Sherbango soup

The journalistic promise of social media was to connect directly with the people who live the news that others only report. That is, the teachers, cops, soldiers, mothers, philologists, farmers and accountants who recorded their personal experiences - what they saw and what they felt. Instead, the bulk of social media that "reports" the news seems to be there primarily to reinforce our a priori prejudices.

I call bullshit on that.

So here are a group of voices that come out of non-crazy people. The fact that it probably seems surprising they're Israeli, Palestinian-Israeli and Palestinian is only more proof that we seek out people that reinforce our expectations. These won't.

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Lisa Goldman

Lisa is a Canadian-Israeli journalist with a wide array of credits, from the Guardian to Haaretz to the Columbia Journalism Review to Time Out Tel Aviv. She came to prominence during the Israel-Lebanon war, when she reported from Lebanon and kept a dialog going with Lebanese bloggers, an undertaking which at times seemed freaking dire.

Lisa's neither apologetic for being Israeli nor blind to the country's failings. She's steely at times, funny at others and remarkably empathetic. Though she doesn't suffer fools gladly, she'll talk to anyone.

From her latest post:

"Somehow, a certain brand of Judaism and militarism have become part of the settler movement's ideological identity. For many religious settlers, the army is an extension of their identity in the sense of serving the state that controls the land mentioned in the bible, that was given by God. For American Jews who support the settler movement's ideology, and share their conviction that they are surrounded by enemies that present an existential threat, a course in the use of firearms might feel as important as a visit to the Western Wall or the Tomb of the Patriarchs in terms of identity tourism - not to mention power. For Caliber 3′s bareheaded instructors, the settlers' ideology is certainly a lucrative source of income."

Issa

Issa is a Palestinian-Israeli (more often in the media called "Arab-Israeli"). He works as a diplomat in an embassy in Tel Aviv. Because of his work, he remains anonymous. But he blogs in a voice you'd think would belong to a good diplomat: empathetic, bridge-building, possessing a distinct point of view but willing to engage. As a Palestinian-Israeli, he focuses a lot of his attention on his country (Israel) and his people (the Palestinians, as well as Palestinian-Israelis).

Among his subject matter is Knesset debates with Palestinian-Israeli and Israeli lawmakers, refugee crises, Israeli basketball and boycotting products of the Jewish settlements.

From his latest post:

"After 62 years, the Ministry of Education has finally decided to implement Arabic language studies starting the fifth grade. The new initiative would allow students at 170 public schools in northern Israel to learn the second official language in Israel on a relatively early age . . . Those who had some knowledge, acquired it at the military service, either at the check points or the intelligence branch. Others have basic pathetic sentences from their junior high school days. It sure felt like someone is missing the point out there, how pity."

Gaza Mom

GM's a mom. She's from Gaza City. Mystery solved. She's also a journalist. Her family live, and she blogs from, the U.S. now, "unable to return to or even visit Gaza due to the siege." Her blog's about "the trials of raising (her) children between spaces and identities; displacement and occupation; and everything that entails from potty training to border crossings."

On visits to Gaza, she walks. I think that's crucial. She walks, sees, talk, then blogs about what she sees. It's a welcome corrective to media tunnel-vision and propagandistic screeching. Not a big fan of the Israeli state, it's safe to say, but she registers clear, sharp pictures rendered in sharp, evocative phrases - neither slogans nor anger-deformed truisms. "No ideas but in things" might be her motto.

From her latest post:

"While out doing field research for The Gaza Kitchen yesterday, Maggie and I stumbled upon what we think is Gaza's only "certified organic" farm. Now before you roll your eyes, keep in mind this is not a departure but a return to very traditional farming practices of pre-1948 days, when life and livelihoods were violently and abruptly disrupted."

There. That's three. An Israeli, a Palestinian-Israeli and a Palestinian. They're all worth listening to. They deliver what we thought bloggers around the world would deliver in the early days: real, human intelligence on where they live and who they live among and what happens there.

Do you have a favorite blogger you follow in Israel | Palestine? Someone who provides a surprising viewpoint, who brings you the good and bad of where they live and who they are? If so, please give us a link in the comments.

By the way, I encourage, in this post and all others, vigorous, propulsive comments. But if you I swear to G-d start hating - on anyone and from any direction and for any reason - and I will delete you so fast it will make your virtual head spin. The whole point of this post is to remind ourselves that human beings bring us human intelligence no matter where we look, thanks to this series of tubes. Emulate them.

The Getty Conservation Institute has introduced the Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities - Jordan, a GIS-powered, map-focused site to "inventory, monitor, and manage Jordan's vast number of archaeological sites."

Working for four years, at the cost of $1 million, the Getty, with the cooperation of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities and the World Monuments Fund, has created a system for matching geographic information and historical research in a land whose history is vast and varied.

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The project is two-fold. First, it will enable scholarly access to, ideally, every archaeological site in Jordan. Second, it will aid in the protection of ancient sites. Looting in nearby Iraq, and globally in general, is on the rise again.

MEGA lists over 10,000 sites of archaeological and historic importance, from the neolithic to Ottoman times. Information the integrity of these sites was formally listed only in a local Jordanian database, with no connection to the Internet.

The site was built with a number of realities in mind. It should be map-based, use free or low-cost software, be bi-lingual in Arabic and English, be easy-to-learn and customizable and allow the export of data that is fully compatible with other GIS tools such as Google Earth, Quantum GIS, and ESRI's ArcView..

