The Internet may feel U.S.-centric today, but there's a big and rapidly connecting world out there. Leading Web-traffic monitoring service Experian Hitwise announced today the launch of its newest venue: Hitwise China.
Hitwise is great about publishing timely tidbits about Web statistics and I look forward to seeing U.S., global and China stats contrasted. The first offering along those lines? Hitwise says that microblogging is more common in China than it is in the U.K., U.S., France, Canada, Australia or India. Sina Micro blog, the leading Chinese microblogging service, sees one out of every 158 website visits in China, Hitwise observed last month. That's more than 3.5 times as large a Web market share as Twitter has here in the US. That sounds like a good market to go monitor.
Chinese technologist Fang Binxing is credited as the father of the Great Firewall of China, the ring of blocks and filters that keeps the Internet in that country under the political control of the ruling regime. Known as the "Golden Shield" in Chinese, is was begun as a way to seize economic opportunities for the country without sacrificing Communist Party control.
Fang, the president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, was speaking at Wuhan University in China's Hubei province when he was pelted with an egg (which missed) and a shoe (which did not).
If the Egyptian revolution was inspired and organized on Facebook, maybe the post-revolution is destined to run its course on Twitter.
Wael Ghonim, the former Google executive who launched We are all Khalid Said, the Facebook page that acted as a clearinghouse for the uprising, has fallen under opprobrium for recent comments and a lot of the criticism is being expressed via the Twitter hashtag #unfollowedghonimbecause.
According to the New York Times, Yahoo, in a regulatory filing last week, accused Chinese Internet juggernaut Alibaba of selling its payment unit, Alipay, to a company owned by Ali Baba's CEO, Jack Ma, without informing them. Because Yahoo is a partial owner of Alibaba, its stock tanked, to the tune of $2.7 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, presumably out of fear its value was significantly lessened by the move.
Now, in a joint statement, Yahoo and the Alibaba Group have announced they are trying to reconcile.
Recently I was honored with an invitation from President Sarkozy of France to attend the e-G8 Summit.
The e-G8 Summit precedes this years G8 Summit in Deauville on May 26 and 27. The purpose of the e-G8 is to inform the G8 leaders by gathering the world's top Internet and digital leaders in advance of the bigger event. Given the closed-door nature of the event and its relationship to the G8 Summit it's somewhat unsurprising that rumors about the nature of the meeting have been flying.
The e-G8 has the potential to be an important event and it is attracting a who's who in technology and government. The attendee list boasts heads of state as well as prominent media and technology figures like Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Eric Schmidt of Google, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook; are all expected to attend.
The Taliban, the ultra-conservative Islamist group that ran Afghanistan while it acted as a host to Osama Bin Laden, have a Twitter feed. Called @alemarahweb (Mostafa Ahmedi), the website attached to it is described as belonging to the "islamic emirat of afghanistan" (sic).
The Taliban have usually been described, rather euphemistically, as "medieval" in outlook and they have not had a public relationship to communications technology, unlike the late Bin Laden. However, the group has been tweeting since December 19 of last year. In that time, they have posted 773 tweets. They have 2,970 followers but only follow 12. So not exactly a robust back-and-forth there.
In the past 24 hours, more than forty thousand people have signed up on Facebook to attend a flash mob barbecue this weekend in Higienopolis, a wealthy neighborhood in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The Sao Paulo state government conceded yesterday to demands from the Neighborhood Association to block construction of a subway station. The neighbors objected that the subway would lead to "different people" congregating in the area.
Danilo Saraiva, an online journalist at leading Brazilian portal Terra, set up a Facebook Event yesterday called "Barbecue of the Different People." Saraiva, who has only 300 contacts on Facebook, set up the event after lunch and now thousands of people are RSVPing every hour. Messages posted to the Event page read, in Portuguese, "I will take the mayonnaise, I will take the popcorn. I will take the cheap soda." Saturday in Higienopolis is likely to be...very different.
There is no single "cyber-war" taking place today. Rather, there are hundreds of brushfire wars taking place online. One of the latest is the Pakistan Cyber Army's attacks on at least 116 Indian sites, according to The Hacker News.
There has been a long history of conflict between Pakistan and India, with the most recent being Indian anger at the alleged Pakistani involvement in the 2008 Mumbai attacks that left over 100 dead and over 300 wounded.
The same week that Freedom House called Iran the world's worst Internet offender, the hacking group Anonymous has begun striking at the country. Officially set to begin on Sunday, some reports indicate the politically-inspired hacking has already commenced, with messages left on several of the websites previously defaced by Iran's government-supported "Cyber Army."
According to the group's press release, the attack officially begins Sunday, May 1 - a labor holiday.
"A new dawn appears to you and your country will be free from the chains of oppression, tyranny and torture. You can finally exhale and take a new breath of air that will fill you with strength, wisdom and freedom."
An innocuous-sounding set of rules called the "Information Technology (Electronic Service Delivery) Rules, 2011" [pdf] went quietly into effect last month in India. These rules, possessing the force of law, practically guarantees that no user of electronic communications in one of the world's largest countries will ever be completely safe from persecution again.
Under the new rules, anyone who objects to content online will be able to effect that content's immediate removal. The justifications for removal are so extensive and so vague that virtually anything will qualify for removal.
