Webs@Work

Brace yourself for an Internet land grab! Almost any word in any language could soon become a domain name extension.

In one of the biggest shakeups in Web history, ICANN, the group charged with overseeing the development of the Internet has voted to relax two key domain restrictions. One allows domains that don’t use Latin character, the other allows domains to use extended letter or number combinations.

This means Web sites will be able to use easier-to-remember suffixes. Apart from the .com, .net or .org, the 1.3 billion web users will be able to acquire generic addresses by lodging common words such as .love, .hate or .city, .kids, .shop, .sex or proper names. The exceptions would be trademarked domains, such as .cnn or .microsoft.

The decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - also known by its acronym ICANN - could spark a virtual domain name gold rush to rival the dotcom boom of the late 1990s. Registration details and fees have not been announced. Companies and individuals will be able to apply for new domains in the first quarter of 2009.

To avoid cyber-squatting, those who register a new extension will have to prove they have a viable reason for it. Some cities or regions have been bending the rules to get the domain they want. Los Angeles has for example signed a deal with Laos to use its .la domain.

Currently all Web addresses fall under one of some 250 top-level domain names: .country or .territory domains, and generic ones such as .com, .net and .org, .gov, and .edu. With the stock of available web addresses under the current IPv4 protocol set to run out by 2011, ICANN has been under pressure to find a solution for burgeoning demand.

If the number of arrests is a metric for assessing the growing impact of blogging on political life, then 2007 was indeed significant. The World Information Access Report says a record number of bloggers was arrested last year with Egypt, Iran and China the most dangerous places to blog about political life. These countries account for more than half of all the blogger arrests.

Since 2003, 64 citizens unaffiliated with news organizations have been arrested for their blogging activities. The report says these bloggers expose bureaucratic corruption or human rights abuses and express opinions about political figures and public policy options.

They run foul of the law for posting reports and photos from social protests, writing about political artwork, or sharing images and texts deemed to have violated cultural norms.

The Committee to Protect Journalists meanwhile says China remains the world’s leading jailer of journalists and writers. Beijing also exerts control over its fast-growing Internet sector, seeking to weed out porn and subversive websites.

China’s censorship of the Web has drawn flak from European Union telecoms chief Viviane Reding who says the Beijing Olympics are a chance for Beijing to show its commitment to free flow of information. Ms Reding, who is the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media does not think blocking of sites for political reasons is the right way to proceed.

Thank goodness, for every state-of-the-art censor today, there are countless tricks to beat these guys. Here’s where the cat-and-mouse game gets creative.

PSSTT! Is your Web connection being censored? You want to elude Big Brother? Would you prefer to stay anonymous, and not have your IP address logged on with every access to someone’s web page?

The Your Freedom services helps circumvent censors and spies. It even hides your network address from those who don’t need to know. Another tool - Gladder or “Great Ladder,” a browser extension for Firefox that helps users scale the virtual wall. Let the fun begin.

State-directed Web filtering happens regularly in Asia with China in the lead and pioneering online censorship methods just in time for the Olympics. The Great Firewall of China or “Golden Shield,” as Chinese officials call it, may be the most sophisticated censorship system in the world.

Many countries are already limiting access to Web content, on the pretext of “securing intellectual property rights,” “protecting national security,” “preserving cultural norms and religious values,” and “shielding children from pornography and exploitation.”

In the name of curbing lawlessness of the Web, many more states are flirting with the notion of erecting firewalls and screening content as a solution to complex social issues. This growing phenomenon defies simple metrics.

The map above was commissioned by Reporters Without Borders, which publishes a World Ranking of press freedom. The 15 internet-restricting countries on its list also top the ranking for press censorship. Here are the states, with their ranking on press freedom in brackets:

1. Maldives (144)
2. Tunisia (14
3. Belarus (151)
4. Libya (152)
5. Syria (153)
6. Vietnam (155)
7. Uzbekistan (15
8. Nepal (159)
9. Saudi Arabia (161)
10. Iran (162)
11. China (163)
12. Myanmar/Burma (164)
13. Cuba (165)
14. Turkmenistan (167)
15. North Korea (168 - bottom of the list)

The Open New Initiative notes that censorship and surveillance have not been taken on as a public policy or legislative issue by governments and civil society in the Asia region.

