kaynobi.com - Business startings-ups and online legal stuff...with ninjas!

Iran's Digital Revolution or Iran's Regime, Meet the Internet

kaywan — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 06:51:58 +0000

Politics

iran

digital revolution

internet

elections

green movement

twitter

Facebook

Hopefully you've been following the near-revolution in Iran in the past week. As a half-Iranian, the last week's events have personally affected my family. My dad's been trying to call our relatives in Tehran for the past week, but the government cut off extra-national phone communications.

It's almost impossible to know what's happening to my family over there. All of my cousins are part of the more than 70% of the Iranian population that's under 30 of age. They're of the same youth you see in the street demonstrations. And as the Iranian government clamped down on official news coverage of the hundreds of thousands of people protesting in Tehran, the outside world has only been able to get bits and pieces of the struggle through pictures, videos and texts over the Web.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the Tehran streets despite a government ban on protests.

But the Internet wasn't something the backwards regime thought of. The most popular social network in Iran, Facebook, gave the first glimpse into the brutality of the state-sponsored religious militia, the Basiji. Soon after Twitter users such as @IranSolidarity gave eyewitness accounts and information on how the global community could join in for a free Iran. Instead of paved avenues and concrete buildings, cyberspace became another front in the war for Iran.

A protester helps an injured riot police officer. Although the police have warned against "illegal" protests, many oficers have stated that they will not fire on the protestors.

This revolution is the ultimate example of online activity creating substantial offline change. The current regime under the Ayatollah, Guardian Council, and religious zealots secured itself due to its isolation and control of media. Now with social networking and ubiquitious Internet access, it's near impossible for the regime to prevent the Iranians from reaching out to the world.

U.S. Government Asks Twitter to Stay Up for #IranElection Crisis [Mashable]
Social Networks Spread Defiance Online [NY Times]
Iran Election Twitter Feeds [Huffington Post]

If you'd like to know the events from the June 12th election until now, CNN put together a concise visual timeline of the past week. Want to join in on the worldwide online revolution? Here's six things you can do to help with social media.

For those new to Iran, here's a quick rundown of the basics:

A Timeline of 20th-21st Century Iran-US relations

1953 US and British intelligence services engineer a coup in which Iranian military officers depose Prime Minister Muhammad Mussadeq, a leading exponent of nationalising the oil industry.

1979 16 January - US-backed Shah of Iran forced to leave the country.

1979 4 November - Iranian students seize 63 hostages at US embassy in Tehran, prompting drawn-out crisis leading to severing of diplomatic ties and sweeping US sanctions against Iran.

1980 22 September - Iraq invades, sparking a war with Iran which lasts the rest of the decade. While several Western countries provide support to Iraq during the war, Iran remains diplomatically isolated.

1981 20 January - Last 52 US hostages freed in January after intense diplomatic activity. They had been held for 444 days.

1985/6 US holds secret talks with Iran and makes weapons shipments, allegedly in exchange for Iranian assistance in releasing US hostages in Lebanon. With revelations that profits were illegally channeled to Nicaraguan rebels.

1988 3 July - US cruiser Vincennes mistakenly shoots down Iran Air Airbus over the Gulf, killing all 290 people on board.

1989 3 June - Ayatollah Khomeini dies. President Khamenei is appointed supreme leader the following day.

1995 President Clinton imposes oil and trade sanctions on Iran for alleged sponsorship of "terrorism", seeking to acquire nuclear arms and hostility to the Middle East process. Iran denies the charges.

Read the rest of the timeline here.

Iranian Stereotypes and Culture

	Incorrect	Correct
Are Iranians Arabs?	Yeah!	Mostly No.
How do you say Iran?	Eye-Ran	Ee-rohn
What's Iran like?
What do the women wear?

The Need for a Constant Social Media Person in Your Business

kaywan — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:36:19 +0000

Not to toot my own horn (it's busted), but I just wanted to illustrate the possible effect of having a dedicated social media specialist in your company. I worked at FIJI Water from 2/26/09 to 5/22/09 in my contract social media intern role...

I'm not saying that social media contributed in the spike of unique visitors to fijiwater.com, but it may be a strong factor.  With enough research, social media probably would be attributed as a primary factor. So all you companies -- get someone who wants to go out there and outreach, have conversations, and create connections with communities all over the 'Net. It probably won't cost you much.

IPG Labs and the Future of Ubiquitous Media

kaywan — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:51:51 +0000

Nestled in the trendy mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles, the Interpublic Emerging Media Lab aims to prove that any message can be embedded into...well basically anything. IPG's high-tech lab seems more like the geek's ultimate fantasy apartment than a space for intensive media study, but big name companies and cutting-edge marketing firms use it as their playgrounds. Their goal: to provide real-world demonstrations of how media can be integrated into life. Be it a refridgerator that's connected to the network, an gaming-intensive dorm room, or an interactive bar, IPG Labs tries to develop innovative ways for companies to reach out to their customers. However, with so much media integrated in everyday devices, what can we do with all this information? There's already the phenomenon of email fatigue -- long-term email users get overwhelmed with daily e-mail. What about information fatigue after media becomes hyper-ubiquitous through wirelessly networked integrated devices?

There are several online tools that can scratch at the torrent of information provided by the Internet. iGoogle, Friendfeed, chi.mp, and various identity and media aggregators are trying to to find order in the midst of the digital chaos. But what if every single item in your life was fighting for your attention? Your computer(s), mobile phone, and game consoles all are networked to the larger Internet community, spouting bits and bytes of every topic and product imaginable. Soon, networked televisions will be more commonplace and they will provide you customized (and ultra-relevant) information from multple sources. But how much information can we really take in we saturate our lives with these "smart" devices?

