Author: Mathew Ingram

Although many people find things to criticize about Facebook, including its privacy policies, one thing that many users — and many companies that connect to the network’s social graph — like is that the social network requires users to register with their real names. In fact, that’s arguably one of Facebook’s big strengths: it allows you to know who you are connecting to and sharing information with. At the same time, however, that approach makes it difficult for political dissidents in countries such as Egypt to use the network as a tool for organizing protests and other revolutionary purposes, since they don’t want the authorities to be able to track them and their activities. Despite some pressure from social activists, a Facebook official said today that it has no plans to change its policy.

There has been a lot of attention paid recently to the use of social tools such as Twitter and Facebook in uprisings in Tunisia and the more recent popular revolt in Egypt. Although debate continues about how much of an effect these tools have had (a topic we have written about before on a number of occasions) there is no question that activists and revolutionaries in both countries have made use of all the tools at their disposal to organize, including mobile SMS and web-based social networks. While they may not create revolutions where none would otherwise exist, they can certainly help to speed up the process.

To take just one example, Wael Ghonim — the Google staffer who was released Monday after being detained for almost two weeks by the Egyptian government, and who has become a figurehead of the popular movement — has talked about how the Facebook page he helped administer was crucial in building support for the January 25th demonstrations that started the recent uprising. Although he used the name “El Shaheed,” which in Arabic means “the martyr,” the social network has a strict policy against the use of pseudonyms, and some protest-oriented groups in Tunisia and elsewhere have found themselves shut down because of this policy.

While Facebook and other social networks make it easy to spread the word and rally popular support to such causes, however, they also make it easy for government operatives to track activists and dissidents who use such channels to communicate. Although Facebook has taken action to stop outright hacking of the kind the Tunisian government engaged in, there is nothing to stop members of the police or army from simply watching what gets posted to pages about protests, etc. and then following or tracking down those individuals. According to a recent story in the Daily Mail, that’s exactly what government agents have been doing.

Jillian York, who works with the Global Voices Online project — an offshoot of the Harvard Berman Center for the Internet and Society — has been one of those arguing that Facebook should find some way of modifying its policies so that the social network can be used by dissidents in a variety of ways, without the fear of being tracked by their governments and suddenly disappearing the night.

I, for one, would like to see Facebook abandon this policy. It is, for lack of a better word, inane in light of how the platform is used globally. Facebook should listen to their users and accommodate their needs. To me, abandonment of the policy isn’t even that necessary; I just want to see a stop to crackdowns on vulnerable activists.

Simon Axten, of Facebook’s public policy team, told The Register in the UK that the company’s “real name culture” is an essential element of the social network, and that while Facebook is talking to human-rights groups about ways they can use the platform without exposing themselves to government retaliation, the whole point of the social network is to replicate people’s real-world connections online, and having real identities is a key part of doing that. In general, he said, “the benefits of real-name culture outweigh the risks.” So while Facebook makes it easy for you to connect with that old friend from high school, it will also continue to make it easy for governments to track the activities of dissidents as well.

When WikiLeaks exploded into public view last year, with its release of a classified Iraqi war video and then thousands of documents relating to the war in Afghanistan, the response from traditional media outlets — and in particular from the New York Times — was very interesting. Although the Times worked closely with WikiLeaks and its leader Julian Assange in order to get access to and report on the documents, executive editor Bill Keller made it clear that he did not consider Assange a journalist, nor did he think of WikiLeaks as being in any way a journalistic entity. Based on some comments that Keller made at a symposium at Columbia University on Thursday, however, he may be changing his mind.

In his recently released e-book about dealing with WikiLeaks, which was excerpted in the New York Times magazine, the executive editor makes it clear that considered the WikiLeaks founder just a source like any other, not a journalistic colleague, and said that he would “hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism.” In December, Keller seemed to come close to admitting that WikiLeaks might be practising something approaching journalism, when he told a Nieman Foundation event that the organization was doing things in a “more journalistic fashion.” But he added that it still wasn’t “my kind of news organization,” and that if Assange was acting as a journalist in some way, “I don’t regard him as a kindred spirit — he’s not the kind of journalist I am.”

At a symposium yesterday at the Columbia School of Journalism, however — where Keller appeared along with Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger and **, in a panel moderated by Emily Bell of the Tow Center for ** — the Times editor all but acknowledged that WikiLeaks is a journalistic entity, when he said that he did not support the U.S. Department of Justice’s attempts to build a case against Assange under the Espionage Act. According to the Huffington Post’s version of the event, Keller said:

[It would be] hard to conceive of a prosecution of Julian Assange that wouldn’t stretch the law to be applicable to us. Whatever one thinks of Julian Assange… journalists should feel a sense of alarm at any legal action that intends to punish Assange for doing what journalists do.

It’s nice to see that the NYT’s executive editor is — however reluctantly — coming around to the view that we have been arguing for some time: namely, that WikiLeaks is effectively a media entity, and that what it does qualifies as journalism (Columbia’s School of Journalism believes this as well, even if Keller doesn’t yet). It may not be the kind of journalism that the New York Times engages in, but it clearly has a role to play in the expanded media ecosystem. And the fact that WikiLeaks is effectively a stateless entity — the first stateless news organization, as NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has called it — is a crucial part of that role, as media analyst Clay Shirky argues in a recent piece for The Guardian.

Because this tension between governments and leakers is so important, and because WikiLeaks so dramatically helps leakers, it isn’t just a new entrant in the existing media landscape. Its arrival creates a new landscape.

