Not surprisingly, there’s already a Chinese edition of Rebecca’s blog post in two days from Yeeyan.com community. The censorship system is really complicated in China, however, the social media mouse is gaining lead in the race.
Labels: Blog, Blogosphere, Censorhship, China, GFW
On the panel of "Digital Community" Winners talk I moderated two days ago in Linz, the three speakers, including Iris Wu from 1kg.org, David Sasaki from GlobalVoicesOnline.org and Jeana Frost from PatientsLikeMe.com, all present the beautifulness of their web site and communities. So I call those rewarding winning sites "Social Art", and of course the people behind them are Social Artists.
So what really Social Art is? Let's try to define it. Social Art is very dynamic creation by crowds with 6 degree of separations. Someone with creative ideas can start from a small core by building framework to foster a community(for sure nobody there the first minute). However, the core framework can grow organically with open DNA and consistence on Sharism philosophy. The beautifulness, of course, is the big picture of so many mirco-behaviors vibrate in such community. So it can be seen as dynamic social artwork. Just like the big cluster of the clouds from the window of flight, Social Art is always changing to attract everyone of us to fly into it, or zooming in and out of it.
Then we need more social artists to create such core frameworks. Lets hope the rains of social creativities.
// updates: Some twitter users reported Godaddy.com can be accessed again in China from last night on. It's not surprising thinking of Sourceforge and Wikipedia's sufferings back and forth.
Domain registrar Godaddy.com was blocked in China about one week ago just after the closing of Olympic Games. Same as usual, there's no any official explanation from authority on this blockage. Some bloggers like William Long in China guessed that it's because Godaddy provided a way for people to bypass CNNIC(The root institution managing .cn domains) to prevent people from registering domain names featuring the names of Chinese gold medallists.
Isn't it funny? But the most ironical thing is that Godaddy ever cooperated with China authority last year to suspend some human rights sites without warning last year to please China government. This time, not surprisingly, the rope hang itself.
When I read recent comments from Google CEO Eric Schmidt at “The Big Tent” event in Denver, I realized why these two G- are wrong:
Schmidt noted that the Chinese have a “Great Firewall” for censoring internet work and is so secretive that it’s illegal to describe it. “A rough summary is that if you don’t say Falun Gong,” it’s okay. The question, said Schmidt, is whether the Chinese are better off with Google than without.--- via Portfolio.com
Either blind about Google China's operation or doesn't telling the truth, Eric misled the audience that Google can do nothing in China but compromise. However, the truth is Google China made more self-censorship rather than just complying the local laws. Google China management wanted to satisfy authority to exchange some space for surviving. But they are wrong as Godaddy, the government won't buy in because there's never contract or agreement to protect them. The hidden rules in China will change all the time. Just like Godaddy's case, any cases can become your nightmare whether it's an event, a people's name, or a domain name. And the worst thing you can never recover is that you lost the support from users. There's only one government one business can please today or tomorrow, but there are millions of users one can't be fooled.
Last year, in my open letter to Google Founders, "The more compromise, the worse". I explained in some other occasions why Google lost market share time by time even they self-censor themselves a lot in this country. The China team not only did a very bad job losing all frontiers to their competitors in this fastest and biggest Internet soil, but also lost trust and loyalty from their existing users. With the same effort and resource to make self-censorship(they put more and more people on filtering system), they can fight back with their guns(technology, laws, user supports, etc.). They didn't complete any missions without accountability.
Once in a private talk with one senior officials of Google China, he was surprised when I told him the story China netizen helped Google back in 2002 when it's blocked in China the first time. Since they've forgotten it (are they googlers?), they won't care users too much today. However, Big Brother can never be satisfied, even one single day. Godaddy.com proved this thumb rule. Godaddy.com was blocked in China. Surely it's so bad to their business benefit from Chinese users. But some Chinese users said, "It deserved! No tears".
