Today was packed with talks on both main stream media and the blogosphere in Russia. While the country’s blogosphere is extremely huge – a count by yandex registers 12 million blogs – the internet is still of minor importance relative to Germany. This is also caused by the fact that only about 40% of the people have access to the net.

TV is still king in the information business. As Evgenij Mezdrikov quoted from a movie title, “if it was not on TV, it didn’t happen”. At the same time, online media outlets seem to lag behind in the adoption of new technology compared to Germany. According to Mezdrikov, allowing user comments and using multi media is still relatively new.

In fact, Russian journalism seems to be in a bad shape. Viktor Juketschev even announced to talk only about “the living parts” of the media landscape, i.e. the privately owned outlets. According to Mezdrikov, “media don’t produce facts”, but only distribute them. Investigate journalism is therefore hard to find.

One reason Mezdrikov gave is that the authorities in general act repellent towards journalistic requests, even though Russia’s freedom of information act is the only worldwide favoring media professionals over ordinary citizens. Officials are obligated to answer their requests within 7 days, while queue time for citizens is 30 days.

That was especially interesting for me because I recently attended a workshop on “Legal Leaks”, where we discussed the issue of privileges for journalists. There’s a very informative toolkit on using freedom of information requests in journalistic work.

Even though he highlighted their advantage of being eye witnesses, Mezdrikov agreed with me that citizen journalists cannot make up for professional investigative journalism. Viktor Juketschev later presented “Tak-tak-tak“, a “social network for civil rights” which aims to provide activists with a platform where to organize collaborative investigation and publication of issues of public interest. I am rather doubtful of its possible success, as activists lack both time and funding for bigger projects.

Elia Kabanov presented several cases of persecution of bloggers and journalists for their writing both on- and offline. Even though Russia has a bad reputation for press freedom due to a series of high profile murders of journalists, repression against bloggers is not as widespread as in other countries.

In some of the cases Kabanov spoke about, police intervention seems fungible, e.g. a fake amok threat. In general, sentences seemed quite harsh, even though prison sentences are rare. After all, local police seem to act independently, which means that there’s no national agenda for repression.

One reason for some of the arrests could be that “people think they can write everything”, as Kabanov said. In some people’s eyes, that includes threats, libel and publication of private data. Kabanov later talked very negatively about Russian blog comments, which he perceives as predominantly useless or even hateful, which could explain his argument.

On the other hand, there seem to be no examples of huge political campaigns driven by Russia’s blogosphere. I presented about Germany’s movement against internet filtering, which is sans analog in Russia. Blogs still need to bring issues to the attention of main stream media – especially TV – to make an impact, of which there are increasingly successful examples.

Or, as Elia Kabanov said, “100 years ago their was a saying, ‘the stone is the weapon of the proletariat’. Today, a blog is the best weapon of a free man.”

I love this album very much. Not only because of the melancholy and the lightness of its songs, but because it is handcrafted music. It is music from another age. An age when music was not a self-contained record, but an ever-changing process of singing and listening, dancing and whistling.

Simply put, it’s music from a read/write culture. For someone grown up in a society still dominated by the paradigms of the industrial era, the era of pop stars being hyped, their faces staring at us millionfold from ad spaces and CD racks, their music repeated every minute on top 40 radio stations, this age-old music is a revelation.

And today, there’s hope to get it back. An article on Global Voices reports on efforts to preserve Macedonian folk music. It is a great project, but to preserve folk music, we must subject it to an endless cycle of renewal, must sing it, changing its lyrics according to our mood, injecting in its melody the beat of our days.

Folk music is a commons: Its rhythms and tunes and lyrics are free for everybody to use. There is no copyright restricting what we do with it, its authors are dead and long forgotten. It’s non-competitive, one can’t use it up. You got nothing to lose.

The songs of today, in the contrary, are “owned” by labels. But the youth is reclaiming the music. Every cover on Youtube, recorded in a messy room by a 15 year old on a cheap guitar, brings us a step farther from a read-only culture to a read/write one. The old communities in which music would be lived together have vanished, but new ones are springing up on the Web every day.

A “cult of the amateur”? Indeed: An everyday celebration of music by people who love what they do. And don’t dare to think about monetization. You wouldn’t pay a friend for accompanying you to a party, would you? Music is there to be sung and played. Do it!