The project's website will open next month to a group of authorized users. The intent is to open it to a wider and wider group as time goes on, as well as to spread the experience with the system to others who might be interested in implementing it in their country or area. Iraq, which was originally the target of an earlier version of the project but was given up in favor of Jordan due to instability, has indicated a desire to revisit the possibility of implementing the system in that country, according to Qais Hussein Rashid, Iraq's Director of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.

Blogging, Tweeting and Facebook have changed the world by making it easier than ever for everyday people to publish and distribute their thoughts and media to the world. The resulting tidal wave of data now offers opportunities for innovative entrepreneurs to build entire new products, services and companies based on processing that data and offering recommendations, analytics and other information products to consumers.

Social data is set to be surpassed in the data economy, though, by data published by physical, real-world objects like sensors, smart grids and connected devices. The United States may have dominated the first basic and the second social stage of the Web, but the Chinese government is moving quickly to make China the world leader in this next stage, the Internet of Things. A major new public/private partnership in Chongqing aimed explicitely at the Internet of Things is just the latest signal.

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The Plan

The Chinese municipality of Chongqing and telco giant China Unicom have announced a multi-billion dollar partnership of investment and tax breaks aimed to create as much as $7 billion in annual revenues within five years from what's called the Internet of Things.

According to a report in Near Field Communications World, "Under the terms of the agreement, China Unicom and the municipal government will also jointly establish an NFC [Near Field Communications] Industry Alliance while China Unicom will establish a research facility specialising in the Internet of Things..."

We reported last month that the national government of China is also developing a national Internet of Things plan. China could take the lead, and Chongqing could try to become the next Silicon Valley.

A world-leading Internet of Things infrastructure and economy would give China a big advantage in efficiency throughout any industries that become instrumented with sensors and a platform for significant innovation.

In June, the parliament of the European Union officially endorsed development of an Internet of Things as well. The United States has no official state plan for the Internet of Things, but earlier this week objects surpassed new human subscribers to wireless data plans for the first time in US history.

Photo credit.

The social web is increasingly multi-lingual. About half the updates on Twitter are in a language other than English, according to a study released in February. Facebook has been translated into more than 50 languages for its 500 million users are all over the world. The day when English is no longer the dominant language on social networks may not be far off.

Social Translate is a new open source extension for Google's Chrome browser that translates updates on social networking sites into your native language using Google Translate.

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You can choose between "reliable," which appears to attempt fewer translations, or "aggressive," which is less accurate but attempts to guess at more words.

Of course, Google Translate's ability is limited, and it seems to extract less meaning when the sentences are short.

A tweet from one of the top users in Beijing translated from Chinese to English using Social Translate.

Social Translate is a useful and relevant idea for a web that is increasingly composed of conversations. The extension has some shortcomings and a few bugs, judging by a quick test and its page on Google Code.

It detects languages correctly on Twitter and translates acceptably (except for the fact that Google Translate often turns up total nonsense), letting users skip the Google Translate prompt that appears when you navigate to a site in a foreign language. If your first language is English but you're also fluent in Spanish, you can tell Social Translate to display Spanish tweets but translate any other language to English.

On Facebook, the extension is measurably less useful. It only translates status updates as they appear in your News Feed - not in comments on updates, in profiles or on users' walls.

It appears the two developers, Andrew Swerdlow and Nav Jagpal, are still working out the kinks with this extension. I could not get the extension to work for MySpace or Google Buzz, although the developers intend for it to work for those services.

Facebook hit 500 million users this week, but where do they all live? If Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populous in the world - but it's not a country. Those 500 million people (give or take a few fake profiles, right?) all live in actual countries, where Facebook is used to a greater or lesser degree.

Ross Perez is a Data Analyst at data visualization company Tableau. When the UK Guardian data blog posted numbers of Facebook user numbers country-by-country this week (including from longtime number tracker Nick Burcher) Perez thought those numbers would look good in a Tableau visualization. And indeed they do.

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Perez, who is part of the marketing team at Tableau, said it took him about an hour to put this visualization together. Tableau aims to be to data visualization what Blogger was to blogging or YouTube to video publishing.

RSS readers can click here to see the interactive maps.

I think it's fascinating to think about the relative sizes and market penetrations of various countries. In case you were wondering, the countries with the highest percentage of people using Facebook are Hong Kong, Canada, the UK and then the United States. Who's most into Facebook in South America? Chileans, at 41%.

Not all countries are included. China, for example, doesn't appear on the map. The giant social network hasn't gained a whole lot of traction there, due to language, culture, marketing effort, local competition and probably most of all - government suppression of access to the site. (See this discussion on Quora for more perspective.)

For those countries where numbers are available, though. This is a pretty cool way to look at the data. Poke it a few times, it really is interactive.

Starting today, countries can use Internet country code top-level domains that are independent of the Latin alphabet, according to Internet regulating body ICANN.

As it currently stands, a site in Saudi Arabia must use ".sa" as its root. Now it can use the Arabic equivalent and leave off translating. Egypt, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are the first to take advantage of this.

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The first site to use a completely non-Latin URL is Egypt's Ministry of Communication.

Now, however, 21 countries have made the request that the Internet recognize their names in 11 different languages, according to an ICANN announcement.

The process to get native-language functionality, called "Fast Track" has three steps.

