Webs@Work

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.

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.’

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.

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.

The order by a California court to muzzle anti-corruption site Wikileaks smacks of contempt for free speech online that parallels practices in repressive countries committed to Web censorship. As feeble as it is offensive, this abuse refocuses attention on the idea of a whistle-blower wiki whose time has come.

Prompted not by government but corporate interests, the restraining order on Wikileaks betrays an ignorance of the Internet domain system and an unfamiliarity with the instinct of Web communities to counter hostile action against free online speech. Outraged netizens have rushed to publicize alternate addresses of backup sites that remain online in defiance. The gag order has the opposite effect of what it intended.

Wikileaks is up from Sweden at (http://88.80.13.160) and mirror sites hosted in Belgium (http://wikileaks.be/), Germany (http://wikileaks.de) and the Christmas Islands (http://wikileaks.cx). Fans of Wikileaks have distributed copies of the offending bank information on their sites and via peer-to-peer file sharing networks. Now even folks who have not heard of Wikileaks or Julius Baer know about the fiasco.

Swiss Bank Julius Baer, registered in the Cayman Islands, sued Wikileaks and successfully requested that its Website be blocked. Wikileaks had posted documents about off-shore trust structures in the Cayman Islands which allegedly implicate Baer in money laundering and tax evasion. Baer claims Wikileaks published and altered documents stolen by a former executive. A recap of Wikileaks coverage of Bank Julius Baer is mirrored here.

Founded in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and computer specialists from around the world, Wikileaks is a wiki platform for whistle-blowers to safely post documents in a manner that cannot be traced. Other users could then analyse the information and discuss its reliability and significance.

Wikileaks says it has published more than 1.2 million documents. They uncover dirt ranging from rules of engagement for American troops in Iraq to the operation of prison at Guantánamo Bay. Though it focuses on government and corporate wrong-doing in Asia, Africa and Middle East, Wikileaks has received most attention with secrets revealed in the US, Europe and Caribbean.

This major test of First Amendment rights is unheard of in the West. As the case heads for the appeals court, one wonders why Wikileaks must explain the meaning of the First Amendment in the land of free speech. “There is no justification under the First Amendment for shutting down an entire Web site,” say David Ardia, Director of Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School:

First, the banks overreached. They worked out what appears to be a sweetheart deal with Wikileaks’ domain name registrar, Dynadot. Even though Dynadot appears to bear no liability for the material at issue, the banks added Dynadot as a defendant in the case.

No doubt thinking they had come up with a legal “silver bullet,” the banks and Dynadot signed a joint stipulation in which Dynadot agreed to, among other things, “lock” and “disable the wikileaks.org domain name” in exchange for being dismissed from the case (a case in which, it appears, Dynadot bore no liability). To give their stipulation the force of law, the banks slipped an order to the judge, which he promptly signed.

DAVID ARDIA
Director of Citizen Media Law Project, Harvard Law School

Wikileaks is getting legal help in its court fight. Freedom of speech group, The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and digital rights advocacy, Electronic Frontier Foundation plan to argue on its behalf at a legal hearing on 29 February.

On another note, the European Parliament has accepted a move by Dutch conservative member Jules Maaten to consider Web censorship a trade barrier. This was first reported in Dutch, on the Web site of Maaten’s political party, the VVD. When the proposal is accepted, the EU has to take measure against countries who deploy Web censorship.

Related reads
Wikileak Blog
A Coming Chill over Internet Freedom

CNN’s public journalism initiative, “beta” iReport is inviting anyone to send in photos, video, stories and more, creating instantly one of the biggest sites online for “unfiltered, uncensored user-powered news.”

Youtubish and video-centric, the site includes standard user-generated features, such as rating contributions, search by subject or submitter, sort by most popular. Anyone from around the globe can contribute pictures and video of breaking news stories from their towns and neighborhood.

Unlike iReports on CNN.com which are vetted by CNN, the iReport portal is unmoderated and stories appear on the site the moment they’re uploaded. CNN makes no guarantees about the content or the coverage.