Because WikiLeaks is “headquartered on the web,” as Shirky puts it, no single country or government can shut it down. Even if Assange is eventually prosecuted or removed in some way as the head of the organization, as early supporter and Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir put it recently, “a thousand heads will spring up.” In factm as Shirky notes, that is already happening — Al-Jazeera and The Guardian formed a partnership to release thousands of documents about the relationship between Israel and Palestine (now being called the “Palestine Papers”), and former WikiLeaks staffer Daniel Domscheit-Berg has launched an entity called OpenLeaks. Meanwhile, the New York Times has talked about possibly creating its own digital tip box where sources could leak documents instead of sending them to WikiLeaks.

Whether Bill Keller likes it or not, the tools of journalism have been set loose from the control of entities like the New York Times or The Guardian. Anyone can effectively become a publisher now, and that includes WikiLeaks and OpenLeaks and anyone who makes use of similar tools — just as people who find themselves in the central square in Cairo or the government buildings in Tunisia can behave as journalists if they wish to do so. That’s an important phenomenon, and it would be nice to see the NYT editor come right out and admit that it is happening, rather than dance around the implications.

After weeks of discussion in the blogosphere over whether what happened in Tunisia was a “Twitter revolution,” and whether social media also helped trigger the current anti-government uprising in Egypt, author Malcolm Gladwell — who wrote a widely-read New Yorker article about how inconsequential social media is when it comes to “real” social activism — has finally weighed in with his thoughts on the subject. But he continues to miss the real point about the use of Twitter and Facebook, which is somewhat surprising for the author of the best-seller The Tipping Point.

Although the topic of social media’s role in events in Tunisia and Egypt — and also in Iran and other countries that have recently seen citizen uprisings — has been the focus of much commentary from observers such as Ethan Zuckerman and Jillian York of Global Voices Online, and from foreign affairs writer and author Evgeny Morozov, the response from Gladwell on the New Yorker’s “News Desk” blog was all of about 200 words long. In a somewhat defensive tone, Gladwell suggested that if Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong had made his famous “power springs from the barrel of a gun” statement today, everyone would obsess over whether he made it on Twitter or Facebook. He concluded that while there is a lot that can be said about the protests in Egypt:

Surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along.

In other words, as far as the New Yorker writer is concerned, the use of any specific communications tools — whether that happens to be cellphones or SMS or Twitter or Facebook — may be occurring, and may even be helping revolutionaries in countries like Egypt in some poorly-defined way, but it’s just not that interesting. This seems like an odd comment coming from someone who wrote a book all about how a series of small changes in the way people think about an issue can suddenly reach a “tipping point” and gain widespread appeal, since that’s exactly the kind of thing that social media does extremely well.

Gladwell isn’t the only one who has taken a skeptical stance when it comes to the use of social media in such situations. Morozov, who writes for Foreign Policy magazine, is also the author of a book called “Net Delusion,” in which he argues that the views of some “cyber-utopians” are in danger of distorting political discourse, and convincing some politicians and bureaucrats that all people require in order to overthrow governments is Internet access and some Twitter followers (Cory Doctorow critiqued the book recently in The Guardian). This view was echoed in a recent piece in BusinessWeek entitled “The Fallacy of Facebook Diplomacy,” which argued that “the idea that America can use the Internet to influence global events is more dream than reality.”

But as sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci argues in a blog post responding to Gladwell — and as we argued in a recent post here — the point is not that social media tools like Twitter and Facebook cause revolutions in any real sense. What they are very good at doing, however, is connecting people in very simple ways, and making those connections in a very fast and distributed sort of way. This is the power of a networked society and of cheap, real-time communication networks.

As Tufekci notes, what happens in social networks is the creation of what sociologist Mark Granovetter called “weak ties” in a seminal piece of research in the 1970s (PDF link) — that is, the kinds of ties you have to your broader network of friends and acquaintances, as opposed to the strong ties that you have to your family or your church or your close friends. But while Gladwell more or less dismissed the value of those ties in his New Yorker piece about how little value social media has when it comes to “real” activism, Tufekci argues that these weak ties can become connected to our stronger relationships, and that’s when real change can occur.

New movements that can bring about global social change will still require people who interact with each other regularly, and trust and depend on each other in somewhat dense networks. Or only hope is if those networks span the globe in a tightly-knit, broad web of activity, interaction, personalization. Real change will come only if we can make friends we care about everywhere and we make bridge ties that cover the world in a web of common humanity.

In places like Tunisia and Egypt, for example, individuals or small groups might be thinking about or working towards revolution, but it isn’t until they connect with other people or groups — or see evidence of others who feel the same — that this tips over into actual activity. As Jared Cohen of Google Ideas said recently, social-media tools can be a powerful “accelerant” in those situations. A recent report from the security consulting agency Stratfor looked at how social media can be used by activist groups to spread their message and co-ordinate activities.

That’s not to say that the question of who is using which tool is inherently more interesting than the actual human acts of bravery and risks that people in Tunisia and Egypt have taken, or are taking — but those tools and that activity can bring things to a tipping point that might otherwise not have occurred, or spur others (possibly even in other countries) to do something similar. And that is interesting — or should be — regardless of what Malcolm Gladwell might think.

There’s been a lot of pre-launch interest in Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad “newspaper” The Daily, in part because the News Corp. (s nws) founder is known for making ambitious bets on new technology — even if they don’t always work out, as he found with MySpace — and also because Apple (s aapl) was a key partner, and used the News app to launch its new subscription model for content. So does The Daily live up to its billing? Is it the future of newspapers? Not really. It does some interesting things, but it also does some very confusing things, particularly around sharing content. And much of it, apart from some bells and whistles, consists of fairly humdrum day-old stories that you might read in, well… a regular old printed newspaper.

The first clue to what you get with The Daily, as more than one person has noted, is in the name itself. It is published more or less just like a regular newspaper, in the sense that the bulk of the content is produced and then published to the app once a day. Although News Corp. made a point of noting at its launch event that the app will be updated throughout the day as news breaks, there was no sign of that happening while I used it for most of the day on Wednesday, and that was while riots were still breaking out in Cairo. Even though Twitter content appeared in a box in one of the stories (a profile of Rihanna) and had live links, the actual tweets themselves were almost 12 hours old — even after the app updated itself and said it was downloading a new version of the paper.

The result is that you get something that feels very much like a newspaper, with stories about things that happened yesterday. And while you can share stories via Facebook and Twitter, none of the pieces contain any links to anything on the web, making the app feel very much like similar apps from newspapers such as the New York Times and magazines such as Esquire and Wired — disconnected from the Internet in a lot of ways. There are live links in Twitter streams in stories (particularly the customizable sports section, which lets you follow teams), and there is a small section of links called “What We’re Reading,” but other than that there isn’t a whole lot of linking going on at all. There’s also no way to contact the writers or interact with them in any way, as Salon founder Scott Rosenberg noted, apart from posting a comment (which you can also do via audio, an unusual choice).

When it comes to sharing the content, The Daily doesn’t really have a website that is open to the public since it is a subscription app (it costs 99 cents a week or $39 for a year), but when you share a link to a story via Facebook or Twitter, people can click through and read it — a “social media passthrough” that the New York Times is also reportedly building into its upcoming web paywall. But with The Daily, when you click through to read the piece, you get what amounts to a screenshot of the app page; in other words, it’s an image rather than actual text. With some stories, you also get a large warning, complete with a big exclamation mark, that says the story is “missing content available only in The Daily iPad app.” There is no way to navigate from that story to any other story on the site, even if it has been shared already, just a link to download the app.

All of that aside, the biggest issue with The Daily is that even when you share a story, there is little that might encourage anyone to cough up the money to subscribe (a Columbia Journalism Review editor called it “a general-interest publication that is not generally interesting” and added that “great design will not trump lackluster content”). In the inaugural version, there were a couple of features that were worth reading, but they didn’t add much to similar stories that have appeared elsewhere for free. And a surprising amount of what appeared in the app — once you got past all the videos, most of which were devoted to advertising, and the interactive Sudoku and crossword puzzles — was run-of-the-mill news briefs that you might see in any newspaper such as USA Today. Many of them, in fact, appeared to be rewritten wire copy.

Much of the pre-launch promotion of The Daily suggested that it was going to focus on the content in a way that many newspapers don’t, and that the $30 million or so Rupert Murdoch was spending on the project indicated there would be a higher level of quality. But while the app is well designed and the articles and photos are nice to look at, there isn’t a whole lot on the content side that makes it any better than newspapers that can already be read for free — and whose links can be shared and read without the bizarre restrictions that The Daily has invented. David Weidner of WSJ’s MarketWatch said that “the pricing is right,” and that $40 a year made more sense than $240 a year for the New York Times, and it’s true that the low price may get some to sign up — but the bigger question is, how many?

Apple caused a minor firestorm of criticism on Tuesday after it rejected Sony’s eReader app from the app store, saying the service had to allow in-app purchases as well as those that take place on Sony’s website. The company later clarified that this was always the rule for apps, but that it is cracking down on the practice now, and requiring all apps which allow external purchases to also offer in-app purchases — which go through the Apple payment system, and therefore give the company its standard 30-percent cut of every sale.

The news caused all kinds of consternation from media-industry observers, but the deal is really very simple: if you want to use Apple as your distribution platform, you have to pay the piper. That’s a useful lesson for media companies to learn, although it is probably too late for most.

When the first rumors about the imminent launch of an Apple iPad first starting circulating, many newspaper companies and other media outlets leaped at the chance to partner with the company and get their content on the new device. At the time, I (and others) warned that the new tablet was unlikely to be the Holy Grail solution to the systemic problems of the traditional media industry — and also that publishers of all kinds should be careful what they wished for. By giving media companies an all-in-one platform for reaching readers and viewers and potentially selling them content via iPad apps (although that hasn’t been going all that well so far), Apple was also locking down its control over that distribution channel and the relationship with those readers and viewers.

This became obvious when some media outlets started negotiating with Apple about a subscription-based newsstand — a service the company is expected to announce tomorrow, when it launches Rupert Murdoch’s highly-touted new iPad-only publication, The Daily. Apple balked at the idea of giving publishers access to any of the subscription or user data that would come from such an arrangement, saying only it would be able to see that data. For media companies, that kind of information is a huge part of how they sell their content to advertisers, by showing that they are reaching the right demographics and therefore that their content is worth buying.

Then Apple did the same kind of thing that it just did with Sony: it reportedly told newspaper companies that they would no longer be able to give their readers a free subscription to their content through their iPad app — instead, they would have to sign them up for a regular subscription via the app. Just as with the Sony deal, the obvious intention was to shut off a potential escape route by which media companies could provide access to their content, and thereby avoid the 30-percent door charge at the Apple store. Frederic Filloux summed this up nicely in a recent post on the Monday Note blog.

That Apple is doing any of this shouldn’t come as any surprise. What’s the point of controlling a platform like the iPhone and the iPad if you can’t force people to pay you a carrying charge for hosting their content and connecting them with their customers? Allowing Sony or the New York Times to either give away their content for free or to sell it under their own terms and keep the proceeds doesn’t make any sense — it would be like a shopping mall owner giving tenants space for free, then allowing them to send shoppers out to the parking lot to finish a transaction, so they wouldn’t have to pay the mall owner his share. All Apple is saying is “Have your website if you want — but we still get our cut.”

Call it a Faustian bargain or a deal with the devil or whatever you want, but Apple is the one who came up with devices that are so appealing, and a content-distribution model that is so effective, that it has sold billions of apps in a remarkably short space of time, and created a whole generation of users who look to it for content such as newspapers, magazines, e-books and games. Putting your eggs in Apple’s basket is a great way to get them to market — but just remember who owns the basket, and who you have to pay for carrying it. They are the ones who control some of the key terms of your relationship with your customers, not you. And over in the corner stands Google, waving frantically.

One of the big issues with the ongoing explosion of social media, whether it’s blogging or Twitter or Facebook, is a lack of effective ways to filter the signal from the noise — in other words, to figure out who we should pay attention to. Facebook relies on your existing social graph, while Twitter uses its own internal algorithms to suggest people you should follow, and LinkedIn uses your professional status and co-workers or contacts as the benchmark. But the race continues to try and measure online reputation in an effective way. Should it be based on activity? Number of followers? A ranking system in which people can vote on you? All of the above?

One of the latest to jump into this pool is Mixtent, which launched today with a voting-based system that uses data from your LinkedIn profile once you log in with your credentials (and will also pull in your Facebook info if you connect that as well). The company says it is “building a professional reputation graph on top of the main social and professional networks” in order to help people hire others and get hired themselves. If Mixtent looks a little familiar, that’s because it appears to be almost identical to a LinkedIn-based game known as Cube Duel that got some attention a couple of weeks ago, in which users vote for co-workers and can “unlock” various badges, and so on.

In trying to measure who has the highest reputation among your co-workers, and therefore who is best qualified to either recommend you or be recommended themselves, Mixtent is going after the same kind of market that other startups such as Honestly (formerly known as Unvarnished), Namesake and BranchOut are aiming at — namely, the professional end of the social web, in which people are looking to network for jobs. In the same way that Mixtent is based on the LinkedIn network, BranchOut uses Facebook as a platform, and leverages all of the people you are connected to via your social graph who might work (or used to work) at other companies.

One issue for BranchOut that I wrote about when the service first launched is that Facebook is primarily personal, and so the overlap between that part of your life and the professional side is haphazard at best, and useless at worst. In a similar way, the game-like aspect of Mixtent might not jibe well with the more professional aspects of LinkedIn for some users. Honestly, meanwhile, is trying to create a reputation-based network that achieves the same thing as LinkedIn or BranchOut — a way of measuring a person’s skills within a certain professional context — but allows for anonymous (and therefore theoretically more honest) input about the people who are being ranked.

Namesake wants to create a personalized network for professional recommendations that is like a more personal or social version of LinkedIn. You can follow people within the network, and recommend them based on what you see as their areas of expertise, and then you can forward or “route” opportunities to them that come from your contacts. The kind of crowdsourced reputation that Namesake is built on also emerges from social networks like Quora and StackExchange, where people answering questions in their area of expertise builds up their reputation (something VC Fred Wilson discussed with me in an interview last year). And a company like Klout comes at it from the algorithmic end, by looking at your activity on Twitter and Facebook to try and give you an overall social-media “score.”

One big problem for these services, however, is that each of us has different reputation ranks within our social, and even our professional networks: I might trust my friend Chris when it comes to advice on barbecuing, and I know he is an excellent videographer, but I would never listen to him when he recommends music. And while I know that my friend Rob is a lawyer and understands technology, I have no idea whether to recommend him based on his knowledge of carpentry, or of wills and estates. This is why Namesake is trying to create a professional network that functions more like a social web — because the ways in which we interact with each other often don’t fall cleanly into one category or another. Will a simple voting system like Mixtent is offering work? I’m not convinced.

Just as it was during the recent uprisings in Tunisia, the role of social media in the recent upheaval in Egypt has been the subject of much debate since the unrest began on Thursday. Daily Show host Jon Stewart on Friday poked fun at the idea that Twitter might have played a key part in the demonstrations, and there are many observers who share his skepticism. The real trigger for the uprisings, they argue, is simply the grinding poverty and frustration of the Egyptian people — which is undoubtedly true. But it also seems clear that social media has played a key role in getting the message out, as well as in helping organizers plan and co-ordinate their protests. And in the end, it’s not about whether to give credit to Twitter or Facebook: the real point is the power of real-time networked communication.

Foreign Policy magazine columnist Evgeny Morozov has argued that Twitter and Facebook should not be credited with playing any kind of critical role in Tunisia, and suggested that doing so is a sign of the “net utopianism” that many social-media advocates suffer from — the belief that the Internet is unambiguously good, or that the use of Twitter or Facebook can magically free a repressed society from its shackles. Morozov, who has written an entire book about this idea called Net Delusion, made the point in a blog post after the Tunisian uprising that while social media might have been used in some way during the events, tools like Twitter and Facebook did not play a crucial role — in other words, the revolution would have happened with or without them.

Zeynep Tufekci, a professor of sociology who has also looked at this issue, described in a post following the revolution in Tunisia how professional observers distinguish between what she called “proximate” causes and “**” causes — that is, things that are required in order to produce a certain outcome, and things that are nice to have but are not a requirement. Tufekci and Jillian York of Global Voices Online both seem to believe that social media tools fall into the latter category: useful, but not necessary. Ethan Zuckerman, one of the founders of Global Voices Online, has also written about how the uprisings in both Tunisia and in Egypt have more to do with decades of poverty and repressive dictatorships than they do with social media.

But is anyone really arguing that Twitter and Facebook *caused* the revolutions in Tunisia or Egypt, or even the earlier public uprisings in Moldova or Iran for that matter? Maybe cyber-utopians somewhere are doing this, but I haven’t seen or heard of any. The argument I have tried to make is simply that they and other social media tools can be incredibly powerful, both for spreading the word — which can give moral or emotional support to others in a country, as well as generating external support — as well as for organizational purposes. As Jason Cohen of Google Ideas put it, social media may not be a cause, but it can be a powerful “accelerant.”

Did Twitter or Facebook cause the Tunisian revolt? No. But they did spread the news, and many Tunisian revolutionaries gave them a lot of credit for helping with the process. Did Twitter cause the revolts in Egypt? No. But they did help activists such as WikiLeaks supporter Jacob Appelbaum (known on Twitter as @ioerror) and others as they organized the dialup and satellite phone connections that created an ad-hoc Internet after Egypt turned the real one off — which, of course, it did in large part to try and prevent demonstrators from using Internet-based tools like blogs and social media to foment unrest. As Cory Doctorow noted in his review of Evgeny Morozov’s book, even if Twitter and Facebook are just used to replace the process of stapling pieces of paper to telephone poles and sending out hundreds of emails, they are still a huge benefit to social activism of all kinds.

But programmer and RSS developer Dave Winer made the key point: it’s the Internet that is the really powerful tool here, not any of the specific apps or services such as Twitter and Facebook that run on top of it, which Winer compares to brands like NBC or Fox. They have power because lots of people use them, and — in the case of Twitter — because they have open protocols so that apps can still access the network even when the company’s website is taken down by repressive governments (athough he didn’t mention Egypt or Tunisia by name, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote a post on the Twitter blog about the company’s desire to “keep the Tweets flowing).

But the real weapon is the power of networked communication itself. In previous revolutions it was the fax, or the pamphlet, or the cellphone — now it is SMS and Twitter and Facebook. Obviously none of these things cause revolutions, but to ignore or downplay their importance is also a mistake.

The New York Times is considering creating an electronic tip line so that leakers of classified documents can go direct instead of having to use a middleman like WikiLeaks, according to comments made by executive editor Bill Keller in an interview with the Cutline blog. Keller said that the plan is still in its formative stages, but the idea is to create a “kind of EZ Pass lane for leakers,” to make it easier for them to contact the paper and deliver information. And the Times isn’t the only one doing this: Al-Jazeera has already launched its own drop-box for leaks, and recently released thousands of documents related to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

When WikiLeaks first burst into public view last year with a treasure trove of secret documents about the Iraq war, including a classified video of an American military attack on civilians, one of the first things some media-industry observers wondered was: why didn’t the sources of this material — widely believed to be Bradley Manning, a U.S. intelligence officer now in a military prison in Guantanamo Bay — just go directly to a newspaper like the New York Times instead of leaking it to some shadowy organization like WikiLeaks? The New York Times probably wondered that too, which is why it’s not surprising to hear that the paper is working on its own digital tip line.

In some ways, it’s surprising that it has taken the NYT and other newspapers this long to come up with this idea. Newspapers and other media outlets have always relied on those with access to secret or confidential information — either about companies or about governments — to deliver material in brown envelopes that are dropped off at the front desk or handed over to people in parking garages, as the famous Watergate documents were in **. Doug Saunders, the European bureau chief for the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail compared WikiLeaks to a brown envelope when it first came to prominence, and said it was nothing more than a middleman, which to a large extent is true.

The key difference with an entity like WikiLeaks, however, is that it is also a publisher — it can instantly release whatever documents it wishes its own web site or dozens of other sites that it has relationships with, although so far it has only released the same documents that the New York Times and The Guardian and other media outlets have (with names of some individuals redacted to prevent them from being targeted). The main thing that WikiLeaks gains by working with the NYT and other traditional media entities is a broader reach — in effect, publicity for the leaks, as Icelandic MP and early WikiLeaks supporter Birgitta Jonsdottir explained in a recent speech in Toronto.

So will more leakers go direct to either the New York Times or Al-Jazeera? Possibly. But the one thing that sources gain by going through WikiLeaks instead of a specific media outlet is the knowledge that they aren’t relying on one newspaper’s view of the documents — in other words, that the New York Times doesn’t control what gets released and what doesn’t, or what gets written about and what doesn’t, since WikiLeaks typically works with several competing organizations at once. For anyone who remembers how the Times behaved when it was reporting about the issues leading up to the Iraq War, that could be a very powerful incentive to use WikiLeaks rather than going direct.

But WikiLeaks is about to get some more competition on that front as well: a new organization called OpenLeaks, set up by former WikiLeaks staffer **, is expected to launch soon with a much more distributed model that was developed in part as a response to criticism about WikiLeaks and the behavior of front-man Julian Assange. For better or worse, the organization appears to have opened a Pandora’s box when it comes to political transparency that may never be closed.

By now, thanks to incidents like the revolution in Tunisia and the recent shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, most people have come to grips with the fact that Twitter is effectively a real-time news network — like a version of CNN that is powered by hundreds of thousands or even millions of users around the world. But what happens when that real-time news network is spreading mis-information? That happened during the Giffords shooting, when the congresswoman was initially reported to be dead, and there are other more recent cases as well: on Wednesday, for example, reports of a shooting in Oxford Circus in London, England swept through the Twitter-sphere but turned out to be a mistake.

The British incident appears to have been caused by two coincidental events: according to several reports, one was an email about a police training exercise involving a shooting in Oxford Circus, which somehow got into the wrong hands and was posted as though it was the real thing. Meanwhile, another Twitter user posted an unrelated message about a TV commercial “shooting” in the area, and the combination of those two things helped to fan the flames of hysteria for a number of hours about buildings being locked down and police sharpshooters being brought in, etc. — which can be seen in the chronicle of tweets collected by one Twitter observer at the site Exquisite Tweets.

In the case of Rep. Giffords, in the minutes following the initial reports of the shooting, a number of outlets reported that the congresswoman had been killed, and these reports made their way onto Twitter — in some cases because the reporters for those news outlets posted them, and in other cases because users heard or saw the reports and then tweeted about them. For hours after the shooting these erroneous reports continued to circulate, even after the reporters and media outlets themselves had posted corrections. Andy Carvin of National Public Radio, for example, spent a considerable amount of time correcting people about the report that he posted, but it continued to be re-tweeted.

This led to a discussion by a number of journalists (including me) in the days that followed, about how to handle an incorrect tweet. Should it be deleted, to prevent the error from being circulated any further? A number of reporters and bloggers said that it should — but others, such as Salon founder Scott Rosenberg and Carvin (who described his thoughts in this comment at Lost Remote), argued that the error should be allowed to remain, but that whoever posted it should do their best to update Twitter with the correct information, and respond to those re-tweeting it by telling them of the mistake. Craig Silverman of Regret The Error, who wrote a post cataloguing the erroneous reports, has also described a way in which Twitter could implement a correction function, by tying any correction to the original tweet so that everyone who saw the original would then see the update.

The problem with this approach, of course, is that Twitter is by definition a stream of content. Parts of it can be posted on blogs by using a number of tools — including the company’s own Blackbird Pie feature, as well as Storify and Curated.by — but the stream never stops flowing, and during breaking news events it flows so quickly it’s almost impossible to filter it all. And because it is an asynchronous experience, meaning people step away from it and then come back repeatedly, and therefore don’t see every tweet even from the people they follow, there is no way to guarantee that everyone is going to see an update or a correction, or to stop them from re-tweeting incorrect information (although someone suggested Twitter could allow users to block tweets from being re-tweeted).

It’s possible that Twitter might be able to either embed corrections or tie errors and updates together using its so-called Annotations feature, which the company was working on last year and had originally hoped to launch in the fall. But work on that project was apparently put on hold while the company launched a revamped website version of the service, and while it sorted out the management changes that saw Dick Costolo take over as CEO from founder Evan Williams. It’s not clear whether Annotations will be revived, but the idea behind it was that information about a tweet — or “meta data” such as location or a number of other variables — could be attached to it as it travelled through the network, something that might work for corrections as well.

Twitter isn’t the only medium that has had to worry about corrections, obviously. Traditional media have struggled with the issue as well, with newspapers often running corrections days or weeks after a mistake was made, with no real indication of what the actual error was. In a sense, Twitter is like a real-time, distributed version of a news-wire service such as Reuters or Associated Press; when those services post something that is wrong, they simply send out an update to their customers, and hope that no one has published it in the paper or online yet. Twitter’s great strength is that it allows anyone to publish — and re-publish — information instantly, and distribute that information to hundreds of thousands or even millions of people within minutes. But when a mistake gets distributed, there’s no single source that can send out a correction.

That’s the double-edged sword that a truly distributed and real-time news network like Twitter represents: it can spread the news faster than just about anything else available, including CNN, but it can also spread mis-information just as quickly.

As it did during the recent shootings in Arizona, the Twitter network provided a ringside seat for another major news event on Friday — the overthrow of a corrupt government in Tunisia, after weeks of protests over repression and economic upheaval. And even as the country’s ruler was being hustled onto a plane, the debate began over whether Twitter had played even more of a role in the revolution than just reporting on it as it happened: was this the first real Twitter revolution? The most correct answer is probably yes and no. Did it help protesters, and thus the end goal of overthrowing the government? Undoubtedly. Was it solely responsible for that happening? Hardly.

Among those arguing the question — on Twitter, of course — were foreign affairs commentator Evgeny Morozov, who writes for Foreign Policy magazine, along with Jillian York of Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, Ethan Zuckerman — who founded Global Voices Online while he was a fellow at the Berkman Center — as well as media theorist Clay Shirky and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci from the University of Maryland. Shirky, responding to Morozov, said that “no one claims social media makes people angry enough to act [but] it helps angry people coordinate their actions.” The Foreign Policy writer, meanwhile, argued in a blog post that Twitter did not play a strong role, asking rhetorically:

Would this revolution have happened if there were no Facebook and Twitter? I think this is a key question to ask. If the answer is “yes,” then the contribution that the Internet has made was minor; there is no way around it.

Jillian York also cautioned against attributing too much of what happened to social media, saying: “Don’t get all techno-utopian. Twitter’s great for spreading news, but this revolution happened offline.” She later amended her comment, however, saying that she definitely believed social media played a role in the day’s events. Tufekci, meanwhile, wondered why there had to be such a dividing line between offline vs. online activity, asking: “I don’t get this was it online or offline dichotomy. The online world is part of the world. It has a role.” She added that trying to answer the question of whether it was a Twitter revolution was “like asking was the French Revolution a printing press revolution?”

There’s no question that Twitter definitely helped to spread the information about what was happening in Tunisia, as demonstrated by the tweets and videos and other media collected by Andy Carvin at National Public Radio while the events unfolded. And at least one Tunisian revolutionary, who runs a website called Free Tunisia, directly contradicted Morozov and told a Huffington Post blogger that Twitter — along with cellphones, text messaging and various websites — was crucial to the flow of information and helped protesters gather and plan their demonstrations. Said Bechir Blagui:

They called it the jasmine revolt, Sidi Bouzid revolt, Tunisian revolt… but there is only one name that does justice to what is happening in the homeland: Social media revolution.

The role of social media in activism is something that has been debated a lot over the past year or so, in part because of a piece Malcolm Gladwell wrote poo-poohing the idea — which Shirky responded to somewhat in a piece he wrote on the topic for Foreign Affairs magazine recently, arguing that social media and other modern communication networks may not directly lead to revolution, but they sure help.

The reality is that Twitter is an information-distribution network — not that different from the telephone or email or text messaging, except that it is real-time (in a way that email is not) and it is massively distributed, in the sense that a message posted by a Tunisian blogger can be re-published thousands of times a second and transmitted halfway around the world to be quoted on television in the blink of an eye. That is a very powerful thing — far more powerful than the telephone or email or even blogging, arguably, because the more rapidly the news is distributed, the more it can create a sense of momentum, helping a revolution to “go viral,” as marketing types like to say. Tufekci also noted that Twitter can “strengthen communities prior to unrest by allowing a parallel public(ish) sphere that is harder to censor.”

So was what happened in Tunisia a Twitter revolution? Not any more than what happened in Poland in 1989 was a telephone revolution. But the reality of modern media is that Twitter and Facebook and other social-media tools can be incredibly useful for spreading the news about revolutions, and that can help them expand and ultimately achieve some kind of effect. Whether that means the world will see more revolutions, or simply revolutions that happen more quickly or are better reported, remains to be seen.

Wikipedia, which turns 10 years old this weekend, has taken a lot of heat over the years. There has been criticism of the site’s accuracy, of the so-called “cabal” of editors who decide which changes are accepted and which are not, and of founder Jimmy Wales and various aspects of his personal life and how he manages the non-profit service. But as a Pew Research report released today confirms, Wikipedia has become a crucial aspect of our online lives, and in many ways it has shown us — for better or worse — what all information online is becoming: social, distributed, interactive and (at times) chaotic.

According to Pew’s research, 53 percent of American Internet users said they regularly look for information on Wikipedia during a survey last year, up from 36 percent of the same group the first time the research center asked the question in February of 2007. Usage by those under the age of 30 is even higher — more than 60 percent of that age group uses the site regularly, compared with just 33 percent of users 65 and older. Based on Pew’s other research, using Wikipedia is more popular than sending instant messages (which less than half of Internet users do) and rating a product or service (which only 32 percent do), and is only a little less popular than using social networking services, which 61 percent of users do regularly.

The term “wiki” — just like the word “blog,” or the name “Google” for that matter — is one of those words that sounds so ridiculous it was hard to imagine anyone using it with a straight face when Wikipedia first emerged in the early 2000s. But despite a weird name and a confusing interface (which the site has been trying to improve recently to make it easier to edit things), Wikipedia took off and has become a powerhouse of “crowdsourcing,” before most people had even heard that word. In fact, the idea of a wiki has become so powerful that document-leaking organization WikiLeaks adopted the term even though (as many critics like to point out) it doesn’t really function as a wiki at all.

Most people will never edit a Wikipedia page — like most social media or interactive services, it follows the 90-9-1 rule, which states that 90 percent of users will simply consume the content, 9 percent or so will contribute regularly, and only about 1 percent will ever become dedicated contributors. But even with those kinds of numbers, the site has still seen more than 4 billion individual edits in its lifetime, and has more than 127,000 active users. Those include people like Simon Pulsifer, once known as “the king of Wikipedia” because he edited over 100,000 articles on a wide variety of subjects. Why? Because that was his idea of fun, he explained to me once at a web conference (he’s a Wikipedia administrator now).

Yes, there will always be people who decide to edit the Natalie Portman page so that it says she is going to marry them, or create fictional pages about people they dislike. But the surprising thing isn’t that this happens — it’s how rarely it happens, and how quickly those errors are found and corrected.

With Twitter, we are starting to see how a Wikipedia-like approach to information scales even further. As events like the Giffords shooting take hold of the national consciousness, Twitter becomes a real-time news service that anyone can contribute to, and it gradually builds a picture of what has happened and what it means. Along the way, there are errors and all kinds of other noise — but over time, it produces a very real and human view of the news. Is it going to replace newspapers and television and other media? No, just as Wikipedia hasn’t replaced encyclopedias (although it has made them less relevant with each passing year). But it is the way information works now, and for all its flaws, Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales were among the first to recognize that.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, which killed an estimated 230,000 people and has left millions of others homeless. As in some other recent catastrophes, social media such as Twitter, text messaging, interactive online maps and other tools were used by both victims and rescue workers to co-ordinate relief efforts. The Knight Foundation has released a comprehensive study of the use of technology during the aftermath of the quake, and found that while there is still a lot of work to be done, such tools can make rescue efforts easier and faster.

Haiti quickly became what the report describes as “a living laboratory for new applications such as SMS, interactive online maps and radio-cell phone hybrids.” But while many of the tools were extremely useful in transmitting crucial information, this information often wasn’t used as well as it could have been, for a variety of reasons. The report notes:

As new media activists have pointed out, “Technology is easy, community is hard.” Many of the
obstacles to the relief efforts concerned difficulties in dialogue between communities: between international
organizations and local Haitian groups, between volunteers and professional humanitarian organizations and between civilians and military.

and

While the democratic approach to information management fuels crowdsourcing, this characteristic can also serve as a limitation in crisis settings. Information may be gathered and assembled in an open, democratic fashion. But often the practical response effort is driven by large organizations that deal with information in a radically different way. Military and international humanitarian organizations manage information within more closed systems.

One of the most powerful new-media and online tools used in the relief efforts, the Knight report says, was Ushahidi — a service that was developed in Kenya in 2007, and can be used to aggregate and process information that comes in from a variety of sources such as SMS, Twitter and radio, and then plot the information on a map. The service “developed an RSS feed for the U.S. Coast Guard to help them retrieve emergency information [and] a team of four to eight Coast Guard responders retrieved the information and disseminated it to forces on the ground.” A group of students at Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science converted the Ushahidi data to Google Earth file formats.

Crowdsourcing also played a large role in the aftermath of the disaster, the report says: two weeks after the earthquake, the labor-on-demand company CrowdFlower took over management of the workflow of volunteers to “translate, classify and geocode the messages” coming in via the short-code 4636. Later, an outsourcing company called Samasource took over the bulk of the translation and coding work in co-operation with a local Haiti-based group. And accurate maps of the country and the location of survivors and victims were also crowdsourced using the OpenStreetMap standard, the Knight Foundation report says.

One of the biggest problems of crisis response in developing countries lies in finding locations that do not appear on any maps. In some cases, the maps have never been made; in others, rural populations have crowded into urban areas so quickly that maps soon become outdated. These problems were addressed in Haiti by another notable development in information technology: the OpenStreetMap (OSM) Haiti mapping initiative.

