Neal's Notes

One of the sparks of the Egyptian revolution, Google marketing manager Wael Ghonim, has exemplified how social media has played a pivotal role in the ongoing protests against despotic rule in North Africa and the Middle East.

As you’re probably aware by now, Ghonim’s Facebook page helped gather momentum in fomenting popular dissent against former President Hosni Mubarak. Ghonim called it ‘Revolution 2.0.’

In reviewing numerous articles, blogs, and listening/watching radio and TV reports, a few really struck home. Evgeny Morozov, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, succinctly summed it up in the Wall Street Journal.

Morozov said that while it’s important to acknowledge the role that the Internet played in Egypt, don’t forget that the protesters “were blessed with a government that didn’t know a tweet from a poke – as illustrated, most of all, perhaps, by its desperate (and belated) gambit in temporarily shutting off the county’s access to the outside world.”

But Morozov also added a caveat, stating that while it was Mubarak’s ignorance of the Internet that helped bring him down, other regional dictators are already playing catch up and quickly reviewing the playbook on how to effectively roll out online propaganda.

In Bahrain, for instance, Twitter was inundated with government propaganda in a clumsy attempt to make it a less credible information source about the protests. Sudan’s President Oman Al-Bashir (who is the first sitting head of state indicted by the International Criminal Court in the Hague on counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for allegedly orchestrating a campaign of murder, torture, rape and forced expulsions in Darfur) plans to provide more electricity countrywide so his supporters can wax eloquent for him on Facebook.

Seemingly overnight, social media has become an influential trigger of these regional revolts. Beyza Unal, a doctoral student at Old Dominion University, recently wrote that “today’s social media supports an explicit ideology that backs up openness and transparency in state formalization, facilitating a higher standing – a political discourse on its own that can change the course of events.”

Jeff Jarvis pens Buzzmachine.com, which focuses on media and news. He’s an associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Jarvis recently blogged that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are fast becoming the Gutenberg press of the Middle East because they provide similar tools that empower people to speak, share and gather.

“The revolutionaries of the Middle East use-indeed, depend upon- these social tools and the net. That is the reason why we must protect them, for by doing so we protect the public and its freedoms…when Mubarak shuts down the Internet, they violate the human rights of their citizens as much as if they burned the products of Gutenberg’s press.”

How these transformative protests will eventually play out is still unknown. But the power of the online connection demonstrates that Revolution 2.0 has opened up a Pandora’s Box of freedom of expression throughout much of the Arab world that will hopefully take root and flourish.

Pity the poor phone book. In today’s digital world, they are quickly becoming tomorrow’s dinosaurs. Every now and then I’ll pick one up when searching for a local vendor, but by and large, they tend to pile up and collect dust in our pantry and other assorted kitchen cabinets and drawers.

In fact, a Washington, DC firm, Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, recently queried 1,100 adults nationwide and asked these probing questions:

• What is your primary source to find a phone number when you need one?
• Do you find the phone book to be the most convenient source for finding phone numbers, or not?
• When was the last time you used the phone book to find a phone number?
• When a new phone book arrives, which one of the following best describes your response?
• In thinking about how much you use the phone book, in five years do you expect you will be using the phone book much more than you do now; much less than you do now; about the same; or not all?
• Do the advertisements in your local phone book have any influence on the purchasing decision you make, or not?

Some interesting snippets from the poll:

• 3 out of 4 Americans rely on Internet and cell phones for finding phone numbers over the phone book.
• Only 3 percent of Americans report they have used the phone book in the last week.
• Nearly 8 out of 10 people 18-29 years old have no use for the phone book.
• Nearly 25 percent of Americans toss out their phone books immediately; one-third of Americans under age 45 throw away their phone books when delivered to their door.
• Almost 50 percent of respondents expect to use their book either much less or not at all in five years.

Michael Koretzky reported in MoneyTalksNews that last October, the Seattle City Council passed an ordinance creating an “Opt-Out System” so residents can stop receiving the Yellow Pages – which can sometimes arrive on their doorstep from multiple publishers per year.

“Based on information supplied by some of the yellow pages publishers, Seattle Public Utilities estimates nearly 2 million yellow pages phone books are dropped off in Seattle every year, costing approximately $350,000 to recycle,” the city declared in a press release.