The site isn’t co-branded with CNN yet in a clear effort to seperate the CNN brand from the unmoderated content on iReport.com. The majority of iReports are on this site — about 90,000 — while CNN has only used about 900 of those on air or on CNN.com

CNN has been experimenting with citizen journalism since 2007. One event in particular catapulted such citizen journalism onto the international stage. On April 16, 2007, video submitted by graduate student Jamal Albarghouti captured the sounds of gunfire during the Virginia Tech massacre.

CNN paid Albarghouti an undisclosed amount for the exclusive rights to the video he shot on his Nokia N70. The immediacy of the pictures demonstrated the potential for such content.

So is citizen journalism inevitable? Is this another step by MSM and its archaic practice of editing to embrace new ways? Only time will tell whether this experiment will end up being a popular entertainment portal or a valuable news source.

The heartbeat of electoral politics in the US has moved online, and Barak Obama is leading the charge. In bringing about new levels of civic engagement, the participatory culture of the Web is changing not just the face of politics, but the way presidential candidates are marketed.

DREAM TEAM?

Obama campaign managers say their focus online is to drive supporters to the Web site so that people can participate in the process by hosting house parties, writing their own campaign blogs and starting grass-roots groups in their communities.

Techpresident.com, a nonpartisan “group blog,” tracks the effect presidential candidates are having online. For example, in terms of MySpace friends, Obama is leading Democratic rival Clinton, with more than 268,400 friends linked to his MySpace page while Clinton has more than 179,300 friends.

Not since the fireside chats of Franklin Roosevelt has a communication medium played such a pivotal role in electoral politics. With the presidential election shaping up to be truly the first of the digital age, hearts and minds are being shaped online.

Can Web 2.0 technologies bring about a sea change in politics, much like TV swayed political behavior in the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960?. They were the first major presidential debates on television, a venue in which a youthful John Kennedy outshone Richard Nixon, who was less telegenic on camera.

PEW Research Center found that the Web is living up to its potential as a major source for news about the 2008 presidential campaign. Online is the key place to get news about the elections, with almost a quarter of Americans now learning about the campaigns online on a regular basis.

Partnering between old and new media adds even more legitimacy to emerging technologies. Like MTV and MySpace, teaming up to feature real time, dialogues between candidates and voters.

Certainly the rules of the game have changed and the politics much more distributed. There are many aspects of Web social marketing in this race. Campaigns are happening on people’s screens and no longer run from headquarters or driven by centralized purchases of TV advertising time.

What YouTube and other Internet sites seem to have done is they enable people to talk to one another. Allow voters to talk to one another without necessarily going to the campaigns. And so you see people making their own ads for candidates and that might be part of what is getting people so excited and what’s leading to this record turnout as well.

Much has changed since Democrat Howard Dean tapped into an online community for support and money in his 2004 campaign. Today top Web experts are hired to outfit candidates’ sites with fundraising tools, blogs and videos and post profiles on social networking sites.

Republican candidates are using the web to grab donations and build communities. McCainSpace allows users to build their own sites hosted on the John McCain site. Other Web features used by campaigns mimic those of YouTube, Google and Amazon.com. But instead of generating a sale or linking to an advertisement, candidates pitch supporters, pick up fundraising leads and potentially land votes.

Well the Internet has certainly been a big target of campaigns for two reasons. One, fundraising. It has made fundraising a lot easier. You can go out and find people to make donations. I think Internet has played a strong role in this record amount of campaign contributions that are flowing to the campaigns. The Internet also enables you to target voters and to target advertising. So it’s brought a lot of change to how campaigns operate in terms of fundraising and in terms of targeting

As people turn to the Web for shopping, banking and news, will getting and being influenced by political information be any different? Certainly, the ‘pull’ type of media on the Web may not get to the masses who are still unwired, and who need political information pushed to them by TV or newspapers.

