departure started speculation that Google might be discovering that they couldn’t be competitive in a Chinese market without making even larger compromises to corporate ideals.

It’s hard to imagine Google walking away from a market as potentially lucrative as China, even if they were in a tough battle for second place. And they certainly didn’t walk away quietly. By (obliquely) accusing the Chinese government of involvement in corporate espionage and challenging the government to shut the company down for providing uncensored search, “Google has taken the China corporate communications playbook, wrapped it in oily rags, doused it in gasoline and dropped a lit match on it.” (Those evocative words are from top Chinablogger Imagethief.) This isn’t a temporary strategic retreat – this is a retreat where you detonate the bridges behind you.

Google abandoned Chinese users.
Despite its second place in the market behind Baidu, there are millions of dedicated Google users in China, and many of them are deeply disappointed today and worried about losing access to services they’ve grown to depend on. Reading their comments in translation on Global Voices, thanks to Bob Chen, it’s clear the frustration is less with Google than with the Chinese authorities. One translated tweet is especially poignant:

The sin of facebook is that it helps people know who they wanna know. The sin of Twitter is that it allows people to say what they wanna say. The sin of Google is that it lets people find what they wanna find, and Youtube let us see what we wanna see. So, they are all kicked away.

Bob also shares a joke about China in the years after Google’s departure:

People born in 90s: Today I stepped out of the Great Firewall and saw a foreign website named Google. Shit, it is all but a copy of Baidu.
Born in 00s: What do you mean by stepping out of Great Firewall?
Born in 10s: What do you mean by website?
Born in 20s: What is “foreign”?

Perhaps most striking is a campaign to lay flowers in front of Google’s headquarters in Beijing. Rebecca MacKinnon reports that Tsinghua University’s security department has banned students from taking flowers to Google headquarters without permission.

(Here’s a sympathetic view of Google’s decision to pull out from Chinese activist Michael Anti, who’s been censored in the past by Microsoft.)

Google is about to join the front lines of the anticensorship wars.
Hal Roberts, John Palfrey and I published a study of tools designed to subvert and circumvent internet censorship a few months back, based on research we conducted over the course of three years. In the course of that research, we ended up with a simple realization about the design of censorship circumvention software:

A robust anti-censorship system has, at minimum, three components:
- Lots of non-contiguous IP addresses, making it difficult for censors to block the entry points into the system
- Huge amounts of bandwidth that can access the public internet, as a censorship circumvention system is basically an ISP
- Multiple methods to feed fresh IP addresses to your users

This isn’t a complete definition, of course – good anticensorship systems use SSL encryption to prevent keyword blocking, but that’s a solved problem. The three components above tend to be very hard for small anti-circumvention projects to solve. It’s very hard to obtain lots and lots of IP addresses, and very expensive to provision sufficient bandwidth… unless you’re Google, in which case, these obstacles should be trivial. There’s still lots of work that needs to be done ensuring that users of circumvention systems get fresh IP addresses, but a Google-backed anticensorship system (perhaps operated in conjunction with some of the smart activists and engineers who’ve targeted censorship in Iran and China?) would be massively more powerful (and threatening!) than the systems we know about today.

These tools would have a built-in market – the millions of users who were enjoying Google’s tools from within China – and could radically change the landscape of the internet freedom field. An emphasis on internet freedom tools would allow Google to engage with a smaller Chinese market, but would allow them to maintain a toe in the waters while maintaining a stance of disengagement with the Chinese government.

Is Google going to do this? I have no idea. I hope so. They could have done so previously, but it would have been viewed as a shot across China’s bow. Now that they’ve launched a torpedo, that shot across the bow seems more likely.

At Global Voices, we were thrilled that Google chose to partner with us and Thompson/Reuters in offering the Breaking Borders Award “to honor outstanding web projects initiated by individuals or groups that demonstrate courage, energy and resourcefulness in using the Internet to promote freedom of expression.” It would be very exciting to see Google becoming one of those groups using their energy, resourcefulness and resources to combat censorship online… and it would certainly take some corporate courage on their part.

We’ll know a lot more about what Google’s doing in the next few days. Responses are already piling up online. Evgeny thinks Google is bluffing, or simply retreating from an unsuccesful market position. Jonathan Zittrain sees this as a masterstroke, aligning Google’s business with its values, and shares my hope that Google will dedicate major resources to censorship circumvention. Dharmishta Rood links to a bevy of reactions from around the web. I’m anxiously awaiting Rebecca’s analysis, which she promises when she finishes two other articles that are due. (Man, I know that feeling.)

