This has not been an easy year for Madagascar. A power struggle between the president, Marc Ravalomanana and Antananarivo mayor Andry Rajeolina led to the army ousting the president, who resigned on March 17th. Rajeolina has been leading the High Transitional Authority, which has become increasingly autocratic and hostile towards free speech.

It’s hard to characterize the opinion of my Malagasy friends towards the civil strife. I think some were frustrated with Ravaolmanana’s government, which faced accusations of corruption and mismanagement, and hopeful that matters might improve under Rajeolina. But everyone I’ve spoken to has been deeply saddened by the violence that’s accompanied the protests, and increasingly upset about the detention of journalists, the closure of radio and television stations and the harrassment of bloggers. And I think everyone is hoping that the country can find a way to come back together and return to normalcy.

That may help explain why Razily has emerged as a hero for many Malagasy bloggers. On March 28, Razily carried the Malagasy flag into a street that had been closed by the Malagasy army. While the streets were filled with protesters, they remained behind the military cordon – Razily crossed into the space controlled by soldiers carrying the flag and marched solemly down the street. He was promptly seized by soliders in a pickup truck, and carried away from scene along with a companion, who had approached the truck to make sure Razily was unharmed.

Razily has not been released from military custody, and news recently emerged that he would be tried by the military for the crime of “flag theft”. Friends in the Malagasy diaspora are organizing a campaign to petition the transitional government not for his release, but for transparency regarding the charges against him and the trial he faces. The petition also expresses concern at the restrictions on speech and the use of tear gas and live rounds against protesters. The petition invites people to sign by adding a comment, and recognizes that many supporters in Madagascar may be unable to sign with their real names due to very real concerns about their safety.

My friend Lova Rakotomalala explains why Razily is so important to many Malagasy people:

Razily embodied the hope of the silent majority that is neither pro-Rajoelina, nor pro-Ravalomanana, that believe that there is still room for understanding and compromise if we reach out to each other and think of the nation first ( hence the flag). The fact that he marched on undeterred by the bullets around him made a strong impression on many of us. Bloggers have the protection of being behind the computer screen, Razily did not.

One of the reasons the crisis in Madagascar persists is that it’s receiving very little attention from the media, even on the African continent. In the absence of sustained pressure and scrutiny, there’s not much pressure on Rajeolina and Ravalomanana to find a solution that allows Madagascar to go forward. I’m often skeptical of the value of online petitions, but I think that demonstrating that people around the world are paying attention to the situation in Madagascar, and to the rights of a peaceful demonstrator, could have an important impact in this case. I hope you’ll join me in signing the petition and in spreading the word about Razily.

Global Voices has been covering the situation in Madagascar closely.

Wikipedia’s article on the 2009 protests is a good introduction to the situation as well.

Two Facebook groups exist to support Razily:
Save Razily and Libérez Razily et les autres.

A note on the video embedded above: There are at least two videos circulating of Razily’s march with the flag. The one above, from YouTube, has no sound. The one on DailyMotion has the sounds of the people recording the video. I interpret their laughter as a sign of their amazement at the audacity of Razily in walking towards the military with the flag. The fact that they cheer as he resumes his march after pausing suggests to me that they’re supportive of what he’s doing, not laughing at him, as does the fact that they posted the video. But I suspect the laughter could be confusing, and could seem very inappopriate given Razily’s arrest and subsequent disappearance. That’s why I’ve embedded the silent version, but am linking to the version with sound.

I had coffee recently with Gavin McCormick, a bright young economist who worked with me at Geekcorps some years back. He took a position with a think tank out West and was telling me that, after leaving Boston, he was thinking about going back to Namibia for a vacation, where he’d spent a difficult year as a volunteer teacher.

“I thought you’d been miserable in Namibia?”

“Well, I had trouble connecting with some people there, but I don’t always connect with people in Boston either. And I miss getting to play with the kids.”

At some point during Gavin’s time in Namibia, we traded email, and I offered my blanket prescription for making friends in other countries: Your best chances to connect with people in other cultures are around eating, drinking, playing music, dancing, playing football (soccer) and having sex. My guess is that “play with kids” belongs on this list as well.

When you’re looking for common ground for connection with people in other cultures, it often makes sense to look for least common denominators. I don’t think it’s a surprise that most Global Voices gatherings end with multinational, multilingual pub crawls. Or that many cosmopolitans I know follow football so they have something to talk
about with cabbies in Bamako.

So why go back to Namibia, Gavin? “You know, when I dance in Namibia, people laugh – I’m a source of entertainment. The white guy who dances badly. When I dance badly in Boston, I’m just a dork.”