What remains to be seen is how web-marketing techniques change as the electoral field is narrowed to two primary candidates. While the Web will matter in this election, will it also determine outcomes? Will these tools make or break a candidate?

Mirror mirror on the tube, who’s the changiest of them all? Notice how the political rhetoric in the US presidential elections is now down to a single word - change? Once upon a time in elections past, candidates fought to distance themselves from change - or flip-flopping - as it was called then.

Now change is so hot candidates are falling over themselves to flaunt their change credentials. Whatever the political stripes, whether in a dress or in suits, everybody wants to change their spots. Any change will do it seems. String these voices and mash ‘em up and presto! The Changiness Chorus:

Spare the change! It’s a word that has inflamed defenders of the status quo and media watchers. Jeff Jarvis, Associate Professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism rants in his blog that change is the “emptiest” word in politics:

“It’s an utterly empty word. Meaningless. The worst of political rhetoric. The worst of political bullshit. Pure spin. Cynical marketing. Juvenile pandering… Oh, just shut up and do something.”

I might be persuaded that progress comes through change, but don’t tell me all change is progress. Democrats will be a big change from Bush. Duh, but change in what terms? Didn’t America vote for change in 2000? Does change imply electing a female or a black President?

Change is the word of choice for an uncritical political culture. Any politician of any stripe can stand behind it without specifics or fear of contradiction:

Notice, when you hear the word “change,” whether the speaker or writer is using it as a noun or a verb. As a noun, the word is an empty abstraction. You don’t have to explain it, or give examples. You can simply invoke it, like “freedom” or “terrorism” or “amnesty.”

As an intransitive verb, “change” rarely helps: as in “I will change!” The politician who offers us the transitive, who gives us an object of the verb — “I will change the way we wage this war” — is at least giving us a small peg on which to hang.

POYNTER INSTITUTE

Out in the field, Obama is cool as a symbol and vessel for change. Clinton is cold and shrill in her naked ambition. Excuse me, is anybody thinking for a change? Changing the face and name in the White House is not change. Holding different perspectives and acting on those ideas is.

Blame it on TV and tube talk in an attention economy. So last century to be sure. Throw in the social networkers of MySpace and Facebook and you get a growing disconnect with the cuckolds. Can user generated politics predict election outcomes?

As people begin to switch off their TV and “live” online, the Web will define politics. If this has become a contest about who represents change, perhaps it makes more sense to talk about who owns the change. Voters own change, not candidates. Voters can vote out representatives and replace them with candidates who deliver more than promises.

Come to think of it, change is no big deal. Talking is the easy part. In the final scrutiny, who can change his or her spots?

Here’s a chance to be a YouTube millionaire, but only if you’re a top content creator. In the US, users of video-sharing site are already making money from the videos they post on the site. The project is being extended to other countries, starting in the UK.

Those signing up to the YouTube Partner Programme will be offered a share of the revenue generated from advertisements that run next to their video. Partners are independent video creators and media companies who are looking for online distribution. New YouTube partners include LisaNova, renetto, HappySlip, smosh, and valsartdiary.

The amount earned will depend on the number and popularity of the videos. YouTube says those making “several thousand dollars a month” are regularly producing videos with over one million views

The first wave of US partners - including singer/songwriter Tay Zonday, wordsmith hotforwords and comedians apauledtv and peteandbrian - have already become responsible for a significant percentage of YouTube’s total traffic, according to YouTube.

As people spend more time on social networking sites, they are increasingly thinking about how to monetise it. YouTube is part of the trend of social networks and user-generated content sites offering people a chance to make money for the content they create.

What’s happening in your neighborhood? Everyblock has just launched to let users search for news and information by address, zip code or neighborhood. For example, typing a zip code in the Chicago site brings up all the crimes reported there.

So far only Chicago, San Francisco and New York are covered, but more cities will be added soon. With its unique filter on the chaos of city life, EveryBlock does a good job of pulling information from disparate sources for Chicago/NYC/SF-based readers.