Video: “Jovano, Jovanke“, a Macedonian folk song, performed by an (apparently Brazilian) enthusiast. Lyrics on pesna.org, the project introduced in the Global Voices post.

Later on, I stood together with another guest. Via Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” (there’s an interview with him by David Weinberger on Radio Berkman), we arrived at the question what digital goods – documents – ought to be preserved. And, more importantly, how to choose them.

For most of human history, the idea of preservation did not even exist. Things were either used or abandoned. What they were built from would become a natural resource for later generations. The Colosseum became a quarry, and vellums with the writings of Aristotle were recycled to contain Byzantine prayers.

At some point, our societies started chronicling human history by preserving artifacts and documents. They had – and still have today – designated places for them (museums) and experts (archivists, curators) who are in charge of deciding what is worth keeping – and what’s not.

Just as newspaper editors, curators are an elite. They are gate keepers, filtering a ubiquitous ressource (information here, artifacts there) for cultural value. This has been an important task, as space is limited, in newspapers as much as in museums.

But, as Clay Shirky writes in “Here comes everybody”, in the digital space the paradigm has shifted from “filter, then publish” to “publish, then filter”. Subsequently, the Digital Museum ought to preserve anything ever published on the Web – and let users sort through it using search functions and rank exhibits by popularity. In fact, Archive.org is doing just that.

But memory capacity isn’t a ubiquitous ressource. Even Archive.org needs to make decisions about what to preserve and what to let vanish. The obvious solution is to crowdsource the exhibits of the Digital Museum. Now the question is: Do we have to fear mob rule?

The answer was one of the most interesting parts of Friday’s panel discussion. As Mercedes Bunz remarked, there has been another paradigm shift. While the industrial age was marked by a trend towards homogenity, the networked information society shifts towards customization.

What does that mean for the Digital Museum? It does not have a main exhibition, but consists of a plethora of theme rooms, each catering a small subculture or niche interest.

This is not absolutely positive. If today we go to an exhibition, we will most likely be confronted with exhibits that we would not come across were they not paired with others that we are interested in. It’s the same with newspapers, or conferences.

In the Digital Museum, this ought not to happen. We, the visitors, with our questions (queries) decide exactly what we will see. In return, the museum will only show us what we already know about.

Imagine such a museum in the analog world. You fill out a questionary about your preferences upon entering and will be served accordingly. At Transmediale 10 yesterday science fiction novelist Bruce Sterling talked about atemporality. If you want to be an astronaut, he said, just dress up as one. You will look ridiculous, but by what standards?

The Digital Museum is bound to feature equally ridiculous situations. As I joked, a Nazi will only get to see Hitler memorabilia, a Communist Soviet agitprop. In the analog world, the question is: What happens if two Nazis and a Communist enter a room together? Will the majority rule, or will the exhibits split to equally represent visitors’ preferences?

In the Digital Museum of customization, people can enter together without noticing each other, neither their differences nor what they have in common. It is possible to fully withdraw from public discourse, one of the pillars that support our democracies.

The book consists of two parts, each comprising a series of essays by international authors. The first four chapters target the context of mobile activism. Christian Kreutz has contributed a great summary of future trends and software developments in African mobile activism.

Another essay by Ken Banks asks whether “social mobile” is “empowering the many or the few”. Ken is the founder of FrontlineSMS, “a free software that turns a laptop and a mobile phone or modem into a central communications hub”. As the second part, consisting of seven case studies, includes a chapter co-authored by Juliana Rotich, the book brings together developers of two applications that stand for the success of mobile activism in Africa, FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi.

I especially liked the essay by Rotich and Joshua Goldstein on “Digitally networked technology in Kenya’s 2007–08 post-election crisis”. It is a short version of a case study written for the Berkman Center’s Internet and Democracy Project. The chapter looks at three facets of social media in a conflict situation: “SMS campaigns to promote violence, blogs to challenge mainstream media narratives, and online campaigns to promote awareness of human rights violations.” Here’s a short excerpt dealing with the latter part:

Ushahidi is a mashup: a blending of two internet applications to relay information in a visually compelling way. The design teams combined Google maps, which allows users to zoom in and view satellite images of Kenya, with a tool for users, via mobile phone or internet browser, to report incidents of violence on the map, add photos, video and written content that document where and when violence occurs. [...]

