Web 2.0 Convergence

Political dissent in Iran in the aftermath of the national election has spread not only to the streets of Tehran, but also online, where protesters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and observers of the election have battled to get news out of the country for three days.

Cell phone service was restored Sunday June 13th after it had been down since Saturday, but Iranians could still not send text messages from their mobile phones. Government filters have also cracked down on opposition party websites and social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as mobile text messaging services.

Satellite Internet connections have also been disrupted. But that hasn't prevented bloggers and activists reporting from Iran by using proxy servers to get around the censors in a game of cat and mouse.

Citizenlab, which runs out of the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies, is one of many groups making software available that allows citizens in Iran to sign on to a server that gives them secure access to web pages anywhere, bypassing government restrictions.

The software, PsiPhon, has been made available for Twitter users, as the social messaging tool has taken centre stage as a source of news from Iran since Saturday.

One of the more active posters of messages on Twitter, someone in Iran named persiankiwi, has attracted over 10,000 followers, with over 2,000 added in less  than a week "We are going offline to get a phone free for calling out. we are also moving location -- too long here -- is dangerous," the poster wrote at about 10:30 p.m. local time (2:00 p.m. ET), followed by a post an hour and a half later: "3 of our group missing from afternoon -- we have no news from them."

Twitter users in Iran have shared pictures from street protests, passed on information about which cities are affected by Internet and mobile phone outages and planned rallies and further protests.

There are also reports of distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) being launched on Iran government websites, though it's not clear what effect they are having.

The website of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad displayed a message reading "The maximum number of users reached, Server is too busy, please try again later," but there are reports that Internet access across the country is sporadic.

As one person with the Twitter name azarnoush reports from Shiraz, Iran: "Internet is at the lowest possible speed."

Despite these attempts at censorship, the world is getting citizen perspectives on the Iranian protest movement.

Photo by Shahram Sharif. CC Attribution 2.0 Generic

Celebrities, media personalities and athletes are increasingly being misrepresented in the world of social media.

Tony La Russa, manager of baseball's St. Louis Cardinals, is suing the Twitter, claiming that an unauthorized page using his name damaged his reputation and caused emotional distress.

The Philadelphia Daily News recently published comments from Philadelphia Eagles cornerback Asante Samuel's Twitter feed, only to find that his words were being tweeted by an imposter.

Media personality Keith Olbermann also was a victim of Twitter fraud, and CNN recently acquired the rights to CNNbrk (CNN Breaking News), the largest Twitter account on record with 959,011 followers. The account was being administered by James Cox, who is not affiliated with the news station.

This all comes at a time of fierce competition between CNN and Ashton Kutcher to have the first Twitter account with 1 million followers. At the moment, the well known actor has about 941,749 followers and singer Britney Spears is in third place with 926,862 followers.

According to two media experts at Temple University, we should expect more social network fraud, something that local governments should be alert to as they move to embrace these new media tools to communicate with citizens.

Professor Susan Jacobson of Temple's School of Communications and Theater compares Twitter fraud to what happened in the early days of the Internet when regular people would rush to buy domain names (i.e., www.madonna.com) and then sell them to celebrities for millions of dollars.

Although she questions why the Daily News' journalists didn't check their sources, Jacobson notes in a press release: "We are still in the early stages of social media. These situations are bound to continue to happen until laws are enacted that prevent people from misrepresenting themselves. If social media follows the same model as the web, we will continue to see misrepresentations of celebrities on social media sites."

Frank Farley, another Temple expert on risk-taking adds that people would do something like this for two reasons: malicious or near criminal misrepresentation, or just to have fun by carrying out a prank.

"We shouldn't be surprised by this; I'm frankly surprised we haven't seen more of it. Through social media, we have created the capacity or opportunities for people to take such actions. It's the old 'If you build it they will come,'" said Farley.

Image from Jeroen Mirck. CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

It's interesting that one of America's most traditional organizations, the armed forces is one of the leaders is using the new media.

Go to a military base after-hours on any given workday, scores of young soldiers plug into a world that would have earlier generations scratching their heads.

They Tweet on Twitter.com and flit from Facebook to Flickr to YouTube. They are, as the late comedian George Carlin once put it, up-linking, downloading, cutting-edge multi-taskers who can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond.

And they're fueling a revolution in how the Pentagon connects with troops and the public.

From the front lines of Iraq, where Army Gen. Ray Odierno posts daily updates to his Facebook page, to Fort Huachuca in Sierra Vista, AZ, which posts video greetings to deployed troops, America's military is infiltrating the world of online social networking.

