Thanks to Veronica I learned about the “Global Network Initiative” a few hours before it hit my RSS feeds coming from all over the web.  If you haven’t heard about it yet, it is a consortium of universities, NGOs, and industry players (noticeably Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo) that teamed up to suggest a code of practice to protect free speech as the flow of information becomes more global and more complex.  Here is what they wrote on the initiative’s website:

“From the Americas to Europe to the Middle East to Africa and Asia, companies in the information and communications industries face increasing government pressure to comply with domestic laws and policies that require censorship and disclosure of personal information in ways that conflict with internationally recognized human rights laws and standards.

The Initiative is founded upon new Principles on Freedom of Expression and Privacy – supported by specific implementation commitments and a framework for accountability and learning – that provide a systematic approach for companies, NGOs, investors, academics and others to work together in resisting efforts by governments that seek to enlist companies in acts of censorship and surveillance that violate international standards.

For me, this announcement triggered a couple of thoughts.

First, I think this is an interesting example of the centrality of information in social and political processes.  It is also a good example of the complexity of relationships between politics, law, and business on a global scale.  International corporations acting in the field of media and information are caught in a situation where they have to navigate between the global nature of their business; the political, social, cultural, and legal characteristics of their country of origin (US in many cases); and the same characteristics and demands of the localities they are acting in.  This is definitely not a simple task.  There is also little doubt that initiatives such as this one reinforce (Western) principles of freedom of speech and privacy in debates with governments that do not necessarily approve those.

Second, I wonder what is the business interest of commercial entities in this initiative.  Of course there is a chance that they join the initiative for ideological reasons, but I doubt they would do it if such a move would compromise their long-term strategic objectives.  In Israel, in the 1960’s the journalistic community established the Israeli Press Council (HE), which since then focuses on two main issues: (1) guarding freedom of expression and (2) observing ethical behavior of its members.  One of the main reasons behind establishing this voluntary organization was a preemptive strike against the political apparatus making ethical principles into laws.  In other words, the media chose to regulate themselves instead of being regulated from outside.  So, following this story, I wonder if there is a similar sentiment behind the “Global Network Initiative” - the companies volunteer to self-monitor themselves according to a set of values that they decide on (in consultation with other like-minded bodies), before they are forced to adhere to some sort of external regulation whether on the local or the global levels.

What do you think?

I gave a guest lecture today in an intro Comm class I am TAing this semester.  For about a week and a half we have been discussing communication and politics in light of the upcoming US presidential election.   As a result, the 50 minutes class I led, focused on digital inequalities and their political repercussions.  It was a very general talk, yet preparing for it helped me clarifying some of my own ideas and made me see that there is uniqueness in my take on things.

I am posting here a PDF of the presentation.  I am not sure how informative it is without the actual talk, but you can probably get the gist of it.  I removed some of the illustrative-only slides and added some of the more informative ones, so I hope it’ll help.  Also, it has some of the recent statistics about internet penetration in the US and worldwide, which may be useful for some.

You thoughts and comments are welcome!

[link to the PDF]

Here is another digest…

I added new category dedicated to this activity and I figured that having subject titles would help readability ( wonder if those will evolve into something sustainable).  What do you think? I have two specific questions: (1) Isn’t it too long?  Would you prefer shorter, but more frequent posts? (2) As of a few days ago Israel also entered into election cycle, which I assume I will follow - would you be interested in getting snippets of Israeli media (my short translations from Hebrew) on the subject?

Comments and questions are welcome!

Interesting event

“Russia online” - A wiki of a conference organized by Columbia University and Harvard’s Berkman Center on social media in Russia. It is already over, but the website still has some very interesting titles and abstracts, (unfortunately few full papers).

Thoughts

“Lets Use the Global Information Infrastructure to Create a Portal Providing Knowledge for Poverty Alleviation” - from John Daly.

More from John - “Musing: The Global Recession Will Be Very Hard on Science for Development”

“Open Networks” - Some thoughts on what the infrastructure should/could look like from BuddeBlog.  What do you think?

