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The revolution was televised, you were just watching the wrong channel.

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One of the reasons I decided to post about this was this article on TechCrunch: The #Tunisian Revolution Wasn’t Televized, But You Could Follow It On Twitter

The first tweet that show’s up on the page is really the point behind this post.

The revolution was televised, you were just watching the wrong channel.

There is a lot to say about the role Social Media played in this, I do think that a lot of people seem to be missing the point on what exactly Social Media can and does do in shaping events. Think back to the Iran Elections and how the lack of context really sent many main stream media organisations down the wrong path on how to cover an event using stories from social networks. If my memory serves me correctly, at one point during the IranElections we had over 250,000 tweets using the tag #iranelections – I wonder how many tweets came out about #sidibouzid?

In Tunisia, it was not about mobilising people through Social Media, it was about broadcasting what was going on to those who chose to listen. Without the tweets, facebook posts or YouTube videos we would not have known about the initial protests… or would we? Only once mainstream media picks up on a story and decides what importance it should have, do people really notice what is going on (Iran Elecations case in point). Tunisia has been developing for the past 29 days – but only now do people seem to really notice it, once they’ve seen the news on their local television station. People still turn to mainstream media to get their information. The challenge is in what mainstream media would consider to be important news… The techcrunch article has a couple of other good tweets discussing what other media organisations in the US were talking about during the events earlier in Tunisia.

Evgeny Morozov has a great post on the this topic and it is well worth a read.

If you only found out about the events in Tunisa in the past 24hours, perhaps its time for you reconsider who you get your news from? A good start would be to check out the amazing coverage our web team has been working on since the events started almost a month ago over here.

And if you dont want to miss the next big story because your twitter trends didn’t tell you about it, you may want to set Al Jazeera as your homepage, or follow us on twitter or follow us on facebook.

Providing Context: The role of Social Media in Iran

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This post is pretty late, but here is one of the interviews I had on Al Jazeera English discussing the role of social media in Iran.

One of the key points I bring up in my interview is the importance of placing the information in context. Towards the end of the mass protests, the number of twitter accounts that we were monitoring dropped from 60 to around 6 (accounts we able to verify). Whilst the information coming out was amazing to show the government clamp down on protests, it is an incredible stretch to say that the information was a reflection of sentiment for the entire population of Iran (over 65million people).

There are two important events that we need to look at.
1) The actual outcome of the election. Did Ahmadinejad win? Do the majority of Iranians feel the election results were incorrect? Its important to note that the protestors are not anti regime, they want reform, but reform within the current system.
2) The protests and the government clamp down on protestors. This is a focus on Mausavi supporters, who felt the results were incorrect. This what is generating the bulk of the discussions online.
Whilst these two events are related, the information that was coming out online is specific to the second event. Once the government started clamping down on the protestors, social media played a critical role in getting the information out.

It is important to understand who are the ones that are sending out the information, what are their backgrounds, where do they come from etc. Harvard provides an excellent analysis on the Persian Blogosphere – the reformists do have a much larger share of the online voice than the conservative voices. There is also a very big percentage of Iranians living outside of Iran who are online, blogging about situation. Ahmadinejad supporters are from the poorer, less connected section of Iran. As such a big percentage of them do not have any access to the internet at all. Their voices are not heard over social media, as such we are only getting one side of the story.

Where social media wins, is the ability to report on the what and when. As events unfold, the immediacy of new technologies allows people on the ground the opportunity to get their voices out. In the case of Iran, it was used very effectively to show the government clamp down on protestors.

Where social media fails, is its inability to provide context and answer the why behind each event. It also does not provide a true representation of the entire population, as the majority of the voices online reflect a minority of the population. The majority of the online population in Iran come from a wealthy, educated background and from the big cities such as Tehran (Mausavi supporters). This is contrasted with the poorer, not connected Ahmadinejad supporters, who are based in the smaller towns and rural areas. When we are dealing with developing countries, we often forget that the majority of the population have no access to simple communication tools, let alone social sites.

A colleague of mine, Mohamed Nanabhay, brought up an interesting point regarding the South African elections earlier in the year. If you were to look at the twittersphere or blogosphere prior to and on the actual election day, you would think no one had voted for the ANC. However the ANC holds popular support amongst the majority of South Africans, the majority of whom are not online.

All of this can be summed up in a tweet that I read recently, it was a quote from Ferial Haffajee on two South Africas: “You have one South Africa tweeting and the other South Africa not eating”

This is the reality of the world we live in. Not everyone is connected. There is a need for us to dig deeper if we truly want to understand the nature of events.

If you want to read up in more detail on the actual role of twitter in Iran, Gaurav Mishra provides a great analysis on the role of twitter. His post also has an extensive list of links to other blogs who have discussed the same issue.

Al Jazeera New Media….