Ideally, we would like to know how censorship reduces the availability of information, how it hampers the development of online communities, and how it inhibits the ability of civic groups to monitor and report on the activities of the government, as these impact governance and ultimately economic growth.

OPEN NET INITIATIVE

Internet censorship and content restrictions can be enacted through means like technical blocking, take-downs, removing search results and induced self-censorship. Filtration can occur at various points in the network such as the backbone level, Internet Service Providers, institutions and individual computers.

The cyclone that hit Burma on 2 May succeeded where the junta failed last September in destroying phone and Web access out of Burma. But this has not stopped Burmese exiles and people in Burma from posting information and stories to the Web.

Photo courtesy Manfred Rist

Photo courtesy Manfred Rist

First-hand accounts of the devastation continue to trickle out of Burma weeks after the disaster. Despite efforts by the ever-watchful military authorities to suppress reports on the aftermath of the cyclone, many blogs and news sites have now emerged to track the devastation.

These sites have been quick to react by posting vivid eyewitness accounts of the disaster and mobilising fundraising efforts. The Mizzima news site, based in India and run by Burmese exiles has been carrying interviews with survivors who tell harrowing tales of life after the storm.

Eyewitness reports are available on exile Burmese news sites such as Yoma3 and blogs by the Burmese diaspora such as Fear from Freedom and the US-based Golden Colour Revolution, run by Ko Moe Thee, a well-known student leader from the 1988 uprising.

The Irrawwady keeps the spotlight on the humanitarian crisis with extensive coverage. Its daily updates have attracted record numbers of readers to the site, which received more than 60 million hits in May.

Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma is a non-profit media organization run by Burmese expatriates. It makes radio and TV broadcasts aimed at providing uncensored news and information about Burma.

The Moegyo Humanitarian Foundation blog by a group of Burmese expatriates is documenting efforts to track the situation and to organise aid.

Check out Ko Htike’s Prosaic Collection which is in Burmese, or The Rule of Lords which posts regular translations of the most compelling stories from Burmese news sites.

Within Burma, blogs such as The New Era Journal and those by people such as Dr Lun Swe, and Nyi Lynn Seck and have been giving updates in Burmese from the disaster zone.

Related sites:
Online Burma Library
BBC Burmese Service
Asian Human Rights Commission - Nargis page
Relief Web - Nargis page
Red Cross Red Crescent - Nargis photo gallery
Burmese Government website

It’s the June school holidays in Singapore and timeout for education. But with creativity and curiosity already schooled out of kids, how many are headed back to the classroom for more learning?

Sir Ken Robinson argues that we’ve learnt to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. His TEDTalk has been distributed widely around the Web since its release in June 2006. Watch it here:

It helps when you’re the leader of 1.3 billion people and you put your popularity on the line online. Flush from the accolades for his sympathetic response to the Sichuan earthquake, Chinese leader Wen Jiabao has gone Web 2.0 with a profile on Facebook.

You can be friends with Grandpa Wen, the moniker for China’s 66-year-old premier who has always cultivated a populist image unlike many of the Communist Party’s aloof leaders. And with 15,000 Facebook ’supporters’ as of this writing, he’s more popular than US President Bush on the social networking site.

As the face of China’s grief, Wen’s knack for looking sympathetic has won him supporters offline. Hours after the quake hit Sichuan province, he was on the scene with a bullhorn. TV cameras followed him for days as he tried to comfort children and put on a hard hat to enter a collapsed building.

Full of laudatory comments, the Facebook page was set up two days after the 12 May quake. It has photos of Wen walking through the rubble, comforting victims and breathless posts such as: ‘I love you, oh my God,’ ‘A model Premier for the world!’ and “Go Grandpa Wen! Go China!”