A massive earthquake hit Haiti last night, with an epicentre only 15 kilometers from Port au Prince, the capital city. It will be some time before the extent of the devestation is known, but early reports suggest that thousands are likely to be reported dead. Major landmarks, including the Presidential Palace, National Assembly and Port au Prince cathedral have been destroyed. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, and the damage from the earthquake will compound the massive challenges the country already faces.

Reporters are racing to Haiti to report on the disaster, but voices are already making themselves heard from the decimated city. Georgia Popplewell, Global Voices’s managing director and pioneering Caribbean blogger, has been rounding up tweets coming from Haiti on our site. Some of the tweets include photos that show the intensity of the destruction.

Photo sent to twitter user marvinady by Carel Pedre of Haiti’s Radio One.

Georgia has started a list on Twitter, aggregating accounts of people who are posting from Haiti. Pooja Bhatia is apparently posting from Port au Prince and reported last night, “quake happened as sun was setting but in plenty of time to see that all the slum houses built into the hillsides disappeared”. Her posts today have documented the devestation of various landmarks and people’s increasing concern about obtaining food and water. Other Twitter users are enroute to PAP and writing about their progress and setbacks in reaching the city.

Troy Livesay, a missionary in Haiti, is writing long, informative blog posts as well as tweets. This morning’s post reveals the extent of uncertainty the island is feeling:

There are buildings that suffered almost no damage. Right next door will be a pile of rubble.

Thousands of people are currently trapped. To guess at a number would be like guessing at raindrops in the ocean. Precious lives hang in the balance. When pulled from the rubble there is no place to take them for care Haiti has an almost non existent medical care system for her people.

I cannot imagine what the next few weeks and months will be like. I am afraid for everyone. Never in my life have I seen people stronger than Haitian people. But I am afraid for them. For us.

Response to the tragedy has been rapid online. My twitter-scanning scripts estimate that 1.5-1.8% of tweets on Twitter this morning have mentioned Haiti – that’s much higher than mentions of “china” or “google”, refering to the major story breaking in technology news, Google’s decision to stop censoring search results in China. Much of the Twitter conversation centers on ways to help the Haitian people – in the US, texting “haiti” to 90999 donates $10 to the Red Cross to support Haitian relief efforts. Chris Sacca offers five more ways you can help, donating to other worthy organizations and learning more about relief efforts as well as about Haiti’s history and resilience. Jen Brea is tracking reactions from the Haitian diaspora and efforts to help, including the project organized by Haitian-American rap artist Wyclef Jean.

We’ll be tracking the crisis and response in Haiti closely on Global Voices and expect to have a special coverage page up within an hour. Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone in Haiti and Haitians in the diaspora around the world.

If I had to pick a project that most excited me in 2009, it would be Yeeyan, a distributed translation project focused on making influential English-language media accessible to a Chinese-speaking audience. Yeeyan’s founders built a community that included thousands of translators and struck partnerships with content providers like The Guardian, giving them permission to publish translated content. I was particularly struck by the talk Yeeyan cofounder Zhang Lei gave at the 2009 China Internet Research Conference at UPenn Annenberg – he made it clear that the motivation behind Yeeyan was a desire to use translation as a bridge between cultures, letting Chinese and English-speakers see the world from each other’s perspective.

I was singing the project’s praises to a journalist last week when he pointed out that Yeeyan’s website was down. I hadn’t checked in on the site in the past few weeks – I’ve been a little busy in newborn land – but was disturbed to find that Yeeyan has been mostly offline since early December. The Guardian, who partnered with Yeeyan, reported on the closure, and their editor Alan Rusbridger expressed his unhappiness and concern that the closure of Yeeyan reflected attempts to control the range of ideas and opinions Chinese readers are exposed to.

Danwei’s article on Yeeyan’s closure gives a sense for how abrupt the move was. Translating from Yeeyan’s status page on the closed site, the site administrators say:

Due to our errors in handling some of the articles on the website, we went against the relevant regulations; therefore Yeeyan has to temporarily shut off its server, and adjust the relevant content.

As for closing the website without giving notice, and for causing inconvenience, we are deeply sorry.