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Following on from my last post- I was asked to go on air again to talk about our new interactive map (second appearence on AlJazeera)… Incase you’ve missed it, our new services are proving to be a fantastic tool in covering the war on Gaza. If you don’t believe me check out what WIRED and NPR had to say….

Getting tweets from the war zone is so 2008. The latest social media advance combines tools like Twitter, text messaging, and online mapping to gather up first-hand reports, straight from Gaza.

Oh and the CEO of twitter, EV,  sent out a message referring to our Gaza Twitter Stream….

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Getting reviews online is always comforting- however the circumstances under which we rolled out these services aren’t. Lets hope and pray that the killing comes to an end and crisis reporting will no longer be needed…

Here is my interview on AJ:

Al Jazeera – Mapping out the Gaza conflict

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After a few late nights at the office we have finally launched our interactive map for the situation in Gaza. The folks over at Ushahidi have been fantastic in allowing us to use their crowd sourcing platform for this project…. Our SMS system was set up and is powered by the guys at souktel (thanks to @Katrinskaya from MobileActive for putting us in touch with souktel)

The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Our goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.

War on Gaza

As updates come in on the situation in Gaza, we update the map with the incident. People can have a look at the timeline and map to get a idea of how the entire event has played out from the beginning. The great thing about this platform is the “crowd sourcing” part… People in Gaza and around the world can submit reports through to the site in 4 ways:

1) Report an incident directly at: http://labs.aljazeera.net/warongaza

2) via SMS (text message) – If you’re in Palestine and on the Jawwal network, you can text in your report to the number: 37191

or if you’re anywhere else in the world you can send a text to: +45609910303

All messages need to start with the word GAZA so that we can track it… (eg: GAZA 5 aid trucks just arrived at the Rafa crossing)

3) If you’re on twitter*, you can submit a report by simply replying to our official AlJazeera account with your report @AJGaza (eg: @AJGaza airstrike just resumed in Khan Yunus)…

*If you still dont know what twitter is head over to CommonCraft and watch the great video that explains it

4) If you have images or video, you can email them through to us at yourviews@aljazeera.net or upload them here.

I do wish the war ends soon so we dont have to actually test the platform out…. With the way its currently looking the end is not in sight, so lets just hope we can provide a great resource of information for the war.

Big ups to the other guys in our New Media team who worked through the nights to get this up…. Its amazing what one tweet can do (got in touch with @whiteafrican via twitter for this)

You can read more about the deployment on the Ushahidi Blog

Collaborative Education

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Over the past few months I’ve been having discussions with a couple of people in the education field. The concept of “open education” came up and seemed to be great idea that could allow institutions, teachers, pupils and the community to share and start discussing their thoughts & challenges. The concept was to allow schools to use online tools (possible wiki concept) as a means to start sharing their syllabi and best practices. The natural challenge is to first get a school to buy into the concept… I was successful in convincing two principals in South Africa to buy into it, unfortunately my trip to SA came to end prior to having a chance to actually implement the idea. I’ve now got some friends on board, hopefully they can take it over and run with it… I’m sure this is already happening elsewhere in the world- need to do some serious research to find success cases…

A friend forwarded this link through to me, the “Social Media Classroom” – I haven’t had a chance to go through it in much detail, but the concept is fantastic. Seems like something def. worth having a play around with… Technology is always just a tool for us, and if used correctly it can really bring about constructive change.

The Social Media Classroom (we’ll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos.

Who Will Rule the New Internet?

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Came across this article on the TIME website, its about “Who Will Rule the New Internet?”

Its def. worth a read….

According to Josh Quittner, Apple, Google & Facebook are the technology standard-bearers of todays age. Google- with its “open” web, Facebook- with its huge user base and “walled” off approach & Apple- with the highly controlled “experience.”

The article goes on to explain the success & strategies of three companies, one of the interesting points he raises with regards to Googles “Open” Web strategy VS Facebook is:

Social networks are a threat to that business; users tend to stay within their network and communicate among themselves or simply fool around with apps. When Facebook’s users are playing Scrabulous or tagging photos, for example, they’re not using Google. Indeed, they’re more likely to discover new things via friends or in-network applications such as iLike, a service that matches your friends’ musical tastes to your own.

The flaw in this theory is, facebook may be the biggest thing today, what happens when users get bored and start moving on to the next big site? It was MySpace yesterday, today its Facebook, tomorrow its going to be twitter? Or a microblogging site similar to it? The life cycle on a specific social networking site is still to be decided. Users are like sheep, and who is to say next year we wont see a mass migration to something completely new that has not even been developed yet?