Dhani Jones isn’t a great dancer either, despite being a professional athelete. But he’s enthusiastic and doesn’t mind being laughed at, and that’s another critical ingredient for cultural bridging. And his new TV show, Dhani Tackles the Globe, may be the best example I’ve seen of a xenophile finding common ground around the world by sweating.

In his ordinary life, Jones is a linebacker for the Cincinnati Bengals. He’s a talented first-string player but not a superstar – he’s played for three NFL teams, but hasn’t been voted to the pro bowl. Off the field, he’s a larger than life personality, and a good sport, which leaves him well positioned for his new job – celebrity host for the Travel Channel. His show is based around a simple premise – he travels to a country, spends a week working out with a local sports team and uses that as his path towards understanding a country and a culture.

Only three shows have aired so far, but Travel Channel is sufficiently pleased that they’ve committed to a second season. Based on the two shows I’ve seen, that’s a good call. The sportsmen Jones hangs out with are amateurs, people who’ve got a day job and compete in sports like hurling for fun. It’s fascinating to watch an extremely gifted professional athlete get his ass kicked in unfamiliar sports… and sometimes familiar ones. Who can outrun an NFL linebacker? Well, if the race is 100 meters and on sand, turns out almost any Australian lifeguard can.

The Ireland show in particular was excellent – Jones spends a week training with a hurling team for ten days and ends up playing in (and losing) a match. Teams are deeply local – the players are cheered on by their fathers and grandfathers, who played on the same team years before. Jones is respectful of these traditions, training hard with his team, meeting their families for pub lunches and visiting with hurling greats as he attempts to learn a sport that apparently involves the tricky parts of baseball, field hockey and lacrosse. At the end of a week, it’s clear that he’s not a great player of the game, but that he’s won a great deal of respect from the guys he’s playing with.

I’m excited to see how Jones deals with higher cultural barriers – the season includes trips to Cambodia and Thailand, which probably require a bit more cultural bridging than hanging out with rugby players in England. But I’m impressed, not just with Jones’s obvious love for making friends around the world, but with Travel Channel’s apparent comprehension of cultural bridging.

One of the other shows on Travel Channel I watch religiously is Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, which uses food as a jumping off point for exploring countries from Iceland to Namibia. The show Bourdain and team put together in Ghana is good enough that I keep a copy on my laptop so I can show people some of the details of why the country is so special to me. (I had a dozen or so Ghanaian friends over for dinner a few weeks back, and they demanded to watch the show three times…)

If the obvious ingredients for cultural bridging are common ground (beer, football, dancing), and a sense of humor, there’s another key ingredient in these examples: airplane tickets. It makes sense that Dhani Jones would need to go to Ireland to learn about hurling, or that Gavin would need to fly to Windhoek to embarass himself in front of a bunch of Namibians. Other globalists have taken this idea to absurd ends, like Matt Harding, who’s wandered the globe, dancing badly.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Are plane tickets the first ingredient in these equations? Do they need to be?

I live just north of Pittsfield, MA, a city of fewer than 50,000 people. For years, the city has held an annual Ethnic Fair. Old timers tell me that this used to be an excuse for people to get shockingly drunk on a summer afternoon, lurching from the kegs at the Polish tent to the German tent to the Italian tent. It’s a very different scene these days. There’s beer, and the ethnic groups that dominated the city when it was a milltown are still here, serving sausages. But there’s a Brazilian booth as well. A Colombian, an Ecuadorian and an Indian booth as well. There’s klezmer on stage before the polka band.

My guess is that there’s an opportunity for me to learn something about Brazilian culture beyond enjoying the two Brazilian restaurants that have opened in town. I suspect it involves losing fifty pounds and playing soccer in a local league. Or putting on my best clubbing clothes and hanging out at Latin Night on Saturday at the Ecuadorian restaurant and dance club. I haven’t done either, and I find myself wondering if part of the equation is that I’m more comfortable looking like a dork in Dakar than in Pittsfield.

One of the reasons I stopped working on Geekcorps is that it became clear that using air plane tickets as a tool for cultural bridging is a prohibitively expensive strategy. It seems like the internet should make it easier for us to stumble into these intercultural encounters, or to engineer them.

There’s no doubt that there are internet “spaces” where people from different countries, with different beliefs and practices, find themselves interacting. These spaces generally form around common interests. That might mean Japanese and American kids getting together to talk about Asura Cryin’… or Arabs and Israelis arguing passionately in the comments thread of a Global Voices article about Palestine. Common interests aren’t always common ground.

