Home ground advantage: commerce and e-commerce

I was at a local chamber of commerce meeting tonight where the guest speakers from one of the major banks gave us a macro-economic view of exchange and interest rates. The conversation about the health of the economy suddenly got round to the internet and its effect on the shopping experience. One of the speakers wondered at what point “home ground advantage” was lost and people did their shopping online because it was cheaper. (photo: transcyberiano)

The tale was told of shops who charged their customers $50 just to try on the footwear. Many people were getting fitted out while getting expert advice then buying exactly the same gear for a fraction of the price online. The owners had a right to be miffed by a time investment not matched at the till, but their defensive measures in response was also short-sighted, the speaker argued. The internet is coming whether the skishop owner likes it or not.

A few minutes later, there was a worried question from the floor asking what this meant for commercial operations in Roma. The speaker reiterated the earlier point: it becomes a question of when home ground advantage is conceded. As another voice from the floor put it, “I like shopping”. The Internet will never fully replace the visceral appeal of commerce in real life.

Nevertheless it is pointless to ignore the truth. Cheaper online overheads and the convenience of clicking will eat seriously into the profits of the shops. People are spending a lot more time online too. A Nielsen Australian Online Computer Report released yesterday showed average internet usage has increased in 12 months from 17 hours 36 minutes in 2009 to 21 hours and 42 minutes in 2010. Usage has tripled in the last decade and with the prospect of high-speed broadband ahead, it is likely this trend has not yet reached saturation point. Australians will sooner or later spend a full day a week online.

Much of this usage is spent watching TV programs or surfing, but shopping online is also on the increase, though not as sharply. In 2008-09, 64 per cent of Internet users (pdf) aged 15 and over made online purchases, up 3 percent on 2006-07. This behaviour is concentrated in the young, which suggests it will increase. Three-quarters of people aged 25-34 bought over the Internet while less than half aged 65 and over made online purchases.

Businesses are going to lose business to the Net whether they like it or not. Rather than resisting change by charging $50 for the right to try things on, the bricks and mortar operations need to engage with the competition. That doesn’t just mean having a website to sell their wares. They also need to maximise other home ground advantages. While issues of security and shopping in person were important factors the most commonly reported reason for not making online purchases in 2008-09 was “a lack of need”. People shop in the real world when they don’t need to do it online. Understanding how to tap into this lack of need should be a holy grail for 21st century business.

Traders cannot rely on the GST loophole argument to equalise prices. There is a threshold below which it is too costly to collect taxes on goods privately imported. Keeping retail price below the cost of imports plus delivery is unlikely so shops should look to value added services to keep the tills ringing. Intangibles like goodwill, trust, a social media presence, an identification with their geography, and an honesty when dealing with customers may end up being decisive factors. If customers think there is a need to for online services - and they will – then they will find them. It’s up to business to find an ecological niche to avoid extinction. (photo seen outside a closing Borders store in the US)

NBN Corporate Plan review tells government to watch assumptions

Greenhill Caliburn have completed their review of the NBN Co business plan and say it is as good as could be expected from “an Australian blue chip company.” Federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the report confirmed NBN Co's key assumptions underlying revenue and cost projections which provided the Government with a reasonable basis on which to make commercial decisions about the broadband network. "As with any infrastructure project, there are always risks, contingencies and external factors and the Government will work closely with NBN Co to put in place agreed performance indicators to track its performance and adjust strategies or operations as needed,” Conroy said today. (photo: ABC News Damien Larkins)

The government asked Greenhill Caliburn to review the corporate plan and provide a commercial assessment, identifying and analysing the plan's key assumptions and potential risks. The company released its executive summary of the review today. In 2009, the Government formed the NBN Co to run the broadband network to bring superfast broadband to 93 percent of the population and a mix of satellite and wireless for the rest. The NBN Co released the final version of its corporate plan in December to provide a detailed overview of the expected technological, operational and financial framework for the development of the NBN expecting to commence large-scale construction by the middle of this year.

The government asked Greenhill Caliburn to review NBN Co Limited's Corporate Plan and provide a commercial assessment, identifying and analysing the plan's key assumptions and potential risks. Greenhill Caliburn is an independent firm listed in the New York Stock Exchange specialising in the provision of financial and strategic advice. Their baseline position having reviewed the plan was that “taken as a whole, the Corporate Plan for the development of the NBN is reasonable.” They said key assumptions underlying revenue and cost projections appeared be in line with a range of available domestic and international benchmarks, and were consistent with the stated policy objectives of the Government with respect to the NBN.

The key assumptions in the plan are network design, regulatory considerations and completion of agreements with third parties. Variation to these assumptions could affect NBN Co’s business strategy and return profile. Similarly NBN Co’s long term revenue forecast contain “inherent uncertainties” and are subject to shifting technologies and consumer preferences. Nor did the review conduct an in-depth analysis of NBN Co’s future funding requirements. However, Greenhill did say NBN Co is likely to be able to obtain debt funding over time with government support.

The Corporate Plan provides a detailed overview of the expected development and operation of the NBN, including a 30-year business forecast. The principle objectives are providing 93 per cent fibre network coverage by the end of 2020, delivering a wholesale-only open access platform, and providing an entry-level mass market product peak information rate of 12 Mbps with the potential to deliver up to 1 Gbps in the future. Recent Government decisions affecting the NBN include the increase of points of interconnect to premises from 14 to 120 and new requirements for Greenfield developments.

But decisions still need to be made to stop market participants from "cherry picking" the most commercially attractive areas ahead of the NBN build, passage of enabling legislation to grant powers and immunities to facilitate the rollout of overhead cabling, passage of greenfields legislation to mandate corporate developers install fibre-ready equipment and execution and performance of the agreements with Telstra hatched out in June last year.

The Corporate Plan estimates it will cost a massive $35.9 billion to build the NBN fibre network and its total funding requirements will be $37.1 billion. To generate the revenues necessary to repay this high build price, it is important a high number of users can be attracted to and retained on the NBN to a total of 13 million homes, schools and workplaces by 2020. They will also need to provide higher value products and services and keep the costs down to what is planned. Trends towards “mobile centric” broadband networks and consumer pushback on the usage-based pricing model could have negative impact on plans. Greenhill Caliburn has recommended a close monitoring of the Telstra customer migration and initial release phases relative to plan and the establishment of NBN Co monitoring arrangements particularly during the early stages of the project when key decisions are made.

Predictably, the Opposition has said the Greenhill report backs up their arguments against the NBN. Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull said the report’s support for the NBN was “grudging” and lacked answers for a range of critical areas. “This report, like the other multi-million dollar consultants' reports the Government has commissioned, fails to address the single most important issue,” said Turnbull. “What is the most cost-effective way to ensure that all Australians have access to high speed and affordable broadband?” Conroy’s rather glib response is that the plan showed taxpayers would get their investment back, with a return. “The NBN will provide a rate of return significantly higher than the government bond rate and all Australians will gain access to this world class network,” he said.

Labor and Liberal's battle of the broadband

Probably much to Labor’s own relief, its problematic Internet filtering policy appears dead in the water. A policy pursued with vigour during the early days of the Rudd administration, it was deferred to 2011 last month before being delivered the coup de grace in recent times with both the Liberals and Greens coming out in opposition to it. Labor haven’t yet formally cut it loose but it is merely a matter of time, probably around 1 July 2011 when the buffoonish pro-filter Family First Senator Steve Fielding is finally turfed out of a parliamentary position that squalid Labor backroom tactics got him into in the first place.

