The Fifth Column

Search Engine: "No Expectation of Privacy"

Fri, 26 Jun 09 20:02:03 GMT

Search Engine hosted by Jesse Brown

Episode 3:
No Expectation of Privacy (.mp3)

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From Jesse:

An Interview with Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan.
Also: Bad Tweets from Iran and good news from Ottawa.

Search Engine #4 by Jesse Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.

Follow Jesse Brown and Mike Miner on Twitter.

PC Leadership Debate Liveblog

Thu, 18 Jun 09 16:10:16 GMT

Tonight's Agenda will feature the leadership contenders for Ontario's Progressive Conservative debate. I'll be sitting quietly off to the side liveblogging the event, and feeding viewer comments to the control room to appear on screen. &amp;lt;a href=&amp;quot;http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&amp;amp;task=viewaltcast&amp;amp;altcast_code=dac21e8e0f&amp;quot; mce_href=&amp;quot;http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&amp;amp;task=viewaltcast&amp;amp;altcast_code=dac21e8e0f&amp;quot; &amp;gt;Ontario PC Leadership debate&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;

Search Engine: Is net neutrality getting pwned? And spying on North Korea online.

Tue, 16 Jun 09 02:55:16 GMT

The case against "Idea Bundling" our digital politics. Also: how to spy on North Korea- an interview with Google-Mapping amateur spy Curtis Melvin.

Search Engine hosted by Jesse Brown

Episode 3:
Is Net Neutrality Getting Pwned? (.mp3)

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Search Engine #3 by Jesse Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.

Iranian election live chat

Mon, 15 Jun 09 19:34:56 GMT

Join the live chat below. It will go live shortly before 8 p.m. If you're using Twitter, tweets tagged #theagenda will be fed into the chat.

Photos from yesterday's Iranian election rally at Toronto's Mel Lastman Square

Mon, 15 Jun 09 16:37:28 GMT

Two University of Toronto students organized a rally to coincide with the protests in Tehran. They never expected to flood Mel Lastman Square with hundreds of people.

David Erwin was there, and has shared some of his pictures.

#CNNFail and following the protest in Tehran online

Sun, 14 Jun 09 20:20:05 GMT

The backlash against the contested election results in Iran have caused a second backlash. The online community has been chastising CNN for being slow to provide the coverage people are looking for, where they want it.

The hashtag #CNNFail is one of the top trending topics on Twitter right now. Fighting broke out in the streets of Tehran after the results of the Iranian election were announced with the incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared the winner with a much higher amount of the vote than predicted. Many Iranians posted updates about the results and the violence to Twitter, which was repeated by Twitter users around the world. As the volume of Tweets about the election expanded and drew attention of Twitter users at large, those that turned to CNN.com found little to explain the situation (the top story was about people having trouble converting their TVs from analog to digital), and with protest in the air Twitter started hammering CNN.

It helps to realize that, although CNN was covering the protests on television, Twitter is particularly popular among mobile internet users. On the phone, on the go, they are not going to turn to a television for news. They are going to a website.

Meanwhile, other news outlets were taking advantage of the wealth of information being sent out of Tehran (one popular quip is that "Tiananmen + Twitter = Tehran" and a Chinese blogger who is following intently shared his list of Iranian Twitterers people should be following). On top of the tweets there are a wealth of pictures and video showing the mayhem in the streets.

Here are some resourches to help you follow along:

First of all, the Agenda's David Erwin is updating Twitter from the protest at Mel Lastman Square here in Toronto, plus following all the developments on Twitter and online.

Flickr is filling up with pictures from Tehran, such as these. A simple search query of "Tehran" provides tons of great photos.

YouTube also has a lot of video to look at.

Blog aggregator "Memeorandum" is jammed with blog posts about Tehran.

Reddit has a list of Iranian Twitterers and other media covering the protest.

Twazzup is collecting tweets, photos and video that are posted online on one page.

