If you have been following the Arab uprising with any level of interest,  you cannot have missed the way emerging technologies are choreographing the entire dynamics of the protests.  And it is a level playing field: both law keepers and the protestors have an equal handle. When it wanted to control protestors during the March 26 protests in London, the Met Police (@metpoliceuk)  turned to Twitter: “A containment is now in place in Trafalgar Square. The Met Police ask that you remain calm”

The way the Arab protests ricocheted mainly through tweets, blogs, Facebook and email is now the stuff of legends. Two technological apps, however, stand out. The first is the student-developed smartphone app Sukey   which informs people where the protests are happening and directs them to either join in or move away. The second is the real-time blogging platform, LiveBlogging, where you can share your eyewitness experiences in realtime and receive instant dynamic feedback.  While the latter was, till very recently, mostly used by media organizations, it is now happily populated by union representatives and student bodies who constantly update activities in real-time throughout the day. And in a classic case of mutual reinforcement, it the media organizations that tap into Liveblogging to get the updates in the form of tweets, pictures and text, thus eliminating the need for a journalist to be physically present to record the happenings.

And of these, two apps—Crowdmap: Check-Ins (or simply CI) and Sukey –perhaps presents the most heady combination—student rebellion, technology and a refined mobocracy.

Launched at SxSW 2011, CI operates on a similar principle to Foursquare–location-based  social networking– but  here users can create their own squares or groups that are specific to a certain cause and network.  CIs are particularly handy to protestors who need to quickly navigate and improvise through rapidly changing scenarios on the ground and direct the protestors away from areas of police activity and thuggery. These geo-tagged status updates can also be shared on Facebook or Twitter or even geo-cached, that is embedded geographically. Hence,  anyone who checks into a certain distance of another person whose CI status update is  ‘Thugs here’ or “Don’t go here”, gets pop-ups alerting them to stay away.

The idea behind Sukey—live tactical mapping for protest swarming or Maptivism– is inspired by a much-debated police tactic called kettling  or coralling of protestors.  Sukey operates on a very simple principle: it collects tweets, messages and information from protestors and passes them on to the app users. The app comes with an in-built  GPS-specific compass that lets you know which direction you can then move to or move away from.  A red mark on the compass indicates police activity or a ‘kettle’ while a green mark shows you which direction you can escape if you get  ‘kettled’.  The project, its founders say on their website, Sukey.org,  is meant to help people “stay safe, stay informed and stay mobile…. Basically, we are giving them information  [that could help them] make informed decisions on staying safe if they choose to.”

The founders envision Sukey to be able to follow the best of democratic norms: free, fair and accessible.  The information is made available autonomously and the founders are working to make it ‘decentralised’ in a way that “won’t need people in a room” and can be replicated in countries where protests may be viewed less tolerantly than they are in London. The software will soon be made available to other protest groups in other parts of the world. For more on Sukey,  go here.

Update:(September 30,2011)

More on the same lines from Wall Street, New York. It seems quite in order that the ongoing Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York City should borrow cue from the London protests and use social networking platforms to the fullest possible extent too. The youth-fueled resistance movement against Wall Street greed  is said to be using social media app Vibe to keep the protests going. Called an anonymous, anarchist version of Twitter, Vibe is still in the pre-beta stage at the time of writing this post, but according to reports, seems to have hit the ground running in terms of versatility. Here is a video of the app’s creator, Hazem Sayed, explaining how Vibe works. Watch this space for more on Vibe.

After the New York Times’ online content went under a paywall last week,  it looks like paywall dodgers have not lost time sharpening their knive

Earlier this week,  a Nieman Journalism Lab report spoke about  NYClean,  a bookmark app for web browsers  developed by a Canadian programmer, that tears down the paywall in one click. All it took to break the paywall, according to the report, was ‘four lines of Javacript’.   And all you need is to drag the NYClean bookmarklet  into your toolbar and click it everytime  the NY Times blocks you out of  an article.

While the paywall lets all reader  view upto 20 pieces of online content per month, to go beyond this limit, the reader has to pay  anywhere between $15 to $35 for four weeks: while the NYTimes.com Plus Smartphone App plan charges readers $15 every four weeks  for full access on Apple iPhone, Google’s Android and RIM’s Blackberry, it charges $20 every four weeks for the Plus Tablet App plan for full access to NYTimes.com, the iPad app, the Google Chrome browser app and Times Reader 2.0 for PCs, and $35 every four weeks for unlimited access to all the platforms listed above. None of these, however, includes e-reader editions on the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Kobo Reader or Sony Reader. Also, if you access the content through Google searches, you are limited to only five articles per day.