If there is a communications policy fight in this election it is now over how broadband will be delivered to the home in the years to come. The centrepiece of Labor’s policy is the National Broadband Network. The ambitious NBN is Australia’s largest ever infrastructure project and will involve the laying of fibre optic cabling to Australian homes, schools and businesses. It will be capable of delivering speeds of 100 megabits per second which is up to 100 times faster than most current speeds. The NBN will reach 93 percent of the Australian population with the remaining premises connected via a combination of next generation high speed wireless and satellite technologies delivering broadband at the much lower speed of 12 Mbps.

The work (both fibre optic and wireless/satellite) has already started under the auspices of the new NBN Co led by former Alcatel boss Mike Quigley. Quigley was chosen for his American experience developing and integrating large scale Fibre-To-The-Premise and Fibre-To-The-Node implementations for US telecommunication carriers.

Most of Australia's telecommunications network is still copper based. This is ageing technology that is primarily responsible for Australia’s slow Internet response times. FTTP involves laying optical fibre from a central location right to the home or business. While it could potentially deliver broadband at speeds of up to 100Mbps, the actual speed is determined by the size of the Passive Optical Network.

The technology is capable of transmitting data at speeds of up to 2.5Gbps; however this amount is divided by the number of termination points on the PON to determine the actual bandwidth to each end point. FTTN is a cheaper option (and was Labor's policy until 2007). In this case fibre is terminated in a street cabinet up to several kilometres away from the customer premises, with the final connection being copper. Customers typically connect using traditional coaxial cable or twisted pair wiring, both of which are 19th century technologies.

The current Labor Government is going with the FTTP option. FTTP is expensive and is one of the reasons the NBN is likely to cost in excess of $43 billion (though this is likely to be substantially reduced now that Telstra are inside the tent) with a rollout period of eight years. Phase 1 has already begun in Tasmania with 1,200km of cable laid and the first services have been switched on in the north-east communities of Midway Point, Smithton and Scottsdale.

In these towns the ISPs iiNet, Internode and iPrimus are offering 25Mbps for $29.95 and 100 Mbps for $59.95 per month. Labor is also addressing “regional blackspots” on the mainland with 6,000 km of new, competitive fibre optic backbone links are being rolled out in regional Australia. NBN boss Mike Quigley is now saying that 1000 Mbps plans may also be available for wholesale. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said at this speed a school could download a hi-def documentary in 20 seconds rather than the five hours it takes now.

The Liberals meanwhile agree Australia needs fast, reliable and affordable broadband services but differs on the technology it wants to use to provide it. It says the NBN Co will be a taxpayer funded white elephant when it is completed in eight years time, does not deliver lower prices, and gives no priority to those who do not currently get an adequate service. They will cancel the NBN and instead deliver a 13 point plan they say will “encourage competition and ensure services reach all Australians.”

Their plan is significantly cheaper than Labor’s at $6 billion and will cover more of the population at 97 percent and will be completed quicker too. However they will only commit to offering 12 Mbps relying heavily on wireless technologies. They will provide $2.75 billion for an open access, fibre-optic backhaul network which connects the big cities to compete with Telstra, $2 billion for blackspots in outer metro and regional areas, $750 million for fixed broadband optimisation on older exchanges and funding for satellite serves for the outlying 3 percent.

The response from experts in the communications field has been mixed. Crikey’s tech writer Stilgherrian said the difference between the two policies as much about ideology, vision and political rhetoric as technological choice. He said the Coalition’s saves money now, but asks “is it merely delaying the inevitable big spend?” However ZDNet reports some analysts saying the Liberal's plan could potentially be safer, more flexible and "give more bang for your buck".

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Adam Turner said the Liberal's plans were stop-gap measures while he called the NBN “future-proof”. The Internet Industry Association has also come out in favour of the NBN saying “the key to Australia’s broadband future is speed.” However Commsday CEO Grahame Lynch in The Australian slammed the NBN as “the world's most generous telecom industry welfare scheme”.

The attitudes of the Greens in the Senate will be crucial to deciding the outcome of telecommunications policy regardless of which sides wins the election. The Greens policy is strangely silent on the position of the NBN. However their ICT spokesperson Senator Scott Ludlam said the NBN should go ahead, with priority for communities in regional areas. “It should absolutely stay in public hands so that we don't see another repeat of the debacle that followed the privatisation of Telstra,” he said. The Greens are also cold on the Coalition’s alternative with Ludlam calling it “a real patchwork of service delivery.”

IP not Idiot Proof: Britain passes bad Digital Economy Bill

The hilarity of yesterday’s news was provided by Boing Boing’ Cory Doctorow who revealed that the Minister for Digital Britain did not know what an IP address is. In a letter purporting to be from the Minister (Neither Boing Boing nor the Financial Times were certain it was genuine and Timms did not respond to a direct enquiry on the matter by Woolly Days) to a fellow Labour MP, an IP address is called an “Intellectual Property” address rather than a “Internet Protocol” address. Such a mistake is forgivable for lay people, but not only is Timms the relevant minister who should know better, but he has also has been responsible for a piece of legislation called the Digital Economy Bill that many see has seriously set back the cause of a free and open Internet. In this context the error takes on a whole new meaning.

The Digital Economy Bill was one of the last acts of the current British Government which they pushed through late on Wednesday night. It may have many long-lasting and unintended consequences. The bill is an extraordinarily wide-ranging piece of legislation that affects communications regulator Ofcom, Channel Four, Commercial TV, spectrum regulation, broadband, digital radio, video games, intellectual property (not Internet Protocol!) and internet domain registrations. MPs had just a few hours to digest its lengthy contents. All of it needs scrutiny but it is its recommendation on illegal downloads that has generated the most controversy.

As Gigaom says the bill tackles copyright infringement by forcing ISPs to cut off persistent file-sharers. In their rush to pass the legislation, it is looking leaky and undercooked and is likely to have many negative implications for digital freedoms. Among the concerns are it could have the unintended consequence of forcing libraries and cafes to stop offering free Wi-Fi and worryingly it could also give the government the power to block sites like Wikileaks, on the excuse it hosts copyright-infringing material. By tackling those who download copyrighted content illegally, the bill also moves to suspend or slow down some web users' connections.

The bill won cross-party support but one of the few active voices in parliament against it was Labour MP Tom Watson. Watson is one of the few MPs who understands what the digital economy actually means, and in his speech against it he described it as a mass (or mess) of “unintended consequences”. As Mike Butcher wrote in the Telegraph those consequences include potentially huge legal bills for Internet start-ups, and everyday parents who have little idea how their download limit is being used up by “teenage children, neighbours, or even someone parked outside their house.”

Another dissenter in parliament, Tory MP William Cash, made the point the impact and implications of the Bill's many clauses are sophisticated and not immediately obvious, and supporting it should not be a given. "The Bill should not be rushed through," he said. "It is not the Dangerous Dogs Bill; it is a very different type of Bill."

But TechCrunch Europe have seen it all before. They emotively used a Churchill pre-war speech as a metaphor for what is happening now “The stations of uncensored expression are closing down,” said Churchill about Nazi dominated Europe in 1938 and TechCrunch argued these stations were shutting down again today. Just as in the proposed Australian legislation the onus will be on ISPs to police the new laws. TechCrunch says ISPs will have to send letters to their subscribers who have been linked to copyright infringements and, after these warnings, suspend their accounts. Copyright holders will be able to apply for a court order to gain access to the names and addresses of serious infringers and take legal action.