And even common grounds can be contested spaces. I’ve been interested in online support groups for expectant mothers, because they tend to display an interesting form of arbitrary connection: the women in the forums have a single thing in commmon – the due date for their baby – and often have lots of cultural distance (location, religion, education level, occupation). I initially saw these spaces as an exciting model for mixing around an arbitrary connection… and it’s clear that lots of people end up making important and lasting connections through these groups. But it’s also clear that it’s possible to pick fights about aspects of pregnancy and childrearing that I, as a nonparent, was completely unaware of.

So here’s my pressing question: if the internet gives us new spaces in which to find common ground with very different people, what’s holding us back from becoming vastly more global and cosmopolitan than most of us are? Why, as I’ve argued elsewhere, do we seem to keep sorting ourselves into familiar groups?

I’m starting to think that there’s something very special about the willingness to look like a dork. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Matt Harding dances badly, but enthusiastically, and that this opens doors for him. Or that Dhani Jones finishes last in races, with a smile on his face. And I wonder whether we’d have more luck building bridges in online spaces if it were more socially acceptable to make fools of ourselves, laughing and being laughed at by our new peers.

This past weekend, I wrote a quick tool that estimates the incidence of certain words within the twitter stream using just a single search, not polling for weeks of data as some of my other tools do. This makes it pretty easy to look at a term like “flu” several times a day, discovering that flu-centric tweets have represented between 1.5% and 3% of all tweets for the past couple of days.

Twitter just overhauled its web interface, and added an interesting feature – terms that are trending. This information has been available in third-party tools for some time, but now it’s only one click to see what people are saying about #therescue.

I ran a set of these trending topics through my tool and got a pretty wide attention distribution:
1.918 % Swine Flu
0.241 % #swineflu
0.233 % H1N1
0.297 % Wolverine
0.152 % #therescue
0.097 % Mother’s Day
0.192 % Mexico
0.233 % Chrysler
0.043 % #wordkill
0.060 % Inbetweeners
(Percentage is an estimate of what percent of all recent tweets contained this term. It’s extrapolated by retrieving 100 instances of the term via Twitter’s search and calculating how many tweets transpired between mention 1 and mention 100.)

Makes sense. Showing the ten most popular terms on Twitter would likely be extremely boring – my guess is that “lunch”, “dinner” and “sleep” would dominate. (It’s evening here on the east coast of the US, and “dinner” is currently appearing in roughly 0.6% of tweets.) Much more interesting to show terms or tags that are higher now than they were an hour or a week ago… It’s interesting, though – do we read a list like this as a list of most popular topics, even if we know that there’s two orders of magnitude more interest in Swine Flu than in The Inbetweeners?

And then, of course, there’s the potential for using these terms to gain attention. Like this wonderful tweet from Beau Wade, demonstrating that the author clearly has his/her finger on the pulse of the planet. Or a particular subcommunity of wealthy, wired, worried people on that planet.

• Dan Gillmor says the future of journalism depends on active citizens: 'Weirdly optimistic': News: Feature: Independent Weekly: Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill
  Thoughtful interview of Dan Gillmor – focuses on what journalism looks like in the future, with a close focus on creating a demand for great journalism, not just ensuring a supply. Dan's in search for a better term than media literacy, but lots of the discussion is about creating better readers to create better journalism
  (tags: journalism citizenmedia berkman gillmor ideas)
• Mobiles in Africa – We Need The Eggs at Many Possibilities
  Lovely article by Steve Song – while we all can recognize the importance of mobile phones in Africa, it doesn't mean we should let mobile companies off the hook if they're screwing over their customers. Includes a close reading of the (incredibly profitable) balance sheet of Safaricom
  (tags: africa kenya mobile telephony business economics ict4d safaricom)
• What are we doing here? Africa Charity Documentary – why aid, development and charity need to be improved – HD Trailer
  Trailer for a film that looks at the efficacy of African aid from the outside perspective of four American brothers (okay, three brothers and a cousin) who travel via public transport from Cairo to Cape Town, talking to aid workers and the people the help and asking whether or not relief aid works.
  (tags: africa documentary aid film charity economics development)
• With no $10 laptop in sight, India buys 250,000 OLPCs – Ars Technica
  India apparently changes direction on OLPC and purchases 250,000 devices, a major shot in the arm for the project. Still no sign of that Indian-made $10 PC…
  (tags: india technology olpc education development laptop ict4d)

