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the long road to media freedom

Last week I spoke at one of the strangest conferences, in one of the most far flung places, I've ever been to - the Eurasian Media Forum in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The conference brings together journalists, business leaders, academics and politicians for two days of discussion ranging from news coverage of global events such as the current economic crisis to the implications of the Obama Presidency on East-West relations.

I went, at least in part, in the hope that by talking about the tools and techniques of blogging and social media, I could encourage delegates to think about being more open, transparent and direct in their dealings with audiences, consumers and, for the politicians in attendance, the populaces they govern. It was my usual sort of presentation but in unusual circumstances because, little did I know as I was speaking, something rather unusual was going on outside the building. Dan Kennedy covered the action outside, and what happened in the subsequent panel which we both participated in, on his blog Media Nation:

"The InterContinental Hotel in Almaty, Kazakhstan, is about as isolating an experience as you can imagine. The luxurious surroundings — and the ever-present security guards — effectively separated the several hundred journalists attending last week's Eurasian Media Forum from whatever was going on outside.

So it was something of a surprise when that separation was breached last Friday afternoon. Between a panel on the global media crisis, which I moderated, and a panel on blogging, in which I participated, several people approached us with handouts, warning of proposed laws that would crack down on Kazakhstan's burgeoning blogosphere. We exchanged pleasantries, and that seemed to be that.

Then, during the blogging panel, one of them — an audacious 24-year-old woman named Yevgeniya Plakhina, wearing a shirt that proclaimed "SHHH!" — got up and demanded to know why six of her friends had been arrested for demonstrating against the proposals.

The moderator, Vladimir Rerikh, a Kazakh journalist, clearly wanted the issue, and Plakhina, to go away. But Danny Schechter, a well-known American progressive journalist, spoke up on Plakhina's behalf, and she was able to continue pressing her case. (Here is Schechter's account.) The organizer of the conference, Dariga Nazarbayeva, the daughter of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, could be seen talking on her cell phone, leaving the hall and returning several times..."

Local campaigners fear that the law in question, explains Matthew Collin [on the Frontline Club blog - a Headshift project] who reports for Al Jazeera from Georgia and was another of the panelists in the blogging session, would "put serious restrictions on internet journalists and bloggers and potentially allow the authorities to block sites on political grounds."

Danny Schechter reports that the arrested protesters were later freed by authorities, quoting an email he received from Plakhina, which read “I really appreciate your help. Thanx. My friends are OK. I guess the authorities were afraid of international scandal, so an advisor to the president took care of letting my friends out..."

Needless to say, the panel discussion didn't exactly go as those of us on it had planned, nor - I suspect - as the organisers had intended. But I'm glad it happened - the protest I mean - and hope that, by being one of the many foreign participants in the conference, just being there helped ensure that the protesters and their colleagues both reach a wider audience with their appeal and remain safe from arrest whilst doing so.

The whole incident reminded me that media freedom is a precious, and all to rare, freedom. And blogging is, I think, an important tool for helping those who are brave enough to fight for it to make themselves heard. It's a long long way from the worlds of media and corporate blogging which I usually inhabit to the scenes I at least partially witnessed in Almaty but I hope that, some day, when they've won their fight for rights, blogging will become as everyday and mundane - and safe - as it is for me and most of you reading this.

massive increase in twitter use good for news websites

UK internet measurement agency Hitwise recently announced that Twitter's traffic has increased a staggering 1000% over the past year and now exceeds that to Digg.

The Hitwise report reveals something far more interesting, in my mind at least - the way that twitter is driving traffic to other sites, in particularly those of mainstream media. From the PC Advisor article about the report:

"Twitter is becoming an important source of Internet traffic for many sites, and the amount of traffic it sends to other websites has increased 30-fold over the past 12 months.

Almost 10 percent of Twitter's downstream traffic goes to News and Media websites, and BBC News is currently the seventh most popular site visited after www.twitter.com. A further 17.6 percent of traffic goes to entertainment websites, while 14.6 percent goes to social networks, 6.6 percent to blogs and 4.5 percent to online retailers.

"As a source of traffic Twitter is still in its infancy, but it is becoming more important every day," commented Goad.

"A number of news sites, blogs, and video and picture websites already rely on Twitter for a significant amount of their traffic."

The most popular website visited after Twitter is Facebook. Britain's most popular social network continues to pick up users and is now the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK.

Yeh, you read that right - 10% of twitter's downstream traffic, that is the site that people go to after visiting twitter, is to BBC News. The article, unfortunately, is not clear whether this is a global or UK specific statistic but either way it's interesting because it demonstrates that, far from just chit-chatting the day away, people are discussing news and current affairs on twitter as well.

manchester police use youtube to make murder appeal

Greater Manchester Police have reportedly posted a video appeal on YouTube for information about a murder. 15 year old Jessie James was murdered on the 9th of September in Moss Side.

teaching an old post new tricks: netvocates again

I always find it strange how a post that's several months old can suddenly get a link from a big site and go bonkers with traffic.