"With our younger soldiers, especially, once they're off the Army clock, they're attached to some form of electronic device," said Tanja Linton, a spokeswoman for Fort Huachuca, Arizona and its military intelligence school, about 75 miles southeast of Tucson.

"They've got their cell phones, their iPods, their laptops; they're texting, Tweeting, surfing -- and sometimes they are doing it all at the same time."

Odierno, the commander in charge of military efforts in Iraq, has close to 4,000 "fans" on his page at Facebook.com.

His site proclaims, among other things, that the four-star general is a fan of Motown, classic rock and country music, and that his favorite films include "Animal House" and "Sleepless in Seattle."

Stories referenced on the general's site range from a report on efforts to revive Iraq's air force to an article about an overseas jazz festival that featured Iraqi and American musicians.

The U.S. Army launched its own Facebook page April 16 and has more than 17,000 fans so far.

"It puts a human face on the Army that you might not otherwise see," said Lt. Col. Kevin Arata, head of the service's new online and special media division.

The move to social media has been somewhat unsettling at the Pentagon, with its tradition of top-down authority, he said.

In cyberspace, where anyone can post feedback anonymously, the musings of military supporters can appear alongside those of anti-war critics.

"This is a culture shift for us," Arata said. "When people exchange thoughts, it's not always rosy. That's something we as a culture have to get over."

There also have been technological snags. Many of the social media sites the military is embracing aren't accessible on military computers, due to concerns about network security.

Solutions are being sought, Arata said. In some cases, staffers have had to work around the issue by having one office computer that isn't connected to military networks.

Locally, Fort Huachuca is using Facebook, YouTube and TroopTube -- the Pentagon's version of YouTube -- for many forms of outreach.

Last Christmas, for example, the fort's public affairs office arranged for local Army families to post online video greetings to deployed soldiers.

Bonnie Sanders, 32, a mother of two, said she was grateful that the new technology allowed her to connect with her husband, Staff Sgt. Roland Sanders, a member of the fort's 11th Signal Brigade who recently returned from a 15-month stint overseas.

"It was emotional. It choked me up," she said of the experience. "It felt good knowing that he would know we were thinking of him."

Fort Huachuca also posts footage from its "Fort Report" cable TV show on YouTube and TroopTube. The video segments include informational clips on cultural and sporting events, health alerts and other aspects of Army life.

In Tucson, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base has not yet taken the plunge into new media, said 1st Lt. Mary Pekas, a base spokeswoman.

Staffers there are still awaiting instructions from Air Force headquarters on how to proceed, she said.

The general public isn't flocking to Pentagon-sponsored sites yet, judging by numbers. Last year, for example, a video clip showing decrepit Army barracks at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, posted on YouTube by an outraged parent, drew nearly half-a-million viewers. The Army's official YouTube clips typically draw fewer than 5,000 viewers.

The push to social networking is a smart move on the military's part, said Sean Aday, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who recently spent time in Afghanistan teaching government leaders there how to deal with the press.

Much of what the Pentagon posts online is akin to advertising that aims to create a good impression, Aday said. Viewers drawn to such sites most likely already have a positive opinion of the military, he added.

The wider public may be more inclined to take the Pentagon's pronouncements with a grain of salt and to rely more on independent news reporting for information about the military, he said.

"Who is reading the general's Twitter page? It's probably someone who is predisposed to thinking that the general is right about things. It's sort of like preaching to the choir," Aday said.

"From a public-relations standpoint, maintaining that kind of support makes a lot of sense," he said. "You want to keep the choir singing your tune."

When the mid-term elections were starting, the big money was on Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama was seen as fighting an uphill battle; Clinton was raising immense sums of money and lining up powerful supporters. She had a seasoned team of consultants skilled at manipulating the media. Most pundits predicted the Clintons would be back in the White House.

Then along came an unknown 25-year-old called Chris Hughes. He grew up in Hickory, North Carolina, the only child of parents of modest means. Because of his intuitive curiosity and new media acumen, Hughes helped create one of the most targeted and successful start-ups in modern history - Barack Obama's run for presidency.

Hughes' intellect was not his only major asset. He also had the uncanny ability of being in the right place at the right time. What forces saw Hughes become a rising star in the Democratic Party? First and foremost was his chance meeting with Mark Zuckerberg, a then 19-year-old fellow Harvard student who was had created a little known online campus network called Facebook.