• Foreign Policy: 68 Million Congolese Can't Be Wrong
  Another response to the FP article on breaking up the Congo:
  "Congo, in short, exists because 68 million Congolese believe they belong to it. And unlike the country's borders, the idea of being Congolese was never imposed. To be Congolese is to share a complex memory of tragic historical events: the collective suffering of Leopold's colonial rule, the deaths of 5 to 8 million who perished in that time, the brutal 32-year kleptocracy of Mobutu Sese Seko, and a fratricidal war triggered by his ouster that at one point drew in the armies of nine bordering countries."
  (tags: africa congo drc nationalism foreignpolicy identity)
• YouTube – Reversible Destiny Lofts
  Video tour of the Gins and Arakawa Reversible Destiny Lofts, via Pink Tentacles
  (tags: architecture video japan death aging ideas arakawa gins)
• Reversible Destiny Lofts at AMNP
  The Arakawa and Gins Reversible Destiny lofts in Japan, including some discussion of the Reversible Destiny philosophy
  (tags: architecture art ideas aging surprise gins arakawa)
• A House Not for Mere Mortals – New York Times
  A house by Japanese/American conceptual architects Arakawa and Gins, as part of their "reversible destiny" project. Living in the house is supposed to revitalize the inhabitant by challenging them at all turns, preventing them from becoming too comfortable.
  (tags: health art psychology nytimes architecture Arakawa Gins reversible destiny ideas)
• Reuters AlertNet – Welcome to a world without foreign correspondents
  An angry and thoughtful plea for the survival of foreign correspondents, based on the miserably bad coverage of Somali pirate attacks in most mainstream media (with a notable tip of the hat to Al Jazeera English).
  (tags: media journalism foreigncorrespondent foreignbureau internet somalia africa news reporting future internationalnews attention disconnect)
• Spamdog Millionaire – The geography of social media spam | StyleFeeder Tech Blog
  Reacting to social media spam on StyleFeeder… wisely by not cutting off India, the country where most of their spam originates. Makes a good case that social media sites are being shortsighted if they simply wall off countries where they don't see themselves doing business.
  (tags: blogs india socialmedia tech spam disconnect stylefeeder)
• Internet Users in Developing Countries Drag on Sites%u2019 Profits – NYTimes.com
  The growth of social software sites in developing nations may be placing a fiscal strain on companies like YouTube or Facebook, as banner ads are hard to sell on these sites. Fair enough, but it seems like a great problem for someone to solve, building syndication networks for the developing world. And the implications for speech of turning off these services in some countries is an ugly and scary one.
  (tags: freespeech innovation web2.0 economics india developingworld socialmedia)

It’s an unseasonably beautiful day here in Western Massachusetts, roughly 30 degrees farenheight higher than it has any right to be, and I was sitting on my front stoop reading when my local census enumerator showed up. We made pleasant small talk about the weather, the remoteness of my house, the challenges of locating houses in our rural area, and then got down to the good stuff – attempting to find my neighbors on her handheld device, so she could ask them their correct mailing addresses.

The device she had strapped to her hand was a Harris HTC, which looks either like the ugliest cellphone you’ve ever seen, or a Palm Pilot designed by the US government. We scrolled through bad, inaccurate maps of the area, which looked like they’d been dumped from an early version of MapQuest, wondering how the ridgeline behind my house had magically been transformed into a navigable road, and talked about the device.

My enumerator was reasonably fond of her HTC – there were serious ergonomic problems, like a power button that tended to get inadvertently pressed when gripping the device, powering it off. And powering on isn’t exactly easy, given a multi-stage security process which requires a fingertip swipe, then a series of three security questions, answered by typing an on-screen keyboard with a stylus. But, all things considered, she was happy for a full-time job, and enjoying the chance to drive around our county on a gorgeous day, attempting to correct government maps and to ensure we all get sent our paper censuses.

I had to find out more about the device in question – how does a company get the contract to build 525,000 handheld computers? And why not just give everyone iPhones or Blackberries instead?

Well, Harris is a huge government and military contractor, which recently announced its intention to swallow Tyco Wireless, another huge government electronics contractor. Given that all their customer testemonials come from military personnel, my guess is that they don’t have much of a consumer products division. Neither do the folks who lost out on the bids, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman.

They’re not making a whole lot of friends with this new device. Last year, the Government Accountability Office added the 2010 Census to a list of high-risk programs. Basically, it sounds like requirements changed several times, and Harris ended up very late to market, with a somewhat buggy device. This freaked people out, and the Census quickly announced that they wouldn’t actually be using the devices – they’d use them just to conduct the first stage of the census, checking addresses, while the actual census (conducted door to door, of people who hadn’t sent in the forms themselves) would take place using clipboards and paper.