The Ushahidi platform is revolutionary for human rights campaigns in the way that Wikipedia is revolutionary for encyclopaedias: they are tools that allow cooperation on a massive scale. Yochai Benkler describes this phenomenon as ‘commons-based peer production’, and argues that it has a central place in rethinking economic and social cooperation in a digital age.

The essay more than once refers to Benkler’s outstanding work, The Wealth of Networks. I am just now reading this book myself and I find it to be very useful to fully understand the whole magnitude of the social media revolution we are experiencing. As Rotich and Goldstein write, “Yochai Benkler provide[s] useful language to help us begin to understand the place of these tools in society.”

SMS Uprising combines theoretical groundwork and practical case studies useful to everyone interested in the use of mobile technology for activism and development. While some chapters are a bit longer than necessary, in combination the book provides a good overview of the issue.

SMS Uprising is published by Pambazuka Press. It is available on their website as a paperback plus PDF for £12.95 or the PDF alone for £9.95 as well as on Amazon.

The publisher encourages non-commercial redistribution of the work, so if for any reason you cannot afford to buy the book, drop me a mail at [myfirstname] [at] [thisdomain] and I’ll send you the PDF.

I think these posts came way too early. You shouldn’t write meta on the first day of the relief efforts. Plus, there is no surprise in the fact that yes, social media is great for fundraising. Don’t get me wrong: I am in full support of those people who are using Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the net to collect donations, though I share Felix Salmon’s concerns that “throwing money at the issue” might not be the best solution for Haiti.

What I am criticizing is the euphoria of certain cyber-utopians who are now praising social media. You wouldn’t praise the town square because you can go there and ask people for donations, would you? Twitter and Facebook are nothing different: Virtual places you visit to converse. It’s not by chance that one of the early forms of “social” media on the web was called “forum”, just like the places where Romans went in ancient times to converse.

Currently, the social web doesn’t change anything about fundraising. Money still flows from the same pockets to the same NGOs as before. That’s exactly what these organizations want. But there’s no reason to be all euphoric about this.

There are indeed things related to the social web’s role in humanitarian relief that ought to be written about, such as the CrisisCamps taking place in several cities of the US. What Ushahidi and the OpenStreetMap community are doing is simply amazing. From a social media point of view, we should not miss these efforts just because the Red Cross is doing what it has always done – fundraising.

You might also want to read this interview with Patrick Meier on Ushahidi’s response to the Haiti earth quake, and German readers may be interested in my articles about this issue for netzpolitik.org and gulli:news.

Simon Columbus: [...] So what is Ushahidi?

Patrick Meier: Ushahidi is a free and open source platform that allows organizations to crowdsource information and to visualize this information dynamically on a map.

Simon Columbus: That sounds really technical. Can you delve a little deeper into Ushahidi’s structure?

Patrick Meier: Sure thing. Ushahidi simply aggregates information, so users can text in information or tweet in or go directly on the Ushahidi website and enter in information that way. The easiest way to think of Ushahidi is as a clever website, which you can send information to using different communication technologies. Information on human rights abuses, for example, or human trafficking. This information can then be mapped geographically, such as riots in a particularly neighborhood of Tehran.

Simon Columbus: What is mapping such information good for? In the last years, you have worked hard to establish “crisis mapping” as an academic field, so it is more than just a nice overview, I guess?

Patrick Meier: Sometimes it’s easier to understand information when it is mapped. For example, take a spreadsheet with lots of numbers: It may be difficult to make sense of the spreadsheet, but one could take the numbers and graph them, which would reveal more about the information. The same is true with mapping. It is simply a way to visualize information in order to reveal more about said information, e.g., like patterns. And yes, crisis mapping as a field is not just about mapping. It’s about information collection, data visualization, geospatial analysis and decision-support for operational response.

You can read the full interview in English on netzpolitik.org.

The study only refers to it briefly. Its authors use the term for the generation they are writing about, those who are 12 to 19 years old at the moment. “Digital natives” has become a name for a generation rather than a description of certain habits.

That’s different from what it was when Marc Prensky coined it in his 2001 work “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”. Back then, there was no generation grown up in the age of ubiquitous Internet access. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say on the origin of the term “digital native”, as used by Prensky:

The term draws an analogy to a country’s natives, for whom the local religion, language, and folkways are natural and indigenous, over against immigrants to a country who often are expected to adapt and assimilate to their newly adopted home. Prensky refers to accents employed by digital immigrants, such as printing documents rather than commenting on screen or printing out emails to save in hard copy form. Digital immigrants are said to have a “thick accent” when operating in the digital world in distinctly pre-digital ways, for instance, calling someone on the telephone to ask if they have received a sent e-mail.