Please don’t worry too much, we have saved all users’ data. We will solve the problem we face as quickly as possible, and recover the articles and personal information treasured by everyone.

In other words, Yeeyan ran afoul of one or another group of Chinese internet censors and was told they’d have to stop publishing until they ensured tighter control over their content. The fact that the site hasn’t come back quickly suggests this was more than a couple of controversial stories that were translated – it suggests that Yeeyan may need to review translations to ensure they don’t cross any red lines.

(Censorship on the Chinese internet happens in multiple places – it’s not just a firewall that makes it difficult to access certain web content. Chinese web 2.0 companies maintain internal teams that monitor content and prevent certain sensitive content from being published. These teams have a great deal of discretion in their decisionmaking, and often come to very different conclusions, as this paper from Rebecca MacKinnon, experimenting with the censorship of blog content on 15 Chinese-hosted blogging providers demonstrates.)

I’ve been catching up on my China censorship news from friends who follow that space more closely than I do. It’s been a tough winter for free speech on the Chinese internet. Rebecca MacKinnon has an excellent overview of four troubling developments that have recently unfolded in the Chinese internet:

- A crackdown on pornography on mobile devices
- A focus on eliminating “obscenity” from search engines
- A shutdown of file-sharing websites
- Restrictions on .cn domain names, which can now only be registered by companies, not by individuals

Some of these steps are defensible – Rebecca reports that CNNIC put restrictions on domain name sales because so many domains were being used for phishing and other criminal activities. But as friends at Open Net Initiative have documented for years, a crackdown on pornography almost invariably turns into restrictions on political speech.

It’s hard to see how any of these crackdowns would affect Yeeyan directly – the site made it possible to read The Guardian, Time Magazine, the New York Times and ReadWriteWeb in Chinese, and none of those publication routinely print much pornography. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that at least one of the authorities that control the Chinese internet – which include the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology – found the prospect of frequent, high-quality translation of US and European media threatening. This is consistent with the history of internet censorship in China – the BBC’s Chinese-language service is blocked far more often than the English-language version, for instance, suggesting that blocking focuses on content that can be easily read by large audiences, and less on potentially sensitive English language content. (That previous sentence is a massive oversimplification – ONI’s most recent country study on China is helpful in understanding some of the nuances of this complex situation.)

So what’s next for Yeeyan? A post on the site today announces that translation will begin again on January 8th. Reading an automatic translation of the most recent post, I believe there’s a new system announced that will audit all translations, holding some up as long as 24 hours before they go live. It sounds like the Yeeyan team has been working hard to review all previously translated content and will launch with about 70% of it, and will work to bring the rest of it online. The post also made clear that Yeeyan’s community had rallied around the founders and that there is a great deal of community support for bringing the project back to life.

Obviously, I’m no fan of censorship – much of my work focuses on testing, improving and disseminating tools that allow unfettered access to the internet and the ability to publish despite firewalls. But there’s something that I find particularly galling in seeing a project like Yeeyan censored. Yeeyan’s not an activist site – they’re not pushing a particular political agenda. They’re trying to open a window on another set of perspectives, to help people in China understand US and UK perspectives on the world. They’ve got a mission analagous to what we’re trying to do at Global Voices… a site that also gets censored fairly often.

So, as sad as I was to see Yeeyan go down, I’m at least as happy to see their community and founders rally around and bring the site back up. I’ll be interested to see if Yeeyan can sustain the energy of volunteer translators now that they won’t be able to see their hard work on screen immediately. It will be interesting to see what stories the community is and isn’t willing to translate, and what scrutiny the site will face from regulators. And I continue to wonder whether we could rally a parallel effort in the US or Europe to translate key Chinese media into English, building on the critical work done by Danwei and by the indefatigable Roland Soong.

So welcome back, Yeeyan – we missed you, even those of us who didn’t know we were missing you.

My Global Voices colleagues have been taking time at the end this year to reflect on the past five years of our joint project. I’ve been rather busy with another joint project, my new son Drew, who is a month old today, and haven’t been particularly reflective. (Moments for reflection are generally spent asleep these days.)

Talking with an old friend today gave me the opportunity to step back and reflect a bit. My friend works for a foundation that supports social entrepreneurs and he’s interested in ways that the projects he’s supporting could work together. How could a set of cool, worthwhile organizations supported financially by the same funder somehow become a coherent movement, working together and learning from each other?