In other words, the relatively lame device my friendly enumerator was carrying, which cost $600 million, doesn’t actually work well enough to use for its intended purpose, is still being used in the field, perhaps so that it can be readied for 2020? Anyone believe that we’ll be able to do better than a half-pound, paperback-book sized plastic brick within ten years?

I haven’t traced the story back thoroughly enough to understand why the US government didn’t use an off the shelf device. My guess is that the requirements (encrypted data streams between device and server, biometric security, a variety of paths towards data networks, mostly via cell networks) were tough for commercial handhelds to meet. But it seems like one pathway might have been to remove the most arduous of those requirements – the biometric sensor – and use a platform whose hardware had been extensively field-tested as a mobile phone, and simply debug a secure communications layer and a data collection application.

Then again, that’s probably why I don’t work on government IT projects anymore.

(Notes from a talk by my friend Marc Lynch, in dialog with Mohammed Bazzi from NYU’s journalism school at Open Society Institute, Tuesday night. Not only am I late to posting these notes, I had to duck out early. But I found Marc’s ideas fascinating and provocative, so wanted to post a quick write-up.)

Marc Lynch has a unique perspective on the Arab blogosphere. He’s a leading expert on Arab media, the author of an influential book on Arab satellite television, and will be the director of a new center of Middle East Studies at George Washington University beginning next year. But his understanding of Arab blogs comes from being an “Arab blogger”, a role he describes as “an honorary status”.

Marc’s influential blog, Abu Aardvark, was begun in the fall of 2002 and rapidly found itself incorporated within the Arabic blogosphere, added to aggregators like iToot. This made sense – Marc was linking to a large number of Arabic bloggers and participating in these discussions. And at that moment, the phenomenon of “bridgeblogging” was a dominant force in the conversations. Arab bloggers saw themselves as part of a global conversation, and often wrote in English so they’d be more widely read and understood. While these conversations were interesting, they weren’t especially influential in terms of local politics.

Marc began to take blogs more seriously as a space for political discourse when they became one of the key tools for political activists. The Kefaya movement in Egypt flocked to blogs, building aggregators and using digital media both as a space to plan offline actions and a tool for promoting and amplifying their views. In this second wave, Marc feels the interesting bloggers were activists first, and users of online tools second. “If the internet were cut off, they’d find another way to organize and act.”

The Kefaya activists, a coalition of diverse anti-Mubarak voices in Egypt, including students, leftists and sometimes moderate members of the Muslim Brotherhood, were able to use a wide range of digital tools to exert a disproportionate influence over Egyptian politics. “Kefaya punched way above their weight in 2004 and 2005″ – they organized protests that gained international attention, were covered by Al Jazeera and managed to drive the Egyptian political agenda for a time. The party was over, Marc argues, when candidates supported by Kefaya failed in elections, suggesting that the movement didn’t have widespread political support and was getting disproportionate amounts of attention because they were simply better at using digital media than anyone else in Egyptian politics.

“One intepretation is that Kefaya really was punching above their weight and couldn’t get sustained political change because they weren’t a big enough movement. Another is that they managed to do things they had no earthly reason to be able to do. They were fighting against extremely high odds, no reasonable reason to believe they could have succeeded in changing” one of the world’s most repressive regimes.

Marc sees parallel movements in Bahrain and Kuwait during this same period, where blogospheres became highly politicized. But he’s unconvinced that the internet was the independent variable in these equations. “There were other changes, openings in the political culture” that made the activist use of the internet possible.

A third wave of political blogging, often focused on organizing protests via Facebook, is less impressive and more worrisome to Marc. He notes that recent “Facebook strikes” in Egypt weren’t actually led by Facebook activists – they were conventional labor-led protests, with a small, parallel online effort. Marc’s concern is that the people participating in Facebook protests may not fully undertand the risks they’re taking.

This concern extends to citizen journalists as well. “Some people are getting involved in doing what the local press should do but don’t,” focusing on urban issues, schools and plight of the poor. But Marc worries that they’re “trying to do this in political systems with no legal protections, and no way to avoid consequences – formal journalists have few protections, and independents are even more vulnerable.” As friends have gotten involved with citizen media in countries like Egypt, Marc has gotten increasingly scared for them, and seen several get into serious trouble.

“I’m worried about things that seem like a good game to a 23-year old, who think that their western connections will spare them the vengence of an authoritarian state.” He worries that it may be a bad idea to train citizen journalists when we haven’t taken steps to protect them through making changes in the the legal environment that surrounds them.