None of this, however, can plug the biggest breach of the paywall: free-for-all content aggregation on Twitter and Facebook. Any content that is posted through a link on Twitter or Facebook can be viewed independent of the paywall and any number of articles can be linked every day. And this means almost all content posted on nytimes.com

A classic example is @FreeNYTimes, which openly prides itself on being “Not New York Times”.  The ‘Unofficial NY Times API feed’ –as it calls itself–uses automated processes on   NY Times’ own API  to let you access the entire range of content  “because you came from Twitter!”  This has rattled NY Times enough to send them running to Twitter asking the latter to disable the feed, according to a report from Forbes. Also on NY Times’ list of to-take-downs are other paywall-bypassing Twitter feeds.

For the time being, however, the Twitter feeds and the NYClean applet are still on. Looks like Goliath did not use the most persuasive means to make David understand.

While the PCWorld post is, as usual, the best of the reviews, the market itself is the ultimate indicator: IE9 has lost very early ground to Firefox. While IE 9 notched 2.3 million downloads within 24 hours of its launch–no mean figure, for sure–it is nowhere near the 3.5 million downloads that came with the launch of Firefox 3.5.  Add to this the fact that Firefox 3, when it launched in 2008, notched 8 million downloads in a single day, the highest number of downloads for any one software so far.

So, what lessons did Microsoft fail to get?  For one, it never recovered the ground it lost to Google Chrome and for two, the open source movement is still a mighty strong competitor.  Also, if imitation is the best form of flattery, then by including the ‘Do Not Track’ feature that Firefox 4 used, Microsoft was not doing itself any favors on the innovation front. All that was changed was the name: while Mozilla called it the ‘Do Not Track HTTP Header’, IE calls it the ‘Do Not Track User Preference’. The Do Not Track technology allows users to choose not to participate in online tracking done by some websites and advertisers. When you activate the feature, a special request is sent along with the HTTP request, telling the site that the user does not wish to be tracked. Interestingly, when IE 9 had its dry run in February, the DNT preference was nowhere in sight, but is included in the Monday final release.

The final word, however, is yet to be said. As of today, Windows XP users may not be able to use IE 9, which leaves out a very vast majority of IE loyalists. Also, though Google is offering several plug-ins that can go with IE 9,  the later is yet to fix a bug when running the plug-in with certain video card drivers. For now, it looks like IE9 is still a work in progress. Watch this space for more updates.

Happy Five, Twitter!

First off, it will be Twitter’s fifth birthday in just a few days. Those of us twitter addicts who like to think the microblogging site has been around forever may do well to follow co-founder Jack Dorsey (@jack) who will be having a two-week tweetathon about how things started. Today, Twitter released some stats on how the beanstalk grew.  Also, today’s PCMag carries some interesting trivia. Worth spending a few minutes learning about the incredibly modest experiment that turned out to be the game changer that it is today.

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No news is good news

What goes down has to come up….well almost. The Pew Research Center’s much awaited yearly report on the fortunes and falls in the media unveiled today, and has some heartwarming news about how the industry may have started putting its worst years behind.

As you can see, all is not well with the news industry, while other major sectors

have rallied back. The size of the average newsroom has shrunk by 30 percent since 2000, the report says, while online news consumption has increased 17 percent. Correspondingly, while newspaper newsrooms downsized by about 1,000 to 1,500 staffers in 2010 alone, hiring seems to have gone up in new media outlets like Bloomberg, for example, which hired handsomely for a new service that tracks government activities.  While it may not be technically correct to call this ‘the first time in history’, it does seem online news is the new Scarlet Pimpernel.

Watch this space for a fuller briefing on the report.

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Squaring the Circle

Is Google going around in circles, literally? Since Google Buzz does not seem to be creating, well, the buzz that it was expected to create, there has been plenty of talk of Google coming up with yet another social networking platform that will take the war right into the preserve of Facebook and Twitter.  The new platform was to have been called Circles and was to have been  launched today at the South by Southwest interactive  at Austin, Texas. It was left to Google  to set the record straight about Circles being only a bubble.  More so, because when it comes to privacy, most users would want to retain it on Google. When you can have so much personal work stored in your Google Docs folder, why would you want to go social with it? Facebook may be constantly pushing the boundaries of online privacy with sudden changes to user controls, but when it comes to Google, I trust them to tread more softly. That said, it seems only a matter of time before Google makes yet another  sortie into the social networking space, having learnt valuable pointers from the Orkut/Buzz face-flats.