Hughes saw a phenomenal opportunity to test some of his social media theories about on-line behavior. Known as the "Empath" amongst his fellow scholars, Hughes became the official Facebook proponent for the Obama team.

In the fall of 2006, with midterm elections approaching, Facebook offered political candidates the opportunity to set up mini-profile to appeal to non-traditional voters. Opportunity struck again, when the freshman senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, known for his community organizing skills, came calling and Hughes accepted the invitation.

As director of on-line organizing, Hughes' technical savvy gave the Obama team an amazing head start in the campaign. Hitting the ground running, Hughes became a "miner" of human behavior data that he salted into online systems, creating an historic campaign that was able to access the most robust set of Web-based social-networking tools ever used in a political campaign history.

This community-based system enabled and energized citizens to turn themselves into online activists; long before a single Obama field staffer was able to interact with potential voters face-to-face.

"Technology has always been used as a net to capture people in a campaign or cause, but not to organize," says Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. "Chris Hughes saw what was possible before anyone else." Hughes built something the candidate said he wanted but didn't yet know was possible: a virtual mechanism for scaling and supporting community action. Then that community turned around and elected his boss president.

Hughes seized on the new Internet media to guide Obama's course into waters that were new to the candidate, but more importantly were under utilized by the Clinton and John McCain campaigns.

Hughes' key web tool was My.BarackObama.com, or MyBO for short, an intuitive and fun-to-use networking Internet site that allowed Obama supporters to create groups, plan events, raise funds, download tools, and connect with one another -- not unlike a more focused, activist Facebook.

MyBO also let the campaign reach its most passionate supporters cheaply and effectively. By the time the campaign was over, volunteers had created more than 3.2 million Facebook profiles on the site, planned 200,000 offline events, formed 35,000 groups, posted 400,000 blogs, generated 14.5 million television viewing hours on YouTube and raised $30 million on 70,000 personal fund-raising pages.

MyBarackObama.com site was the catalyst that helped turn the election tide in Obama's favor. Raising more than $500 million through average donations of under $100, in addition to mobilizing new voters, it was the major tipping point for Obama's victory.

Chris Hughes' king-making efforts paid off royally. Now, what does a king-maker do after his king ascends to the highest office in the land? In Hughes' case, he closed one chapter and opened another. On March 18, 2008, General Catalyst Partners announced that Hughes had chosen to join their venture capital team as entrepreneur-in-residence. The Cambridge, MA firm's mission is to create a new generation of digital media and social-networking start-ups and open a hi-tech corridor in the north east similar to that found in the Silicon Valley. Hughes will play a pivotal role in their success.

Who knows what the future might bring for this unlikely kingmaker. Perhaps he will be called back into service in 2016. Where will social networking be in seven years?

Photo of Chris Hughes by Steve Rhodes. CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

The British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) is using the New Media to help get out it's Old Media messages.

The BBC's new mobile homepage launched in March with the results of months of work on customization that will bring the service in line with the main BBC site, bbc.co.uk.

Users can chose to shrink or expand sections according to their interest across the BBC's news, sport, entertainment and business coverage, and i-Player for radio and TV, schedule information and weather forecasts also accessible.

The site is optimized for most commonly used mobile handsets and smart-phones, but also for the range of different networks that provide differing signal quality; the challenge was to produce a error-free i-Player service even on the slowest network.

Customization options include location, which means the site will automatically show weather and news for the user's local area.

Richard Titus, BBC future media controller for audio & music and mobile, said the BBC mobile site has seen growth of 30 % in the past two quarters and shows no sign of slowing down.

"Part of the BBC's public purpose is to encourage digital curiosity and media literacy, and those are important themes," he said. "But we have to recognize that everyone has their adoption curve."

He said the BBC's mobile site does historically tend to be used more by older males and by under 25s, but that  this redesign was "a real opportunity to deepen engagement".

"It was the same with the web ten years ago - guys in their late 30s and younger users with disposable incomes. But as the technology has progressed it has brought people with it and we're now seeing exponential growth of mobile, especially smart-phones."

"People my age are very focused on the privacy aspects but for a 19 or 20 year old, everything they do is an open book."

BBC recognizes that if they want to survive in the age of Media 2.0, they better use this New Media to their advantage.

The recent demise of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, after a 150 years of publishing was a shock to the old media. Two west coast papers the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are potentially facing the same fate.

We know that the new media - the Huffington Post for example - chuckle with glee at such events, bragging that as the new media, they saw this coming and are leading the way to a promised land of citizen journalism with unlimited free information at the click of a mouse.