Koretzky added that the ordinance also requires Yellow Pages publishers to pay a “recovery fee” of 14 cents per book to help pay for that recycling.

“This being America, the entire thing will end up in court – the Yellow Pages sued the city last month.”

Seems like only the lawyers will come out ahead in Seattle – the phone book is basically on life support and will soon be as relevant today as the telegraph.

So how does 2011 portend for social media? I’ve been slogging through a number of articles, studies, blogs, yada, yada, yada. Lot of drivel, some good stuff and some really interesting prognostications from folks in the industry who are well-respected for their ruminations.

A few of these trends look quite intriguing:

Ravi Lichtenberg, founder of Ustrategy, predicts that social media will be ‘supersized,’ that is, we’ll see an increase of service providers throwing together social networks, video, mobile, cloud services and analytics.

“Telecom companies will offer video tools for businesses and consumers with greater bandwidth, storage and syndication; learning management systems integrators will add engagement, archiving, training and collaboration tools,” said Lichtenberg.  “We’ll also see more easy-to-use community platforms and applications that will help people manage relationships – some of these may include Loopa, Diaspora and Path.”

“People today look for more personalized private information where we make a social contract around a topic or context that is beyond the reach of search engine results and Facebook crowds,” said Dave Blakely, director of technology strategy at IDEO.

Thought-leader Tom Foremski said for consumers “this means the ability to create smaller, more intimate, context-specific communities; for companies it’s the ability to facilitate a custom-branded experience on their online properties not possible now on Facebook.”

WordPress-based websites will also become more ubiquitous. It’s an open-source application and it’s easier for websites to do SEO for pennies or free with a few plug-ins – this can add more capabilities to software applications.

Stephanie Schwab, who blogs frequently on social media topics, added that social gaming will become huge.  FarmVille is fast becoming a testing ground for brand integration – to wit – you can now see promotions from Farmer’s Insurance and McDonald’s, among others and Schwab says that “in the coming year we’ll see more, as well as deeper, brand integrations with existing gaming platforms as more brands create their own gaming structures for consumer advancement into preferred status, coupons or freebies.”

Just the tip of the iceberg here, to use a hackneyed cliché. Should be an interesting year!

Back in August I did a post on how members of Congress are using Twitter. Two of the key sources I used were Feng Chi and Nathan Yang from the University of Toronto who released a study back then called, “Twitter in Congress: Outreach vs. Transparency.”

Feng and Nathan recently contacted me and indicated they’re releasing a new study, “Twitter Adoption in Congress,” currently undergoing its second round of reviews at the prestigious Review of Economics .

In brief, this second study takes a close look at the early adoption of Twitter in the 111th House of Representatives. The main objective was to determine “whether successes of past adopters have the tendency to speed up Twitter adoption, where past success is defined as the average followers per Tweet – a common measure of ‘Twitter success’ –among all prior adopters.”

Feng and Nathan reported that their data indicates that accelerated adoption can be associated with favorable past outcomes: increasing the average number of followers per Tweet among past adopters by a standard deviation (eight followers per Tweet) accelerates adoption time by about 112 days.

Other interesting findings:

• The acceleration effect is dampened if the adopter in question is already a Facebook user, or precedes a large number of past adopters.

• Politicians who adopt soon after past successes are themselves successful at attaining followers/Tweets.

• Positive surprises generate an effect analogous to the first bullet point.

• Politicians seem to respond more strongly to recent information about past successes rather than stale information about past successes (no surprise here).

• Politicians don’t react differently to past successes of past adopters within/outside their home state, nor do they react differently to past successes of past adopters inside/outside their party affiliation. Feng and Nathan did add, however, that politicians benefit more from adopting soon after past successes within their home state, rather than past successes outside their home state, suggesting some sort of geographical advantage.

And still somewhat surprising, when I did my August post, Tweet Congress reported that a little over 200 members of Congress are using Twitter. Those figures have grown a bit but there are still quite a few folks on the Hill that have yet to avail themselves of basic social media tools such as Twitter, which I still find perplexing. Thoughts?

Are your kids spending hours upon hours playing World of Warcraft and other video games to the point where you’ve noticed disturbing behavioral patterns? No joke – these could be signs and symptoms of what’s called Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD).