1. Preparation (by the requester in the country / territory). Community consensus is built for which IDN ccTLD to apply for, how it is run, and which organization will be running it, along with preparing and gathering all the required supporting documentation.
2. String Evaluation: incoming requests to ICANN in accordance with the criteria described above: the technical and linguistic requirements for the IDN ccTLD string(s). Applications are received through an online system available together with additional material supporting the process at: http://www.icann.org/en/topics/idn/fast-track/
3. String Delegation: requests successfully meeting string evaluation criteria are eligible to apply for delegation following the same ICANN IANA process as is used for ASCII based ccTLDs. String delegation requests are submitted to IANA root zone management.

Eventually I'll test my thesis that says, "The bigger the product launch, the more social media users get banged in the tanty." (Pardon my French.) In the meantime, let's see how much ill was done by whom to people like you.

Facebook account removals criticized. Jillian York wrote an extensive examination of Facebook users around the world who have had their accounts closed out. "Facebook has not spoken publicly about how this process works, but my suspicion is that when a number of users report the same user, their profile is automatically disabled." If this is true, it's disturbing. Because it's mob rule.

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Britain's Labour Party removes candidate for Twitter account. Gordon Brown, UK prime minister, and head of the Labour Party, "fired" a Labour candidate. The candidate, Stuart MacLennan, apparently directed profane comments toward ethnic minorities, women and the elderly. His account seems to have been deleted. He seems to be a tool.

Microsoft had a role in media repression that led up to the Kyrgyzstan coup. According to author Jeffrey Carr, writing in Forbes, "Microsoft's Kyrgyzstan agent assisted the Kyrgyz authorities in cracking down on dissenting media five days before last week's uprising." Carr publishes a timeline of online repression prior to the overthrow of Kyrgyz president Bakiev. A Microsoft representative showed up with state authorities to the offices of an internet TV station with the charge that the station used pirated Microsoft products. The authorities shut the station down. This is a strategy that repressive governments use with some regularity.

UK candidate makes "digital pledge." In response to the passing of the Digital Economy Bill in the UK, candidate Tom Watson issued a set of pledges to maintain access to online information and defend user rights.

South Korea institutes gaming curfew. Gizmodo reports South Korea "is disabling internet connections for six hours per night for underage gamers.The ban won't affect most internet uses, just a blacklist of 19 specific games."

Thai government blocks thousands of websites. Building on last week's crackdown, Thailand goes from 36 blocked websites to somewhere between 9,000 10,000. Global Voices says in their headline that they have begun locking up webmasters, but do not elaborate or source the statement.

Top photo by Cdogstar
Bottom photo by Karen Blumberg

A spin-off of Finnish software development company Nodeta, Flowdock aspires to help developers and others sift out actionable bits of knowledge from ongoing conversations and make them retrievable. Their team messenger services allows separation and tagging of conversational elements.

"In Flowdock, the epiphany comes when you tag a chat message for the first time," Nodeta and Flowdock's CTO Otta Hilska wrote us. "You realize how you just took a piece of conversation and turned it into a nugget of knowledge. Somebody talked about a bug, and you turned it into a bug report. Or pasted a snippet of code, and you categorized and organized it. The real validation for the concept comes when you are looking for some other snippet of code, a link to a partner, an eBook or something else and come to think 'I wonder if it's tagged in Flowdock". Sure enough it will be.'"

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Designed for groups, Flowdock attempts to address a new kind of information overload, the one that intensified when social media tools began to be adopted by exponentially more people. The theory is that by tagging bits of the conversation, they are made discreet and retrievable based on folksonomy.

Use examples include agile development and handling to-dos.

Flowdock is out of private data and you the public is invited to try it.

Kaiser Kuo presented today at SXSW about Google in China. He spoke about how the Google situation will impact Chinese Internet users, other companies and the Chinese government.

In the presentation, Kuo (who also spoke to ReadWriteWeb a week ago) clarified how censorship in China works. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the Great Firewall that has the most impact in China - but something China calls "self-discipline." Kuo also discussed what the next moves will be from Google, since he believes that the ball is in Google's court and Beijing won't push the situation.

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History of Google in China

Before getting down to the nitty gritty of the current Google-China standoff, Kaiser Kuo gave some valuable context to Google in China.

In 2005 Google started to hire aggressively in China, he said. Google's decision to enter China with a censored product immediately brought grief to Google, with some pundits describing it as a "black day for Internet freedom." Google defended its actions at that point by saying that not providing search to a fifth of the world's population would be a greater loss than having censored results.

At first Google had a notice on their search results stating that they were censored. Kuo also pointed out that Google only omitted results that users wouldn't have been able to view anyway had they clicked through (because the pages or sites were blocked). At that point, Google didn't host Gmail, personal search history, Blogger or other services that had personal information. Google in China also protected their employees, Kuo noted.

Google never had an easy time of it in China. For example, many Chinese users couldn't spell the word "Google." Regulators made it difficult for them, as did their Chinese competitors. Google did manage to make good revenues and market share, but never "moved the needle" against its Chinese search competitor Baidu. Kuo remarked that Google was not singled out for any special treatment by the Chinese government.

In 2009 Google got into trouble due to pornography, and it went dark for a short time as a result. There has been a massive growth in Internet users in China in the four years since Google entered that market. There were 2-3 million Internet users in China when Google began operations there; now there are 384 million Internet users in China. Google has around 35% market share in China, which has not been matched by any other Western company. Its annual revenues in China is around $300-400 million in revenue, which is nothing to sneeze at.

