The famine eating up northeast Africa and threatening 13 million people is probably something you've seen out of the corner of your eye. A terrible thing, to be sure, but life goes on. Well, for some. Now, the World Food Programme has pulled open data from the United Nations, USAID and their own food distribution program and used mapping technology to enable us to visualize the data involved; to turn it, in fact, from data into knowledge, from data points to human beings and from what to so what. The resulting map is dynamic and easy to understand, if hard to digest.
"In the map you can see what areas are most affected by the famine, where food is being distributed, and how much more funding is needed to meet the demand," said Bonnie Bogle, of WFP's partners, Development Seed, by email. "For example, you see that the most affected areas have limited humanitarian access, as they are in the al Shabab controlled sections of Somalia."
VP and General Manager Earl Zmijewsk wrote us today from Renesys, the Internet intelligence company, to let us know that, after a long, stable summer of nothing much to report, Libya's Internet has now started to fail, probably as a result of infrastructure degradation due to war and neglect.
"Much of the country's Internet routing has started to show evidence of sporadic failures this week, which have gone unreported in the media," James Cowie remarked on the Renesys blog.
Can a government build an effective Facebook for education?
The government of Rajasthan, one of the largest states in India, is building out extensive infrastructure for Information and Communication Technology resources and training, with the collaboration of multiple international agencies including the World Economic Forum.
Next month, the state's information technology department plans on launching its own education social network: like Facebook, for learning. According to coverage in The Economic Times of India and elsewhere, the site will include all the standard features of social networking (photos, games) but will be focused primarily on educational collaboration and will include topic experts jumping in to answer questions raised by users.
This is the second in a three-part series. The first covered Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain. The final post will cover the effect of these uprisings outside the Arab world.
As it has with other countries in the Arab world, technology continues to play a role in communications between protesters in Morocco, Yemen and Syria, as well as between those protesters and the global public. It has also served as the fulcrum for the offending regimes' attempts at hanging onto power: posting propaganda, misleading statements attributed to protestors, shutting off access to the Internet and more.
I asked people I know in the countries of the Arab Spring to tell us how they think things currently stand and what role technology continues to play there. Today we take a look at Morocco, Yemen and Syria.
Five suspects have been arrested in the politically-motivated killing of Brazilian blogger, Ednaldo Figuiera.
In June, Figuiera became the first blogger to be assassinated. Figuiera, who was also a newspaper editor and the president of the local branch of the Workers Party, used his blog to discuss drug-related corruption in his home state of Rio Grande do Norte.
The city of Chongqing will be the first in China to see the debut of a "cloud district," or, to give it its official name, an "International Offshore Cloud Computing Special Management District." This area in an industrial city in the southwest is primarily designed to "gain market share of cloud computing technology." But users within the district can access the Internet outside of the traditional Chinese censorship regime.
The special district in Chongqing is a reflection of a huge overall investment in cloud computing. According to the People's Daily, the government is making a $772 million investment in a 93,000-square mile "cloud computing industrial base."
On March 18, 2009, Omid Reza Mir Sayafi became the first blogger to die in prison. A culture blogger, he was imprisoned in the vicious Evin prison outside Tehran and either killed outright or at least allowed to die. He was followed on April 9 of this year by Bahraini blogger Zakariya Rashid Hassan al-Ashiri, who perished following a beating.
Now 36-year-old Brazilian blogger Ednaldo Figueira joins these two poor souls. Figueira, however, was not in prison. He was shot down in the streets of his home town, Serra do Mel.
One blogger in the Gulf country of Bahrain has been sentenced to life in prison while another has received 15 years, according to Reporters Without Borders. The life sentence is the longest sentence a blogger has ever received.
Blogger Dr. Abduljalil Al-Singace was one of eight imprisoned Bahrainis to receive life sentences. Al-Singace. Another blogger, Ali Abdulemam, was given 15 years after being tried in absentia.
China's best known artist, Ai Weiwei, has been stuck away in a Chinese jail since his arrest in early April. He was released today.
"I'm out. I'm fine," the Los Angeles Times quotes the artist as texting on his release.
We're delighted when anyone unjustly imprisoned for the sake of politics is released, but ReadWriteWeb has a particular connection to Ai.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
has put to rest three years of speculation by giving final approval to generic Top-Level Domains that they think will be the future of site addresses and brand homes on the Web.
Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) are essentially specific destinations for brands. Companies will be able to buy their brand and attach it to a URL. So instead of seeing Pepsi.com, the soda manufacturer could have Pepsi.soda or something similar. It will not be cheap to get your own TLD, with an $185,000 application fee and $25,000 a year to run the registry. Yet, some Internet advocates are crying foul, saying that gTLDs will create new headaches in cybersquatting, trademark issues and excessive spam.