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LinkedIn goes the newsroom way

The coin could fall either way. While mainstream media faltered under the online challenge, social networking biggie LinkedIn has announced that it will be tilting at the windmills of mainstream journalism with the launch of LinkedIn Today,  a business focused news service that aggregates its daily news from the links posted by its members, along with their tweets and Facebook updates. “If you only have five minutes to catch up on news, LinkedIn Today can help you cut through all the clutter, so you can discover the top headlines you need to read to be better informed everyday”, LinkedIn said in its blog Thursday last.  As of now, paid ads are out and free content is in. However, with the demand for crowdsourced news growing and LinkedIn itself announcing it will go public, financial realities may well take precedence over user preferences.

The application is currently available for iPhones and Android smartphones. A clear indication that FB is pushing for more social networking-on-the-go since at least 200 million out its current 500 million plus users access FB through their smartphones. Beluga said more details would be forthcoming. Watch this space for updates.

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More on online privacy. After several (mostly abortive) experiments with changing its privacy policy, Facebook is at it once again. Earlier this week, FB came out with a draft revised privacy policy. “We’re working on communicating about privacy in a simpler, more interactive way. Let us know what you think …..This isn’t our official privacy policy”, FB said in a blog post. Included in the draft are simpler privacy settings and publisher privacy controls that let users select their audience each time they post. Designed for ease of use, a clearer and more illustrative navigation and larger fonts, but comes with enough red flags that are sure to get users alarmed once again. For example, while the existing privacy policy gives more information about what happens when a user deletes or deactivates an account (deleting/deactivating does not mean automatic erasure of your data stored in your friends’ user accounts and these can still be accessed by others), the draft policy is precariously silent on this.

The last attempt at pushing the limits of online privacy happened in May 2010 which fell foul with privacy groups. In December last year, it was the turn of the South Koreans to tell FB that its privacy policy was inadequate when it came to protecting user information. Such dust was kicked up about the issue that later that month, the US Department of Commerce came up with its own online privacy policy that attempted to regulate how online companies could use data supplied by users. One recommendation suggested setting up a privacy policy office within the Department which would then liason with the government and other stakeholders in identifying and eliminating gaps in online privacy protection. Though it was never explicitly stated that the government intervention happened due to the Facebook vs. users stand-off, the former lost no opportunity in striking the right pitch by sending a longish letter that, in essence, neither aye-ed nor nah-ed the government’s suggestions.

Earlier this month, Facebook announced plans to allow third party developers to access users’ personal information, but was still not clear on how it will educate its users on how this will be done. Now, with FB toying around with another privacy policy revamp, it remains to be seen which shape the cloud will take.

Meanwhile here are some interesting predictions for 2011 about how the online advertising pie will be divided. Yahoo, anyone?

Afternote: The Washington Post has reported a net drop of three percent in its income for the last quarter of 2010, as compared to the same period last year. Interestingly, it is only the print edition that is flailing, while two other holdings–washingtonpost.com and Slate–have bettered their bucks. No prices for guessing how this happened.

As you watch, here are a few things you may well pay attention to:

• The proliferation of zombie computers (those sneak-pullers that are used to send out spam bots, wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese had a separate Ministry for just these)
• The very interesting graphic about the growth of social networking sites: the slow, almost salubrious pace throughout the ‘90s, the sudden burst of energy in the early part of ‘00s, uptil 2004 when, almost as if by an invisibible hand, the counter starts to  slow down. Looks like Facebook and Twitter’s monstrous growth has created very high entry barriers for start-ups.

What Twiangulate gives you is a complete mapping of your Twitter reach and lets you decide which way you want to head and all this without even having to register with them or give out your Twitter password. The screen grab above is pretty much indicative of the  kind of goodies that are in store. You are right in thinking it is like playing Scrabble with your Twitter.

Basically, what Twiangulate does is to allow you to make informed choices on who to follow and whether or not want to follow the same people that your friends/networks are following so that you do not miss out on the most interesting conversations. You also get to know which among your followers you share with your friends and, by extension, the spam bots that are the curse of any tweeter.

I am just a few days into twiangulating, so it is too early to forecast results. But my ‘following’ list is already looking better and I get to listen in on quite a few interesting conversations.