It took me a couple of moments to realize that my friend was turning to me for an answer to this question: how do you build a movement? (I’m sleep-deprived, remember?) He’s right – five years in, Global Voices isn’t just a website, a project, or a community. It’s a movement. Reading reflections from GV folks from around the world, it’s clear that Global Voices is a very different thing to different people – a window into other corners of the world, an alternative to despair, an antidote to stereotypes, a technologically-enhanced pilgrimage, a defender of language and culture, and of Article 19 rights, and an odd sort of family. The people who participate in Global Voices do very different things – mapping online censorship, translating texts, collecting links and offering original reporting – for very different reasons.

Believe it or not, this is by design. But it’s taken five years to get there.

Many nonprofit projects are the manifestation of the vision of one or more dedicated founders. That’s not the story behind Global Voices. Yes, Rebecca and I set the ball rolling five years ago with a meeting at Harvard. And we’ve both done what we can to move the work forward, Rebecca using her unparalleled journalistic skills, me leveraging my hard-earned talent for begging.

But the parts of Global Voices we’re proudest of are the results of other people’s passions and energies. Without Sami ben Gharbia, we’d be on the sidelines of the freedom of expression debate in cyberspace, rather than on the frontlines. Had Portnoy Zheng not started translating Global Voices into Chinese, we’d be a monolingual project, working to bring the world to an English-speaking audience, rather than the complex polyglotism we are today. Without Georgia Popplewell and Solana Larsen, we’d be writing just for blog readers, not reaching out to audiences through partnerships with newspapers, television and radio broadcasters. Had David Sasaki not challenged us to demonstrate that citizen media wasn’t just the province of the wealthy and well-connected, we’d not know about remarkable efforts in Colombia, Madagascar and Cote d’Ivoire and dozens of other parts of the world.

When Rebecca and I invited some dozen bloggers from around the world into a conference room at Harvard in late 2004, our goals were pretty simple – we wanted to see if there was common ground between people from different circumstances and cultures, united by a single, simple practice: writing about their thoughts and lives online. By the end of the day, I was so excited and energized that I wanted our group to produce a detailed plan for world domination, complete with marching orders. I was furious at my friends Jim Moore and Joi Ito, who moderated our closing session, because we came out of it not with a concrete plan, but with a general sense that we had some common values that we could build on.

They were right. I was wrong.

Global Voices – the people, the projects – hold together not through a grand, structured design, but because we share some very simple principles: people have a right to speak and an obligation to listen. (That’s my Twitter-sized summary of the Global Voices manifesto, itself a compact little document.) The people and projects who’ve chosen to flock under the GV banner tend to share a fondness for late-night parties in global cities, a strange sense of humor and a fondness for open source software… but the core values that allow us to work together are extremely simple. More complicated, more tactical and less vague and we’d find ourselves excluding some of the remarkable people and the creative ideas they’ve brought to the table. Had we a plan, an agenda, a schedule, we would have said no to ideas that have shaped us, making us what we are today.

Here’s the thing about a movement as inchoate as ours – there’s no way to know what’s coming next. That’s the challenge for Ivan Sigal – who ably took the reins from Rebecca and me eighteen months ago, and who’s kept our project thriving through the toughest of financial times. I don’t think a project like Global Voices can be steered. I think a leader needs to listen, to discover where the community is going and figure out how to smooth the path ahead. It’s the opposite of what a management textbook might tell you to do, a form of leading by following.

So what’s next for Global Voices? I don’t think anyone can tell you. Not just because we can’t predict the Green revolution, the Fijian Coup or the Malagasy crisis. Not just because we don’t know what comes next after Facebook and Twitter. We can’t predict because a movement isn’t predictable – it’s the product of the passions and energies of the people who’ll stay with us, the new ones who’ll find us, and the continuing influence of those who choose to leave us. Global Voices has never stopped surprising me: what’s worked, what hasn’t, what we’ve done and left undone. Here’s hoping for an unpredictable, chaotic, participatory, passionate future built on the simple foundations of speaking and listening.

Many of my colleagues have featured a favorite recent GV post in their meditations. I wanted to do the same, but couldn’t fit the post I’d chosen into the thoughts above. So here it is as a bonus.