In fact, a program called reStart, co-founded by Cosette Rae and Hilarie Cash, was recently launched. The 45-day program is held at the Heavensfield Retreat Center in Fall City, WA, not far from Redmond (where Microsoft is located).

Some signs of computer/Internet/gaming addiction that reStart identified (3-4 yes responses suggest abuse; 5 or more suggest addiction) include:

• Increasing amounts of time spent on computer/Internet activities

• Failed attempts to control behavior

• Heightened sense of euphoria while involved in computer/Internet activities

• Craving more time on the computer and Internet

• Neglecting friends and family

• Feeling restless when not engaged in the activity

• Being dishonest with others

• Computer use interfering with job/school performance

• Feeling guilty, ashamed, anxious or depressed as a result of behavior

• Changes in sleep patterns

• Physical changes such as weight gain or loss, backaches, headaches, carpal tunnel syndrome

• Withdrawing from other pleasurable activities

While IAD is not currently included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), we probably all know someone either directly or indirectly who has been sucked in to playing video games incessantly, or spends way too much time online to the detriment of ignoring real-world obligations/social responsibilities.

Dr. Cash noted that both China and South Korea have already designated IAD as a significant problem and have developed multiple treatment programs.

“The United States, by contrast,” says Dr. Cash, “has been slower to recognize and respond to the problem but now is beginning to take some proactive steps.”

The reStart program isn’t cheap – there’s an initial $200 application fee; an $800 2-day screen interview fee and the 45-day retreat center day costs $17,500 ($322 per day).

The motives are noble – “provide a family-style retreat where its participants can have an Internet and video-game-free therapeutic experience.”

But unlike drug and alcohol addiction, completely abstaining/avoiding the Internet post-treatment would be near impossible because of the ubiquity of the web. Hopefully programs like reStart will at least provide a roadmap for overcoming cyber addiction.

Thought I’d borrow some of the verbiage for the aforementioned headline from Bob Dylan’s iconic third studio album, released in 1964. I recently did a story for IEEE Computer on how the increasing practice of networking peering is changing Internet traffic patterns.

A few key points/thoughts:

Internet traffic has historically flowed through network service providers’ backbone networks to large networks – this is all changing, primarily because of peering – when networks directly connect to each other instead of paying upstream providers to carry and route their traffic.

Some other contributing factors – huge Internet portals (known as hypergiants) that carry large amounts of traffic; the growth of cloud computing; social networking; and wireless Internet access. And there are additional issues too – the growth of online video; a rise in ad-supported Internet content and the proliferation of exchange points (connections through which Internet service providers communicate data directly with one another).

In addition, peer-to-peer (P2P) communications are becoming a smaller portion of overall Internet traffic.

Right now, 30 large companies, some of which include Facebook, Google and Microsoft, generate about 30 percent of all Internet traffic. A Network Box analysis reported that five companies have also used much of the Internet’s bandwidth the past two years – YouTube (owned by Google), 10.2 percent; Facebook, 5 percent; Windows Update, 3.2 percent; Yahoo’s image server, 2.9 percent; and Google, 2.5 percent.

Arbor Networks did a study that analyzed global Internet traffic data collected by 110 regional networks, content providers, cable operators, and international transit backbone networks between July 2007 and July 2009. A key finding: the top 150 content companies generated 26 percent of all Internet traffic in July 2007; that figure doubled to 52 percent two years later.

Mobile data usage is also becoming a factor – Cisco reports that this traffic has been doubling annually for the past five years, faster than any other type of Internet traffic. By 2014, it will represent about 7.4 percent of all Internet traffic. Smart phones, tablet computers, and laptops with mobile broadband access are driving the migration from fixed to mobile. And this proliferation of new devices increases the number of mobile connections and contributes to Internet traffic growth.

So where’s it all heading? We’re seeing more direct traffic exchanges via peering and we’re also experiencing an aggregation of traffic in certain areas. And overall, as more devices of different types access the Internet and different types of global networks, the networks will need greater intelligence to handle, provide security for, and prioritize traffic. This challenge could be exacerbated in the years to come by an increase in machine-to-machine traffic.

As the Internet consolidates, will there still be room for innovation in underlying technology or will the Internet be controlled by a small handful of content sites?

