Digest #23
This time the digest is rather dense and lengthily. You will find links to writings about the recent Googlle-China clash, some responses to the launch of the iPad, some stats about broadband and young people online, discussions about ICT4D, information about some interesting initiatives, and more…
Enjoy!
Google’s confrontation with the Chinese government, Hillary Clinton’s speech that followed, and the somewhat anticipated reaction have been all over my RSS feeds, Twitter, and what-not. Here are some of what I think the more interesting reactions, particularly to the later, diplomatic developments. Evgeny Morozov of Foreign Policy was one of the first to post his rather critical comments and he has a few points. Milton Mueller, over at the IGP blog, suggests that Clinton’s speech will backfire (or already is backfiring) in the way the Chinese government will act in the Internet Governance arena; he thinks the speech was an important event, but not in the mainstream view of it as a US stand for internet freedoms. Finally, Aleks Krotoski, who is working on a BBC documentary about the history of the web, tries to draw a complex picture of opportunities as well as dangers that Internet brings with it; all this triggered by this recent clash.
Another topic that has been recently in the news is the new gadget from Apple – the iPad. Leaving aside the humorous aspects of its design and name, there are some interesting discussions starting to emerge about the meaning of the direction Apple is taking to the future of our mediated experiences and perhaps the technology-based society. Jonathan Zittrain published an opinion article in FT warning against Apple’s move towards a more closed and controlled platform. He sounds both concerned and disappointed with this move from the open to the closed. The comments on that article seem to disagree with Zittrain, but no so Rory Cellan-Jones who blogs for BBC. Interestingly, the comments on the British website were not as defensive of Apple. In another post, from David Parry of U. of Texas, is trying actively to discourage people from buying iPad because he argues it is a bad educational tool. Finally, you may also want to watch a documentary about Apple fan-base I have posted a link to below – I found it to be really interesting.
Interesting reports, numbers, and visualizations
“floatingsheep.org” – A blog of a research project that maps out and analyzes user generated information about places; pretty neat. Here is an example of their “Great American ‘Pizza’ Map“.
“2009 Year in Review: Filtering, Surveillance, Information Warfare” – The OpenNet Initiative at Berkman Center put up a neat tool that allows you to browse through various instances of filtering, etc. that occurred in 2009.
“Review of 2009: Telecoms During Global Recession” (PDF; via InformationPolicy) – A review of the last year in telecom industry issued by TeleGeography. They show that while the subscriber base continued to grow almost as during the pre-recession times, the revenue growth has slowed down. The most interesting observation though is that the developed regions of the world were more affected by the recession compared to the less developed ones.
“More Data To Fuel Metered Pricing” (via @Norm_Lewis) – A summary of a report with some interesting numbers about wirless browsing bandwidth usage (for example, YouTube accounts for 10% of worldwide bandwidth use) which leads the authors to a conclusion that metered pricing is the future for mobile data; I am not a prophet by any stretch of imagination, but I think this signals a tendency towards more expensive mobile internet.
“P2P and Broadband Adoption” – A blogpost about an SSRC study that shows that P2P, and by proxy copyright infringement, is the main driver behind broadband adoption worldwide.
“Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds” (via holesinthenet) – An interesting survey about media consumption of the US youth (not just the internet); because of multitasking, they actually pack in more media than the nominal number of hours. And another related report from PEW – “Social Media and Young Adults” – mobile is taking over blogging.
“How different age groups are using the internet” (via @Viil) – Somewhat convoluted graphic representation of the subject over time.
“The Future of ICT for Development” – The Global Voices host a collection of blogposts about the online discourse about ICT4D; quite interesting to browse through them. This is part of a project Berkman Center runs together with Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC). At the same time, University of Manchester’s Centre for Development Informatics has posted some stats about ICT4D scholarship on their blog – “ICT-for-Development Research: Size and Growth“. Finally, and this may not belong to this section of the digest, Michael Best asks: “Do we have an ICT4D field? And do we want one?“
“The top 10 cleantech countries of 2009” (via @gbarzil) – Shawn Lesser of Sustainable World Capital posts brief profiles of a dozen of countries and what they do in terms of green policy and entrepreneurship.
And of course, some regional stats:
Interesting thoughts, ideas, opinions, and discussions
“Obama’s mixed record on tech policy” – An article, written by William Reynolds from Duke Law School; it goes over some recent steps taken by the Obama administration, but mostly in the realm of copyright.
“Internet Self-Regulation and Fundamental Rights” (via @infopolicy) – An SSRN article discussion the use of ISPs as intermediaries in internet regulation.
“Clay Shirky, info overload, and when filters increase the size of what’s filtered” – David Weinberger from the Berkman Center shares some thoughts about information overload and the changing meaning of filters in this reality.
“Using Mechanical Turk to Crowdsource Humanitarian Response” – Some thoughts and observations from Patrcik Meier who is working on his PhD at Tufts on related subject; I would also recommend to take a good look at his website as he has some really interesting thoughts and observations there.
“World Computer Exchange” – An interesting initiative that refurbishes computers from the ‘developed’ countries for continuous use in ‘developing’ countries; of course there has been criticism about the global dump for electronics from the global north, i think this project shows how it can be done well.