Citizen journalism site Global Voices Online also offers perspective from Iranian bloggers.

Andrew Sullivan is blogging away for the Atlantic, keeping track of some of the most interesting writing, pictures and videos he's found online.

The most frequently looked-up words on NYTimes.com

Thu, 11 Jun 09 23:05:25 GMT

Some wonderful person put together a list of the words that most often send NYTimes.com readers clicking over to an online dictionary so far this year. It's fun to poke through and get some insight into the minds and thesauri of the Grey Old Lady's reporters (it seems that the word "sanguine" appears about 10 times per month - what does that tell us?).

The top three are:

1. Sui generis

2. Solipsistic

3. Louche

You can check out the rest of the list here.

Naturally, this paroxysm of risible profligacy with the English language leaves some readers apoplectic and underlines just how enervating, sometimes Sisyphean, a task it can be to understand what's written in the Times.

Wiring Kinshasa *with possible correction

Tue, 09 Jun 09 18:46:28 GMT

I came across an interesting post in the travel and technology blog Subsaharska, that outlines an impressive project in DR Congo that ran internet cable from the Atlantic Ocean the capital city of Kinshasa.

To put that in perspective, that's a little further than a road trip from Moncton to Vancouver, and just 1000 km longer than a drive from Timmins to Tijuana, Mexico. (I have to assume this distance includes a significant undersea portion, but nothing in the article explains it.)

Update: I asked the blogger where the line originates from. He cites an article and says the line either starts in Europe or there has been an error, possibly an added '0'. Either way, stringing cable in DR Congo, be it several hundred or several thousand kilometers is a monumental challenge.

But distance isn't the only obstacle, as Subsaharska points out:

Seeing as how this is the first land internet connection being deployed in DR Congo (a nation of 2.3 million square kilometers and 66 million people), it's understandable that this would be a big occasion. But there was another reason for this in that Kabila wanted to emphatically state that the fiber was not copper and thus had no value. While that isn't completely true and it may seem like a rather ridiculous thing to have to say, Congo is notorious for "Article 15" which is a remnant leftover from Mobutu times in which he basically decreed that it was "okay to steal just a little". Probably one of the most impressive examples of this was when 75km of power lines were stolen... in one night. So, one can understand that 5,650km of fiber would be a tempting target for thieves.

New map of most popular social networking sites by country

Mon, 08 Jun 09 22:10:17 GMT

Many Eyes, an online data visualization tool, has a great map up of the popularity of various social media networking sites around the world by country.

Check it out in more detail and in all its interactive glory here.

Let's compare this to an older map:

This map is a little over a year-and-a-half old. Hi5 and Google's Orkut are hanging on in their strongholds, and the Philippines are still kicking it Friendster-style. What's interesting is that Skyblog, the French social networking site (now called Skyrock.com and I believe the cause of the Rise of the Machines in the Terminator movies) has fallen behind Facebook in France and Senegal. Also interesting is the only place former top-dog MySpace is in the lead is Guam.

Vincos Blog goes into the data on the new map, which is based on Alexa & Google Trends for Websites traffic data for June 2009.

Twitter isn't the top dog anywhere, although it is number three in the United States behind Facebook and Myspace. Canada's top sites are Facebook, MySpace and Flickr.

Top networking site in the world? QQ. It's a Chinese website boasting around 300 million users.

This still makes me wonder about the effect of diverse social networking software on expats. If you move to a country where they use a different platform, does your online time have the same social mixing effect as it would back home? Or, would it just keep you more in touch with people from your home country.

Search Engine: Jesse and Steve talk web and fashion

Fri, 05 Jun 09 16:50:30 GMT

In case you didn't see it on the show last night:

Search Engine's host Jesse Brown stopped by the Agenda for a Q&A with Steve. The conversation wandered from web literacy to Jesse's appearance and points beyond.

Take a look:

Search Engine hosted by Jesse Brown

Episode 2:
Who's Copying Who? (.mp3)

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