The profile creator had uploaded a mournful “We Are The World” - style music video that interspersed horrific images of the quake’s aftermath with shots of musicians wearing white T-shirts with “5-12″ printed on them.

Facebook lets users create personal profiles. The page appears to have been set up recently though it’s not clear whether it’s the work of Wen himself, a government official or someone with no ties to the premier. The page bears the official government photo of Wen in a gray suit.

The Chinese leader is one of hundreds of politicians on Facebook. He joins Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, Taiwan’s Ma Ying-jeou, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and every major US presidential hopeful who have Facebook pages. The site has a section where users can ‘Browse All Politicians’ and see them ranked by their number of ’supporters.’

Since the turn of the millennium, we’ve known Web users are an impatient lot in the attention economy. In new media writing courses, students learn how to write succinctly and chunk text for scanning.

Research has shown that highly literate Web users scan text and studies tracking reader eye movements validate this. Now there’s a mathematical formula to quantify how much or how little people read online.

A study on high-end Web users found that clicking hypertext links remains the most-used feature on the Web followed by clicking buttons on the page. Clicking the “Back” button is the third most-used feature.

The reason for this change is the increased prevalence of applications and feature-rich Web pages that require users to click page buttons to access their functionality.

Savvy users know exactly what they want when navigating the Web’s interactive environment. They resist flashing promotions, ads or other editorial choices that try to entice them. They are using search engines better to beat the distractions.

In fact, Web sites that pepper their pages with cute widgets and fancy applications that take ages to load could lose users impatient to get to their information. I am one of them.

Read the full study, “Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use.”

In the end, it took a national tragedy of horrific proportions for a country with a history of contempt for free speech online to loosen its grip - but only a bit, and perhaps in a mere flirtation with unfettered information gathering.

The Web and mainstream media are abuzz with news and commentary of Monday’s earthquake in China. Amid the outpouring of grief and anger, a one-party state long wary of citizens’ access to sensitive information is letting a lot more reporting out, and with uncommon candor.

To be sure, scenes of devastation and suffering are staple media fare in the coverage of catastrophes. I’ve seen my share in the wires and feeds from international news organizations such as Reuters, AP, IPTV, APTN.

But the news of this quake disseminated by journalists and witnesses in China is remarkable because images and information are being let out uncensored from a country long suspicious of citizens and foreigners conspiring to undermine the state.

Thanks to lessons of the past, China’s media is living up to global standards for once - and about time. Lest we think this is a defining moment, remember that the men in Beijing are trying to balance hardline impulses with a nimbler grip on information as they limber for the Olympics.

This country with a history of covering up natural calamities and bungling responses is set to stage the Olympics in the full glare of international media. A media with third-world repute is trying to live up to first-world expectations. In experimenting with a new openness, a recent law requires public officials to provide information to the news media during natural disasters.

China knows the world is watching its behavior in a humanitarian crisis. Certainly it wants to avert the international scorn that the junta in Myanmar earned for their xenophobic response to the cyclone in Irrawaddy Delta.

As they say, if you can’t beat them, join them. Certainly, you can’t keep the digital arena sterile when a disaster of such magnitude hits home. You can’t muzzle netizens when you lead the world for mobile phone and Internet users.

You can’t dam the flood of searing images from being uploaded to the Web with mobile phones and digital cameras wielded by tens of millions of citizens. You can’t silence the blogs, the chatter and the Twitter on the Web. You can’t cover up. You can’t hide.

The Great Firewall that has kept the Chinese digital realm sanitized cracked this week, yielding to the murderous temblor that united the country in grief and mourning. Chinese mainstream media have found greater freedoms to show graphic images of devastation without the sanitizing that censors demand. Foreign media are getting unrestricted access.

Images of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao directing disaster relief officials and comforting survivors dominate the airwaves. This openness appears to be paying off. Websites and chatrooms are full of praise for the rescue response.