Similar to the battle here in Australia over the Government’s proposed Internet censorship plans, the British digital economy bill has lined up the tech savvy and civil libertarians on one side and mainstream politicians on the other. As in Australia, neither side has covered themselves in glory in an issue that does not fully resonate with the majority of the electorate. Politicians, with too many other issues to deal with, allow themselves to be swayed by party whips, vested interests and industry lobby groups. The tech savvy’s mobilisation of platforms such as Twitter starts by being a good focus of anger but ends up being a frustrated and vitriolic echo chamber of like-minded views. Politicians know these views fail to cut through to suburbia and the issues affecting marginal electorates. Those fighting the #nocleanfeed war in Australia should closely examine the way the Digital Economy Bill played out. An antipodean repeat is on the cards.

US State of the Media 2009 report paints grim picture

The latest American State of the News Media report shows a continuing and catastrophic decline in advertising revenue in online, newspapers, magazines, radio and network television. Cable television was the only sector not to decline and the overall picture leaves analysts wondering how much farther the industry has yet to fall. Amid the gloom, the Pew Project report says 2009 was the breakthrough year for Twitter and other social media which emerged as powerful tools for disseminating information and mobilising citizens.

But the uncontrolled nature of social media is not much consolation for major news media organisations. Their most immediate concern is how much revenue they will regain as the US economy pulls out of recession. Market research and investment banking firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson predicts that by 2013 newspapers, radio and magazines will take in almost half as much in ad revenues as they did in 2006.

The collapse so far has been extraordinary. Newspapers, including online, saw ad revenue fall by a quarter during the year bringing the total loss over the last three years to 43 percent. Local television ad revenue fell 22 percent in 2009; triple the previous year’s decline. Magazine ad revenue dropped 17 percent, network TV is down by 8 percent, while online ad revenue fell by 5 percent. Revenue to network TV news and online news sites weren’t broken out of the overall totals but most likely fared much worse.

Newspapers are in the worst trouble. The researchers estimated the US newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000 - roughly 30 percent. They predict further cuts in what remains a $4.4b industry in 2010. This is a major concern because newspapers still provide the largest share of reportorial journalism. The report uses the metaphor of sand in an hourglass. “The shrinking money left in print, which still provides 90% of the industry’s funds, is the amount of time left to invent new revenue models online,” it said. “The industry must find a new model before that money runs out.”

But it is not just newspapers feeling the heat. Network news divisions are on a long slow curve of decline since their 1980s peak period and have since halved in size. Local television has not been hit as hard but is also feeling the pain. One estimate puts the losses in the last two years at over 1,600 jobs roughly 6 percent. Flagship magazines such as Time and Newsweek have also shed almost half their staff since 1983.

Life on the Internet paints a more complex picture. Almost three in five Internet users now use some kind of social media, including Twitter, blogging and networking sites. Citizen journalism is on the rise at local levels and rapidly filling niches vacated by undernourished news organisations. But the report says that despite the invention and energy of new media efforts, their scale is dwarfed by what has been lost. The J-Lab project estimates $140 million of non-profit money has been pumped into new media in four years but that represents less than a tenth of newspaper losses alone. According to NYU’s Clay Shirky “the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”

But this is not necessarily a bad thing. The motivation of news corporations over the last 20 years has been to cut expenses for the sake of profit eroding its sense of public good in favour of efficiency and profit. The researchers say the collapse of these ownership structures may mean a partial rebirth of community connection and public motive in news. But it warns unless someone can develop a system of financing the production of content, reportorial journalism will continue to shrink despite the new technologies.

The vexed question of a viable Internet revenue model is core to this problem. The researchers found that four out of every five online news consumers say they rarely click on online ads. Rupert Murdoch and News Ltd are moving to paywalls to address this problem but studies also show most people are “grazers” and only about one in five people say they would be willing to pay for online content - this number is likely to decrease with less voracious news consumers not included in the survey.

The upshot is a growing tendency towards niche operations. Most news organisations are becoming narrower in ambition and more specific in focus, brand and appeal. The researchers see the critical questions now as being: What collaborative models might work and under what ethical basis? Will there be more sharing of content and resources and what does that mean for fairness and accuracy? “The year ahead will not settle any of these,” they conclude. “But the urgency of these questions will become more pronounced.”

BBC strategic review is useful template for the ABC

The BBC Strategy Review of March 2010 (pdf) is an important read not only for those interested in the future of Britain’s premier broadcaster but also for those who follow the fortunes of its antipodean cousin the ABC. Given the tagline “getting the best out of the BBC for licence fee payers” the 79-page document is the BBC Trust’s attempt to steer a course for the public-funded organisation in the likely event of a Conservative win in the forthcoming election and a corresponding serious reduction in government expenditure. (photo: The Guardian)

The Trust said its reference points were the audience and the market. It said its audience is proud of the BBC and willing to pay for a strong and independent voice that delivers original and high quality content. The market meanwhile is more ambiguous. It wants the BBC to fulfil its public service charter but questions where the boundaries lie with private enterprise and also its genuineness in its proposals for partnerships.

The Trust said the time was right to look at its future direction and possibilities of expansion in the framework of four key questions. These were: Is its portfolio of services still appropriate in the digital age? Has its near 24 x 7 expansion caused a dilution in quality and distinctiveness? What is the best distribution model for content? And finally how should it react to the problems of commercial media?

These questions in turn raised five lines of enquiry the Trust put to BBC management. These were: How can the BBC best maintain quality and distinctiveness? Where could it narrow focus and scale? What will a fully digital BBC look like? Can the BBC better define the public space it provides? And finally how can the BBC create the most value from its scale?

The response to all these questions from BBC management called “Putting Quality First” is in the same document. The Director-General’s vision was to create “a BBC focused on quality content and enduring values, keeping open a public space for all”. This would be achieved by five central principles: putting quality first, doing fewer things better, guaranteeing access, getting better value from the licence fee, and setting new boundaries.

The BBC mission statement is worth repeating because it has relevance also in the Australian context. It says, “[the mission] is constant and enduring: to inform, educate and entertain audiences with programmes and services of high quality, originality and value. It strives to fulfill this mission not to further any political or commercial interest, but because the British public believes that universal access to ideas and cultural experiences of merit and ambition is a good in itself. The BBC is a part of public space because the public themselves have put it there.”

The BBC is part of an independent public space that include other media, public institutions, libraries, museums, parks, universities, monuments and voluntary bodies. And while the digital age should be a “golden age” for public space, fragmentation of audiences is destroying business models causing public space to diminish. The BBC say their role is to be a main guarantor of public space and its technological underpinning and should also be a catalyst and connector within that space.

Its mantra, says management, should be putting quality first. It will have five content priorities: world-class journalism, inspiring knowledge, music and culture, ambitious local drama and comedy, outstanding children’s content, and events that bring communities and the nation together. That means changing £600m of priorities a year (a fifth of the BBC’s cost base) over the next four years and committing to 90 percent of licence fees on high quality content (though it will be interesting to see how ‘high quality’ will be defined and measured).

This also means doing more with less. Spending on the BBC’s website will decrease by a quarter each year to 2013 and its number of sections will be halved. There will also be more external links with the intention of doubling monthly ‘click-throughs’ to external sites. Other services to be closed will be Radio 6 Music, Asian Network and teen offerings BBC Switch and Blast! In order to guarantee access to all, BBC management want to make internet-connected television a reality, continue free access to news and also to open its archives and program library and work with its partners such as the British Library and BFI to bring their public archives to a wider audience.

To pay for all this, the BBC is proposing to reduce costs, reduce senior management numbers, freeze pay and suspend bonuses. They will also reduce spend on overseas content, cap sports rights spending, defer to commercial radio and other broadcasters in area in areas of popular music and serving teenagers and to not go more hyperlocal than they already are.