Labels: Article, Blogger, Blogosphere, guardian，Blog
Some links to this summit(#gvsummit08) I'm attending from 25th-29th
http://summit08.globalvoicesonline.org/
Live stream: http://www.mayvelous.com/?p=402
Twitter channel: https://twitter.com/gvsummit08
Twitter summize: http://summize.com/search?q=gvsummit08
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/event/global-voices-2008-summit
Photos on flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/gvsummit08
I'm now in Bali Island but not for the legend sea shore and historical views. It's the first time that I'm here joining the 3rd Global Inter-media Dialogue(GIMD), a conference backing by two distinction countries, Norway and Indonesia. Deputy Minister Wegard Harsvik shared me the story how this GIMD was founded three years ago: Indonesia was one of three countries(China, Indonesia and Vietnam) Norway conducted talks on human rights with. And eventually after those talks, Indonesia become more democratic and healthy on politics today. They win the friendship of Norway as well. So the two governments set up the conference quickly in month in 2006.
I enjoyed some of the sessions especially those about local issues and community practices, but more happily to see old friends( Ying Chan, Kavi Chongkittavorn, etc.) there. I was surprised with the coverage of this conference because the organizers did invite a broad range of journalists from almost around the world. Amazingly, Cuban journalist, Lic. Magda Resik Aguirre, almost flied around world to attend this conference. The first session I joined was about the minority coverage problem of current media where a guy called Said Ibrahimi came from Afghanistan added me more knowledge about this country on the situations of reporters, as well the problems in that not-far-away country. What should global journalists do with such issues? Be more participatory or be more professional watcher? How to keep ethics in extreme situations?
If we just think about such issues in traditional ways. I can't help because they are actually the all time issues bothering journalism the whole discipline. The common problem to journalism in any countries, of course, its prejudice and ethical correctness. In our session called "Global Happenings" most on China issue, I quickly shared the future journalism could be the best collaborative spectrum between amateur journalism and professional journalism by applying the new technologies especially those web 2.0 ones. The stories in China were actually telling not only the possibility of such blurring between amateur and professional journalism, but also the possibility to approach truth.
About the truth, actually it'll be forever issue in our society but a real challenge to current traditional media. Even we can see some stories from the mainstream media covering minorities timely, it may be easily eclipsed by the limited bandwidth and persistency of the media. However, since everyone of us has more channels today to get information, you can sense how important the future journalism will be with new media technologies. Further saying, if people can provide and well use the throughput of new information channels, they can find more supporting materials to support their co-perceiving the truth. Obviously, the traditional media and journalists should change themselves proactively to fit for the trend.
The last minute before I click "publish" of this post and go to the Bali beach, there's a new notification from Twitter telling me one of my friends Maria Trombly recommended a new article about journalism: The future of journalism. Though there are different perceptions on the future of journalism, the holy thing to me in Sharism age is that you can meet magic of coincidence with new technologies all the time. Isn't it part of future journalism?
Just re-posted to Slideshare, yet to have another video explanation on BigThink.com.
Some pages on Slideshare were changed on color palettes and drawings positions. But seems slideshare is still the best place to share presentations.
It's really bizarre recently after a series of blocking and un-blocking by the censorship system in China(GFW):
- Youtube was blocked after 3/14 tibet riot
- Youtube was released two weeks later
- English BBC News released 25th,Mar.
- Wikipedia English site found unblocked on 1st, April (not April Fool), including https://secure.wikimedia.org
- Wikipedia https://secure.wikimedia.org blocked again two days ago on 6th, April, because Chinese version of Wikipedia can be accessed via this channel
- Flickr picture farm1, farm2 found unblocked yesterday (7th, April)
Etc.
How do you think if the Olympic Torches behave the same?
For different kinds of social application, we can now link them easily by importing/exporting their RSS/Atom feeds. In this way, they can be connected like a pipeline system(Do you still remember the classic fun game "Pipeline"?). Meme with XML format can flow over different pipes to reach different users eventually . There are different kinds of pipeline building blocks in the system including pipes, Tee joints("T"), and elbow joints, etc. Since there are more and more such type of components can be chosen by users, the system becomes more complex than a traditional one-to-many system(like the urban waterworks). The many-to-many relationship between those building blocks can generate non-linear chain effect that maybe possible to amplify little voices into big bang. It's the new type of media, "Social Media".