In mid-December 2009 there was a hacker attack on Google, which in January Google announced on its blog was from China. At that time Google announced it would stop censoring search results on google.cn. Kuo doesn't believe this announcement was a cynical retreat from China due to its being defeated by Chinese competitors, which many pundits suggested at the time.

Kuo said that the challenge to Google's business model is around trust, for personal data in the cloud. So Google's blog post in China was appropriate, Kuo believes.

Some people have suggested that the Chinese government used the strategy known in China as "Using Quiescience to control action." The government has however unblocked Google Docs and Groups, and has not blocked any further Google services since January.

Currently Google is still hiring in China and is in midst of negotiations with the Chinese government. Kuo believes there is deliberate confusion right now."It's impossible to grasp what Google is up against without having a better grasp of how censorship in China works."

The Great Firewall

There are two main types of Internet censorship in China, said Kuo.

The first is The Great Firewall of China, which has been nick-named "Iron Curtain 2.0." It's a system of filters at domain name or page level. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger and other western sites have been blocked at this level. Kuo said that it's fairly simple for Chinese Internet users to "hop the firewall " using proxy services, free VPNs.

So The Great Firewall is more of an inconvenience. Kuo pays for a VPN that allows him to access Western websites.

Self-Discipline

The second form of censorship is "more pernicious and effective," according to Kuo. It is carried out by Internet companies, on instructions from Chinese government. All Internet sites in China have to practise what is termed "self-discipline."

Failing to adhere to this form of censorship means having your website or service shut down. There are some 30,000 "Internet police." Two cartoon avatars are wont to show up on webpages if a Chinese users visit pages with content offensive to Chinese government.

Most Internet users in China don't come across the Great Firewall, because most Chinese Internet users don't use Western services like Twitter and Facebook. But, Kuo said, "Google is different." It has become "a real part of the Internet culture in China."

Kuo then talked about how Chinese censorship nowadays is almost all social media, such as social networks and microblogging sites.

How Chinese Netizens Use The Internet

Kuo mentioned that the Chinese Internet is more "entertainment superhighway" than "information superhighway." Online gaming is big in China. Most Chinese Internet users, Kuo said, enjoy the Internet that they have - rather than worry about the one that Western pundits think they should have.

The Internet has also emerged as a de-facto public sphere in China. As long as you don't overstep certain boundaries (political activism and so forth), then the "will of the masses" is often expressed on the Internet through the likes of bulletin boards or social networks.

Regularly, Chinese netizens are exposing public officials. However Kuo warns that there are "very very serious limits" to what is emerging in the public sphere. For example, anonymity leads to a lot of trolling. It's ad-hoc, reactive and informal - however it is a "squeaky wheel that is regularly getting grease." Also, a minority are pro-democracy - most of the netizens in the public sphere are pro-Chinese government.

Next Moves from Beijing and Google

Kuo said that the Chinese government will wait for Google to make the next move. It realises it has nothing to gain by pushing Google or being openly hostile. The ball is in Google's court and it will probably keep to its word that it will stop censorship in China. It may still shut down operations in China, which in practice means closing google.cn. But this has a lot of problematic scenarios - including the difficulty of having translations done for Google.com and staffing issues of closing down.

The pros of pulling out of China include saving face and appeasing western users. But the cons are significant. They include a backlash from tech-savvy, urban Google users, a setback to scientific research, a global black eye for their image, and ceding the virtual monopoly in search in China.

The moderate scenario is that Google.cn is shut down, but continues to work with its mobile partners in China, R&D and sales continue to operate in China, and Google services will be unblocked.

The best case scenario, Kuo believes, would be google.cn stop censoring but still stays.

Reporters Without Borders released its annual report [PDF] on online access today. They call it Enemies of the Internet, and it shows a world where online censorship, intimidation and worse is increasing.

It's not surprising that as access to the Internet expands, more and more dictators and tyrants will try to suppress it. But what's troubling about this year's report is the inclusion of two democratic countries: Australia and South Korea.

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Both countries were included in the report's Under Surveillance list - a sub group of the main Enemies list.

Australia's proposed online filtering system is something RWB says it has "never before seen in a democracy." Additionally, in the state of South Australia it's now against the law to be anonymous online if it's in the context of an election.

In South Korea, a new censorship law allows for five-year prison sentences for anyone found using the Internet "to disseminate false news intended to damage the public interest." The same law requires online visitors to register their real name and national ID card number when visiting sites with more than 100,000 members.

Here are a handful of the worst violators of online freedom of expression on the Enemies of the Internet list:

Burma

Two high-ranking government officials have been sentenced to death for having e-mailed documents abroad. Net censorship is a serious matter in Burma. Massive filtering of websites and extensive slowdowns during times of unrest are daily occurrences for the country's Internet users. The legislation governing Internet use - the Electronic Act - is one of the most liberticidal laws in the world.

China

As its polemic with Google and the United States on the Internet's future unfolds, China continues to intensify Web censorship, faced with an increasingly forceful online community.The much-vaunted promises made by organizers at the open ceremonies of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games have proven to be mere illusions for the world's biggest netizen prison. Expanded dissemination of propaganda, generalized surveillance and crackdowns on Charter 08 signatories are commonplace on what has become the Chinese Intranet - with significant consequences for trade.

Egypt

More than a mere virtual communications tool, the Egyptian Internet has become a mobilization and dissension platform. Although website blocking remains limited, authorities are striving to regain control over bloggers who are more and more organized, despite all the harassment and arrests.