This doesn’t mean he believes that all bloggers are ineffective in the Middle East. He’s particularly optimistic about “public sphere bloggers”, a group who’ve written in Arabic, not about politics but about social issues. Their work, he tells us, is about the play of ideas and the shattering of taboos – it was aimed locally, not at a foreign audience, and didn’t attempt to directly engage politics or journalism. “These blogs are ways of engaging in a society that had no place for the authors.” Marc expects to see the impact of these blogs not on media or elections, but on the bloggers themselves – in the long run, this form of expression will change expectations about the societies the bloggers live in. That said, we might not see the impact for ten to fifteen years, and even when we do, their impact will be subtle. “This sort of change is not very sexy – you don’t see it in the streets, you don’t see revolutions or changes in government. We want to see immediate payoff – I don’t think we should. We’re talking about groups of 100-200 young people with very little social and political capital, confronting some of the most authoritarian regimes in the world.”

When we consider the role of new media in the Middle East, Marc argues that politics have to come first. “It’s easy to be overly impressed with impact of media technologies, used for their own sake.” We can lead ourselves astray if we don’t pay attention to underlying political structures, especially in authoritarian regimes like Egypt. The failure of Facebook activism in Egypt shouldn’t have been a surprise – it would have been a surprise if those protests succeeded.

Again, I missed most of the questions put to Marc – friends tell me that over an hour’s worth of discussion followed his talk. But the first couple focused on the role of organizations like OSI, which have been interested in finding ways to support activists in countries like Egypt. Marc recommends that we focus not on training users on particular tools and strategies. Instead, “we should pressure governments to respect basic human rights, freedom of speech, freedom not to be tortured. We should create a framework to enable all sorts of protest.” But we should be wary of starting either from a particular set of individuals we want to support, or from a technical perspective. And most of all, we need to be patient: “Mubarak is never going to get voted out, but we might be able to change the speech environment in the country.”

Two weekends ago, I wrote a couple of scripts designed to let me (and anyone else who was interested) study the emergence of memes on Twitter over the course of days or weeks. I built the tools to study use of the #pman tag during the Chisinau protests in Moldova, but colleagues immediately pointed towards other stories they wanted to track, like the #amazonfail campaign. I’ve got high hopes that we’ll be able to say something coherent about how ideas spread on Twitter at some point in the future.

This weekend, I’ve been innundated with emails from friends warning me about precautions I should be taking to protect myself from swine flu. (There are some pretty good wikis emerging, for those who are interested.) And though I’m not especially planning on going out of my way to avoid human (or porcine, for that matter) contact, it’s been pretty amazing to watch Twitter get flooded with flu posts. I searched for “flu” on Twitter, walked away from my machine to get a beer, and came back to the message “5670 results since you started searching”.

It’ll be worth studying the spread of swine flu on Twitter – Evgeny Morozov is already worried that Twitter is spreading panic and misinformation, and it would be interesting to see if we can find correlations between the actual incidence of the disease, or discover whether media hype has a cycle independent of disease cycles. But who can wait for real data? Isn’t it worth figuring out just precisely how much people are freaking out, right now?

So I wrote a cute little script that quickly calculates what percentage of current Twitter traffic includes a particular keyword or tag. It takes advantage of the fact that Twitter sequentially numbers its posts, and includes this information in search results. This means you can retrieve a page of 100 search results and calculate how many tweets it took to get 100 results. That, in turn, lets you calculate what percentage of tweets, recently, contained the term you’re searching for.

Earlier today, I saw levels as high as 1.5% of all tweets mentioning the word or string “flu”. It’s quieted down by this point in the evening. Here’s a recent comparison of flu terms:
1.003 % flu
0.794 % swine
0.171 % swineflu
0.143 % #swineflu
0.055 % #influenza
0.005 % #flu
0.004 % gripa

(#influenza is in there because it’s been the dominant term in Spanish-language flu posts. gripa is there because my friend David Sasaki wondered why people weren’t tweeting about “gripacochina”.)

Just for comparison’s sake, “redsox” shows up in 0.12% of posts, and we’re in the 9th inning of a very good Red Sox game.

Some interesting data in there – looks like I can safely ignore the #flu tag, in favor of #swineflu. And I’d love to figure out what’s the most common ratio between people referring to a phrase in plain text and to people using it as a hashtag. But it’s hard to generalize anything from single data points – the fun is probably running this tool once an hour or so and watching how it trends over time – perhaps I’ll do that tonight.

I’ve got a cute little Perl script that will take an arbitrary number of terms to search for as command line arguments – if anyone wants to turn this into a CGI program, let me know and I’l send you my code. Too tired to write the CGI tonight…

Yesterday, Yahoo announced that it would be shutting down its free webhosting service, Geocities, later this year. The Geocities website sports a banner announcing that new accounts are no longer available, and urging potential customers to try their paid hosting services instead.