In their 2008 book “Born Digital”, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser make it explicitly clear: Not everybody growing up in these times, as Internet use is the norm, is a digital native. The authors rather describe them as the heavy users and early adopters of the Internet and the social web among the young generation.

Which is probably a good distinction to make. As the study I cited above shows, sophisticated use of social media is far from being the norm among Germany’s youth. While Internet penetration in this group is close to 100 % and nearly everybody uses it – with instant messaging and social networks being the most popular applications – participation stays at a low level.

Only 37% create own content on the web at least once a week. In most cases, this means writing a forum entry or uploading photos or videos. As a blogger and twitterer, I am clearly not a common example for my generation. According to the study, only 4% each do this daily or several times a week. But today, I am also a professional. For me, it’s no longer “user-generated content”. It is (also) writing for a living.

So while on the one hand the promise of participation and democratized media does not seem to appeal to Germany’s youth, they just love passivity on the other hand. Nearly two thirds say it’s great you don’t have to actively look for content on TV. Is this a Bradbury generation? (Well, no. Book reading has increased by two percentage points since 1998, the study says).

In fact, nothing may have changed with the Internet. At least that’s what digital anthropologist danah boyd is saying. “There’s nothing native about young people’s engagement with technology”, a recent (very read-worthy) article in The Guardian quotes her. She goes on:

Young people are learning, they’re learning about the social world around them. The social world around them today has mediated technologies, thus in order to learn about the social world they’re learning about the mediated technologies. And they’re leveraging that to work out the shit that kids have always worked out: peer sociality, status, their first crush.

The JIM study might suggest danah is right. For the youth of today, the Internet is a communication medium. But it’s not the borderless cyberspace the utopists in the ‘90 dreamed of. Only 7% say they have befriended people in social networks they haven’t met face to face. For this generation, the World Wide Web is a very local thing. Just as communication was ever before.

From the beginning there has been considerable resistance against the feature. That’s quite the usual, seems as if even social media early adopters have a huge bunch of conservative techno-critics among them. One of the main points of criticism was that the new tool does not allow to add a comment to the retweeted text. Well, duh: You don’t need to use it every time you retweet something.

But in some cases it would be nice if people would start to adopt it. Today, there was an occasion which made this extremely clear. It was the day of the first hearing of the class-action law suit against the data retention bill before Germany’s federal constitutional court. There are about 35.000 complainants – more than ever before – so interest in the case is high. Still, only three people were twittering out of the court (as you needed to have a press card to take a laptop with you), using the hash tags #vds (“VorratsDatenSpeicherung”, en.: data retention) and #BVerfG (BundesVerfassungsGericht, en.: federal constitutional court).

Following these hash tags on Twitter, users would want to get the coverage from people inside the court room, plus commentary from others following the event (at least that’s what I assume). Well, here’s what they got:

@akvorrat is the account of the working group against data retention, twittering from the court room. The other messages are retweets of either @akvorrat’s coverage or commentary on it. The news stream for the hash tag is polluted with redundant messages. Because people are using the old retweet method. Twitter’s new feature cleans the stream of redundant information. In my opinion, that’s a huge plus in usability.

Earlier this week I attended a panel discussion on related rights. There has been a discussion going on in Germany for some times, started by newspaper publishers that are lobbying for the introduction of related rights for newspaper publishers. My boss Markus Beckedahl (I’m currently doing an internship at newthinking communications, in case you’re wondering), who was on the panel, has written it up here (in German).

The Axel Springer AG has been one of the publishing companies pressing for said related rights, so its concern director for public affairs, Christoph Keese, represented it on the panel. Keese did make a fool of himself because he could not exactly explain what he was lobbying about, but he did say something reasonable:

“There wont be a working market for journalistic products without a one-click solution.”

Today, I was in the perfect situation to experience what he meant. One of my favorite journalists, Heribert Prantl, has interviewed Germany’s new interior minister, Thomas de Maizière. The newspaper’s online version published snippets of the interview that sounded quite interesting, so I wanted to get hold of the real thing.

“Read the whole interview in Saturday’s edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung”, it said below the summary. I tried to find a way to purchase the article online, but did not find any reasonable option (you can get an epaper, but the minimum is a month’s subscription). Which left me with two options: Find a kiosk and buy the paper (it was 9 pm by then), or pirate it.