To get a taste, check out a map of all photos taken recently in Downtown San Francisco, a list of vehicles stolen in Chicago, or a log of the graffiti recently cleaned up in Brooklyn.

Al Thompkins of Poynter Institute reviews:

Click the word “map” on the upper right corner of the listing, and it maps all of the crimes. The site also gives you restaurant inspection scores for every zip code, street or specific address.

I then found all of the new business licenses issued for that zip code. When you click on the Business Reviews navigation bar, you’ll be directed to a listing of various businesses that you can comment on and rate.

Anytime the city of Chicago sends a press release from a city department that mentions this section of town, it will show up in the city press release section of the site.

The “news articles” tab features stories from various sites that in some way mention the area covered by the zip code. “Filmings” is a tab that mentions what movies have been filmed in that area of town.

The “photos” tab takes you to Flickr photos that have been tagged as having to do with Chicago. The site lists street closures due to construction, block parties. etc

While the sites may look like a random collection of data pulled from myriad services and slapped together, they promise serendipitous moments as Website destinations and innovative journalism.

The site was dreamed up by Adrian Holovaty, also behind the popular ChicagoCrime.org that maps incidents of crime daily. EveryBlock is funded by a $1.1M, two-year grant from the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge, a competition for making local news more easily obtainable.

Everyblock competes directly with Outside.in. Yahoo’s OurCity, while still beta and only covering cities in India, has many similar features as well. Also see YourStreet.

There’s a zero-sum flavor to the arguments of Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, at the Hugo Young memorial lecture in London. Misdiagnosing the threat facing media today, he warned that reliable news reporting is dwindling in the face of bloggers.

Dubbing the Internet a “media tsunami,” Keller flailed at blogs and pilloried sites like Wikipedia and Google News, insulting the Web products for not having things like foreign bureaus in war zones and because they don’t create content but aggregate it from other media.

“The civic labour performed by journalists on the ground cannot be replicated by legions of bloggers sitting hunched over their computer screens,” he declared. Hold it a sec. Google News and Wikipedia never claimed to be a news organization.

While the dinosaurs lay their last eggs and take swings at the new pamphleteers, perhaps we should revisit the history of The Press to remind ourselves why it exists. Perhaps at the top of their pyramids, old media dinosaurs fail to see that they have lost their monopoly on information.

Rather than being the sole source of information they once was, the press and TV are now part of a new information distribution structure. Content will always be king, and readers will go to wherever they can get the highest quality, most credible news. Good journalism is always in demand, whoever delivers it.

There is room for bloggers to contribute to the conversation. Instead of competing, bloggers and journalists should focus on good reporting. No model has worked so far. In a truly robust press, trained journalists and ordinary folks work to improve understanding of the communities. Professionals form the backbone with citizens in their various communities providing ideas, information, and old-fashioned legwork.

Well and good, problem is why would people offer time and knowledge to help out the journalists? The results of the Assignment Zero debacle portend the potential of citizen journalism. The concept of user-generated content is in danger of becoming a distraction from the real discussion about how professional journalism will navigate the rapids of technological evolution.

Steve Outing said recently in an item on the demise of his user content-powered Enthusiast Group, “I believe that what user content needs to succeed as a business is professional editors to be the ones to sift through it all to find the stuff that people will care about.”

Crowd sourcing works fine if you want to buy stuff and exchange verifiable info with peers in a Web forum. But news consumers want accurate, reliable, fair, credible, relevant and useful information which the citizen journalism model has yet to provide.

Michael Hedges notes in his Follow the Media post that citizen journalism, a term invented by accountants, is past its prime when listeners, viewers and readers lost interest in ‘reports’ from the 16-year old on the corner with a cell-phone camera:

Blogs, touted as giving voice to many, became, largely, ranters ranting to themselves or PR people posting the daily spin. Blog creation has peaked, wrote the Pew Research Center in a 2007 report. The successful became niche publishers, albeit of the traditional media model. The rest are just out there, hanging by the Web.