Remember a few months back when I started posting about Netvocates, the company that willfully uses B.I.A.S. ["Blog Intelligence and Advocacy Service" - I kid you not] as it's acronym. (I'll link to all the posts I've tagged with Netvocates but, as they're in the business of Astrotufing, I'm not going to link directly to them from this post.)

When I first blogged it, the post got some links from some busy blogs (Daily Kos, Pandagon and others), which were then linked to by lots of smaller sites, and then reblogged by lots of people on livejournal and by forum users. A couple months later, the whole thing was revived with a link from Feministe and traffic spiked up again.

Today it's round three with a link from Crooks and Liars sending upwards of a thousand visitors to that post about Netvocates from way back in May.

casual encounters participants exposed

If you're seeking a no-strings attached sexual encounter - and thousands of people are - then there are worse places to look than the casual encounters section of sites like Craigslist or Gumtree.

They offer anonymous users to post and respond to ads and, one gathers from the huge number of ads looking for the widest range of partners, pairings and "activities" imagineable, are quite popular. It also seemed like, up until last week, quite a safe and discreet way for people to pursue their sexual fantasies, affairs and casual encounters.

What changed? Last week, Jason Fortuny started an "experiment" of posting ads as bait then republishing the responses he gets, along with email addresses, contact telephone numbers and photos. A number of the people who emailed him in response to his ads are married or in relationships and most of the others I'd suspect don't really want their friends, families, and colleagues knowing they were posting or replying to sex wanted ads.

And there's the rub - most of the people that Jason has exposed for whatever reason it is he did this (looking at his LiveJournal site, I reckon it's simply to get some attention) are likely to be completely innocent of any legal or, so long as you're fairly liberal and open minded about the idea that people can and do have casual sexual encounters, moral wrongdoing.

What Fortuny has done is attack the trust between users that is necessary for sites like craigslist to function as a community. It will be interesting to see how the casual encounters communities defend themselves against what they probably view as unfair attacks like this in future. [Meanwhile... Craigslist saw it's traffic increase by 99% on last year.]

(There's more on this story at waxy.org)

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event: political blogging debate - manchester 24 sept

blogger Iain Dale on BBC News 24
Originally uploaded by robinh1973.

A few weeks ago I fell asleep on my sofa and woke up at half past midnight to find political blogger Iain Dale on my telly, reading through the day's newspaper headlines. It was at that moment that I realised that political blogging, which has been huge in America for a few years with sites like the Daily Kos and Huffington Post getting more readers than The Times, had finally hit the mainstream here in the UK. The BBC's Alan Connor recently put together a comprehensive list of political blogs if you'd like to have a look at what's out there.

With political blogs getting lots of attention from the media and political strategists alike, and Manchester playing host to the Labour Party Conference from 24-28 September, the Political Bloggers Panel being organised by local blogger Manchizzle is likely to be a popular event.

On the podium at Urbis from 4pm on Sunday the 24th of September will be Norman Geras, Professor Emeritus at Manchester University and author of Normblog, the Press Gazette's Martin Stabe and Bill Jones, a former Manchester University lecturer and author of several books on politics who blogs at Skipper.

You can find more details of this free event on Manchizzle or over on the Urbis website .

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xanga gets fined for coppa violation

A social networking site, xanga, will reportedly pay a fine of US $1 million after the Federal Trade Commission found they'd violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by "collecting, using and disclosing personal information collected from children under age 13".

In a written statement, FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras said the law "requires all commercial Web sites, including operators of social networking sites like Xanga, to give parents notice and obtain their consent before collecting personal information from kids they know are under 13."

the lost cameraphone and the chihuahua

At 18.27 GMT +1 (that's London time to you and me) today my blog started getting visits. Dozens and dozens - over 250 in two hours - all visiting the post I made on Wednesday about the guy who lost his phone and ended up with photos of the person who found it, and their Chihuahua.

Reuters covered the story today and I reckon the evening news on one of the UK networks ran something about it at the end of the 6pm bulletin.

Whoever thought that this picture of a chihuahua would cause what the Reuters article calls a "media sensation" - a few minutes ago the flickr page view count said 9700 visitors had seen the photo and, in the couple of minutes it took me to type this post, it's shot up to 14,285.

A lot of the visits to my earlier post have been from media company IP addresses - Chicago Tribune, CNN/Time Warner, Toronto Star, etc so my guess is we'll all be tired of this one by the end of the weekend...

how I got kicked out of google adsense

Yesterday I received an email from Google Adsense telling me that I had been kicked out of the programme.