Iran

Iran, one of cyber-censorship's record-holding countries, has stepped up its crackdown and online surveillance since the protests over the disputed presidential reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12, 2009. The regime is demonizing the new media, which it is accusing of serving foreign interest.While a dozen netizens are serving out their terms in Evin Prison, bold Internet users are continuing to mobilize.

Saudi Arabia

An emerging bloggers' community is up against harsh censorship. These bloggers are confronting the traditional forces of Saudi society, which are attempting to prevent the Internet from becoming a forum for free discussions. Saudi Arabia is one of the first countries to have been authorized to write Internet domain names in Arabic.The Internet penetration rate, currently estimated at about 38% of the population, is rising. How- ever, it is still one of the most repressive countries with regard to the Internet.

Syria is reinforcing its censorship of troublesome topics on the Web and tracking netizens who dare to express themselves freely on it. As a result, social networks have been particularly targeted by omnipresent surveillance. The promised technological improvements are slow to materialize. The authorities' distrust of the potential for dissident online mobilization may be playing a role in this delay.

The progress made by Vietnam in the domain of human rights, which allowed the country to become a member of the World Trade Organization in 2007, is nothing but a distant memory. As the 2011 Communist Party Congress draws nearer, the regime is muffling dissident views on the Internet, and its first target is critics of the country's policy toward China.

For obvious reasons, we care about what goes on in various parts of the world, particularly New Zealand and other areas that are underserved in terms of Internet access.

So, we were quite excited to learn this evening of a new proposal that would give New Zealanders - including a couple RWW staff members - a better broadband experience. According to NZ website Stuff, a haldful of well-known innovators and entrepreneurs are teaming up on a $900 million dollar project that would give Kiwis (and their Ozzie neighbors) "virtually unlimited" broadband access via an international cable that would run across the Pacific Ocean. Just how much of a difference would this cable make compared to current Internet access?

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The difference would be significant, as Stuff's graphic shows:

The plan is to construct a 5.12 Terabits per second-capacity fiber cable to connect Australia and New Zealandto the U.S. - a cable that would deliver data at five times the speed of the current network.

This proposal puts Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall, TradeMe creator Sam Morgan, entrepreneur Rod Drury, and techies Mark Rushworth, John Humphrey and Lance Wiggs in competition head-to-head with Southern Cross Cable, a large network partially owned by Telecom New Zealand. The team, called Pacific Fibre, hopes to complete the project by 2013.

Of course, the next step is figuring out the exact cost of the proposed cable - the group thinks $900M might be a highball figure - and find investors. However, as Tindall eloquently noted, you have to spend money to make money - something anyone with an interest in NZ's economic future and global competitiveness must consider.

"The New Zealand Institute identified billions of dollars in economic potential by unleashing the Internet," he said, "and it is beyond time to address the issue. This is necessary and basic infrastructure - we must decrease the distance between New Zealand and the international markets.

"Doing so will be incredibly valuable for New Zealand and Australian businesses and consumers. If we are able to deliver on this cable this it could be as valuable to our NZ economy as the quantum leap refrigerated ships were to our export trade many years ago."

How feasible do you think this project will be? Is 2013 a realistic time table? And where do you think Pacific Fibre's investors will be found? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

The Getty Conservation Institute has introduced the Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities - Jordan, a GIS-powered, map-focused site to "inventory, monitor, and manage Jordan's vast number of archaeological sites."

Working for four years, at the cost of $1 million, the Getty, with the cooperation of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities and the World Monuments Fund, has created a system for matching geographic information and historical research in a land whose history is vast and varied.

Sponsor

The project is two-fold. First, it will enable scholarly access to, ideally, every archaeological site in Jordan. Second, it will aid in the protection of ancient sites. Looting in nearby Iraq, and globally in general, is on the rise again.

MEGA lists over 10,000 sites of archaeological and historic importance, from the neolithic to Ottoman times. Information the integrity of these sites was formally listed only in a local Jordanian database, with no connection to the Internet.

The site was built with a number of realities in mind. It should be map-based, use free or low-cost software, be bi-lingual in Arabic and English, be easy-to-learn and customizable and allow the export of data that is fully compatible with other GIS tools such as Google Earth, Quantum GIS, and ESRI's ArcView..

The project's website will open next month to a group of authorized users. The intent is to open it to a wider and wider group as time goes on, as well as to spread the experience with the system to others who might be interested in implementing it in their country or area. Iraq, which was originally the target of an earlier version of the project but was given up in favor of Jordan due to instability, has indicated a desire to revisit the possibility of implementing the system in that country, according to Qais Hussein Rashid, Iraq's Director of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.

Blogging, Tweeting and Facebook have changed the world by making it easier than ever for everyday people to publish and distribute their thoughts and media to the world. The resulting tidal wave of data now offers opportunities for innovative entrepreneurs to build entire new products, services and companies based on processing that data and offering recommendations, analytics and other information products to consumers.

Social data is set to be surpassed in the data economy, though, by data published by physical, real-world objects like sensors, smart grids and connected devices. The United States may have dominated the first basic and the second social stage of the Web, but the Chinese government is moving quickly to make China the world leader in this next stage, the Internet of Things. A major new public/private partnership in Chongqing aimed explicitely at the Internet of Things is just the latest signal.

Sponsor

The Plan

The Chinese municipality of Chongqing and telco giant China Unicom have announced a multi-billion dollar partnership of investment and tax breaks aimed to create as much as $7 billion in annual revenues within five years from what's called the Internet of Things.