Witnesses to the devastation have been flooding the Web with homemade videos, filling chat rooms and Twittering tidbits of information from their mobile phones at a furious pace. Popular video-sharing site, tudou.com, now has about 1000 clips related to the quake, including appeals to locate relatives.

With uncharacteristic vigor, party organ Xinhua News Agency has stepped up to plate, offering a stream of updates on the rescue operation. Here’s a roundup of other compelling quake-related acts of journalism from China and elsewhere on the Web:

Global Voices Online: Roundup of blogging and local nonprofessional reporting on the quake.

QQ.com: Chinese video-sharing service has a special page aggregating contributed videos.

Yupoo: Gallery of earthquake photos from a major Chinese photo-sharing site.

CNN iReport: Aggregator page of all contributed content posted about the quake.

NowPublic: All submissions tagged “earthquake” on this citizen reporting site.

Shanghaiist: “Metroblogging” site offers several quake-related stories.

Flickr: All photos on this photo-sharing site tagged “China” and “earthquake.”

Tweet Scan: What the Twitterati is talking regarding the China quake.

Related read:
Chinese Internet Censorship

Devotees of the micro-messaging service Twitter watched the news unfold before their eyes as a 7.8 magnitude struck Sichuan province in China at 2:28 pm (0628 GMT) on Monday. The “Twitterati” got the news even before networks like Singapore-based Channel NewsAsia, CNN, MSNBC, BBC or the earthquake tracking US Geological Survey had the information.

This is a major disaster the horror of which is only just unfolding. While mainstream media scrambled to put up their “breaking news” headlines of the deadly catastrophe which has killed well over 20,000 people, Twitter had pictures, maps, videos all being sent in real-time. Here’s a glance at Twitter search site SUMMIZE and real-time results for “earthquake”

Micro-blogging outshone mainstream news as the earth shook with tragic consequences because people who felt the quake in China used their mobile phones to dash out “twitter” text messages as events unfolded, via the service provided by San Francisco-based Twitter Inc.

While it is stretching the imagination to suggest that the “Twitterati” knew of the earthquake before the US Geological Survey, Twitter reportedly became a source of information for major news organisations covering the earthquake. Twitterers became a bridge between the Chengdu-based Twitterati and mainstream media:

CNN’s John Vause in Beijing: 900 school children in Sichuan buried; 3000 troops and helicopters, Wen Jiabao on their way. ANDREW LIH (fuzheado)

BBC says 100 confirmed dead and rising. MICHAEL DARRAGH (michaeldarragh)

Here are more Twitter posts:

Slightly dizzy after being shaken around by the Chengdu earthquake for several hours now. CASPERODJ

At home in fact, cooking dinner and getting on with things. Just had another aftershock though.
INWALKEDBUD

Twitters are abbreviated text messages that can be instantly posted on online bulletin boards and personal websites and sent to the mobiles of selected friends. They were at the forefront of a gush of quake pictures and video swiftly posted online via Yahoo’s Flickr, Google’s YouTube.

Here’s how information spreads like wildfire on Twitter. First responder Robert Scoble a blogger, who was on the news into the early hours of the morning, was transferring news from the more than 21,180 people he follows to the 23,200 people following him. In turn, many of those folks would re-tweet (the term used to describe a message being re-sent out) the news to their followers.

Twitter was launched in March 2006 to let people share their every move with friends every moment of the day. Twitter users get a maximum of 140 characters a message. Ironically Twitter designer Biz Stone envisioned its potential as a communication tool by a ‘tweet’ warning he received about a California earthquake while about to board a train last year.

The first stage of the BBC’s newsroom integration project is up and running as journalists from the corporation’s television news service began working in a common newsroom with their colleagues from radio and television news bulletins. The Press Gazette reports that this week’s changes are the first phase of the BBC’s effort to integrate its news operation across media.