Opponents of public broadcasting here in Australia such as Mark Day have seized on this report as a rationale for trimming down, if not totally removing, the ABC from the media landscape. While this goes too far, the BBC Trust document does ask some very good questions and opens up a debate on public broadcasting and its platforms and contents we do need to have in Australia. Particularly as there is no licence fee, it behooves us to question the direction the ABC is headed (and also ask where SBS fits into the picture). All too often media policy here is reactive. As we stand on the cusp of the death of the analogue age, we could do worse than examine the BBC document. It is a template for honest and mature discussion into what we might want from “our ABC” in the coming years.

Interrupted lives - A story of a Twitter Hack

Yesterday my Twitter account was hacked causing me to spam at last 100 of the people I follow with sexually suggestive Direct Messages. Apparently I was not alone in this phishing attack. There was also something similar recently in Facebook. In my case it was caused by rather stupidly clicking on a DM sent to me on Thursday night. I knew the person who sent it and had no immediate reason not to trust it. As Pete Cashmore said we're less wary when a link appears to be from a trusted contact. The message read “Is this you?” and provided a link (via a deceptively meaningless short URL) which I clicked on almost without thinking.

Almost instantaneously I regretted clicking although nothing happened immediately. Barely minutes later I saw someone’s Facebook warning that the “is this you?” message was malware and you shouldn’t click on the attached link. I was annoyed at my stupidity and hoped nothing further would come of it. But when I checked the Internet on Friday morning it was obvious a lot more had come of it.

Apparently what happens when you click on the link is that your Twitter password is sent to the attackers, permitting them access to your account. According to Cashmore, your friends receive the same message shortly after, which will look like it was sent out by you. I didn’t send out the same message (as far as I can tell) but the one I did send was a classic in its own right.

At approximate 7am yesterday morning, about a hundred DMs were unleashed from my account. Twitter has now cleaned out all the messages from my sent folder however someone however was kind enough to send me a screenshot of how it looked. In the message I was claiming to be “female/24/horny” and added “I have to get off here but message me on my windows live messenger name paris928love@hotmail.com” It is unlikely that any of the messages would have fooled their recipients. For starters they were all sent out complete with my name and headshot avatar which makes it blatantly apparent I am neither female, 24 nor horny (unless, as I wrote later by ‘horny’ they meant ‘scaly’).

I was blissfully unaware of this activity while munching my weetbix for breakfast. When I logged on an hour later, I became aware of the problem when I checked my regular emails and noticed quite a lot of Twitter DMs sent to me in return. These were all genuine DMs sent to me by friends who were either laughing at the absurdity of the message (if they knew me well) or warning me I was hacked (if they didn’t). When I logged on to Twitter there were many more messages.

“excuse me?”

“Just got a DM from @derekbarry that makes me think his account has been hacked.”

“Time to change your Twitter passwd. Ur sending our "interesting" DM spam. eg "..hi, i'm 24/female/horny...message me on my...”

“unless you are leading a secret double life someone is using your account for spam”.

“Derek, your account has been compromised. Unless you really ARE 24 and horny.”

“You don't look like a 24yo horny female to me.... :) I think you've been hacked!!”

“so u won't hit any "is this you?" messages in future? :) was caught by one back at Xmas. Mine sent out colonic irrigation tweets :P”

One person wrote to tell me he had received one of female/24/horny messages but he also had been hacked and was “going nuts” about how to solve the problem. While I was sympathetic, this was not a reaction I shared. I was momentarily embarrassed so much spam had been sent out in my name but looking at how absurd it was, I found it funny. It was also unwittingly the cause of more real interaction with people than I would normally have had if I'd been left alone.

I sent out a few Tweets apologising for the spam, joked about being scaly rather than horny and immediately changed my Twitter password. This in turn got a lot of responses most of which saw the funny side of what had happened. Here, I hope my reputation in Twitter allowed me to turn a potentially nasty situation into one which people could laugh at. And as far as I know, no one stopped following me thinking I was a spambot.

Within a half hour, I got an email from Twitter saying they believed my account was compromised. They forced me to change my password again and hopefully I’m now clean until the next time I accidentally click on a safe looking link. I say “next time” because despite my increased wariness I’m convinced it will happen again. Spammers are becoming more adept at mimicking convincingly real behaviours – though as my own messages proved they still leave a lot to be desired in matching physical attributes with the text!

Scammers use Haiti earthquake for online fraud

The Haiti earthquake had an unintended consequence of driving up phishing and scam attacks across the Internet in the first month of this year. In the days after the Haiti quake, scammers asked users to donate money to a charity however any donation disappeared into an offshore bank account. Building on this, spammers began to send phishing messages, pretending to be from legitimate organisations like UNICEF. Hackers also took advantage of the tragedy to deliver malware. In one example, users download a Trojan when they click on the link to view a supposed video of the earthquake damage. The findings were in the monthly State of Spam and Phishing report from Symantec. (photo by alex_lee2001)

The report found both scam and phishing categories doubled as in percentage of all spam in January 2010 compared to a month earlier. The total of scam and phishing messages came in at 21 percent of all spam, which is the highest level recorded since the inception of the report. As well as Haitian scams, the report found the well-known Nigerian 419 scam (named for the section of the Nigerian penal code which addresses fraud schemes) was on the rise again as was online pharmacy spam.

Symantec say spammers have changed their tactics regarding online pharmacy spam. They have now taken to using subject lines such as “Must-Know Rules of Better Shopping” and “You Must Know About This Promotion” which are vaguer than “RE: SALE 70% OFF on Pfizer.” Other misleading subject lines such as “Confirmation Mail” and “Special Ticket Receipt” were also used for online pharmacy spam messages.

They also say phishing attacks are getting more and more targeted in nature and are focused on attacking major brands rather than being mass attacks. Symantec observed a 25 percent decrease from the previous month in all phishing attacks. The decline was primarily due to a decrease in the volume of phishing toolkit attacks which have halved from the previous month. A 16 percent decrease was observed in non-English phishing sites as well. More than 95 Web hosting services were used, which accounted for 13 percent of all phishing attacks, a decrease of 12 percent in total Web host URLs when compared to the previous month.

The US remains the most likely point of origin of spam. Approximately one in four of all spam is American-based with Brazil next most likely far behind in second place with just 6 percent. India, Germany and Netherlands are responsible for 5 percent each. The US is even more dominant in the categories of geo-location of phishing lures and hosts with 52 percent of the former category and 49 percent of the latter. Germany is second far behind with 6 percent in both categories.

Symantec notes that China has clamped down on spamming by suspending new overseas .cn domain registrations. The China Internet Network Information Center stated this suspension will allow them to implement a better procedure to verify registrant information from overseas registrations. This was a follow-up action to a related move in mid-December that required additional paperwork with registrations. As a result, spam messages with .cn domain URL dropped by more than half in January, compared to December with a steep drop towards end of January.

The report also found a new trend in adult oriented phishing. The phishing site tempts the unwary by promising free pornography after logging in or signing up. These scams affect users who enter their credentials in the hopes of obtaining pornography. Upon entering login credentials, the site redirects to a pornographic website before leading to a fake antivirus site containing malicious code. An incredible 92 percent of adult phishing scams were on social networking sites. The phishing sites were created using free webhosting services.

The report offers advice so familiar it beggars belief so many people are still falling victims. It talks about unsubscribing from lists, keeping your mail address secret, deleting all spam, avoid clicking on suspicious links and email attachments or replying to spam, don’t fill in forms online that ask for personal information and finally don’t forward virus warnings which are usually hoaxes. Spamming is a multi-billion dollar industry that relies on the truth of the hoary phrase that “there’s a sucker born every minute”.