In early December of 2008, Mark Dummett of the BBC reported a wonderful “news of the weird” story from Dhaka, Bangladesh – a life-scale replica of the Taj Mahal, built at enormous expense. Global journalists sprang into action, documenting a diplomatic spat between Bangladesh and India over ownership of this cultural treasure, talking about the shocking idea of “pirating” another nation’s national symbols.

None of these intrepid reporters actually visited the Bengali Taj, though. Bloggers did, and they weren’t impressed. Aparna Ray translated their posts for Global Voices and explained that it was a poorly-made tourist trap clad in bathroom tiles, not the diamond-studded wonder those hardbitten AFP journalists credulously reported on.

A critical underreported story? An important victory for intercultural understanding? Nope. But as someone who spent far too much time the past five years answering journalistic questions about the credibility of bloggers, I can’t but help celebrating this inversion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher Dickey posted an interesting, though somewhat odd, story on Newsweek’s web site yesterday. Odd, because there’s nothing in the story that’s new since he began repsearching the story in late August. My guess is that the story hasn’t run until now because it’s a story that has no real facts. It’s about an absurd, Kafka-esque conspiracy… and I worry that Dickey’s article may not be entirely clear on how absurd the conspiratorial accusations are.

Hossein Derakhshan has been in custody in Iran for over a year – I’ve written about his detention on the blog several times. In August, in the wake of arrests after the Green Revolution, a series of show trials went on in Tehran, where an unnamed “spy” was said to have “confessed” to being involved with a vast, global conspiracy to overthrow the Iranian government. This conspiracy was widely reported in Persian-language media, and the details of the case made it clear to anyone who knew Hossein that he was the “spy” in question.

Friends who follow Persian media closely alerted me to the testimony because I, along with other individuals, were named in the show trial as Hossein’s collaborators. Investigating the story in August, Dickey contacted me to ask about my interpretation of events. I told him that the conspiracy was absurd, that Global Voices and I certainly knew and worked with Hossein, but that we were in no way involved with attempting to overthrow the Iranian government.

Because the story is completely false and because it makes accusations that are blatantly untrue, we decided not to cover the story on Global Voices and introduce the fabrications into the English-language media. Dickey made a different decision and reprints these imaginings – months after they appeared in Persian-language media, along with my denials that I or Global Voices are involved with anything more than promoting blogging around the globe, and then includes this paragraph:

“There are aspects of the testimony that align closely with reality.” Zuckerman continued. “Hossein participated in the first meeting of Global Voices in November 2004, hosted by the Berkman Center.” Just as the prosecutor said he did.

Let me be very clear about what I was saying in that comment. The aspects of the testimony that align with reality aren’t the ones about me – they’re details about Hossein’s travels and meetings. Yes, I’ve met with Hossein half a dozen times since 2004, when he first came to the Berkman Center’s inaugural Global Voices meeting. That’s not because I’m involved in plotting to overthrown the Iranian regime, but because I’m one of the founders of an international blogging network and Hossein’s a key figure in the Iranian blogosphere.

To understand what’s going on in this case, it’s worth listening to Omid Memarian’s recent story on This American Life. Omid was also a pioneering Iranian blogger, and he was detained in 2004. In his TAL story, Omid describes being forced to write his life story dozens of times, while interrogators attempted to fit details from his life into a paranoid narrative about a CIA plot to destabilize the country. Memarian’s description explains precisely how Hossein’s life story – an unusual and complicated one, to say the least – has been reframed into a spy novel-worthy fantasy. The initial Global Voices meeting at Harvard – memorable mostly because Hossein coined the term “bridgeblog” at the conference – turns from an academic conference into a fantasy vision of an initial planning phase for the green revolution.

Let me just be very clear, because Dickey’s story is not:

- Hossein Derakhshan isn’t an Israeli spy. He’s been unfairly detained for over a year and has likely been forced to issue a “confession” that includes real biographical details as well as fabrications.
- The other people and entities that feature in Derakhshan’s forced testimony – myself, the Berkman Center, Global Voices – have no involvement in Iranian political unrest beyond studying it and reporting on it.
- The Iranian government’s characterisation of my background and ties are as absurd and fabricated as any other aspect of this story.

Dickey gets it right in the last paragraph when he says, “Only a regime as introverted, unworldly, and uncertain as Ahmadinejad’s could believe in the conspiracy theory that’s been pumped up in the Iran show trials.” It’s rather unworldly to be somehow blamed (credited?) with masterminding a plot to overthrow the Iranian government. In reality, my involvement goes no further than sharing my concerns about an old friend who’s been unfairly detained by an unjust regime.

An earlier version of this blogpost suggested that Dickey had acted unethically in publishing our Facebook exchange. Dickey forwarded that exchange to me – which I had deleted – and pointed out that I had not explicitly asked him to keep the exchange confidential. While I still would have prefered that Dickey contacting me before quoting what I had perceived as a background exchange, I retract my earlier accusations and offer him my apology on those grounds.

What do you know about Fiji?

Before getting involved with Global Voices, I knew that it was an island paradise somewhere in the South Pacific much beloved by vacationers and honeymooners and that, despite being an island nation surrounded by seawater, they export a lot of high-priced bottled water.

As I’ve followed Michael Hartsell’s reporting on Fiji on Global Voices, I’ve gotten a very different impression of the nation. The tensions between ethnic Fijians and Indo-Fijians have divided the nation politically, leading to rewritings of the constitution and severe government instability. Fiji has had four (or four and a half, depending on who’s counting) military coups since 1987 and is currently under the thumb of Commodore Frank Bainimarama, who’s taken power three times since 2000, twice via military coup. (Earlier this year, the Fijian supreme court declared his 2006 coup illegal. Bainimarama stepped down from his post of interim Prime Minister for 24 hours, while the President abrogated the constitution and fired the judiciary, then immediately reappointed him as Prime Minister. That’s the half coup, for those of you counting. Confused? This might help.) Fiji has been expelled from the Commonwealth, condemned by Amnesty International for arresting opposition politicians, church leaders and journalists, and today, severed diplomatic relations with Australia and New Zealand, its two largest and most powerful neighbors.

(This last one is a doozy. The row with Australia and New Zealand concerns Bainimarama’s plan to hire Sri Lankan judges to replace the justices fired earlier this year, when the supreme court was liquidated. Australia and New Zealand have had travel bans against senior members of Bainimarama’s government in place, and when the Sri Lankan judges travelled through Australia to Fiji, they were informed that they would be subject to the same bans once they took their positions in the Fijian government. Bainimarama argues that Australia and New Zealand had banned transit; Australian authorities say they merely informed the Sri Lankan judges that they’d not be able to return through Australia once joining the coup government. Given the importance of Australia and New Zealand as trading partners, it’s hard to imagine this ending well for Fiji.)

I’ve been fascinated for years with the concept of “nation branding”, an idea promoted by Simon Anholt, a UK-based researcher and consultant. I heard Anholt on a BBC broadcast years back making the salient point that Ethiopia has a great brand for recieving famine aid (even if that’s an outdated understanding of the country) and a lousy brand for tourism. It’s an idea I’ve found useful in understanding some of the challenges that African nations face in encouraging tourism and foreign investment – if everyone thinks your country is impoverished and ill-governed, who’s going to want to visit on vacation or buy shares on the local stock exchange? Part of the challenge of rebuilding Africa is rebuilding an image and narrative of the continent that shows it as open for business. (See “Africa’s a continent, Not a Crisis” for more of this line of thought.)

Fiji is somehow blessed with a nation-brand that many African nations would kill for. Despite the 2006 coup, Fijian tourism brought in nearly $500 million in 2008, 24% of GDP, more than the nation earned from the next seven industries combined. Major international hotel chains have large properties in Fiji, and air travel patterns suggest the importance of tourism – international flights land in Nadi, the tourist capital, not the governmental capital Suva, which is served by a prop plane from Nadi. Fiji Water is now the leading imported bottled water in the US, and represents 20% of Fijian exports and 3% of GDP, benefitting from and reinforcing an image of Fiji as an unspoiled tropical paradise.

Defending the brand of Fiji has become a major political cause for the Bainimarama government. In April, after expelling a number of foreign journalists, the government instructed journalists that they needed to begin practicing “the journalism of hope“. Some journalists responded by filling local newspapers with non-news – the Fiji Daily Post ran stories titled “Man Gets on Bus” and “Weather to Improve Soon”. Bloggers have filled in the gaps, taking great risks to publish ferocious political commentary, usually under psuedonyms.

Anna Lenzer, a journalist for Mother Jones, found out just how serious the Bainimarama government was about nation brand when she came to Suva to report on the various ironies that surround Fiji water – a green-branded product with an immense carbon footprint, a premium bottled water produced in a community with no drinkable tap water, a dominant player in the local economy with a stated disinterest in Fijian politics. She was detained and questioned after sending an email from a cybercafe with links to articles critical of the government, and fled the country with the help of the US Embassy.

Her article, “Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle” is an excellent introduction to the strange phenomenon that is Fiji water, though I think she lays too much blame on the Fiji Water company and not enough on the military government and the circumstances that led to the recent coups. It’s worth reading Fiji Waters’s response, even if it’s something of a cop-out – I think Lenzer is right to point out that it’s hard for the company to position itself as environmentally and socially responsible while working with a repressive government. And I can’t argue with this line: “The reality of Fiji, the country, has been eclipsed by the glistening brand of Fiji, the water.”

Fiji may be a case study in eclipsing a complex reality with a shiny brand:

- Start with a country with low media attention.

- Invest massively in tourism, presenting visitors with a reality that’s not wholly, though mostly, divorced from ordinary life in the country. (All tourist destinations do this to one extent or another. Fiji appears to have embraced this strategy thoroughly, providing a string of five-star compounds insulated from the outside. This blog post complains that, at some resorts “Fijian society is reduced to over-chlorinated swimming pools and overpriced palm hats which fall apart in the departure lounge of Nadi Airport.” At the same time, the author wonders why service at these resorts seems so poor these past few months, and worries that, “It appears to be lethargy and uncaring when a guest asks for something. I think all of this is more dangerous to the future of Fiji Tourism than anything else, including the oft-mentioned ‘political instability’.”)

- Build or embrace an export that reinforces your brand image.

- Surpress contrary media voices via censorship or exile.

What would it take for circumstances on the ground in Fiji to damage brand Fiji? What would it take for Fiji to move beyond this mirage and build this vision of a nation in reality?

My friend and colleage Sami Ben Gharbia just launched a fascinating and useful new site: Threatened Voices. It’s an interactive map of bloggers under arrest and under threat around the world, with an accompanying timeline that makes it possible to track the phenomenon of arresting bloggers over the past several years. It’s an uncomfortable fact that, as blogs become a more influential public space, the technique of arresting bloggers to silence online speech becomes increasingly common.

The Threatened Voices map complements another map that Sami maintains on Global Voices Advocacy, the Access Denied Map. That map is an overview of government efforts to block online publishing platforms, like Blogger or YouTube. I continue to believe that censorship of these types of sites is one of the most serious problems the web faces today. When a government blocks a website, it blocks the voice of one person or one group – when they block a tool like Wordpress or Twitter, they block all the voices that wanted to use that tool, which might represent hundreds or thousands of alternative perspectives. While I believe we should combat all online censorship (or, more to the point, I believe that any filtering should be done at the edge of the network, by parents, schools or businesses that pay for internet access, not by governments or ISPs), I think there’s a special importance in calling attention to these blocked platforms.

But the blocking of a platform for speech is an abstract idea. Threatened Voices helps personalize the idea of internet censorship, making it clear that it’s a technique that doesn’t just involve blocking packets – it can involve harrassing and arresting individuals, sometimes detaining them for months or years. The goal was to provide a complement to organizations like Committee to Protect Bloggers and Reporters without Borders, who do a great job of leading campaigns to call attention to the imprisonment of individual bloggers. Threatened Voices isn’t campaigning for any of these individual bloggers – it’s trying to present a picture of how vast the phenomenon of imprisoning and threatening bloggers has become.

There’s no way a map like the one Sami is building will ever be complete. We don’t know about every blogger who’s been arrested. And it’s a difficult question whether someone has been arrested for their blogging or for other alleged offenses – is Hossein Derakhshan still in prison because he’s alleged to be an Israeli spy (an absurd accusation) or because he’s an influential blogger? Sami’s trying to broaden the information available, asking people to contribute reports of bloggers under threat to the map.

Knowing what countries are harrassing and arresting bloggers is a first step. What’s the most useful next step is an extremely difficult question. Not all countries respond well to external pressure, or to direct lobbying. It’s possible to harness a great deal of energy around the cause of releasing an individual blogger, but it’s not as clear how that energy should be productively channelled. My hope is that efforts to map this problem will help build solidarity between organizations that have a long track record of protecting journalists, or protecting human rights more generally, and the emerging movements to protect bloggers and the tools of online speech.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Say what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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