As it happened, I was sipping coffee from my Geocities mug while reading tweets that either mourned the demise of the service or, far more often, expressing amazement that the service still exists. The mug is one of my prized possessions from the dot.com years – it’s a gift from Geocities founder David Bohnett, when my friend and business partner Bo Peabody and I visited their corporate headquarters in Santa Monica. (Bo got a Geocities polo shirt, which he promptly tye-died and wore around Tripod offices to taunt us into working harder. He threatened to smash my mug more than once, but I fended off his assaults.)

Geocities was Tripod’s much larger and more commercially succesful competitor. (In one sense – they sold the company for lots more money than we did. I’m not convinced that they ever got any closer to profitability than we did.) And while I’ve got a certain pride in the fact that Tripod and Angelfire, two free web page companies I’ve helped run, have survived longer than our rival, I wouldn’t be surprised to see those companies – both part of Lycos, a company that’s changed hands more often than a joint at a Phish concert – close doors in the near future.

When Geocities was at the top of the web game, we HATED them at Tripod. We spent years in an escalating arms race, competing for users. Both companies offered tools to “move” homepages from one site to another, screenscraping the data in the hopes of capturing customers… and building increasingly aggressive countermeasures. We believed that their vastly superior traffic statistics came from users hosting pornographic sites on their servers, and ran “black ops” to reveal their secret pornographic business plans. Over a decade later, I feel cameraderie, not rivalry, and I’m sad that they’re gone.

Gregorio Espadas sees the Geocities closure as the definitive sign of the death of Web 1.0, with old-fashioned static websites replaced by the dynamic, interactive sites we all know and love today. I don’t think the dividing line is quite that neat. I’d suggest that sites like Tripod and Geocities were the first Web2.0 sites, years before Tim O’Reilly and others had popularized the term.

Web2.0 isn’t a technical shift but a conceptual one, from professionally-generated to user-generated content. This wasn’t an easy shift, nor was it one that we at Tripod were especially happy about. As late as 1998, half our staff was dedicated to designing and editing smart, funny, edgy web articles by brilliant writers like Emma Jane Taylor and Josh Glenn, who’ve gone on to real-world literary success. Unfortunately, their best contributions often generated less traffic than a user’s page of cute cat photographs, and after 18 months of heated argument about the future of Tripod, we ended up ditching most of our professional content and focusing on getting as much revenue as possible from the cute cat content our users were providing, gratis.

We never figured it out. When I left Tripod/Angelfire/Lycos (Lycos bought Tripod, and with Lycos’s money, we bought Angelfire) in 1999, our R&D department was focused on text classification tools, which we hoped would let us identify all car-focused webpages and sell adspace to Ford or Toyota. At the same time, Google began pushing a new model of advertising, one where you paid not for impressions of an ad, but actual clicks on the ad. Google’s model has helped turn them into the juggernaut that they are today, while it gets tougher each day to run businesses supported by banner ads.

There’s two interesting questions that arise for me from the death of Geocities. One is whether ad supported, user-generated content models will ever be viable. Farjad Manjoo had an interesting piece on Slate recently, arguing that Google may be forced to rein in YouTube because it’s been difficult to sell ad inventory on videos of cats flushing toilets. (My example, but his general point.) Manjoo points to a Fortune article by Taylor Buley about Facebook, which reveals that ad inventory on the network is extremely cheap, even despite the network’s access to lots of demographic targetting information. (Ad inventory, targeted specifically to college students, appears to sell for $0.50 on a cost per click basis. That’s a very low rate, compared to ad rates on high-quality professional content on blogs or mainstream media sites.) We couldn’t make targeted advertising work with text analysis on Tripod, and Buley speculates that Facebook won’t be able to do it with careful demographic targetting on Facebook. My guess is that models that offer free services and upsell premium memberships, like Flickr, are a lot more viable in the long term than hosting companies that focus purely on ad inventory.

The other question has to do with the valuation of web companies. It’s easy to laugh at the money companies like Yahoo paid for Geocities – over $3.5 billion in early 1999 – but somewhat harder to know how to value other popular web properties today. What’s Facebook worth? It just turned down funding at a valuation of $4 billion, and various methods for calculating valuation turn in prices from $2 billion to much higher.