Pew finds the young are deserting blogging for social media

A new report from the Pew Internet and American Life project has found blogging has dropped among teens and young adults while simultaneously rising among older adults since 2006. The findings suggest that as blogging has matured as a practice, so has its practitioners. The survey was conducted as one of a series of reports undertaken by the Pew Research Center to highlight the attitudes and behaviours of American adults ages 18 to 29. The report brought together recent findings about internet and social media use among young adults and situated it within comparable data for adolescents and adults older than 30. Pew surveyed 800 adolescents and 2,253 adults in 2009 to get their data. (photo:eurleif)

The report found the Internet is a crucial “central and indispensable element” of the lives of American teenagers and young adults. 93 percent of teens between the ages of 12 and 17 went online, a number that has remained stable for three years. Nearly two-thirds of teen internet users go online every day. Families with teenage children are also most like to have a broadband connection (76 percent and up 5 points since 2006). It will probably surprise no one that the older you get, the less likely you are to be connected to the net. 74 percent of adults use the internet. But that number is skewed because younger adults (18-29) go online at a rate equal to that of teens (at 93 percent).81 percent of adults aged 30-49 are online while just 38 percent (but still rising) of those over 65 are hooked up.

Use of gadgets is on the rise as the Internet increasingly moves away from the desktop and onto mobile and wireless platforms. But again the growth is skewed towards the young. In September 2009, Pew asked adults about seven gadgets: (however they listed just six: mobile phones, laptops and desktops, mp3 players, gaming devices and ebook readers). On average, adults owned just under three gadgets. Young adults of age 18-29 averaged nearly 4 gadgets while adults ages 30 to 64 average 3 gadgets. But adults 65 and older on average owned roughly 1.5 gadgets out of the 7.

While the desktop or laptop remains the dominant way of getting online, newer ways of connecting are making headway. More than a quarter of teen mobile phone users use their cell phone to go online. A similar number of teens with a game console (PS3, Xbox or Wii) use it to go online. One in five owners of portable gaming devices uses it for Internet access. Perhaps surprisingly white adults are less likely than African Americans and Hispanics to use the internet wirelessly. African Americans are the most active users of the mobile internet, and their use is growing at a faster pace than mobile internet use among whites or Hispanics.

Less of a surprise is the fact that teens are avid users of social networks. Three quarters of online American teens ages 12 to 17 used an online social network website, a statistic that has been growing at 7 percent each year since 2006. Teenagers are also more likely to use it as they get older. While more than 4 in 5 online teens ages 14-17 use online social networks, just a bit more than half of online teens ages 12-13 say they use the sites. Pew says this may be due to age restrictions on social networking sites that request that 12 year olds refrain from registering or posting profiles, but do not actively prevent it. The other notable statistic is that differences in gender are evening out ending the previous dominance of girls on social networks.

Usage of social networks stays constant in the 18-29 age group but then drops off rapidly for those over 40. Adults are also more likely to have profiles on multiple sites. Among adult profile owners, Facebook is currently the social network of choice; 73 percent of adults now maintain a profile on Facebook, 48 percent are on MySpace and 14 percent use LinkedIn. Analysis by education and household income show that support for Facebook and LinkedIn rises with both factors validating Danah Boyd’s research into the subject.

The news is not so good for Twitter. Pew’s September 2009 data suggest teens do not use the microblogging platform in large numbers. While one in five adult internet users ages 18 and older use Twitter or update their status online, teen data collected at a similar time show that only 8 percent of online American teens ages 12-17 use Twitter. Pew did add a rider to say the question for teens was worded quite differently from how the question was posed to adults so the results are not strictly comparable. With adults there was a sliding scale of Twitter usage with age. 37 percent of online 18-24 year olds use the platform compared to just 4 percent of over 65s.

But while use of all other web2.0 platforms was on the rise among the young, the striking exception was blogging. Teenage blogging has dropped from 28 percent to 14 percent of all users in the last three years. The decline spreads to commenting on other blogs. 52 percent of social network-using teens report commenting on friends’ blogs, down from 76 percent commenting in 2006. Young adults show a similar decline. However blog as a whole had not declined as there has been a corresponding increase in blogging among older adults. The hard work involved in blogging is increasingly becoming an old person’s game.

Google has more to lose than China

On 12 January, the official Google blog posted a seemingly innocuous entry called “a new approach to China”. In it Google claimed that serious cyber-attacks in December resulted in the theft of their intellectual property. The post stated the attack was aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. It also said the accounts of dozens of American, Chinese and European Gmail users who advocate human rights in China “appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties”. Then they dropped the bombshell. As a result of these attacks, Google decided to stop censoring results on Google.cn. “We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China,” concluded post author David Drummond, Google Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer.

There is little doubt that Google made a business decision and dressed it up with noble values. The news was even kept secret from Google’s 700 Chinese staff until it was made publicly available. Techcrunch’s Sarah Lacy offered three reasons why Google made their decision. Lacy claims Google were not doing great business in China (with 30 percent of the market) and could never outdo local leader Baidu (with 63 percent). Secondly Google had already made their decision and the announcement was a “scorched earth” move aimed at buying Google goodwill in the west. Thirdly it is only going to get harder for western firms as cashed-up Chinese tech companies begin infiltrating the US market.

The official Chinese news agency Xinhua has been strangely diffident in its response. Normally it reacts bullishly to any perceived criticism of the Communist regime but an article on 13 January merely suggested China was seeking more information on Google’s stance. They quoted an anonymous high ranking official merely said "It is still hard to say whether Google will quit China or not. Nobody knows.” They also quoted Guo Ke, professor of mass communication at Shanghai International Studies University, who said it was "almost impossible" for Google to quit China and also impossible for the Chinese government to give up its management right over the Internet. "I think Google is just playing cat and mouse, and trying to use netizens' anger or disappointment as leverage,” Guo told Xinhua.

The official Chinese Government response is that companies must follow the law of the land. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said China welcomed foreign Internet companies but that those offering online services must do so “in accordance with the law.” According to the New York Times, another high-ranking official has called for even tighter Internet restrictions. Wang Chen, the information director for the State Council urged Internet companies to increase scrutiny of news or information that might threaten national stability and emphasized the importance of “guiding” online public opinion.

Subsequently Google has hinted it will negotiate with the Communist regime. It may be that Google needs China more than China needs Google. China has by far the world’s largest internet population with estimated 338 million Internet users - 46 million of those were added in the last 12 months alone. The entire network is policed by the Great Firewall of China and the government stepped up efforts to censor the Web during the Beijing Olympics and the Communist regime’s 60th anniversary last year. During the purge, the Chinese government made particular efforts to shut down social media sites such as blogs, online video sites, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.

However, many Chinese users have sophisticated knowledge of the Internet and are able to circumvent the censorship. Locals call it “fanqiang”, or “scaling the wall.” Users connect to an overseas computer via a proxy server which costs $2 a month to share with about two dozen others. Chinese citizens engaged in such practices say the government rarely cracks down on them individually, preferring instead to go after prominent dissidents who publish information about forbidden topics online. Meanwhile non-profit companies have set up censorship-evading tools for users to download in a cat-and-mouse game with authorities.

But as The Hindu puts it, many Chinese online users will be let down by Google’s losing battle with the authorities over censorship issues. They quote Chinese Internet expert Kaiser Kuo, who believes the ordinary Chinese Internet user is being ignored. “But they are also questioning whether the moral point Google is trying to make is worth the price they have to pay,” he said. “The government no longer worries about access to outside information through Web 1.0 sites, but has closed down social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube that allow for the rapid dissemination of information.” The absence of Google will simply tighten the Government’s grip on power in this most closed of kingdoms.