Now, usually I would not have come to the point where I have to make such a decision. Not only because most content is available online for free, but also because there are not many articles that are “must haves”. But this one was done by Prantl, so I would have paid for it. That I still tried to get hold of the interview when I realized they would not let me pay for it (at least online), and finally left the house and spent 40 minutes to get it from a kiosk, was only due to the fact that I wanted to write about it for gulli:news (I did here (in German)).

I think at this point it is clear why the way the Süddeutsche Zeitung is doing it can’t be but wrong. It’s the ultimate turn-off for any casual reader. But how could it be done better? As Keese says, a one-click solution that makes it easy for me as a reader to access paid content is a must have.

What would this one-click solution look like? There are several things we can already say about it. First of all, there needs to be an easy way to do micropayments (I would not pay more than a few cents for newspaper articles on a regular basis – I consume at least 100 blog entries per day. If I paid just 10 cents for each, that would exceed my rent).

Then, paid content needs to be integrated into the link economy, i.e. it needs to be searchable and linkable (Süddeutsche Zeitung’s epaper is delivered as a PDF, which means subscribers can’t point others to individual articles).

Behind the pay wall, access needs to be unlimited. Any kind of DRM – like restricting requests of the article to a certain number of times – is a no-go: If I pay for content, I do not want to be constrained in its use. Just as I may do what I want with the newspaper I got at a kiosk, I don’t want anybody to interfere with my use of paid online content.

Now there’s a reason I don’t use iTunes, either: I don’t want to download a software to be able to pay for music. I don’t say there shall not be such a thing. But just as you may or may not use a shopping cart at the super market, I don’t want to be forced to download Apple’s software.

Now that I’ve written up this list, I can’t but wonder why publishing companies like Springer are lobbying for related right instead of just letting me pay for their content. Until then, I will either get it for free – or ignore it behind pay walls that for absurd reasons were built without doors.

This music has become known under various labels in the West: It was named “Desert Blues”, categorized as world music, even the term “griot” is an English one most probably derived from a Portuguese expression. And here the trouble begins.

Since I wanted to listen to Afel Bocoum, Oumou Sangaré and Toumani Diabaté, just to name a few, I usually started with one of these musicians, using the “similar artists” radio function to get a broad mix of related songs. What I got was indeed a broad mix (and a very nice one, too) – but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted.

Quite often, music from other genres would interrupt my stream of precisely this Malian mix of folk music and modern influences from pop, blues and rap that I was looking for. I admit, I don’t know how to call what I wanted to listen to. And that’s exactly the problem Last.fm is struggling with.

For Western pop music you will find that tags are often extremely precise – e.g. Black Box Recorder, another band that I have recently discovered through Last.fm, is tagged as “indie, female vocalists, indie pop, british, britpop” (that’s the five most used tags for the trio). A group found to be “similar artists”, Cinerama, is tagged as “indie, indie pop, britpop, chamber pop, pop”. Three different types of “pop”: With this information, Cinerama can be located pretty well on the map of pop music.

Now let’s have a look at said Malian musicians. Oumou Sangaré is tagged “african, mali, world, africa, world music” – that is exactly no distinctive genre. “World music” can be anything from Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club to Siberian overtone singing; “Mali” and “Africa” are but regional tags. While “Mali” might be indeed helpful, “Africa” certainly is a category much too broad to be of any use. Would you even think about tagging any music as “European”?

In the case of Oumou Sangaré, her biography (on Last.fm) gives a hint how to correctly tag her music: She is a prominent performer of wassoulou, a Western African style of pop music. In the case of Toumani Diabaté, there is at least one correct tag. It’s “kora” – the 21-string harp-lute he plays. But this is a rare example – “Africa”, “Mali” and “World” are the words used by far most often to tag this kind of music. Which explains why occasionally, some Ugandan singer’s voice would interrupt my stream of Malian music.

This is a problem Last.fm is suffering from in about every branch of non-Western music: As its users are not precise in tagging it, its radio functionality is not precise in playing it. I have always thought of Last.fm as a great example how web 2.0 and crowd-sourcing can broaden your horizon. But its lack of functionality when it comes to non-Western music shows: The crowd needs to be familiar with what it tags. A bunch of Western neo-hippies listening to Afel Bocoum’s tracks out of exoticism obviously aren’t.