According to Josh, Apple doesnt really care who wins the online war- as long as we use an Apple device to access the content. He quotes Matt Murphy (a venture capitalist) as saying:

He claims that the iPhone will “absolutely be the driver of the post-PC world.” Murphy points out that the kit needed by developers to build iPhone apps has been downloaded more than 200,000 times, and he estimates that about 1,000 applications will be available to consumers when the iPhone-apps store launches with the phone. “If you look at so many of the constraints that have held back the mobile ecosystem, Apple basically takes all of those away and provides an open platform, a great device and a user base that’s rabid for these new kinds of applications,” he says.

The best part of this article, is that Josh did not forget to mention Android. Googles open mobile platform that is due to hit the market place later this year. Andy Rubin, Googles Director of mobile platforms says:

Developers have so far written more than 1,800 applications, which could be distributed on a Google site arranged according to popularity, as YouTube is. “There’s some pretty innovative stuff there,” Rubin explains. “This is merging the handset and the Web and coming up with something completely new.

We’re in for an exciting second half of the year, with the iPhone 2 coming out in a couple of days & Android later in the year, its going to be very interesting to see which company will take the market by storm. Two companies, with very different go-to-market strategies. The problem Google may have, will be the actual device Android is running on… They have already signed deals with many companies (Moto, LG, HTC etc.), but if these companies are not able to provide a compelling UI like the iPhone, this would most likely see users moving towards the iPhone.

Nokia are also due to launch the N96 later this year, i’m sure Nokia will sell the most handsets, but their market share will be sure to take a bit of a knock with some serious competition from Android & Apple. For myself, this is the first year that is a seriously tough decision on which handset to buy? Will Nokia be able to come up with a device that provides a compelling user experience like what we have seen so far from Android and Apple? I doubt it. Regardless of who wins, its great to finally have some quality devices coming to market.

I suppose Google still has a 1 up on Apple & everyone else in the market- anyone who lands up buying an iPhone/Nokia will in the end, still be using Google/Youtube on their handset.

As for the battle of the internet, if Google actually own the platform on which you’re accessing facebook or the next big thing on your mobile, they dont have much to be worried out. At least in the short term…

Lets wait and see how this plays out in the coming months….

Opera Mobile 9.5- the new look mobile web….

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Opera have just announced the latest version in their mobile browser, Opera Mobile 9.5. They have a host of new features in this release.

The one that stands out most for me is the ability to incorporate Flash Lite 3- (see previous post here)….the sad thing from their press release is that “OEM, Operators will have the capability to incorporate Flash Lite 3…” which means that the telco/handset guys still have control over your functionality, if they chose not to include this feature then it just really your bad luck…

If only they had it as a standard feature in their free browsers it could really provide a big shift and opportunity for media companies/content owners to develop compelling products for their browser….

Other neat features are: the ability to SMS bookmarks to friends, MMS/Email images directly from sites that you like by just selecting the image, and the widgets.

Features such these do have the potential to provide a good enough web experience on mobile. Personally I think Opera need to get out of the OEM/Telco mindsets and start opening up their offering directly to consumers. Give the browser away for free- build an ad supported model and work on a rev share with advertisers/media companies. I am sure they will see much greater usage by end-users of the product and it could then really be a big move to providing a true “Web” experience on mobile….

(As much as it pains to me say this- the Safari experience on my iPhone still seems to be much smoother. From the Video Demo- Opera seems to have a “clunky” UI)

Mobile Video Search – vTap

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Earlier this year I met a company called Veveo at the 3GSM in Barcelona. They had what was one of the most interesting applications on show. A search engine, for your mobile device, that crawls the Internet for videos (in any format) and converts them to a format that your handset can view. Sounds simple enough….

However what made this really fantastic was that they were able to cut down the key strokes needed on a handset to search for content… They did this by coming up with a system that searchers based on letters instead of words… so from the second you start typing the search begins, which means you should be able to find your video much quicker!

What takes it to the next level is that you don’t have to actually type the full word to find your video, you can search via your normal numeric keypad.

The best way to explain this is for example: If I wanted to find a videos on a “cats”, to type the word “cats” on my Nokia n95 handset would involve 10 keytrokes (three strokes on the number “2″, five strokes on the number “7″ etc.) With vTap, instead of having to type the full word, I can simple just put in the numbers: “2287″ (which is where I would find the letters). The system will automatically associate the numbers with the word “cats” and then start searching the web for all the videos that are tagged “cats”

That’s why we at Veveo™ created vTap—the quick and easy Web video solution that lets you search, browse and pinpoint the exact Web video you’re looking for—from sources all over the Internet—and play it on any supported device! With vTap’s unique character-based incremental search—where results are returned with every character entered—you can perform searches using just a few characters instead of whole keywords. It’s so easy, you’ll think it’s reading your mind.

don’t believe me? try it out for yourself!

You can test out vTap here:

http://vtap.com/

Flash Video on Mobile… now thats awesome!

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Adobe’s Flash Lite 3 will have video support on mobile devices. This is another great move towards a converged experience of web and mobile.