Stay tuned.

The Economist recently had a lively online debate about whether more government action is necessary to protect individuals’ online privacy. Will this result in excessive government regulation and finally bring to reality Orwellian controls over every detail of our private digital lives?

Marc Rotenberg, president/executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, argued that there’s currently no definitive check on private sector data collection. He said companies do post privacy policies on websites and then “do as they wish with the personal information they collect.”

He makes some good points – some new Internet privacy laws and regulations may be necessary to stop what these companies are allegedly doing.

But Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, postulated that “the Internet is not for couch potatoes. It is not an interactive medium. While Internet users enjoy its offerings, they should be obligated in watching out for themselves.”

I fall into Harper’s camp. The less government intervention/intrusion, the better. And he made a number of cogent arguments.

All major browsers currently allow users to control online tracking – with Internet Explorer and Firefox you simply click on the ‘Privacy’ tab to customize cookie settings – yet few people even take these simple steps to guard their privacy.

Government regulation, Harper argues, “will make consumers worse off than they could be. The better alternative is to get people educated and involved in their own privacy protection.”

To wit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation provides a list of the Top 12 ways to protect your privacy, itemized/condensed as follows:

• Do not reveal personal information inadvertently
• Use cookie management software
• Keep a clean email address
• Don’t reveal personal details to strangers or just-met ‘friends’
• Realize you might be monitored at work, avoid sending highly personal email to mailing lists, and keep sensitive files on your home computer
• Beware of sites offering some sort of reward or price in exchange for your contact information or other personal details
• Do not reply to spammers for any reason
• Be conscious of web security
• Be conscious of home computer security
• Examine privacy policies and seals
• Remember that you decide what information about yourself to reveal, when, why and to whom
• Use encryption

Pretty basic/common sense stuff – if we all put these practices to heart, we’ll keep the government at arm’s length – digitally speaking. Thoughts?

TweetCongress recently reported that more than 200 members of the U.S. Congress are utilizing Twitter. While this may look impressive, the numbers are still less than 50 percent and in today’s digital world, you would have thought that all 435 members would have quickly jumped on board in order to reach out to constituents – and especially as another fund-raising mechanism.

Most followed? Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), 1,717,550; Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), 45,836; Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), 39,284; Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), 38,786; and Senate Republicans, 21,702.

Republicans also capture all top 5 spots in Tweets per day: Senate Republicans, 7.98; Rep. Charles Djou (R-HI), 4.9; Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), 4.02; Rep. John Carter (R-TX), 3.46; and Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), 3.44.

So how are members of Congress using Twitter – and is it proving effective? Feng Chi and Nathan Yang from the University of Toronto recently released a study entitled, “Twitter in Congress: Outreach vs. Transparency.”

To quote their abstract, “the paper provides some support in favor of Twitter adoption being driven by outreach reasons, rather than the well-popularized transparency motive. Furthermore, outreach considerations factor into a Republican’s perceived benefit more than a Democrat’s.”

Chi and Yang concluded that transparency matters more for Democrats; outreach is more important for Republicans.

“The perceived benefit of outreach is related to the impact it could have in influencing political rivals who are also on Twitter, while the perceived benefit of transparency is related to a representative’s experience,” the pair said. “A representative’s propensity to adopt Twitter increases with the number of bills he/she sponsored, which we argue is a proxy for the perceived benefit associated with government outreach through Twitter.”

Chi and Yang said their study came up short in identifying the role that constituents play in social media.

“While we would expect that politicians keep track of their constituents’ Tweets, we are uncertain whether these Tweets have any direct influence on specific details contained within important legislature. That is, does the content from a constituent’s Tweet every make its way into the content of a bill.”

Chi and Yang further postulated that if politicians are using Twitter for outreach, then they predict that those who adopt Twitter will have greater success in getting bills passed. “If politicians are using Twitter for transparency, then those who adopt Twitter should perform better in approval ratings and elections.”

I expect we’ll see a plethora of related papers on this topic shortly after the mid-term elections – stay tuned.

Five years ago I could pick up the classified section of my local paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and actually feel some substance to it. Today, even the Sunday classifieds are silicon wafer thin.