Let's stop and consider the merits of this claim. Most newspapers today are becoming the 'new media' as they develop their blog capacity, send journalist out to cover stories with video cameras to capture stories and upload them to their newspaper websites. Newspapers across the country are buying radio and TV air time to advertise their websites as the "go to" place for up-to-date i-news.

Newspaper journalists and columnists now write 'new media' blogs, in addition to their 'old media' stories because blogs are seen by their editors as powerful tools to obtain news content, as it is developing, to help them stay ahead of the curve.

Some folks feel the 'old media' provides more accurate information and a degree of accountability to their editors, publishers and shareholders. The 'New 2.0 Media' are accountable to no one but themselves.

This may indicate that consumers are not so much concerned with the medium as they are with the content. If 'old media' can provide current information in the 'new media' format, they may be on the road to survival.

What you get from trained journalists, over amateur bloggers, is assurance of quality and accountability.

Arguments can be made by bloggers about individuals citizens having the resources to generate the quantity and quality of news to which citizens are accustomed. 'Old news' is hard to gather and is expensive. Journalists are empowered to write without fear because their employers defend their right to do so. Bloggers do not have these same protections.

There have been some interesting developments recently in the world of Media 2.0.

According to a recent article in the Huffington Post - a Media 2.0 vehicle in itself - Social Media Week (SMY) NY is a great example of this process in action. The idea, born of a group of friends in the digital media space went from concept to implementation in just 3 weeks, under the leadership of one man, Toby Daniels. Daniels, 32, had just left a high profile job at MintDigital, an online digital platform and was looking to reinvent himself as a digital strategist.

His first step was to convene an executive committee consisting of academics, business leaders, media thinkers and others he knew.

This Advisory Panel then created a mission statement everyone could buy-in to: "SMW aims to create an open and inclusive environment offering a series of free events, including workshops and panel discussions, and a platform for individuals, group and companies to organize their own activities."

Thirdly, Daniels suggested that their events would get far more press as part of a self-organized Social Media Week strategy than if done as stand alone events by the individual panel members.

Finally, he enlisted Tumblr to build the website. With all of the week's events listed in one place, a unified vision for SMW and how it might benefit the social media community began to emerge - all this in less than a month.

Along a similar vein, Tactical Marketing Inc., based out of Las Vegas announced the launch of New Media Minutes - a weblog and weekly podcast by longtime blogger, Emmy-award-winning broadcast journalist and Las Vegas News anchor Dave Courvoisier; and internet marketing veteran, Joe Perez on new media today at www.newmediaminutes.com.

New Media Minutes intends to give audience sixty second breaking reviews on new media and the newest technologies that are extremely newsworthy but not necessarily making the headlines. They run on a newly launched social networking-based direct sales platform called Vi-Net. Vi-Net is an industry first in direct selling through a seamlessly integrated proprietary social network in the health and wellness space.

They want to give you all the news you need in 60 seconds.

What impact is this type social media news having on the traditional media as they undermine traditional media business models?

Take a look at what is happening to the San Francisco Chronicle, the city's major daily. Yesterday, the Chronicle's parent company, Hearst Newspapers, announced that unless they secure major concessions from its unions (read: layoffs and salary cuts), it will have to close the paper altogether.

Google, a Media 2.0 leader, has played no small role in redefining how people read the news. And last week, one of its most prominent executives launched a side project to see if he can save local reporting from the lethal dynamics that threaten papers like the Chronicle.

When Tim Armstrong isn't busy running Google's North and South American advertising arm, he's behind the Polar Capital Group, which has just funded Patch, a new company, dedicated to providing online local reporting in small towns that newspapers can no longer afford to cover. So far, the company has set up one reporter in each of three New Jersey suburbs: South Orange, Maplewood, and Milburn. Patch is based out of New York, where former Time Out New York editor-in-chief Brian Farnham will try out the new model.

Like New Media Minutes, the site will weave short stories about city government, traffic, and local businesses with photos and video, trying to keep local officials accountable in an era when the media are retrenching and scrambling to stay alive.

These trends mark some of the new trails being blazed each day by Media 2.0 innovators.

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama showed how to get off the mark fast in the introduction of his first major announcements.

When it was discovered that former U.S. Senator Tom Daschle had "forgotten" to pay his taxes for three years. Daschle resigned but President Obama took responsibility.

He said, time and time again in his February media blitz that "I screwed up, I should have been more diligent."

This shows how well President Obama understands one of the fundamentals of communications.

When you make a mistake, acknowledge it, take responsibility, tell people what you are doing to "fix' it up ... and it goes away. I call it: "Mess Up, 'Fess Up, Dress Up."