Digital Divide

“HU: Parliament votes for closing digital divide” - More of puzzle to me at this stage as the article does not list any concrete steps they are going to take, most of the listed action items are more of a declarative character… any ideas about what I am missing here?

“‘Broadband for all’ scheme unveiled as usage limits criticised” - Another interesting take on the digital divide as it is faced in UK.

Still in the same region, here are some efforts in the EU community to use technology for the benefit of visually impaired people - “Enabling the blind to find their way”

Economic crisis and MICT

Continuing a “thread” I’ve started with bits of information about the current financial crisis and its potential relationships to MICT, here are a number of interesting items.  “The financial crisis and the mobile device industry” - making similar point to my earlier post.  “Financial Crisis the effects on European Communications” - a short analysis making a similar point as before, but this time for Europe, plus some financial repercussions for the telecos.  A slightly different take on things from the same source - “Global financial crisis It’s not such bad news for unsophisticated economies” - which keeps me thinking about the role of the “global” village in the “global” aspect of the current crisis, or in other words if we can extand the unsophisticated also to telecommunication markets/infrastructure.

Here is another interesting analytical piece on the subject - “Is The Economic Crisis Affecting European Startups At All?”

Interesting reports, numbers, and visualization

New PEW report “Networked families” - some interesting trends and motivations in technology ownership by US families.  Speaking of which, here is an item about an interesting attempt to capture the traditional TV viewing experience in the online world - “CBS creates ’social viewing rooms’ for online programming“.  Here is also a summary of the PEW report on the ITU website.

More mobile penetration trends - “Turkey - Annual Growth at Lowest Ever Level“.  “Nigeria has achieved 80% phone penetration” but at the same time “Nigerian ICT companies fail to conquer rural connectivity market“.  Also on Africa - “Portugal Telecom Reports 12.1 mil. African Subscribers by End-Q2“.

“Telecoms growth in Asia set to continue” - snippets from another BuddieComm report.

“Booming telecoms in Russia, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine” - some trends and a few numbers from that region.  And here is another region we don’t hear about a lot - “Australian Broadband Market Statistics” - not as much numbers in the post (they have to sell their reports after all), but some interesting information.

Also booming is the online advertising in the US - “US: IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report Shows First Half of ”08 Up 15.2% From Same Period ”07”

“World Map of Top Social Networks” - I think the title talks for itself.

“Look at the Size of U.S. Nukes, and Other Things Too” - Another map-based visualization of some international statistics.

Thanks to John Daly’s post, here is an interesting interactive map of the debate over the current financial crisis.  I need to spend more time looking at this tool as it seems really interesting.  And speaking about interesting textual analysis, here is another one from “Flowing Data” blog - a lexical analysis of the presidential debates in the US.  And here is a good graphical comparison of the S&P index behavior in the current and some previous crises (NY Times).  Finally, and I actually think I’ve metnioned it before, NY Times has launched a website with some really intersting visualizations.

Another post from John Daly’s blog summarizes - “Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries” - it looks to me that the original report should be very interesting.

MICT regulation

“Broadcasters lash out in fear over FCC support of white space” - The debate surrounding the white space issue in the US seems to become really interesting.  If you have not heard about “white space”, here are a couple of popular explanations:

Here is a response of National Association of Broadcasters to that initiative.  And more buzz in the blogosphere - “FCC under fire for Google-backed spectrum release plan”

MICT controversies

I wrote in the past about the ongoing attempts to filter internet in Israel.  Here are some recent news from another part of the world - “Australia trials Internet filtering - what happened to personal choice?”

Technology and US election

“Ad Wars” - This is not exactly a blog, but a NY Times page dedicated to the US presidential campaign ad-wars.  Pretty interesting - thank you Laura for sharing this!  More  election related stuff - “Rivals’ Visions Differ on Unleashing Innovation“.