Watch this space for more updates.

Image from: www.cs.virginia.edu

If there is one thing that the controversy over Google Buzz has foregrounded, it is the myth that you can have an online life and still hold on to your privacy. Concerns over cyber privacy and how you can retain some degree of control over the information that you put online are  issues that will be increasingly tested as social networking continues its explosive growth in the new decade. The bottom-line is this: you can never ever wipe away your cyber footprint. That compromising photo of yourself that you posted on Facebook and later took off hasn’t gone anywhere: if Facebook had its way, it could very well end up as advertising fodder and to hell with your permission. Good thing is, Facebook is not being allowed to have its way and now, no longer will Google Buzz. That having been said, there is only one way you can make sure your information stays private: keep it private, keep it off the network.

Which is why the ten tips given out by AVG for keeping your information safe makes such good sense.

Here is the condensed version:

• Be very careful when responding to friend requests. Remember you are giving the person access to all your data. Do not write on random strangers’ walls.
• Check your privacy settings: know what you want to go public about and what you want to stay among friends.
• Ask yourself why you are on Facebook. If it is just to keep in touch with friends, keep your friends list to just friends.
• Use different passwords for different accounts.
• When accessing your account from different computers, be careful not to accidentally click on  ‘Remember you?’
• Be status-message savvy. Why tell the world that you will be returning home late tonight?
• Beware of phish-ers. If you get an email asking you to reset your password, always do it directly from the Facebook site, not on the email.
• This, you probably know already: If your site has been hacked, change your password immediately. If you can’t access your account, go to the Help link at the bottom of the Facebook homepage and notify Facebook security.
• If your mobile device has direct access to your Facebook page, either make sure you log off the sites or make sure others don’t access your device.
• If a link looks suspicious, it probably is suspicious. Don’t be click-happy.

And while we are it, compare notes with Julian Smith in the video below to see if your list of pet-FB-peeves matches his:

Questions have often been asked why newspapers,  in a country like India which so obviously has survived the global economic meltdown (whoever put together this phrase is a genius, I can’t think of another temblor that so convincingly captures the insanity of the situation), have to transition online. More so, when the industry itself is doing remarkably well in an era where even the New York Times is going through an upheaval that it may never recover from. And, why online, when broadband penetration in India  is still nowhere near the global benchmark?

The answer is, quite simply: Survival.

The reason for the NYT’s present woes is because it failed to read the market indicators properly and made a delayed entry online, in a country where the readership demographic is averaging forty plus. Conversely, in India, media enterprises that have chosen to ride the tiger have prospered. And those that have learnt from past mistakes have done even better. And for those that have made their enterprise one seamless print-to-portal entity, the auguries have never been so good.

Let us look at a few examples of how the coin is being tossed:

• While Times of India’s web forays such as Indiatimes and 8888 have been floundering against to-the-manner-born sites such as Rediff and Yahoo! India, newer entrants such as CNN-IBN and Mint, that started out with  the screen/print-to-portal seam intact have been able to capitalize their assets better.
• The Indian media space can no more keep out aggressive global players. Like it or hate it, we will have to do business with the likes of Rupert Murdoch. With market aggregators such as the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group announcing plans to double Indian investment, can we really ignore the dynamics of the market and place our bet on just advertising revenues?
• With Dow Jones launching the online Indian edition of the Wall Street Journal and the so-far successful partnership between WSJ and HT Media in creating Mint (and liveMint), global collaborations will make all the difference in the publish-or-perish equation.
• Those media houses like The Hindustan Times and The Hindu that have gone the definitive multimedia way have been able to weather the recession much better.  The Hindu, for example, has constantly experimented with its online avatar and has not shied away from changing course midstream, if and when needed. The newspaper recently pulled out the print version of its niche tabloid, Ergo, while retaining it online.

So, to answer the earlier question: Why go online?  The answer: if you don’t, you may go under. This is, quite literally, where the buck stops.

So, here it goes, my through-the-looking-glass view of  how social media is transforming the patterns of news production. We will be focusing specifically on social media tools for journalists and about integrating Web 2.0 applications in the newsroom.

This will be a free-form, hydra-like blog, constantly evolving and improving upon itself and changing shape with the landscape. I promise not to make it too technical or too serious, though.

As the famous tag line goes, join the conversation and let us keep the dialogues going.

And, lest we forget the year that was , here is Rob Cottingham doodling on where social media stood in 2009: