I was on Radio 2SER’s program The Fourth Estate yesterday, talking about Iran and Twitter much as I did for Crikey on Thursday. By all means, listen to the podcast. You’re after the program for 19 June 2009, and it contains other good stuff too.
Psywar in Iran
“This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media,” says Clay Shirky, professor at New York University and author of the book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. And what’s had the greatest impact? “It’s Twitter,” says Shirky.
So starts my piece in Crikey yesterday, We’re all wearing green for Iran now, apparently.
The article covers two main points.
One, this isn’t really the first time demonstrations have been organised or teargas reported via Twitter. Try Bangkok in October 2008. Try Chişinău in April 2009. And as Business Week pointed out, A Twitter revolution? Hardly.
Two, people are changing their avatars green to “support democracy in Iran” based on very little information. And as commenter Rena Zurawel claimed:
Whether it is a Rose Revolution in Georgia, or Orange Revolution in the Ukraine or a Green revolution in Iran — the source and inspiration is exactly the same: $70 million decided by the Congress to spend on so called “democratic changes in Iran”.
That last point intrigued me, so I poked around a bit.
I found this 2008 report from STRATFOR Global Intelligence: Geopolitical Diary: Iran, Psywar and the Hersh Article… which is reproduced in full over the jump.
A Series of Tubes episode 86
The latest A Series of Tubes podcast is online for your listening pleasure. Richard Chirgwin talks with Chris King and David Thrum of Palo Alto Networks about the firewall market; sponsor Nortel about last week’s announcements at Interop; and me about National E-Security Week and the decisions of French courts on anti-piracy legislation.
Phonecasting in WordPress
While chatting with Jeff Waugh, we worked out a great way of blogging from remote Tanzania: podcasting by telephone! Here’s how.
Even if we’re not in one of the 70% of Tanzanian villages with mobile phone coverage, we’ll still have a satellite phone. We call into a voicemail service like mBox and just start talking. It then emails us the MP3 file of the recording.
WordPress already lets you blog by email, checking a standard POP3 mailbox and turning whatever it finds there into a blog post. Email subject becomes post title, email body becomes content. But it doesn’t support attachments. Yet.
Jeff reckons it’d be easy enough to see if the email contains an MP3 file and extract it. It could then be handed to, say, the PodPress plug-in, which in turn makes sure the MP3 file is properly connected to the blog post to work as a podcast. PodPress then automatically updates your podcast listing in iTunes and other directories.
As an added bonus, WordPress can automatically send a message to Twitter when a new episode goes online.
How do we avoid spam? Well, mBox uses Caller ID to make sure the email has a subject like:
mBox Voice message from NNNNNNNNNNN to MMMMMMMMMM
We can check the email headers to ensure they’re legitimately from mBox or whoever we use. And we can use the sender’s phone number to correctly assign the author, and the receiving phone number to, well, post into different categories or whatever.
So, to run through it again… I’m standing on the ferry to Zanzibar. I make a satellite phone call to describe the magnificent view. Five minutes later, that’s a podcast. And everybody gets notified via Twitter.
Of course there’s bound to be some potential for screwing this up, but whaddyareckon?
A Series of Tubes returned weeks ago
I’ve been very slack about keeping you up to date with the podcast A Series of Tubes, on which I’m a regular guest with the redoubtable Richard Chirgwin. So, here we go…
In episode 83 (24 May) I spoke about about my Project TOTO trip to Tanzania.
In episode 84 (31 May), it says “Stilgherrian is trying to get ready for Project TOTO in Tanzania, in spite of the tribulations of topless garden gnomes (Tubes doesn’t know either!), but still took time to talk censorship, international cables, the OECD and Sol’s parting shot.”
And in episode 85 (10 June), I spoke about regulation, censorship, and Google Wave.
Richard and I recorded another interview yesterday, so I’m guessing episode 86 will appear tomorrow some time.
NBN: Of course there are no applications yet!
The guy in the photo is Jerry Watkins, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne — and I want to slap him.
This morning he was a guest on ABC Radio National’s FutureTense, where he talked about some fantastic third-world technology projects, like India’s DakNet.
A Wi-Fi transmitter and receiver is fitted to the local bus. So the bus drives along its normal route, goes through a number of villages, and what it’s doing while it’s stopping at the bus stop in each village, is simply picking up and delivering information via Wi-Fi from publicly-accessible computers in each village… Once it gets back into town, it simply uploads all its stored data onto the Internet… So in this way, the rural community is getting access to a very affordable internet connection, it’s just simply not always on…
It’s services like e-shopping which are proving increasingly popular with these users. So e-shopping is using the bus internet system, and it allows villagers to order essential items and luxury items, which just aren’t available at the village market. And what’s more, the items are often delivered to the village on the very same bus with the Wi-Fi transmitter.
Awesome. But that’s not why I want to slap him.
I want to slap Jerry Watkins because he said daft things about Australia’s proposed National Broadband Network.
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