France's war on Google hots up with new Internet advertising tax

The French Government has released a report that calls for a tax on online advertising revenue to fund subsidies for French culture. This would include subsidies for newspapers, art, music and other products struggling in the digital era. The media has dubbed it the “Google Tax” which is reasonable as the Silicon Valley search engine giant holds the dominant position for search in France. However, the report’s author says the plan would likely target other big players such as Microsoft and Yahoo (some English reports also say Facebook is included, but this is disputed by French media). (photo by mathias poujol rost)

The government commissioned the report into the wake of complaints from media companies that aggregators such as Google are getting a “free ride” on their content. The report called “creation and the Internet” was an outcome from Culture minister Frederic Mitterrand’s new baby called 'mission Zelnik'. The mission takes its name from Patrick Zelnik, CEO of independent music label Naïve, and other members include Jacques Toubon, former minister of culture and Guillaume Cerutti, CEO of Sotheby's France. While their report had 22 recommendations on such matters as increasing spending on digitising books, creating Internet portals to aggregate online content, cutting the tax for online cultural sales, and setting up bodies to ensure that artists are paid for work downloaded from the Web, it is the “Google Tax” that has hogged all the headlines.

Details are sketchy about how it will work but the idea is that France would place a tax of one or two percent on all online advertising revenue in order to raise 10 to 20 million euros. Silicon.fr (in French) wonders how online music sites would make the proposal work and says the Zelnik report proposes a move to collective management of music rights. It says the Society of Authors and Composers (SACEM) says the proposed solution only partially meets their requirements and says web2.0 services such as Youtube, Facebook and Myspace should also contribute to the scheme.

The idea has been rejected by the big internet firms. Critics say the tax would be difficult to implement and Google says it is not the right way forward as it could slow down innovation. Google claims their partnerships with publishers and content creators has distributed more than 4.2 billion euros worldwide last year. “The better way to support content creation is to find new business models that help consumers find great content and rewards artists and publishers for their work,” said Olivier Esper, senior policy manager for Google France.

The move is part of a growing French trend to shackle some of the more extreme elements of the Internet. In October France introduced legislation to cut Internet access from illegal downloaders. Under the law, a new agency will send out an e-mail warning to people found to be illegally downloading films or music. A written warning is sent for a second offense in six months and after a third offense, a judge can order a one-year Internet rights suspension or a fine. But while President Sarkozy was happy with the legislation, Reporters Without Borders called it "a serious blow to freedom of expression on the Internet."

Last month Sarkozy also took on Google over its plans to digitise the world's books. Portraying himself as a defender of French culture in the digital age, Sarkozy’s concern was that the project would “strip France of its heritage”. He has launched a counter-proposal for a French firm to scan the contents of the country’s libraries. Sarkozy’s call was echoed by Prime Minister Francois Fillon who said France would not accept another cultural industry being "threatened by looting."

It is easy to dismiss such tinkering like some do as French “cultural arrogance”. But France does have the right to take measures to ensure its vital and diverse culture is not reduced to an Anglophone add-on. Other countries are beginning to realise that the invisible hand of the US-dominated market does not necessarily lead to good outcomes and local culture is threatened by this as much as local economies. While Google’s ambitions are, in the main, admirable, France is right to hold up its hand and question its outcomes, if not its motives. If being digital means being democratic, then others should have a part to play in the brave new world, not to mention have access to Google’s enormous profits. If the levy puts an end to “enrichment without any limit or compensation”, it will be no bad thing.

Blogging in the Noughties

The end of the year brings to an end an extraordinary decade for social media on the Internet. Google has turned itself into a verb, Youtube has become a video-sharing phenomenon, Facebook has transformed the way people talk to their friends while Twitter has established itself as the premier destination for finding out what is happening in the world right now. All have been crucial in democratising the Internet. Yet none of them have had the same effect on democracy itself as much as technology that predated the decade. That technology is blogging, which seems almost old hat as the Noughties draw to a close.

Yet blogging has not disappeared. On the contrary, blogging is a mature technology that is in rude health on an international scale. In 2006 the Pew Internet & American life project estimated that 12 million adult Americans kept blogs and 57 million adult Americans read them. Five million blogs globally posted content in June 2008 in 66 countries across 20 languages. 59 percent of these are maintained by people who have been blogging for 2 years or more. Scott Rosenberg says that the “blogosphere” is so large and anarchic, it does not exist in the singular. There were many blogospheres. “The one you saw depended on which little slice of the blog universe you were following.”

Blogs are interactive, contain posts of varying lengths in reverse chronological order, usually contain hyperlinks, allow comments, and have a blogroll of other blogs. But there is no single accepted definition of a blog. The academic Scott Wright said “It is generally accepted that a blog is a regularly updated website with information presented in reverse chronological order. But what do we understand by the term regular? I have recently updated a blog having failed to do so for several months. In the intervening period, was it a blog, a defunct blog, or a website?” Others have argued that a blog must contain a blog-roll or links section, yet several apparently highly active blogs do not have blog-rolls.

The technology advances of the later 1990s made mass communications possible in a way impossible in any previous era. In Dec 1997 Usenet user Jorn Barger coined the term weblog on his site robotwisdom.com to define his site which he saw as both a log of, and on the web. Barger’s site contained posts and hyperlinks but had no comments or other interaction. In early 1999 Internet analyst Peter Merholz announced he was pronouncing the word we-blog or “blog” for short and said he liked the new name’s crudeness and dissonance. “I like that it [blog] is roughly onomatopoeic of vomiting. These sites (mine included!) tend to be a kind of information upchucking”.

Information upchucking became a lot easier with new blogging tools such as Google Blogger, Wordpress and Movable Type in the early 2000s. No longer, as A.J. Liebling suggested, did the freedom of the press belong exclusively to those who own one. Blogs evolved from being listings of websites people liked to increasingly take the form of personal journals sharing thoughts and encourage others to take part in conversation.

Blogs have changed our politics and our world. Their hyperlinking structure created a nonlinear activity and an almost instantaneous feedback loop. These hotlinks are the key to the success of the blogs. Stephen Coleman called blogs the listening posts of modern democracy. According to David Perlmutter, the advent of blogging allowed people to bypass regular big media and create mass communications messages without formal training, in the process reaching large audiences, inviting others to co-author knowledge and producing a range of effects on public opinion, political affairs and government policymaking.

The word blog first appeared in a mainstream publication on 11 October 1999. The New Statesman described it as a “web page, something like a public commonplace book, which is added to each day…if there is any log they resemble, it is the captain’s log on a voyage of discovery”.

A couple of months later the word appeared in a newspaper in Ottawa Citizen article about pop singer Sarah McLachlan. Television took another six months to cotton on. And even then it was a typical TV take-down. CNNdotCom’s show of 8 July 2000 introduced its nerdword of the day thus: “Today’s training in technobabble: “blog”. No it’s not the way feel in the morning after drinking too much tequila the night before. And no its not one of the creatures found in Dr Seuss’s zoo”.

But blogs were quickly escaping the zoo and entering the mainstream. Blogs were an ideal outlet to express the trauma caused by 9/11. At a 2002 Harvard conference on Internet communication Professor Jay Rosen of New York University identified “a new kind of public, where every reader can be a writer and people do not so much consume the news as they ‘use’ it in active search for what’s going on sometimes in collaboration with each other, or in support of the pros.” This was the germ of Rosen’s later oft-quoted idea of the “people formerly known as the audience”.

But not everyone was convinced the former audience was up to the job. Writing around the same time as Rosen, Washington Post editors Len Downie and Robert Kaiser’s critique of journalism decried the degeneration of political reporting and investigative journalism and blogs were no help either. “There is little [in blogs] of what journalists would call reporting (our study this year found 5%)” they wrote.