We sure as hell thought $3.5 billion was a crazy price to pay for Geocities in 1999. We’d sold Tripod a year earlier for less than $100 million, and we’d used Lycos stock to purchase Angelfire for a small fraction of what we had cost. But these numbers are all pretty meaningless when you’re playing with equity – if your stock is overinflated (as Yahoo’s certainly was in 1999), it’s cheap currency for these transactions. And the late stages of the first dotcom boom became an odd race to acquire as much traffic as possible, whether or not that traffic could be turned into ad sales. In late 1998, Tripod was #8 in the world in terms of traffic, and I believe Geocities was in the top 5 – it was an irresistable target for Yahoo, which desperately wanted to retain its position as the top of the web traffic heap to help prop up its stock price.

So what’s Twitter worth? Whatever it’s worth to an acquirer to position themselves at the top of the social media heap, whether or not the site ever makes a dime.

Later today, I’ll pour a beer into my Geocities mug and toast their demise. It’s my demise, too, and the sort of creative destruction and rebirth that’s made the Internet such a fascinating place for the last fifteen years or so.

I’m once again locked onto the #Madagascar tag on Twitter, trying to get a sense for what’s going on in the wake of the March transfer of power/revolution/coup. Unfortunately, that tag has been very busy today, as protests erupt into violence and Malagasy citizens find themselves reporting on gunfire in the streets of the capital, Antananarivo.

For those not up to date… for most of this year, Malagasy President Marc Ravalomanana has been under intense pressure from an opposition group led by Antananarivo mayor Andry Rajoelina – that pressure stems in part from accusations of corruption and mismanagement by Ravalomanana. In February, Rajoelina declared himself the new President, but wasn’t able to take power. By mid-March, Ravalomanana had lost support of the army (in part because the army didn’t want to shoot protesters, as they did on the tragic Red Saturday) and was forced to step down, and into exile. Rajoelina can’t actually serve as President due to his youth, but has appointed Monja Roindefo and promised elections within two years. Because the government was installed by the army, most nations aren’t recognizing the change in power, and are terming it a coup. (Wikipedia’s article on the crisis is quite good. An earlier summary from this blog might be helpful as well, particularly for understanding underlying factors.)

Today’s violence is connected to demonstrations in support of the ousted president. The military, now in control of Rajoelina and his allies, has been asked to dispel protesters, who have been building barricades and looting shops and buildings. There are no reports yet listing casualty figures, but multiple reports of gunfire suggest that conflicts have been violent at times.

It’s been disappointing to watch Rajoelina, who criticized Ravalomanana’s control of media, ban public demonstrations and crack down on the media. Reporters Sans Frontiers issued a strongly worded statement today (fr) condemning pressure from the new government on media agencies, designed to keep them from reporting on the protests. The nature of that pressure is uncertain, RSF admits – some journalists say they haven’t been prevented from doing their jobs, while others claim they’ve been intimidated and warned off of certain stories. But other actions, like the shutdown of Mada TV – closely associated with Ravalomanana’s supporters – are less ambiguous. The Malagasy media environment is far from open, which makes it hard to track events on the ground, whether you’re inside or outside Madagascar.

I celebrated the use of Twitter by Malagasy friends to report events on the ground in a blogpost a few weeks back, and got gentle but firm pushback from Paul Currion at humanitarian.info, who noted that most of these posts were Twitter users reposting reporting they’d heard on radio or television. Twitter wasn’t responsible for the reporting, he argued, but was being used as a new channel to disseminate journalism. I suggested that, given the confusion around which faction controlled which radio and television stations during the crisis, reporting on which radio station was saying what might well have constituted a form of journalism. It’s an interesting conversation, and not one that’s easy to settle.

But the situation on the ground is different now than it was two months back. Malagasy bloggers, photographers and twitterers are reporting on gunfire in their neighborhoods, and taking photos of armed military personnel confronting demonstrators. These reports by themselves are pretty disjointed and confusing, but the synthesis being offered by Malagasy bloggers and on the Global Voices site are an important journalistic complement to the reporting being offered by wire services like AP and AFP.

The argument about whether citizen media is or isn’t journalism in this context is much less important than the larger question of how bloggers and journalists could help focus more attention on the conflict in Madagascar. As CARE International points out, Madagascar is simultaneously facing a drought, cyclones and political instability. The country is one of the poorest in the world, and is in need of food aid, a need that’s likely to become more acute as the political situation continues to be unstable.

There’s lots of reasons why media attention is important to a country – trade, investment and international support at moments of crisis. Disasters that get a great deal of attention, like the Boxing Day Tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, make it possible for organizations like the Red Cross to raise sufficient money to support those affected. Quiet disasters don’t. And Madagascar’s ongoing instability continues to be too quiet, at least in terms of attracting international attention and aid.