According to a report in Near Field Communications World, "Under the terms of the agreement, China Unicom and the municipal government will also jointly establish an NFC [Near Field Communications] Industry Alliance while China Unicom will establish a research facility specialising in the Internet of Things..."

We reported last month that the national government of China is also developing a national Internet of Things plan. China could take the lead, and Chongqing could try to become the next Silicon Valley.

A world-leading Internet of Things infrastructure and economy would give China a big advantage in efficiency throughout any industries that become instrumented with sensors and a platform for significant innovation.

In June, the parliament of the European Union officially endorsed development of an Internet of Things as well. The United States has no official state plan for the Internet of Things, but earlier this week objects surpassed new human subscribers to wireless data plans for the first time in US history.

Photo credit.

The social web is increasingly multi-lingual. About half the updates on Twitter are in a language other than English, according to a study released in February. Facebook has been translated into more than 50 languages for its 500 million users are all over the world. The day when English is no longer the dominant language on social networks may not be far off.

Social Translate is a new open source extension for Google's Chrome browser that translates updates on social networking sites into your native language using Google Translate.

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You can choose between "reliable," which appears to attempt fewer translations, or "aggressive," which is less accurate but attempts to guess at more words.

Of course, Google Translate's ability is limited, and it seems to extract less meaning when the sentences are short.

A tweet from one of the top users in Beijing translated from Chinese to English using Social Translate.

Social Translate is a useful and relevant idea for a web that is increasingly composed of conversations. The extension has some shortcomings and a few bugs, judging by a quick test and its page on Google Code.

It detects languages correctly on Twitter and translates acceptably (except for the fact that Google Translate often turns up total nonsense), letting users skip the Google Translate prompt that appears when you navigate to a site in a foreign language. If your first language is English but you're also fluent in Spanish, you can tell Social Translate to display Spanish tweets but translate any other language to English.

On Facebook, the extension is measurably less useful. It only translates status updates as they appear in your News Feed - not in comments on updates, in profiles or on users' walls.

It appears the two developers, Andrew Swerdlow and Nav Jagpal, are still working out the kinks with this extension. I could not get the extension to work for MySpace or Google Buzz, although the developers intend for it to work for those services.

Facebook hit 500 million users this week, but where do they all live? If Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populous in the world - but it's not a country. Those 500 million people (give or take a few fake profiles, right?) all live in actual countries, where Facebook is used to a greater or lesser degree.

Ross Perez is a Data Analyst at data visualization company Tableau. When the UK Guardian data blog posted numbers of Facebook user numbers country-by-country this week (including from longtime number tracker Nick Burcher) Perez thought those numbers would look good in a Tableau visualization. And indeed they do.

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Perez, who is part of the marketing team at Tableau, said it took him about an hour to put this visualization together. Tableau aims to be to data visualization what Blogger was to blogging or YouTube to video publishing.

RSS readers can click here to see the interactive maps.

I think it's fascinating to think about the relative sizes and market penetrations of various countries. In case you were wondering, the countries with the highest percentage of people using Facebook are Hong Kong, Canada, the UK and then the United States. Who's most into Facebook in South America? Chileans, at 41%.

Not all countries are included. China, for example, doesn't appear on the map. The giant social network hasn't gained a whole lot of traction there, due to language, culture, marketing effort, local competition and probably most of all - government suppression of access to the site. (See this discussion on Quora for more perspective.)

For those countries where numbers are available, though. This is a pretty cool way to look at the data. Poke it a few times, it really is interactive.

Starting today, countries can use Internet country code top-level domains that are independent of the Latin alphabet, according to Internet regulating body ICANN.

As it currently stands, a site in Saudi Arabia must use ".sa" as its root. Now it can use the Arabic equivalent and leave off translating. Egypt, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are the first to take advantage of this.

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The first site to use a completely non-Latin URL is Egypt's Ministry of Communication.

Now, however, 21 countries have made the request that the Internet recognize their names in 11 different languages, according to an ICANN announcement.

The process to get native-language functionality, called "Fast Track" has three steps.

1. Preparation (by the requester in the country / territory). Community consensus is built for which IDN ccTLD to apply for, how it is run, and which organization will be running it, along with preparing and gathering all the required supporting documentation.
2. String Evaluation: incoming requests to ICANN in accordance with the criteria described above: the technical and linguistic requirements for the IDN ccTLD string(s). Applications are received through an online system available together with additional material supporting the process at: http://www.icann.org/en/topics/idn/fast-track/
3. String Delegation: requests successfully meeting string evaluation criteria are eligible to apply for delegation following the same ICANN IANA process as is used for ASCII based ccTLDs. String delegation requests are submitted to IANA root zone management.

Eventually I'll test my thesis that says, "The bigger the product launch, the more social media users get banged in the tanty." (Pardon my French.) In the meantime, let's see how much ill was done by whom to people like you.

Facebook account removals criticized. Jillian York wrote an extensive examination of Facebook users around the world who have had their accounts closed out. "Facebook has not spoken publicly about how this process works, but my suspicion is that when a number of users report the same user, their profile is automatically disabled." If this is true, it's disturbing. Because it's mob rule.

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Britain's Labour Party removes candidate for Twitter account. Gordon Brown, UK prime minister, and head of the Labour Party, "fired" a Labour candidate. The candidate, Stuart MacLennan, apparently directed profane comments toward ethnic minorities, women and the elderly. His account seems to have been deleted. He seems to be a tool.