While the majority 95 percent ran the gamut from purely personal journals to opinions that could not make it into big media, the five percent that reported were starting to make inroads. The power of American bloggers was shown in the Trent Lott and Dan Rather cases. Lott was a key congressional ally of George W. Bush but the president was obliged to denounce him after the blogs ran hard on his Strom Thurmond 100th birthday speech. In “Rathergate” the blogs forced CBS to apologise for the fact it could not prove its documents were authentic and Rather himself retired.

In the UK, blogger Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes) is a one-man wrecking ball with a string of political scalps. Salam Pax’s online diary captured the frightening reality of invasion in Baghdad during the Iraqi war that disputed official accounts of the conduct of the 2003 war. Elsewhere in Asia, successful Korean OhMyNews’s motto is “every citizen is a reporter" while online citizen journalism outfit Malaysiakini has evolved into Malaysia’s premier news site.

Here in Australia there have been no “gotcha” moments among the blogs yet but they are proving successful if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Mainstream media have been busy copying the blogs while still professing to damn them – who could forget The Australian’s 2007 castigation of “sheltered academics and failed journalists who would not get a job on a real newspaper”?. But by 2009 News Ltd had started up The Punch, while Fairfax reheated the National Times masthead and the ABC has begun The Drum. The Drum’s editor Jonathan Green was hired from Crikey where he was responsible for starting up an influential network of bloggers to complement its journalism.

Asking whether blogging is journalism is like asking whether TV is journalism: it all depends on what’s on. The two practices should and do co-exist - often under the same name. Nevertheless the transformation from journalist to blogger isn’t always smooth. The Guardian’s groundbreaking Comment is Free website struggles to deal with the hoi polloi. As contributor and political journalist Jackie Ashley puts it, “there will always be those who know much more about a subject than a columnist. And equally there will be those who think they know much more. I’m delighted to hear from both: just so long as you make proper arguments and don’t call me a fucking stupid cow.”

The ease of anonymous publishing in an online environment has turned it into a space where it is all too easy to diagnose stupidity. Rumours, hoaxes and cheating games circulate which risk the public sphere descending into a chaos and anarchy. But as Henry Jenkins notes this is not an inevitable outcome, “As the digital revolution enters a new phase, one based on diminished expectations and dwindling corporate investment,” he says, “grassroots intermediaries may have a moment to redefine the public perception of new media and to expand their influence”. That moment has arrived.

Media140: Internet political economy in Asia and Africa

This is my sixth and final post about the Media140 conference in Sydney last week. I've enjoyed putting together my reflections of an important event and I’d encourage readers to check out Julie Posetti’s (Sydney Media140's editorial director) excellent overview and discussion of where it might lead next. See also my prior posts about my initial impressions, and the speeches of Mark Scott, Posetti, Mark Colvin and Jason Wilson, and Jay Rosen. (photo by Derek Barry)

I wanted to finish off by talking about some of the underexplored political economy of the Internet. The presentations of Riyaad Minty and Jude Mathurine brought some of the brightest ideas of Asia and Africa to Friday’s events. Both presenters are South African of similar age with a fascination for all things new media working in different fields. Minty was a digital entrepreneur at 19 before joining Al Jazeera in 2006 as a new media analyst. Jude Mathurine went into education and advocacy and is now head of the new media lab at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape Province.

Minty’s presentation was a quick introduction to how the new media team in Doha promotes Al Jazeera online. Minty noted that Al Jazeera is broken into six major functions: Arabic, English, documentary, sport, training and research and his group is involved with all of them. Their job is to ensure the brand stays relevant in the new digital age. Their mantra is “people trust people” so Al Jazeera has been personalising its message in what Minty called a “virtuous circle” of old and new tools and old and new audiences.

He discussed how Al Jazeera covered Operation Cast Lead (Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza). According to the UN Goldstone Report this was a particularly brutal occupation and unsurprisingly Israel didn’t want the media around to question their actions. They made Gaza off-limits to westerners but Al Jazeera had two reporters Ayman Mohyeldin and Sherine Tadros inside the Strip who got their message of the devastation out on television, the website and Twitter. Al Jazeera also urged the people of Gaza to give their online “views from the ground”. Their Twitter live updates were a compelling real time unveiling of suffering that was otherwise unheard in the western media.

Al Jazeera used Ushahidi to integrate mobile, email and alerts for crowdsourced crisis mapping and provided Google maps mashed up with up-to-date bombing information. The site also enabled creative commons video footage which was used creatively by artists, activists and educators alike. Minty said that telling the truth was hard, but not telling it is even harder. His team give Al Jazeera the tools to make it just a little easier.

While Minty is doing great things in Asia, Jude Mathurine is determined Africa will not be left behind in the digital revolution. The theme of Mathurine’s presentation was that the future of journalism in that continent is firmly tied up to mobile social networks and its enormous array of tools.

The question for Africa is how many people will be able to access the tools. Although 15 percent of the world’s people live there, Africa has just four percent of the world’s Internet users. The continent is handicapped by huge income disparities, education issues, poor bandwidth and bad regulation. In South Africa the black and poor are digitally disenfranchised and online social media is biased towards the white and wealthy. Journalists suffer just as badly as the general population and have little by way of media education or exposure. Media organisations are staid and hierarchical and do not engage audiences.

Yet Mathurine says Africa will not be left out of the global village of social networks. He sees hope in the fact the social network sites such as Facebook, Youtube and Blogger are among the most popular sites in many African countries. Critically, this trend is further exacerbated on mobile services. “The revolution will be mobilised,” says Mathurine. In the last six years world mobile growth has outstripped landlines by a factor of over a hundred to one. By 2007 Africa had almost 200 million mobiles compared fewer than 30 million fixed phones. Mobile users are transforming the continent using SMS (and reconnecting the millions elsewhere of the African Diaspora).

Mobile growth is fastest among the young and are taking to the social networks in greatest numbers. Online tools such as Kabissa and Zoopy are changing the political landscape too as Africa looks to local and cheap solutions to get around its many problems. People can buy mobile handsets using open source operating systems with camera and recording capability for just $15 and the Internet backbone is slowly increasing around the continent. But SMS remains the killer app and sets the agenda often bypassing media censorship in the process. Young people and social media are Africa’s great hope for a truly democratic continent, concluded Mathurine. And mobile technology will be far more important than desktop access.

Net nudges towards Neutrality

Net Neutrality is one of those phrases that has people automatically come out in palpitations. The very word neutrality reminds us there is a war going on that we haven’t been told about. It is a high-stakes war for control of the Internet that goes to the heart of American divisions about the role of government in society. Net Neutrality is the formal policy which prohbits ISPs from discriminating between websites. It ensures all content on the internet is treated on just terms by the owners of the networks that make up the Net. (photo by roynel.flores)

Idealists say information on the Net should not be controlled by a pricing or access system and it distorts the market place of ideas. According to British journalism writer Charlie Beckett it is an essential part of the Internet political economy. The alternatives are to construct a series of balances to look dangerously like Internet over-regulation or else allow big companies set a price structure that restricts access to markets and denies the public choice and information. As the Internet develops as a global, decentralised network, it challenges national sovereignty over citizens and territory. So solving net neutrality is not just an American issue.

Robert McChesney writes that US neutrality provisions date back to common carriage non-discrimination requirements in the 1934 Communications Act. When the act was changed in 1996, Congress did not explicitly change this requirement. The problem was that the telecommunications and cable giants began rolling out their cable modem services around the same time and saw Net Neutrality as a barrier to profits. They unsuccessfully lobbied the Clinton administration to exempt the Internet from the provision but found the Bush presidency more accommodating.