I'm making an illustration on "Social Media" big picture by putting some typical "Micropipeline" applications on one map to show how information could flow from one person to mass population by routing those pipelines and possibly generate impact. Of course, the value of the original meme should be recognized along the path. Traditional media like "Reuters" is no more than a super node on such a big map. The picture is not finished yet, but I would love to share some draft works to get your comments to improve it.
Someday in near future, I think the connection between different pipeline application won't be just limited to RSS. They can eventually "talk" to each other in more flexible and semantic way. Some new kinds of authentication methodologies like OpenID could be applied in such scenario to ensure that information are authentic enough. And I'm sure XML-based Microformats will play key roles in future picture.
Micropipeline will be more important to some totalitarian countries like China to confront it's censorship system("Great Firewall", or GFW in short). Those seems-redundant building blocks(like Google Reader v.s. Bloglines) just more helpful to build fault tolerant media pipelines to serve people in such countries. E.g. It's found that Soup.io were blocked two weeks ago by GFW in China:
As feared, we've been blocked in China again.
Soup user kunshou has posted some new suggestions on how to circumvent the block (in Chinese). Should these fail, Tor remains your best bet.
This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs for our Chinese users – but as much as we'd like to, we can't just keep changing our IP address every day.Sorry! :( ---[via Censorship evades Soup, has stronger kung-fu]
Bloggers got very angry(Chinese) on such blockage with curses all the time. But they are now becoming smarter to build more complex personal pipelines to avoid of single point failure. They switched to FriendFeed.com as the alternative solution to burn their social feeds as life stream. And their subscribers can response as well to keep their information pipes flowing at normal level. The same trick applys to Yahoo Pipes! when people found Feedburner was blocked in China half year ago. If it's a mouse and cat game, the mouse seems faster and smarter now.
For the draft illustration shown above. I'm actually using Zooomr as the picture link here instead of Flickr since the later one has been blocked in China as well. However, I believe they can't block every picture sharing site around the world to kill themsevlves. So I think it's a great hack that we Chinese can survive in such a Social Media age. We can even change the country in a longer extent for sure.
Labels: Computing, GFW, Sharism, Singularity, Social Media
Just watched the "Super Tuesday" gala via many ways, the Twitter+Google mashup is the coolest one. But after reading Richard Dreyfuss's comments on how to teach our kids on the concep of "Democracy" and how to foster the love , I realized that the real democracy is still a long way to go. That' is how to maximize the enlightment of "collective intelligence" to cover all human brains.
There are still silent majority in our world( even in those so-called democratic countries) to eclipse the value of democracy. But with the longtail of sharing with different kinds of social applications, human's intelligence is possible to be aggregated to upgrade the established democratic system. We can call it Democracy 2.0. We can all see the changes in the new presidency bids 2008 in US, as well in Taiwan and other more wired countries.
Twitter's "Super Tuesday" experiment is cool, yet to improve in two directions: firstly, more inclusive to enable people to express in such a micro-way; secondly, to aggregate such intelligence and merge into the future design of democratic system. Twitter is killer app because it amplifies the sharing mechanism from explicit sharing to subtle sharing. It works just like the membrane to exchange materials in between cells. Sharing of such nano-sized memes can be easily adopted by users to open their mind to connect them with the social voice space. Those with such tendency of sharing can understand the return of sharing step by step. It's a kind of spiritual practice I called "Sharism".
Sharism, then, plays very important role inside people's social tendency. In the presidency racing, people were actually reluctant to vote or express because of their weary of the procedures and results. In democracy 2.0, people were enlightened to share their opinions. And if they found their any opinions are collected and respected, they will be encouraged to participate further steps. So Sharism fosters a continuum of participation of the democratic system, even effective after the voting with its open-end power.
Without considering such spirit in democratic system redesign, I'm afraid, the more problems will emerge in the next decade over the current democratic system around the world. The emergence of second super power won't just be a utopia, but a driven force to change the world. The news about a Chinese former professor set up a new political organization called "Chinese Netizen Party" won't be just April Fool as well.
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