Microsoft had a role in media repression that led up to the Kyrgyzstan coup. According to author Jeffrey Carr, writing in Forbes, "Microsoft's Kyrgyzstan agent assisted the Kyrgyz authorities in cracking down on dissenting media five days before last week's uprising." Carr publishes a timeline of online repression prior to the overthrow of Kyrgyz president Bakiev. A Microsoft representative showed up with state authorities to the offices of an internet TV station with the charge that the station used pirated Microsoft products. The authorities shut the station down. This is a strategy that repressive governments use with some regularity.

UK candidate makes "digital pledge." In response to the passing of the Digital Economy Bill in the UK, candidate Tom Watson issued a set of pledges to maintain access to online information and defend user rights.

South Korea institutes gaming curfew. Gizmodo reports South Korea "is disabling internet connections for six hours per night for underage gamers.The ban won't affect most internet uses, just a blacklist of 19 specific games."

Thai government blocks thousands of websites. Building on last week's crackdown, Thailand goes from 36 blocked websites to somewhere between 9,000 10,000. Global Voices says in their headline that they have begun locking up webmasters, but do not elaborate or source the statement.

Top photo by Cdogstar
Bottom photo by Karen Blumberg

A spin-off of Finnish software development company Nodeta, Flowdock aspires to help developers and others sift out actionable bits of knowledge from ongoing conversations and make them retrievable. Their team messenger services allows separation and tagging of conversational elements.

"In Flowdock, the epiphany comes when you tag a chat message for the first time," Nodeta and Flowdock's CTO Otta Hilska wrote us. "You realize how you just took a piece of conversation and turned it into a nugget of knowledge. Somebody talked about a bug, and you turned it into a bug report. Or pasted a snippet of code, and you categorized and organized it. The real validation for the concept comes when you are looking for some other snippet of code, a link to a partner, an eBook or something else and come to think 'I wonder if it's tagged in Flowdock". Sure enough it will be.'"

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Designed for groups, Flowdock attempts to address a new kind of information overload, the one that intensified when social media tools began to be adopted by exponentially more people. The theory is that by tagging bits of the conversation, they are made discreet and retrievable based on folksonomy.

Use examples include agile development and handling to-dos.

Flowdock is out of private data and you the public is invited to try it.

Kaiser Kuo presented today at SXSW about Google in China. He spoke about how the Google situation will impact Chinese Internet users, other companies and the Chinese government.

In the presentation, Kuo (who also spoke to ReadWriteWeb a week ago) clarified how censorship in China works. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the Great Firewall that has the most impact in China - but something China calls "self-discipline." Kuo also discussed what the next moves will be from Google, since he believes that the ball is in Google's court and Beijing won't push the situation.

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History of Google in China

Before getting down to the nitty gritty of the current Google-China standoff, Kaiser Kuo gave some valuable context to Google in China.

In 2005 Google started to hire aggressively in China, he said. Google's decision to enter China with a censored product immediately brought grief to Google, with some pundits describing it as a "black day for Internet freedom." Google defended its actions at that point by saying that not providing search to a fifth of the world's population would be a greater loss than having censored results.

At first Google had a notice on their search results stating that they were censored. Kuo also pointed out that Google only omitted results that users wouldn't have been able to view anyway had they clicked through (because the pages or sites were blocked). At that point, Google didn't host Gmail, personal search history, Blogger or other services that had personal information. Google in China also protected their employees, Kuo noted.

Google never had an easy time of it in China. For example, many Chinese users couldn't spell the word "Google." Regulators made it difficult for them, as did their Chinese competitors. Google did manage to make good revenues and market share, but never "moved the needle" against its Chinese search competitor Baidu. Kuo remarked that Google was not singled out for any special treatment by the Chinese government.

In 2009 Google got into trouble due to pornography, and it went dark for a short time as a result. There has been a massive growth in Internet users in China in the four years since Google entered that market. There were 2-3 million Internet users in China when Google began operations there; now there are 384 million Internet users in China. Google has around 35% market share in China, which has not been matched by any other Western company. Its annual revenues in China is around $300-400 million in revenue, which is nothing to sneeze at.

In mid-December 2009 there was a hacker attack on Google, which in January Google announced on its blog was from China. At that time Google announced it would stop censoring search results on google.cn. Kuo doesn't believe this announcement was a cynical retreat from China due to its being defeated by Chinese competitors, which many pundits suggested at the time.

Kuo said that the challenge to Google's business model is around trust, for personal data in the cloud. So Google's blog post in China was appropriate, Kuo believes.

Some people have suggested that the Chinese government used the strategy known in China as "Using Quiescience to control action." The government has however unblocked Google Docs and Groups, and has not blocked any further Google services since January.

Currently Google is still hiring in China and is in midst of negotiations with the Chinese government. Kuo believes there is deliberate confusion right now."It's impossible to grasp what Google is up against without having a better grasp of how censorship in China works."

The Great Firewall

There are two main types of Internet censorship in China, said Kuo.

The first is The Great Firewall of China, which has been nick-named "Iron Curtain 2.0." It's a system of filters at domain name or page level. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger and other western sites have been blocked at this level. Kuo said that it's fairly simple for Chinese Internet users to "hop the firewall " using proxy services, free VPNs.

So The Great Firewall is more of an inconvenience. Kuo pays for a VPN that allows him to access Western websites.

Self-Discipline

The second form of censorship is "more pernicious and effective," according to Kuo. It is carried out by Internet companies, on instructions from Chinese government. All Internet sites in China have to practise what is termed "self-discipline."