Journalists from the BBC’s international news channel, BBC World News, and those responsible for the text-based sections of the BBC News website will be brought into the converged newsroom in the coming weeks. The change has reduced the number of newsroom roles significantly. More...

The first wired generation raised in the virtual realm is coming of age and recreating the world in their image. Digital natives are deserting traditional sources of information for an emerging journalism of interactive multimedia experiences informed by the timeless dynamics of story.

This was the theme of my talk this week at a conference in Singapore on computer games and multimedia. I spoke about how news organizations are experimenting with storytelling in virtual worlds and the need to re-imagine journalism in a game environment.

Serious games and their potential for interactive, player-directed storytelling are great at illustrating complex situations. The concept is not far-fetched. Journalists must re-imagine story narratives and experiment with computer simulations to help digital natives learn about news events and trends.

Such an approach envisions new narrative forms as sophisticated play to engage a tribe of gamers who demand stimulating complex systems. The medium of games has matured along with the digital natives who grew up with it. In a galaxy not too far away, this generation will be learning about politics - not by reading or watching the news - but by playing games with peers in virtual worlds.

For example, news on the Olympic Torch and the shadows that dog it can be created as a game that immerses people in the real world, full of real-time political crises. Players create avatars modeled on characters such as the Dalai Lama and politicians caught in the fray. The route to Beijing offers rich scenarios for the virtual reconstruction of real cityscapes.

In his keynote, David Wortley of the Serious Games Institute in UK shared a glimpse of the future of serious play. The movement has serious brain power behind it. Advocates and nonprofit groups have joined forces to search for new ways to reach young people, while tech-savvy academics are keen to explore video games’ education potential.

Serious games are already being developed to help players learn about health, social, political and economic issues. The United Nations has released Food Force, a game that helps people understand the difficulties of dispensing aid to war zones.

A newspaper or other local news organization needs to be more than just a pipeline for informing people about current news and events.

PAUL GRABOWICZ University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

News games are more than voyeuristic mindless fun. They can be a medium for change. At Carnegie Mellon University, a game on the Middle East conflict is being developed. In the game Peacemaker, players assume the role of either the Israeli prime minister or the Palestinian president.

The idea of games for journalistic storytelling is in the skunkworks. The New York Times has published a game to help readers understand immigration legislation that was up for debate.

News media can use games to provide context for young people to understand their community and its history. Journalism professor Paul Grabowicz says video games let people re-live the history of their communities and understand not just what’s happening today but what came before.

Funded by a Knight News Challenge grant, Grabowicz and his students are developing Remembering 7th Street, a virtual reality game that replicates an Oakland street known for its jazz and blues club scene in the ’40s and ’50s.

Educators and traditional media approach games with fear. There is much to celebrate and little to fear when a young medium and old media converge on new media to reach a post-MTV audience. When information is retooled as enthralling experiences that tap the emotion and intellect through the interplay of narrative, performance and play, the consequences of this fundamental shift in media creation and use are profound and promising.

Through their ability to renew age-old modes of cultural expression, games can be adjuncts to topical issues, providing fresh experiences to spur community interactions. Augmenting play with media narratives can connect audiences to current events and issues.

We need best practices to re-imagine a knowledge aesthetic that provides core journalistic services built around a community of media producers, visual storytellers, information designers, narrative architects and game developers.

Serious Games sites:
Water Cooler Games
Social Impact Games
Games for Change
Impact Games

Related Read:
Why Journalists Should Develop Video Games
Using Video Games to Tell the News

What do you do when mainstream media, controlled by the administration of your hand-picked successor, (who you now detests) ignore your ranting of the way things are run in the country of which you were the former premier? Start a blog.

Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad today launched a blog to join a growing band of Malaysian politicians turning to the Web to spread their views. True to form, the vehement critic of his successor Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, raised prickly questions in his maiden post.

His blog www.chedet.com questions the recent decision by the administration to set up an independent commission to appoint judges. They are currently appointed by the prime minister at his discretion.