Although social media and other tools were important, the report makes a point of cautioning that the Haiti relief effort shouldn’t be seen as a “new-media success story,” because some of the new approaches used did not work very well, due to a lack of co-ordination — and in many cases a lack of understanding of how to use the tools. For example, U.S. Air Force Col. Lee Harvis, the chief medical officer who landed in Port-au-Prince 36 hours after the earthquake, said that he had no knowledge of Ushahidi, and neither did any of the other military doctors operating in the country.

The Knight Foundation report (which was co-produced with Internews) also noted that despite all the new media tools, the single most important tool in Haiti was one that has also been crucial in almost every other major disaster in the past 50 years: namely, traditional radio broadcasting. However, the report’s authors noted that social media and other tools helped spread the information farther than radio would otherwise have been able, and that this was an important aspect of the relief efforts.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament and an early support of WikiLeaks, said that despite having had a falling out with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over his role in the organization, she is willing to “stand up and stick my neck out for him” and defend the document-leaking entity against attacks by the U.S. government and others, because doing so is her duty. “We must all stand behind WikiLeaks and defend freedom of information and freedom of speech,” Jónsdóttir said in a presentation at the University of Toronto on Tuesday night, in which she also called on media outlets to support the organization. Jónsdóttir also said “even if they chop the head off WikiLeaks, a thousand more heads will come out.”

The Icelandic MP didn’t talk a lot about the WikiLeaks leader, except to say that “WikiLeaks is bigger than Julian Assange.” But she did talk about how she met him at a conference in Germany in 2009, while she and her party were developing proposed legislation in Iceland called the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, and Assange was looking for a “transparency haven” that could help the organization. The IMMI legislation is aimed at helping to protect freedom of information and whistleblowers like WikiLeaks who leak documents — something Iceland as a whole is also interested in, because many believe that more whistleblowing could have helped the country avoid its financial meltdown in 2008.

Jónsdóttir and Assange started working together, and in the spring of last year he showed her a copy of the infamous U.S. military video of American bombers firing on a civilian vehicle during an attack in Iraq. The Icelandic MP described how she watched the video in a crowded cafe and began to cry — and at that point decided to help WikiLeaks get publicity for the video, which she said she was afraid would get lost amid all the other leaked documents on the organization’s website. Jónsdóttir spent her Easter holiday editing the video, including pulling out still photographs to send to various media outlets. WikiLeaks even sent people to Iraq to the village where the attack took place, to confirm whether there were children in the van.

That video was the beginning of an explosion of interest in WikiLeaks, which culminated with the leaking of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables late last year, and the current attempt by the U.S. government to mount a case against Assange under the Espionage Act. As part of that effort, the Department of Justice has gotten a court order that compels Twitter to release certain information — including messages, IP addresses, payment information and other details — about the personal accounts of Jónsdóttir, Assange, Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp and American programmer Jacob Appelbaum. Jónsdóttir has said that she will resist this order, and has hired the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help with her defense.

In her talk, Jónsdóttir also freely admitted that she was completely unprepared for entering government. A member of a loosely-affiliated group of human rights protesters known simply as The Movement, she only volunteered to run for office because there weren’t enough female candidates, she said — and “to my great shock, I actually won, and I was in parliament two weeks later.” But the MP, who is an author and a poet, said that she believed her ignorance of the ways of government was a benefit rather than a disadvantage, because it meant that she could look at everything with fresh eyes and try things that others might not, including pushing forward the idea of the IMMI legislation.

Jónsdóttir said the idea behind the initiative — which was unanimously supported by the Icelandic parliament in a vote last summer — is to create the most advanced freedom-of-information and whistleblower-protection legislation in the world. The group looked at laws protecting freedom of speech and freedom of information in dozens of major countries and cherry-picked what they thought were the best ones. “The Internet is becoming industrialized and corporatized,” she said. “We need to make sure we don’t lose our freedom of speech and freedom of information.” Here’s a video interview that Jónsdóttir did with the public television station TVO while she was in Toronto

As I read about the layoffs at MySpace — the company today confirmed that it is shedding close to half of the company, or about 500 employees, including virtually the entire international operation — I couldn’t help thinking of the legendary 1986 science-fiction film Highlander, which starred Sean Connery and Christopher Lambert as warriors fighting to become the world’s sole remaining immortal. The tag-line for the movie was “There can be only one,” and that certainly seems to be the case when it comes to social networks.

News Corp. (s nws) has tried hard to make something of the company it acquired for close to $600 million in 2005: it has changed chief executives repeatedly, to the point where it has almost become comical, and it has refocused several times, with the latest incarnation targeting the entertainment market. The latest redesign pitched the network as the place where people can follow their favorite musicians and other celebrities, and then not long afterwards the network added the ability to integrate user accounts with Facebook — a final sign of how completely it has surrendered to its former foe.

The layoffs also appear to be a sign that no one is rushing forward to take the company off the hands of its corporate parent. News Corp. has made it clear that it is looking to unload the operation, but so far there have been no reports of interest. While some content portals such as Yahoo might be more attracted to the social network once it cuts its staffing levels by 50 percent and takes a huge writedown, the best News Corp. can probably hope for is a Bebo-style deal, like the one that saw AOL shed its own failed social network for a fraction of what it paid.

MySpace’s latest CEO, Mike Jones, did his best to put a positive spin on the downsizing, saying the company has seen ** new signups since ** and that traffic — particularly mobile traffic — has increased. But the reality is that the social network has been in decline for years now, and there are no signs that it can recover any of that lost ground. And in the (admittedly brief) history of modern technology companies, there are very few that can claim they laid off half of their staff and yet still went on to become successful. The best-case scenario for News Corp. is that it either manages to sell the company to someone, or run it on a shoestring for awhile and then quietly shut it down.