In 2002, new FCC boss Michael Powell came to the rescue of the cable companies. The FCC redefined cable modem services as “information services” and at one swoop removed it from the provisions of the Act. Consumers and competitors immediately appealed the decision. There followed 3 years of litigation to determine if the FCC had the authority to make the change. That debate ended with the 2005 Brand X case which the divided Supreme Court ruled the FCC indeed had to power to make the change. The FCC then ruled that neither cable nor DSL broadband services would be subject to Net Neutrality.

With hardly any discussion in the media, the FCC’s ruling suddenly meant that 98 percent of the entire US broadband market would be subject to a biased money-driven view of the Internet. The idea was to create a fasttrack environment for companies willing to pay the premium. Those that refused would get “the slow lane, and probably oblivion,” says McChesney. Although the cable companies did not create the Internet, they could now start charging tolls as if they now owned it. Or as Columbia law professor Tim Wu said, “it's like the Tony Soprano system…a protection racket, and it’s not an economically productive activity".

The FCC decision brought together a decidedly strange group of bedfellows in opposition. Liberal organisations such as Move.on and ACLU sat side by side with, the Christian Coalition and the National Religious Broadcasters. But it was the new media players such as Google and eBay who got all the media attention and helped the meme spread it was simply a clash of Google versus AT&T.

The public clamour woke up the minority Democrat members of the FCC and they grabbed their chance in 2006 to insist the huge merger of AT&T with BellSouth including Net Neutrality for 2 years. After the Democrat victory of that year’s midterms Senators Byron Morgan (D-ND) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) introduced bipartisan legislation to make Net Neutrality the law of the land. All the Democrat presidential candidates endorsed the bill.

The Morgan-Snowe changes were finally presented as the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008 but it remains stalled in Congress. In the meantime the FCC used its powers to allow discrimination and many companies did push back against the data transfers of applications such as Bittorent. The wireless industry began complaining that if they had to stop discriminating it could push them beyond their limited capacity with affect on the cost of data plans and possible bandwidth caps.

Many people have also questioned the government's ability in an era of rapidly-evolving technology to come up with meaningful regulation was not going to be counter-productive. Opponents also see Net Neutrality as mandating government power over the Internet that will stifle innovation and competition. Nevertheless New Obama-appointee FCC boss Julius Genachowski has signalled his intent to pursue neutrality. That means bringing the broadband and wireless industry back into the fold. In September he said he would adapt the agency’s four 2005 Internet principles (any lawful content, any lawful application, any lawful device, any provider) to prevent ISPs from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications, while allowing for reasonable network management. ISPs would also need to be transparent about network management.

But policy matters move slowly in the FCC. The latest is that Genachowski’s organisation has voted unanimously to begin consideration of the proposed rules. According to Google’s Public Policy Blog that means an official rulemaking proceeding will take place over the next several months. There will also be public workshops and technical advisory discussions, allowing everyone to provide feedback before the Commission adopts a final set of rules. Right-wing demagogues such as Glenn Beck call Net Neutrality “a Marxist Plot” but the reality is, as always, all about naked capitalist greed. Unless every packet of data is neutral, the big telecommunications companies and media corporations will take full control of the Internet.

Stephen Fry, Twitter and the Fifth Estate

The Prince of Twitter dropped a bombshell to his near million followers tonight with his attempted Twitter quitter note. “Think I may have to give up on Twitter. Too much aggression and unkindness around. Pity. Well, it's been fun” he wrote. Looking back a tweet earlier and there was a more definitive statement. “@brumplum You've convinced me. I'm obviously not good enough. I retire from Twitter henceforward. Bye everyone.” @Brumplum was Richard of Birmingham, England. Richard’s blog “Plum’s plums” comes with an adult warning from Google but is otherwise unremarkable. Stephen Fry is not mentioned anywhere except in the Twitter stream. (photo adapted from the original by wilsondan)

It would seem that Richard and Fry are unknown to each other. But Brumplum mentioned in passing to another Tweeter today he thought @stephenfry’s tweets were ‘a bit... boring.... (sorry Stephen)”. For some reason this mild rebuke got under Fry’s skin as it caused him to reply to brumplum “whereas yours are so fascinating I can barely contain my fluids.” Two hours later, Fry made his announcement he was quitting.

Pity poor Brumplum. Within minutes of Fry’s announcement, people were flocking to his page for more information. Once Brumplum was outed as the Fry twitter killer, the Twitterverse was intent on proving Fry right about the aggression and unkindness. “Always nice to forever be known as the idiot who fucked over Fry”, said one person to Brumplum. “Look what you've done, meaningless piece of meat!” said another. “i feel i should say something horrible to you for you're stephen shunning” said a third. And on it went.

But the reality is that if Stephen Fry is going to quit Twitter it won’t be because of the boredom he caused Richard Nobody of Birmingham. Fry is a massive presence on the social network. He is on more lists (5,520) than most people have followers. He has 924,300 followers of his own. According to the Telegraph, Twitter has given him extraordinary power. He has used the platform as a bullypulpit on issues from Japanese shark fin fishing, to Westminster press freedoms, to getting a Londoner off death row in China. “On September 16, he demanded that Gordon Brown attend the Climate Change conference in Copenhagen;” said the Telegraph. “On September 21, Mr Brown announced that he would.”

Fry was also instrumental in the Twitter campaign to castigate Jan Moir for her homophobic column about Stephen Gately. In short he is at the centre of most Twitter storms. He deeply understands the tool’s potential to be a mouthpiece of the masses. But to his vast army of followers he is merely a funny and honest person who shares his life on a public social network. And so for all the people who tweeted for brumplum’s head, many times more simply wanted to show Fry their support and pleaded with him to continue tweeting.

Fry gave a sense of how the pressure to perform in the platform may be playing out with a brilliant essay on his own blog a couple of weeks ago. In “Poles, politeness and politics in the age of Twitter” he reflected with scorching honesty on his practice of “tweet first, ask questions later” in the light of the Moir affair. He also noted how an appearance on Polish television went badly wrong when he said something like “let’s not forget which side of the border Auschwitz was on.” It was an insensitive remark which he immediately regretted but the hatemail he got extinguished “any spark of apology”. This only made matters worse and he unreservedly apologised in the blog post.

Fry was finding out the hard way that he was now considered a politician and was being treated the way anyone with real power is treated. He was aware of his own influence in the Moir and Trafigura cases and noted “a shift in the very focus of democracy.” The “Twinternet” was becoming a Fifth Estate he noted (a label previously used to describe blogs) rescuing the media in its battles with the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government. “A pleasant twittery microblogging service that I joined in the spirit of curiosity and fun has emerged as a real force in the land and it is of course fascinating and pleasing to see this,” he admitted.

Fry then attempted to undersell his role. He does NOT wield influence, he contended. He was late on the scene with Moir and Trafigura. There was occasionally better things to do than Twitter. “Contrary to appearances I have another life and do not spend all my time monitoring screens and detecting every twitch on the filament of the web,” he said. Twitter’s name is a clue to its meaning, he said. It is not called “Ponder or Debate”. Yet he also conceded it was a new and potent force in democracy and “a thorn in side of the established order of things”.

And Fry was getting fed up with the centrality of his role in the revolution. “Hundreds of requests pour in every day asking me to use my strange, new-found ability to connect to a lot of people,” he said “It is as if I own a billboard on the busiest road in Britain.” Fry was beginning to sense a paradox at heart of his power. The closer he gets to the centre, the more people pay attention to what he has to say. “Maybe the very fact that I have so many followers now disqualifies me from stating the sort of opinions all others are free to – as if I were a member of the royal family.” Perhaps accepting his now figurehead status, he concluded, “the best I can do is hope for a quiet week ahead.” If he does remain quiet in Twitter, it will be his decision.