While the Presidential team continues to use You Tube and the other New Media to communicate with Americans, they made sure every major US media outlet interviewed the President. It has been estimated that 25 -30 million Americans saw his television broadcasts (Bloomberg.com).

This is further evidence that the rules of the game have changed forever by technology. This is a good example of the melding of the roles of traditional and new media. The Obama team recognizes that you cannot focus on just traditional or new media but need to make creative use of the two.

Remember during the run up to the election sites with names like Politico and FiveThirtyEight and Eschaton and Crooks and Liars and AlterNet collectively come to rival the three television networks in influence with younger audiences.

Huffington Post's "Off the Bus" site often made headlines with on-the-scene bulletins and audio/video snippets from some 3000 contributors.

What's happening today?

The Democrats used www.change.gov as the "go-to" place to find out what was happening in the election.

As soon as President Obama was confirmed in office, the site closed, a message said: "The transition has ended and the new administration has begun. Please join President Obama at whitehouse.gov."

Now, that is effective use of the new media. By the way, President Obama got to keep his Blackberry, making him the first media-savvy President.  Stay tuned!

Photo: Barack Obama. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

We are entering the age of the "Internet Law and Order."

A former CBS anchor in Philadelphia was found guilty recently of reading his co-anchor's e-mail in an effort to derail her rising career. He was sentenced to six months house arrest, ordered to perform 150 hours of community service and fined $5000.00. He was also fired from his job by the station.

On the west coast, 49 year-old Lori Drew was convicted in Los Angeles of three misdemeanors for violating the American Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In 2006 she organized a MySpace hoax that targeted a 13 year old girl who committed suicide.

In England, a young woman said her three year marriage came to and end when she caught her husband's electronic persona having e-sex with another Second Life virtual woman. Her lawyer said that this as the second such Second Life divorce case he had handled.

At one time, being on-line meant anonymity and freedom -- the ability to say anything you wanted. Not any more. Now, it seems, if your online activities are questionable, you just might risk losing your spouse, your job and even your freedom as more and more folks are being sued and dragged into court over their computer activities.

Is it surprising that wWe now find lawyers trolling Twitter looking for targets and clients?

Electronic discovery in the legal world is creating new specialists who drill down into hard drives and find material you thought you had deleted forever.

Remember, when you log on, everything you create can come back to haunt you, Be very careful about what you say.

Photo by Nolene Dowdall. Creative Commons License Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic

If you want a lesson on how to use Web 2.0 as a force for change look at how Macon Phillips and the other members of the Obama transition new media team hit the ground running and built a dynamic, responsive and refreshingly open and creative government website on www.change.gov.

They call it "An American Moment: Your Story"

The site says: 'We're counting on citizens from every walk of life to get involved. Share your experiences and your ideas -- tell us what you'd like the Obama-Biden administration to do and where you'd like the country to go.'

Every day they add some new element:

- Discussion forums on health care, the economy, and community service;
- Community rating of posted comments using IntenseDebate.com, a
third-party service;
- Responses from transition staffers on YouTube;
- A quick and friendly shift from copyrighting everything to using
the most open Creative Commons license and formats for sharing content;
- Posting the names of the outside groups lobbying the transition
as well as the text of their position papers, asking for comments on same; • An invitation to readers to host community-led health care reform discussion groups; and the
- Creation of "Open for Discussion," a gigantic open forum for
people to share the questions for the transition and vote the best ones to the top.

Recently, their Open for Questions feature was received by more than 20,000 people casting nearly 1,000,000 votes on questions posed by the community.

Overall, just over 10,000 questions were voted up or down and ranked by visitors to the site.

During the election campaign, Open for Discussion attracted 980,000 votes on over 10,000 questions from about 20,000 people in its first run.

Phillips' Media 2.0 team showed its peers across the web community that it's OK to 'build the plane while you're flying it,' and that small errors are easily corrected online when everything is understood to be in 'beta' as opposed to perfect from the start.

It's also worth a look at the Presidential Inaugural Committee's website, which looks and feels like it was also done by Phillips'
team.

They have a searchable, public database of donors to the Committee, that allows a 'virtually real-time' search by the donor's name, employer, city or state, as well as who has bundled contributions for the committee.

The list allows for dynamic displays, if you want to order donors by size or group them by employer.

All in all, it's a very impressive start and hopefully a good sign for how the Obama Administration will be using the Web 2.0 to move forward. Talk about raising the New Media bar!