It’s nothing new to report – the Internet has wreaked havoc with media budgets nationwide. Community newspapers, for instance, used to derive about 10 percent of their annual revenue from public notices. Today, cash-starved state and local governments simply go online and publish themselves, effectively cutting out the community newspaper as ‘middleman.’

And the media continues to be directly/indirectly impacted from other government funding sources – the Nieman Journalism Lab reported that postal subsidies were worth $1.97 billion in the mid-1960s (in 2009 dollars). Today they have shrunk by more than 75 percent to $288 million. A postal fee hike last year, for example, cost The Nation more than $500,000 in mailing costs last year – not exactly good news when the magazine reportedly bled more than $300,000 in red ink.

Is there a solution? Most would agree that free speech and free press are sacrosanct and also essential to a healthy U.S. economy. Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, recently postulated one interesting scenario – enhanced public funding for journalism.

It’s not a new concept – public broadcasting, according to the Nieman Journalism Lab, is, in the aggregate, funded 40 percent by various government entities. In fact, Bollinger reported that both the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission have initiated studies of ways to ensure that the economic pickle facing newspapers and broadcast news doesn’t deprive Americans of important information they need as citizens.

Bollinger said Americans already depend to some extent on publicly funded foreign news media for a lot of international news – “especially through broadcasts of the BBC and BBC World Service on PBS and NPR. Such news comes to us courtesy of British citizens who pay a TV license fee to support the BBC and taxes to support the World Service.”

He added that this type of state support hasn’t resulted in official control – “the reliable public funding structure, as well as a set of professional norms that protect editorial freedom, has yielded a highly respected and globally powerful journalistic institution.”

Bollinger believes top priority should be given to strengthening America’s public broadcasting role globally. The federal government’s two international broadcasters, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, for instance, can’t even broadcast within the U.S. – an anachronistic Cold War policy.

The solution? Bollinger recommends creating an American World Service that can compete with outfits like the BBC, China’s CCTV and Xinhua News Agency, even Qatar’s Al Jazeera.

“The goal would be an American broadcasting system with full journalistic independence that can provide the news we need,” Bollinger said.

Sounds good to me.

A few months ago, the renowned Pew Research Center launched the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Telephone interviews of 2,252 adults ages 18 and older (including 744 reached via mobile) were conducted between April 29-May 30.

Overall, the results produced nothing earth shattering or game changing, but many of the findings further illustrated a number of handset trends.

Here a few:

Minority Americans are setting the pace when it comes to mobile access, especially via handset devices. African-Americans and Latinos are more likely to own a cell phone than their white counterparts (87% for both; compared to 80% for whites). Both minority groups also take advantage of a much wider array of their phones’ data functions compared to white cell phone owners.

Not surprisingly, 90% of 18-29 year olds own a cell phone and are more likely than those in other age groups to utilize mobile data applications discussed as part of the survey.

Some significant stats for this age group: 
• 95% send/receive text messages
• 93% use their phone to take pictures
• 81% send photos or videos to others
• 65% access the Internet on their mobile device
• 60% use their phones to play games or record a video

And some interesting percentages on the low-end:
• 21% have used a status update service such as Twitter from their phone
• 20% have purchased something using their mobile phone
• 19% have made a charitable donation by text message

The findings also indicated that while overall cell phone ownership has remained steady (82% of all American adults own a cell phone), the use of mobile data applications has jumped markedly as you can see in the above visual:

Figures gleaned for seven additional cell phone data applications also revealed some interesting numbers:
• 54% have used their mobile device to send someone a photo or video
• 23% have accessed a social networking site using their phone
• 20% have used their phone to watch a video
• 15% have posted a photo or video online
• 11% have purchased a product using their phone
• 11% have made a charitable donation by text message
• 10% have used their mobile phone to access a status update service such as Twitter

More than half of mobile web users go online from their phones on a daily basis.

A direct quote from the study:

“In addition to being a growing proportion of the overall cell phone population, users of the mobile web now go online more frequently using their handheld devices than they did as recently as last year. More than half of all mobile Internet users go online from their handheld devices on a daily basis – 43% do so several times a day, and 12% do so about once a day. At a similar point in 2009, just 24% of mobile Internet users went online several times a day.”

The survey added that among mobile Internet users, frequency of use was highest among the affluent and well-educated.