User-generated content is another concept designed to warm the accountants’ books. Couple it with the much vaunted social networking sites and zillions of web hits are created. All content may, indeed, be equal for 20 year old user/creators but an adult looking for knowledge and clarity is left empty. Unfortunately, sources for adults have evaporated into the dither of click-through ads

All said, is there a self-sustaining Website that actually practices journalism out there? Kara Swisher, who covers technology for the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital said this of Keller’s speech:

Actually, I think Keller’s real problem is the audience, especially young people, who are increasingly using those sites and others. The fact of the matter for an awfully long time now is that consumers of information are sampling all over the Web and don’t just rely solely on the New York Times for info.

That’s too bad for Keller, I guess, but not bad at all for consumers, who Keller never assumes are discerning at understanding what they are getting. But they are and are simply not a mass of dumb sheep just taking it all in and not questioning anything.

But I cannot imagine he lives in the present-day world when he claimed in the speech: “Most of the blog world does not even attempt to report. It recycles. It riffs on the news. That’s not bad. It’s just not enough. Not nearly enough.”

This is simply not true going forward, and he should have done some reporting on the subject to find out. There is an ever-increasing number of online outlets who are doing most excellent online reporting.

Read his full text here.

2008 is beginning to look like 1984 behind the Great Firewall. China’s economic juggernaut reveals its darker side yet again as Beijing moves to nip a blossoming online video industry in the bud with new rules that could block YouTube and other services in the country.

Starting Jan 31, sites that provide video programming or allow users to upload video must have a permit and be either state-owned or state-controlled. Permits for video hosting sites will be subject to renewal every three years and operators who commit violations may be banned for up to 5 years.

Politically or morally objectionable content will be forbidden under the new rules. That digital contraband would include politically sensitive messages about racial minorities and human rights as well as sexual images, although most are banned already. Providers will be required to delete such content if it is uploaded and to report each incident to the State.

This new policy about video sharing sites may or may not be a big deal. Youtube was blocked for several weeks at the end of 2007 after a Chinese version of their site was launched, but normally there is no official notification or justification that a service has stopped working. One day, you can access it and the next day it is blocked.

Perhaps Youtube will become semi permanently blocked like Wikipedia, but Google has a history of adapting itself to be compliant with China’s culture of Internet censorship. It is more likely that the China’s Youtube copysites like tudou.com will have to register with and be subject to more control from the Chinese government.

CATSHANGHAI

To be sure massive censorship in the US exists though mostly driven by special interest groups and corporate advertisers. These manipulate investigative reporting and block facts from getting into the media by threatening to pull ad dollars from newspapers and TV stations.

Google is well known to the gay blogging community for unfair adjudication of standards when it comes to adwords account approvals. It is known in China to be a partner and advocate of censorship as long as currency, American or Chinese, is involved.

While the statute could limit online video to state-controlled media sites and ban foreign-owned video-hosting sites, it may also go unenforced, serving more as a threat to coerce video-hosting sites to police themselves. China’s popular video websites are run by private companies, and have in recent years been the focus of attention from venture-capital investors.

If it feels like everyone is crying “wolf” or “totalitarian” too early, it bears remembering that China is a hotbed of bad Internet activity. Presently the government lacks the technology to filter video as selectively as it filters text. The move may scare sites into censoring the content authorities want banned.

All said, the Chinese are fine, hard working people with a great and proud history. You can’t stop the Chinese, but it’s unfortunate that a state with a distrust in its own citizens has chosen affirmation power through control of information.

Related post:
Journey Into China’s Internet Censorship

Rich Gordon at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University has an interesting post, Data as Journalism, Journalism as Data. He writes that one of the most striking developments in online news has been the rapid proliferation of interesting database applications.

Gannett Co. newspapers have been leaders in this area, driven by the company’s “information center” initiative, which is yielding new organizational structures and approaches to information gathering and presentation. The “data desk” is one of the seven pillars of the company’s new approach to news.

As Gannett realizes, data should be a driving force in online journalism.