“UN telecom agency makes plans for Haiti’s present and future” (via @UN) – A plug about ITUs efforts in Haiti; as the amount of news from that region is going down, I think it is actually really interesting to see what grand problems remain to be resolved and what is done about that; there is also a bunch of numbers about the telecom sector in Haiti.
“Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) and the Office” (via Information Policy) – Yes, there is a new European regulatory body on the block.
“UN chief calls for treaty to prevent cyber war” (via @ITU_News) – A scary article both in terms to the problems it raises and the solutions it proposes.
“Mobenzi” – This is a South African company that basically allows crowdsourcing using mobiles; companies can submit any data-related tasks that require human intelligence and people perform them in a distributed fashion, while making some money; interesting idea.
“Replacing your TV antenna with an Internet connection by using Boxee or Hulu” – We gave up TV and have been watching TV shows on computers for a while now; this is something that can make us reconsider getting a TV set I think.
“Facebook Largest News Reader?” – HitWise suggests that Facebook is becoming the largest RSS reader on the web.
“Data.gov.uk versus Data.gov – Which wins?” – FollowingData analyzes the two websites and declares the UK site as a winner.
Simply Interesting, Fun, and Coll Stuff
“Project H Design” – Sean pointed out this really interesting initiative that designs solutions to ease people’s lives in the challenging regions of the world.
“Real Lives” – A potentially interesting game that allow the participant to simulate life in anyone of the 192 countries based various statistical data about those countries; I have not tried it, but it sounds intriguing and the the demo downloadable from their website allows you to try tree different lives.
“Maga No Need Pay” – My friend ‘Gbenga, who is very much involved in the Nigerian internet-related matters, posted this video, which is a rather innovative way of raising awareness of anti-cyber-crime efforts in his home country.
“MacHeads” – Ever since moving to US I am surrounded by people using Macs and it is quite phenomenal; this is a full length (about an hour) documentary, trying to unpack the phenomenon of Mac users (or more precisely fans) and how it has been changing over the years. I found it very interesting.
And for those of you who have ever doubted that engineering is cool, here is a reminder from the IBM folks (via Sadat):
Everything Hillary has been saying lately has been backfiring so we should expect that for Google, China issue.
In the start when iPod was launched, it was overly criticized but almost everybody ended up buying it. I think, the same thing will happen with iPad (even though Hitler dislikes it :-): http://www.geekword.net/hitler-dislikes-apple-ipad/ ). What do you say?
Thanks a lot for sharing the floating sheep and Project H Design. I am collecting data for analysis on social networking sites and the users keywords stats and also how developing countries use these stats for their policy making etc. so these two will come in handy. Here’s another interesting site for you and your readers: http://fanpageanalytics.com/countryprofiles.html
It tells about fan page analytics of facebooks and keywords that are popular with users. It tell some real ironic and surprising stats about countries.
Yes, David Pogue, who reviews gadgets for NY Times made a point about the cycles of bashing Apple products before trying them and adoring them after having an experience. Maybe he is right and it is too soon to tell, but I do find the closeness control-freakishness of the new Aplle products worrisome.
And thanks for the link! Nice visualization, though it is not surprising that the US is the number one location of friends for any other country; after all this is where FB started. One thing that is not clear is if the people in the database gave their consent to be included. There is a debate currently going on at the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list about the ethical aspect of this kind of inquiries when people don’t even know that they are being studied.
But what you are doing sounds interesting, particularly the policymaking implications. Would love to hear more…
As far as I know, the website is using public facebook profiles (written in the About page of the site). I think it is listed in Facebook terms and conditions that if people keep their profiles public, they will be indexed and might be part of certain surveys and statistics taken by third parties, atleast the old facebook policy said so (not sure about the new one).
Right now, I am only staying in South Asia focusing on Pakistan and India users of telecom and social networking sites. Once, I gather all the stats and shape the idea, I’ll blog about it.
I think formally you are right and this may be in the Facebook’s terms of service. However, I think substantively the argument is more complex. The company and the users are not equal players and the former has greater responsibility in protecting the later. I think people on the mailing list made those arguments much better. You can take a look at the archive, just search there for “facebook.”
And as to your study, whenever you are ready. I am curious about the policymaking angle.
Here is another blog post, going deeper in this topic. I am not sure I am in a complete agreement with the author, but i think it provides a good example of the additional thought going into ethical considerations of online research.
I completely agree with you on the taking permission from the people before using their data for analysis even if the profiles are public. How to stop the third parties? Suing them isn’t really working. So, facebook or any other social networking site is putting such words into their privacy policies to avoid going through the trouble of suing such companies.
I, myself, hate the fact that I cannot hide my display picture from appearing into searches just because according to latest facebook policy I can’t hide it. I know this is a real small issue but the display pictures are stolen by torrents sites and other “not so good” sites and we all know how such sites are like.
So, the big question is what to do about public profile data/copyrights material being stolen?
I am going to write you an email detailing the project I am working on and especially the policy making angle. Since, I haven’t shaped it much even the policy making aspect, I won’t write it here for now.
Yes, I see your point. I think though that Zimmer takes this argument further – even if all these data are available, as researchers, should we use it or not? He posted another opinion addressing this very case of a group of researchers exploiting a security breach in FB to collect data from public profiles (without actually breaking FB’s terms of service).
Looking forward to your email, whenever you feel like it :)