82-year old Mahathir is the latest of the old guard politicians who have started their blogs after the March 8 elections which trounced the ruling National Front coalition and swept several bloggers into parliament. The ruling coalition has admitted it lost the cyberwar to the opposition.

Their voices ignored by state-run mainstream media, many opposition leaders reached out to voters through blogs. Jeff Ooi, a professional blogger known for his anti-government views, contested the elections on an opposition ticket and won.

Mahathir is Malaysia’s longest-serving prime minister from 1981 to 2003. His blog is named after his former pen name Che Det, or Mr. Det when he wrote for the Straits Times newspaper more than three decades ago. But he’s a few years behind daughter Marina, who has been blogging at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com.

Related posts:
Bloggers Rock The Vote In Malaysia
M’sian Blogger-Politicians Make History

While national newspapers like The New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today are growing, local newspaper sites are losing market share to pure-play Internet sites like Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN, as well as aggregation sites like newsvine.com and topix.net.

Acoording to a 2007 study from The Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, new types of nontraditional actors can be expected to enter the arena of Internet news, increasing the competition for users’ attention. Lobbying groups are among the possible candidates.

The Internet has unleashed news with a partisan spin. Although some news aggregators highlight stories on the basis of journalists’ or visitors’ judgments, other aggregators emphasize stories and angles that promote a partisan agenda.

eEmmys? Oscars 2.0? The people have spoken, and viral clips along with Web stalwarts won big in the second annual YouTube Video Awards recognizing the top user-created videos of 2007.

The honors include “bragging rights, a trophy and a special invitation to an event later this year.” YouTube users voted from six nominees in each category: music, sports, comedy, instructional, short film, inspirational, commentary, creative, politics, series, eyewitness and “adorable.”

My Name is Lisa, a drama about a young girl and her mother who has Alzheimer’s, triumphed in the newly added Short Film category.

Honors for top Web Series went to The Guild, whose creator and star Felicia Day is getting lauded left, right and center for her quirky online comedy chronicling the relationships among a fictional team of online fantasy gamers. Here’s a profile of the series.

Chocolate Rain stole the thunder in the Music camp, having already morphed Tay Zonday from an unknown musician to Web superstar.

Stop the Clash of Civilizations by AvaazOrg topped the Politics category.

The Original Human Tetris was Creative video of choice.

Battle at Kruger took Best Eyewitness Video for its astonishing footage of a baby water buffalo surviving an attack by lions and a crocodile in the African prairie.

The journalism of PBS FRONTLINE is recognized every week for in-depth, no-glitz examination of something significant. On Monday March 24, the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, PBS will retrace the path of the war in a two-part documentary that draws on its FRONTLINE reports to examine the legacy of the Bush administration.

Once in a rare moment, a work comes along to reconcile our hopes in the Web as a documentary medium. “Bush’s War” elevates the telling of true stories by weaving facts with technology in innovative ways to illuminate the enduring myths of our culture. Conceived last November, FRONTLINE’s New TV/Web Experience offers the definitive documentary analysis by veteran producer Michael Kirk.

Here’s how PBS describes its political thriller:

Across the entire four-hour Bush’s War series that will be streamed online, FRONTLINE will integrate and embed in its video player an array of related interviews, background material and video that can be viewed with just a click. In addition, more than 100 video clips of key moments and events in the Iraq war will be the centerpiece of an annotated master chronology which FRONTLINE will publish on the Bush’s War site.

The interviews, video and background material are drawn from one of the richest archives in broadcast journalism: FRONTLINE’s 40+ hours of documentaries and 400 interviews done since 9/11 on Iraq and the war on terror, as well as new interviews conducted for Bush’s War.

Who owns your Web history and surfing data? Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web thinks consumers need to be protected against systems which can track their activity on the Web. He told BBC News he would change his internet provider if it introduced such a system. More >

Plans by leading internet providers to use Phorm, a company which tracks web activity to create personalised adverts, have sparked controversy. Many people argue that the firm’s Webwise technology breaches customer’s privacy.