The study "How Much Is Too Much? Media Structure, Content, and Cognitive Load, and Overload," viewers were given increasing amounts of visual and aural inputs through the television. The study tried to find at what level does the average person start ignoring or confusing inputs.

Initial results say that increasing the number of dimensions increases reaction times and decreases recognition. Signs of cognitive overload appear at 4-5 dimensions of information.

If television viewers alone reach cognitive overload after 4-5 dimensions, imagine if your Chumby tells you 5-6 different things, your iPhone is alerting you about recent news items, and your car radio is scrolling the latest song and associated advertisement -- all at the same time. At some point, the average media consumer will loose tons of information or worse, get the messages jumbled in the mix.

The same overload issue can be applied to social media. Conversation fatigue is a very real thing. Jennifer from the Search Engine Guide Blog shares her dialy social media routine:

On an average day, I skim through roughly 400-500 RSS feeds. I have active accounts at four or five major social networks. I run three blogs. My instant messenger program generally has five to six conversations windows running throughout the day. All in all, I spend anywhere from 4-6 hours a day using or talking about social media and Web 2.0 tools and another 2-3 hours a day writing.

Jennifer solves her time sink dilemma by prioritizing what messages and conversations are worth participating in:

Out of that 4-6 hours I spend reading each day, I might find two to three topics worth writing about. I have to wonder if I might not find the same amount of topics with less reading. Or perhaps the same amount of topics with less reading, but more thinking.

I see the same trend with technology; where Jennifer picks and chooses specific places like Facebook and LinkedIn, we're going to pick and choose which devices to pay attention to. And in a media-rich bar like in the picture to the left that might not be good for advertisers who bank on one message per technology.

With fatigue and overload issues on the horizon, the world needs something simplier. If we can get one plug-in wireless communication and computing device with variable projection or display technology, then our TV won't need to spout 5 lines of stock tickers and local weather conditions and the toaster won't spit out a torrent of RSS feeds. Defeating ubiquitous media fatigue is all about the individual's total control over the information they want, instead of having multiple devices pushing all of your senses at once. But that's probably something advertsers don't want...

You can find IPG Lab's thoughts on the future of media on their blog, The Future of Media. Oh! Click on the pictures in the post to find out what tech is in them.

Another Another Widget

kaywan — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:18:16 +0000

I was thinking of creating widgets for Filipino American artists (or in this case groups with Fil-Ams in them) so I decided to test on the Blue Scholars (who I super-highly recommend to anyone). Sproutbuilder is awesome for 20-minutes-or-less widget making when you're taking a break from multiple final papers.

Oh Geo, Sabzi or management, let me know if you want me to modify/take down/replace the song.

A rebirth!

kaywan — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:00:51 +0000

So I finally figured out Drupal well enough to turn this templated site into something more good-er. Watch out over the next couple of months for designs, functions, and especially content that's applicable to you (rather than my interpretation of things).

Rest assured that ninjas will be involved.

The Salt of Urban Lifestyle

kaywan — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 21:52:05 +0000

We'll be salting the streets with cool content soon. Where? Urbansalt.com. A joint venture of Y | K | M | K

And don't worry, it's not gonna be about silly SNL shorts ;-)

The Return!

kaywan — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:37:34 +0000

Kinda returned... Anyway, in January I came up an idea called "Wyttr"...

Messages on the microblog service Twitter evolved from being status updates on your day to becoming one-liners about the state of governance, technology, society, and even existence. The current Twitter community blossomed from a vibrant group of technology experts, social media mavens, would-be philosophers, and all-out ego-trippers, creating an atmosphere of unspoken competition around whose tweets can make one look the most intelligent or thoughtful. However, even a self-centered impetus can generate extremely innovative ideas. With so much “wit” present all throughout the Twitterverse, how can we catalog and share these poignant thoughts to the Internet as a whole?

Wytter comes into play as the aggregator of these points of ego-backed wisdom. Using a crowdsourced reputation and contribution system and reinforced by the strategic implementation of the Twitter API and mobile applications, Wyttr hopes to employ the Twitter community to identify, tag, share, and discuss these 140 character statements with the public. The tweets and their respective discussions should be easily referenced, linkable, and embeddable in order to overtly and virally expose these ideas to those new to and outside of Twitter.

That was January 2009. And taken. I found this site: http://tweetingtoohard.com/ which just launched. Luckily, In May 2009, I turned Wyttr into the Witty Twitter:

What if your news was fun, collaborative, and peer-produced? The Witty Twitter responds to the needs of the increasingly participatory news consumer by bringing the collective knowledge of the Twitter community together into a hyper-accessible and organized newspaper format. The site imports headlines from Google News and attaches relevant tweets to each topic. A robust recommendation system orders tweets by the community’s preference – tweets that receive the most “witty” ratings rise to the top, while the extraneous tweets fall into obscurity.

The Witty Twitter collects the products of Twitter’s collaborative and open user culture – alternative news sources, concise analyses, and breaking coverage – and displays them to all Internet users, even those without Twitter accounts. The site’s community dynamically regulates the order and visibility of tweets and populates content with comments and criticisms.

So, I'm incredibly lucky to change Wyttr to The Witty Twitter. People pick up on ideas fast, especially when they concern Twitter. Now help me pick a better name before it's too late :)