Failing to adhere to this form of censorship means having your website or service shut down. There are some 30,000 "Internet police." Two cartoon avatars are wont to show up on webpages if a Chinese users visit pages with content offensive to Chinese government.

Most Internet users in China don't come across the Great Firewall, because most Chinese Internet users don't use Western services like Twitter and Facebook. But, Kuo said, "Google is different." It has become "a real part of the Internet culture in China."

Kuo then talked about how Chinese censorship nowadays is almost all social media, such as social networks and microblogging sites.

How Chinese Netizens Use The Internet

Kuo mentioned that the Chinese Internet is more "entertainment superhighway" than "information superhighway." Online gaming is big in China. Most Chinese Internet users, Kuo said, enjoy the Internet that they have - rather than worry about the one that Western pundits think they should have.

The Internet has also emerged as a de-facto public sphere in China. As long as you don't overstep certain boundaries (political activism and so forth), then the "will of the masses" is often expressed on the Internet through the likes of bulletin boards or social networks.

Regularly, Chinese netizens are exposing public officials. However Kuo warns that there are "very very serious limits" to what is emerging in the public sphere. For example, anonymity leads to a lot of trolling. It's ad-hoc, reactive and informal - however it is a "squeaky wheel that is regularly getting grease." Also, a minority are pro-democracy - most of the netizens in the public sphere are pro-Chinese government.

Next Moves from Beijing and Google

Kuo said that the Chinese government will wait for Google to make the next move. It realises it has nothing to gain by pushing Google or being openly hostile. The ball is in Google's court and it will probably keep to its word that it will stop censorship in China. It may still shut down operations in China, which in practice means closing google.cn. But this has a lot of problematic scenarios - including the difficulty of having translations done for Google.com and staffing issues of closing down.

The pros of pulling out of China include saving face and appeasing western users. But the cons are significant. They include a backlash from tech-savvy, urban Google users, a setback to scientific research, a global black eye for their image, and ceding the virtual monopoly in search in China.

The moderate scenario is that Google.cn is shut down, but continues to work with its mobile partners in China, R&D and sales continue to operate in China, and Google services will be unblocked.

The best case scenario, Kuo believes, would be google.cn stop censoring but still stays.

Reporters Without Borders released its annual report [PDF] on online access today. They call it Enemies of the Internet, and it shows a world where online censorship, intimidation and worse is increasing.

It's not surprising that as access to the Internet expands, more and more dictators and tyrants will try to suppress it. But what's troubling about this year's report is the inclusion of two democratic countries: Australia and South Korea.

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Both countries were included in the report's Under Surveillance list - a sub group of the main Enemies list.

Australia's proposed online filtering system is something RWB says it has "never before seen in a democracy." Additionally, in the state of South Australia it's now against the law to be anonymous online if it's in the context of an election.

In South Korea, a new censorship law allows for five-year prison sentences for anyone found using the Internet "to disseminate false news intended to damage the public interest." The same law requires online visitors to register their real name and national ID card number when visiting sites with more than 100,000 members.

Here are a handful of the worst violators of online freedom of expression on the Enemies of the Internet list:

Burma

Two high-ranking government officials have been sentenced to death for having e-mailed documents abroad. Net censorship is a serious matter in Burma. Massive filtering of websites and extensive slowdowns during times of unrest are daily occurrences for the country's Internet users. The legislation governing Internet use - the Electronic Act - is one of the most liberticidal laws in the world.

China

As its polemic with Google and the United States on the Internet's future unfolds, China continues to intensify Web censorship, faced with an increasingly forceful online community.The much-vaunted promises made by organizers at the open ceremonies of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games have proven to be mere illusions for the world's biggest netizen prison. Expanded dissemination of propaganda, generalized surveillance and crackdowns on Charter 08 signatories are commonplace on what has become the Chinese Intranet - with significant consequences for trade.

Egypt

More than a mere virtual communications tool, the Egyptian Internet has become a mobilization and dissension platform. Although website blocking remains limited, authorities are striving to regain control over bloggers who are more and more organized, despite all the harassment and arrests.

Iran

Iran, one of cyber-censorship's record-holding countries, has stepped up its crackdown and online surveillance since the protests over the disputed presidential reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12, 2009. The regime is demonizing the new media, which it is accusing of serving foreign interest.While a dozen netizens are serving out their terms in Evin Prison, bold Internet users are continuing to mobilize.

Saudi Arabia

An emerging bloggers' community is up against harsh censorship. These bloggers are confronting the traditional forces of Saudi society, which are attempting to prevent the Internet from becoming a forum for free discussions. Saudi Arabia is one of the first countries to have been authorized to write Internet domain names in Arabic.The Internet penetration rate, currently estimated at about 38% of the population, is rising. How- ever, it is still one of the most repressive countries with regard to the Internet.

Syria is reinforcing its censorship of troublesome topics on the Web and tracking netizens who dare to express themselves freely on it. As a result, social networks have been particularly targeted by omnipresent surveillance. The promised technological improvements are slow to materialize. The authorities' distrust of the potential for dissident online mobilization may be playing a role in this delay.

The progress made by Vietnam in the domain of human rights, which allowed the country to become a member of the World Trade Organization in 2007, is nothing but a distant memory. As the 2011 Communist Party Congress draws nearer, the regime is muffling dissident views on the Internet, and its first target is critics of the country's policy toward China.