I've been using Adsense to monetize my blog and other websites for about a year now and have been pleased with the results. Not only did it pay for typepad, hosting of the old site, and my monthly broadband bill it also sometimes generated a little bit of a surplus which I was able to use to do things like give away a free flickr pro account and help pay for the wemedia fringe venue. I'd link to the posts but I can't currently find them on my own site because Google has deactivated my site search too.

I appealed by following a link in the original email from google and today I got back this response to my appeal:

...After receiving your response, we re-reviewed your account data thoroughly. We have reconfirmed that invalid clicks were generated on the ads on your site in violation of our Terms and Conditions and programme policies...

Fair enough - if they'd simply provide some evidence - but they haven't. Not one shred. Not a single indication of why I was kicked out of the adsense programme.

I've got a few ideas why I might have been kicked out. The first of which is unexplainable, at least by me:

• I had a look at my adsense revenue for the month of August the other day and it was indeed higher than for the previous month. I reckon there would have been, by the end of August, a 200% increase month on month from July to August. I didn't click ads on my own site at anytime but it is, of course, entirely possible that some idiot sat there clicking ads - nothing to do with me and google should be able to, if this happened, supply me with some IP address or something as evidence.

It's possible that I did, many months ago, violate the terms and conditions of the programme but it was a long time ago and I really don't think they'd come after me for it now:

• Around 9 months ago I posted the amount I'd made through google adsense for the month in an attempt to be transparent about this. I realised that this was a grey area of the terms and conditions (I didn't disclose the click through ratio) and stopped doing this.

I also recently made a slight change to the way my google search works although I figured this was fine - maybe mistakenly:

• I recently installed a thing called "blogbar" on my site. It's that nice looking search box in the top right corner. I installed this after I had noticed the increased ad revenue for the month so it didn't directly contribute to that. Within about two days of installing blogbar, my adsense account was closed. Blogbar has extensive information on integrating their blog widget with adsense so I assumed they'd taken the time to sort things out with Google, but had they and, if not, is this the reason I got kicked out of Adsense? I'm sending blogbar a link to this post so watch the commentspace below...

And finally, I might not have done anything wrong but, instead, have been the victim of a malicious attack:

• A couple of months ago I blogged about a spam blog that was republishing my content and my attempts to get it shut down by contacting it's ISP, domain name host and google adsense. I hate to sound paranoid - but maybe I should be.

That's all I can think of but, as I wrote above, I honestly don't know why I got kicked out of adsense because Google won't tell me. So can I force them to? I'm going to try to use the Data Protection Act (alternatively see this pdf on your rights under the DPA) to force Google to disclose what information they hold on me and how that information is used. I'll let you know how I get on with that. If anyone has other ideas as to how I can find out what, if any, evidence of wrong-doing google might have with regards to my adsense account, do get in touch.

In the meantime, I've switched over to Swicki for my site search and I'm looking for some other way to pay for typepad, and cover my hosting costs and broadband access. It's not a huge amount of money but I think it's worth trying to keep the blog paying for itself if at all possible. Let me know if you have some ideas (like this)...

flickr roles out geotagging

Last month I got a Nokia N70 with Co-Pilot software and a bluetooth GPS reciever. Of course, I needed to test it's accuracy so I dragged the family off to Greenwich Observatory, home of the Greenwich Mean Line. That's 0 degrees longitude for those who have yet to dabble in the strange world of geo-tagging.

From the start I was disappointed that the phone couldn't automatically geo-tag photos. I have tried to use ZoneTag from Yahoo Research but can't get it working. Tom Coates doesn't seem to have any problems so maybe it's just me. To add insult to injury, my digital SLR doesn't have GPS built in (do any?), nor does it have bluetooth or wifi so it can't talk with my external GPS reciever. So what to do if I want to geotag stuff? Well, until now I could go to google maps and find the location, then grab the latitude and longitude and add it to the tags of my photos on flickr.

Now, thanks to flickr's new geotagging feature, I can just go to the photo organizr and add geo data to my photos. It's not quite the same as them automatically getting tagged but it's better than the old way. Then when someone visits my photo stream, they can click the map tab under a photo that has been geotagged and view it on a map, a satellite image, or a hybrid. To the left is an example of the photo above which I tagged with the locational data.

Part of the fun of flickr is meeting other flickr users who have taken photos of similar subjects, or in the same places, as you have. Using the new geotagging features, it's possible to see "everyone's photos" from a specific area. I had a look to see what other photos have been posted from the area around Greenwich:

Pretty cool results and, I think, quite useful if used by communities or groups to photo-plot landscapes, create tourist maps, etc. Flickr users seem to think it's a great idea too - flickr expected a million photos to be tagged in a month, maybe within a few weeks, but over 1.2 million were tagged on the first day alone. Try it now before the servers grind to a halt...