Personalised advertising is expected to be big business with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all purchasing online ad firms. Privacy advocates and consumer bodies have called for an opt-out list for Web users who do not want to be tracked by advertisers. This list would prevent companies from tailoring adverts based on a user’s web habits.

The groups behind the idea include the Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Consumer Federation of America. They have approached the Federal Trade Commission to create the list.

Parliamentarians who blog are now a dime a dozen. But bloggers who become parliamentarians are a new breed, and Malaysia is possibly the first country to have the most number of bloggers enter Parliament after the stunning success of the opposition in Saturday’s elections.

The shift in the political use of digital media tools cannot be underestimated as a resurgent opposition chart what has been hailed as a new era in Malaysian politics. It is compelling to conclude that cyberspace was where the election was lost as Malaysians desert mainstream media and turn to alternative information platforms for political news and views.

Except for former copywriter Jeff Ooi who has a domain, the bloggers who triumphed over their ruling party opponents in the elections used little more than a free blog host like WordPress.com and Blogspot.com to raise alternative views and funds to counter incumbent sloganeering and a hostile mainstream media.

Blogs proved a potent tool for the Davids who slayed the Goliaths in the ruling National Front coalition to enter parliament. They include Oxford-educated Tony Pua for PJ Utara, human rights activist and political consultant Elizabeth Wong for Bukit Lanjung and NikNazmi Nik Ahmad for Seri Setia.

Interestingly in Rembau, school teacher blogger Badrul Hisham aka Chegubard lost to National Front candidate and son-in-law of PM Abdullah, Khairy Jamaluddin who managed to squeak through by countering late in the campaign with a blog of his own and a Website www.rembau.net.

Of course prominent opposition leaders like Democratic Action Party chief Lim Kit Siang and Parti Keadilan Rakyat leader Anwar Ibrahim already post multiple blogs. Parti Islam SeMalaysia even has editing suites to support candidate Websites that live stream press conferences and PAS Internet TV.

We cannot conclude that online campaigning affected outcomes, but the swing in votes was most pronounced in cities and towns. Kuala Lumpur had 10 out of 11 federal parliament seats falling to the opposition. Penang had 11 out of 13 parliamentary seats to opposition and 29 out of 40 state seats. These major urban areas did matter in the final tally that combines with rural areas, to deny the ruling National Front coalition a two-thirds majority.

Sex, lies and video sleaze peppered cyber soap operas in the run-up to the elections. Bloggers pushed parameters of legitimate opinion with the shrill subtext of their unruly discourse.

The elections are over but the drama is just beginning. The processes and structures of debate could prove far messier post-election. It remains to be seen how these blogger-parliamentarians will use the promise of civic media to distinguish themselves and fulfill their electoral mandate.

Related Read:
Reuters: Malaysia opposition win shows power of cyberspace
Straits Times: Battle Lost in Cyberspace

Did the Web make a difference in the elections in Malaysia? Early results show the opposition are set to trounce the ruling Barisan Nasional as blogger-politicians poise to make history. The opposition has taken the northern island state of Penang, with blogger Jeff Ooi successfully using his blog as a platform to launch a political career.

Ooi contested a seat for the opposition Democratic Action Party, which has claimed victory in Penang, ousting the government for the first time since 1969. Economic grievances, inter-religious disputes and unfulfilled pledges have spawned a unifying disillusionment with PM Abdullah’s administration, eroding popular support for his United Malays National Organization party at the ballot box.

The blogosphere heralds a new reality in democratic citizenship as agile opponents use the Web to rustle up support and deny the ruling coalition of its near monopoly over information flow. Independent Websites and blogs such as Malaysia Today and Malaysiakini have kindled lively debates to challenge the ruling coalition stranglehold over TV and radio. They engage their publics around complex, controversial subjects in which mainstream media are seen to have failed to address and convince citizens.