Also, in the last “Reading blogs” I posted a link to an item about Barak Obama advertising in computer games.  Here is another item on the same subject, which I find fascinating - “Barack Obama presidential campaign comes to Xbox 360”

Also related to the elction, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, has recently hit the headlines with his endorcement of Barak Obama and speculation about whether or not he will (or wants to) be the first US CTO - “Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt throws support behind Barack Obama“, “Schmidt for Obama“, and “Google CEO Wants to Be ‘President’ Obama’s Tech Chief?“.  I find this story pretty interesting.  Also intersting is the fact that “access to the internet” is again mentioned as one of the pivots (if not the pivot) of the entire debate.  And here is an opportunity for you to voice your opinion regardng who would make a better CTO for the US.

“The Election That Has the Whole World Blogging” - a WP article about grassroots coverage and analysis of the US election.

Talking about buzz, there has been a lot of it regarding a customized video in support of Barak Obama produced by moveon.org.  Here is a post from Statistical Modeling blog showing what are the actual chances of your individual vote to be decisive for the election, provided the state you are voting in.

OLPC

“One Laptop features on stamps” - Nice… but apparently this is an old news.

Simply cool stuff!

This is slightly futuristic, but cool! - “Robotic ants building homes on Mars?”

NY Times has a photostream of people and their avatars - check it out!

“How To Photograph an Atomic Bomb” - some really amazing images.

If this is not your first time reading my posts, you know that a while ago I started posting digests of interesting things i spot while reading (primarily) blogs and some other resources.  Given my interest in telecom policy with a particular focus on developing countries, it is not surprising that one of the blogs on my RSS feeds is called “IT News Africa“.  I started following it a few months ago as I thought it brings interesting and relevant information.  However, the more I follow this blog, the more doubts I start having about its credibility.

My main problem with this source is that it never links back to its sources.  Many times it looks pretty clear that the article is re-posted from elsewhere, which is a common practice, but there is no link back.  Sometimes they would even mention the source (like Business Africa Daily, but would still provide no link to the original.  Sometimes the post would be signed by ITnewsAfrica.com Reporter, but if you check out the about page, it does not have any reporter on staff, which raises questions.  In fact, I even tried contacting them once, asking for the source of one of their items, but I have never heard back.

The “about” page is also weird.  It has a very concise description of the project, which boils down to the fact that they syndicate their content across various platforms, and a list of names with titles.  There are no bios and no other information about the people behind the project, which does not add at least to my level of trust.

I think I’ve reach a point where I feel I should finish that semi “trial period” with this website and I am left with a few thoughts and concerns.  On the one hand, I wonder how people judge the trustfulness of individual blogs.  To what extent people are concerned with crediblity of information they encounter online.  Specifically, how do they establish what blogs to trust and to what extend?  On the other hand, I wonder if there are really good information sources about telecom news from the African region and other parts of the world that are less covered by the mainstram media in the US.  Any ideas?

Now, after circulating the local press for about a month, it made to the New York Times - Ithaca is trying to be the first US site to have Pod-Cars. Pod-Cars, or Personal Rapid Transit, are little wagons that can carry 2-8 people to a destination of their choice, as long as it is on the route of monorails these cars are running on.  Kind of a personalized little light train that also uses clean energy.

The initiative has generated a lot of positive buzz.  Being a liberal and environmentally conscious hub, the impression i am getting from the media (and some of my Facebook contacts) is that people are eager to have little white trans running around Ithaca.  After all it is cleaner than the cars, it is safer, particularly for those nights when the students are going out and drink, and it is supposedly faster than a personal car.

Sounds great… but somehow i have doubts.  Imagining a network of elevated monorails running all around Ithaca, across its gorges and waterfalls, really blocks my excitement with the environmental and safety benefits.  I do wonder if Ithaca with its rush-minutes (a much shorter version of rush-hours) and maximum 60K people (including students) needs such a public transportation system that will tremendously change one of its main assets, the looks?  What do you think?