Imagine the possibilities with this! Almost all the major social network sites these days have some sort of flash video running on it. YouTube will be easily accessible on handsets, which is fantastic. The YouTube mobile version is currently streaming video through to you in RealMedia [on my N95]. Due to YouTube having to convert the videos to a compatible format they have only made a selection of their content available on http://m.youtube.com site [at least for now]. With flash support for video, this would in theory mean that we could now browse and access all the content on YouTube, as you would on your desktop! Very sweet indeed!

Al Ramadan, senior VP for mobile at Adobe, said: “With Flash Lite 3 and its support for video, we’ve passed a major milestone in bringing a desktop experience to mobile and transforming the wireless industry.”

What is quite interesting about this, is that the mobile industry have always been saying that one of the key factors that will drive mobile tv usage would be the access of short form content. With flash now serving video to mobile devices this opens up the entire market to short form content.

NTT DoCoMo & Nokia have both commited to to embedding Flash 3 Lite on their devices & Adobe expect to have a billion handsets with flash-enabled devices by 2010.

Now I just need to get myself a version of the software so I can play around with it!

Googles Mobile Ambitions

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Last week we saw an announcement from Google that they had purchased the mobile social networking platform Zingku. Everyone seems to be guessing as to what exactly it is that Google has up its sleeve in the mobile space. One thing is for sure though, they are serious about getting into mobile. If the news coming out over the past few months is anything to go by, i’m sure the Google mobile offering will be one to revolutionalise the mobile world (no, not like how the iPhone promised to do so).

Why do I say this? Well as Steve Jobs said in his speech at Standford “You can not connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward”. So lets start connecting the dots….

First things first, lets look at all the things that people in the industry seem to complain about as to what is holding the mobile revolution back:

1. Operators – cant live with them, cant live without them. They control your access to information. “Walled Gardens”, Data charges and the like are really holding people back from utilising all the cool things that can be done on your mobile phone.

2. Discovery- We have heard this many times, if people can not find your content in an easy way- you’re not going to be successful. Remember the 3 click rule? Anything more than 3 clicks to get to what you’re looking for on a mobile device and you have lost your consumer. Its all about top of the deck status

3. Data Charges- linked to point 1. but this is pretty annoying. I for one do not use my GPRS/3G connection in Qatar for serious mobile browsing because its way too expensive. Back in South Africa though, where I was paying much less I was quite an active user.

4. Not enough compelling content out there- Many companies have entered the market, made their money and left. We saw content aggregators doing well for a while, but it seems that power is now shifting to a branded mobile strategy. Where brands are controlling their own mobile portals and going direct to consumers.

5. Cost of content- Users are very willing to use content if its free of charge. Having to to pay both for content & data is just not on.

6. Lack of successful integration of a Web 2.0 type strategy extended to mobile-With the new wave of web 2.0, I have not seen any successful integration of web 2.0 type service on mobile. We have seen MySpace announcing a new application under development, this could be interesting.

Alright those are all the limitations that I can think of now of the top of my head, if I think of anything else I’ll update the list or feel free to add to the list.

Now lets start connecting the dots and see how Google are dealing with the above limitations…

1. Rumours are going around about Google looking into getting the 700mhz spectrum both in the US & UK. Fantastic idea- If the telco’s are going to be a barrier to market, who needs them? We will just create our own network. Assuming the stories are true- this is a great move. Don’t forget Wifi, however to rely only on Wifi (like the iPhone in the UK) is not the best of strategies.

2. Google are developing something. Is it a new mobile platform to be loaded on existing devices or is it the gPhone? Either way, this is a great way to deal with discovery of your services. With a brand as big as Google, this makes sense. Google have also been working on their mobile search service, to help with the content discovery.

3. Again, linked back to point number 1. Needless to say if Google have their own network and own handset the sky is the limit as to the possibilities. Another interesting thing is the launch of AdSense for mobile recently by google and the filing of a patent for mobile advertising. This could lead to subsidised costs for end user.

4. Google have been working hard at getting their mobile search functionality going. This added to the mobile version of YouTube that will be coming out. Will really help users in getting & finding some compelling content.

5. With the launch of AdSense for mobile & Google filing a patent for mobile advertising. This could pave the way for free content in exchange for advertising. Maybe or maybe not?

6. Lastly we have just seen Google acquiring Zingku, the new mobile social network platform. Zingku is supposed to allow users to “zing” content between their handsets and PC’s. Built around community this could be a good extension of the web 2.0 model of community to a mobile device. Google after all to have a pretty big community to build on.

That all said and done, if you connect all of these dots together its pretty clear that Google are looking at coming to market with something that should shake up the entire industry. I’m sure in the coming weeks and months we will see many more announcements coming out of Google. Now all we have to do is wait in anticipation to see the final image these dots will reveal once completely joined and coloured in.