Media analyst Mustafa Kamal Anuar said, ”A lot more people have become more discerning especially after recent demonstrations revealed the stark contrast between the mainstream media’s coverage and the bloggers.” Last week, the senior cabinet minister who heads the ethnic Indian party in the ruling coalition was jeered when he officiated at a dance competition in Penang. It would have passed unnoticed if a video of that incident had not been quickly posted on YouTube.

Certainly the Web has lowered barriers to political participation and revitalized civic life. In the northeast constituency of Kuala Terengganu, a barely literate 89-year-old granny has outfitted her campaign with every trick from the Web 2.0 toolkit.

Like her Western counterpart Barack Obama, Maimun Yusuf, the oldest election candidate in Malaysia, reached out to her voters with a Facebook profile. It’s set up by her Web savvy supporters who are also running a blog for her, a Gmail account, a YouTube channel and a Picasa album.

Web 2.0 tools empower individuals and provide new opportunities for political involvement. Detractors may argue for methodologies to isolate the cyber chatter and quantify the effect of online videos on Youtube to determine whether online participatory culture translates into tangible offline outcomes. The trouncing handed out to Barisan National speaks for itself.

Now here’s a clear signal to plaintiffs contemplating court gambits and meritless lawsuits to censor Web sites. Bank Julius Baer has blinked in the Wikileaks staredown, but don’t expect to see the end of it. After losing their fight over an injunction, the Swiss bank backed down, filing a brief notice to dismiss the case - without prejudice.

The bank had said Wikileaks displayed stolen documents revealing confidential information about the accounts of the bank’s clients. It triggered a constitutional furore after filing a complaint that led a US District Court to order Wikileaks to shut down.

Last week, in the face of widespread media attention and rights-groups action, Judge White dissolved his previous orders, allowing the wikileaks.org domain name to go back up. The judge said he was worried about its First Amendment implications and that he thought it might not be possible to prevent viewing of the documents once they were posted on the Web.

Related read:
Wikileaks: Web Censorship Won’t Work

It’s been four days since Mas Selamat Kastari answered nature’s call and put Singapore in the global spotlight. The city’s most wanted man, and now ubiquitous poster boy, gave his guards the slip during a toilet break in a top security detention facility on the island. Accused of plotting to crash a plane into Changi Airport in 2001, Mas Selamat was never charged in court. At the time of his escape, he was being held under an internal security law that allows for detention without trial.

The circumstances surrounding the prison break in a city-state that touts itself tops in everything - from being a terror target to policing and ministerial pay - are as incredulous as the escape is audacious. It’s been 86 hours. Tens of thousands of police and security personnel are still looking for this middle-aged Singaporean national with a limp.

3.9 million mobile subscribers in the city will receive a photo of Mas Selamat via multimedia messaging from Singapore’s three main telecommunications companies. Singtel, the country’s biggest telco, will also send the fugitive’s photograph and a physical description to Internet subscribers.

There is no official word on how Mas Selamat breached one of the tightest security apparatus in the world. MSM has not raised the tough questions which are being asked on the Web with increasing derision. Mas Selamat’s face in possible guises are beginning to appear on blogs and portals. As much as the case is grist for conspiracy theorists, The Great Singapore Escape is becoming fodder for Photoshop artists and mash-ups. Here’s a sampling of the fare:

Possible Guises of Mas Selamat from NEW PAPER

Possible Guises of Mas Selamat from TALKINGCOCK.COM

Spoof: Mas Selamat Kastari - Confession of a Terrorist

Apology: DPM Wong Kan Seng Informs Parliament

Related Reads:
Interpol Global Red Alert
Comments by Deputy Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng on 2 March 2008 at the Visit to the Special Operation Command
MHA Press Release: Escape Of JI Detainee Mas Selamat From Detention

The Great Escape
Was Mas Selamat Kastari Assisted in His Escape? And By Whom?
Questions That Wong Kan Seng Must Answer
My Theory of the Great Escape of Mas Selamat