The election saw interim president Goodluck Jonathan elected for a full-term. Nigeria is not noteworthy for its repressive attitude to the Internet. In fact, Jonathan was the first presidential candidate anywhere to announce his candidacy on Facebook.

Update after the jump.

Around 30 world leaders arrived for the inauguration.

As one Twitter user, @biodunolusesi, commented: "Abuja's just out of over 12 hrs of telecom/data lockdown! No phone, no Internet for the entire democracy day. Hello!"

Nigeria has seen political violence, especially as it surrounds the issues of the country's large oil deposits, environmental desolation around some of the drilling grounds and accused profiteering by the companies exploiting the resource and the government officials managing it.

Still, shutting down the Internet and mobile networks? It's a bad precedent.

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Update: Doug Madory, an analyst at Renesys responded to our question:

So, unlike Egypt, Libya and Syria, Nigeria did not technically shut their Internet down in a global context. Effectively, though, it seems they did just that.

Abuja mosque photo by Shiraz Chakera, voting photo by Jeremy Weate | other sources: allAfrica

"Freedom on the Net 2011" determined that the five worst countries for online freedom - based on obstacles to access, limits on content and violations of user rights - are Iran, followed by Burma, China, Cuba and Tunisia. (The last entry is certainly changed somewhat by the uprising earlier this year.)

Turkey blocks domain names. Turkey has listed 138 words that cannot be used in domain names. Any website that opens in Turkey using one of these words will be shut down. The words include "animal," "beat," "escort," "homemade," "hot," "nubile," "free," "teen," "pic," (bastard in Turkish), "got" (ass), "Haydar," (mans name but also means penis), "gay," "çıplak" (naked), "itiraf" (confession), "liseli" (high school student), "nefes" (breath) and "yasak" (forbidden). Yes. The word forbidden is forbidden.

Burma bans Skype, trashes Internet cafes. The Burmese leadership banned Skype and other VOIP services and have sent Bureau of Special Investigation officers into Internet cafes to tell owners not to provide VOIP at their establishments.

Bahrain renews state of emergency. Bahrain has kept its "emergency" status to enforce a greater repression of expression and assembly in the wake of the March protests.

Vietnam jails sentences another blogger. Vi Duc Hoi, a blogger and democracy activist, has been sentenced to a five-year term in prison. The CPJ counts six bloggers currently imprisoned in the southeast Asian country.

Azerbaijani Facebook user denied bail. Bahthiyar Hajiev, a former opposition politician, was arrested for a show trial because he called for protests on Facebook and posted videos condemning the last set of elections in his country. He has been charged with "desertion." Despite being beaten and threatened with rape, the "judge" in the case refused his attorney's request to hear witnesses in Haijev's treatment.

Uganda, at the insistence of its national police commissioner, has sent its three largest ISPs a memo requesting they begin blocking what they called "Tweeter" (presumably Twitter) and Facebook, in order to "eliminate the connection and sharing of information that incites the public."

They have made the mistake that others have made, including Egypt and Libya, that the tech is the issue. It's not, of course. The fulcrum for the lever of disruption are the people. When they're fed up, there's trouble.

In this case, the Ugandan people have been protesting the abrupt rise in the prices of food and fuel in the face of such governmental purchases as a $720 Russian-made fighter jet. The street marches have been met by police violence.

The online expression of the protests is the hashtag #walktowork.

Thanks to Rassina | Kasubi tombs photo by notphilatall

Now, in a material indication of its priorities, China has released its budget expenditures at the start of its new parliamentary session. For the first time, the country's spending on internal security, including online censorship program and tools, has passed the yearly budget for the army and all other defense organization.

The budget for China's army, on the other hand, increased only 12.7 percent to $91.5 billion.

The power of the Jasmine Uprising in the Middle East as an example to people around the world seeking change could probably not find a better indicator than this shift in priorities for a county which is widely acknowledged as the world champion in the repression of internal dissent.

As the Chinese Communist Party newspaper Beijing Daily put it:

"Everyone knows that stability is a blessing and chaos is a calamity."

Kimberly Smith, a University of Texas, Dallas, grad student in Emerging Media Communications, thinks this priority accurately reflects the priorities of the Chinese in general. Smith spent the last year in China studying and making iPhone documentaries.

"I attended the Internet in China Conference at Peking University last year. Several Industry representatives were in attendance, and they appeared to be united in their view: respect Party rules, period. And, because The Party views social stability as a top priority (to maintain Party control), they will do what is in their power to ensure that the country continues it's steady, positive growth."

Are the people the final arbiters in their governments' choices, even if the country is not designed to reflect their choices? Are the people of China really supportive of these priorities, or is it only certain groups that benefit from these decisions?

Army photo by Schmeeve

The ALBA-1 cable arrived in Siboney on February 9th, linking the eastern Cuban town to the cable's start-point in the Venezuelan port city of La Guaira. The second part of the project will lead from Cuba to Ochos Rios in Jamaica.

The Venezuela-Cuba joint project has been advertised as a triumph against the United States embargo of the island nation. Venezuela's Gran Caribe and Cuba's Transbit hired a Chinese subsidiary of the French company Alcatel-Lucent to lay the cable at a cost of $70 million. It took 19 days for the specialized cable-laying ship, Île de Batz to make the journey from Venezuela.

The project is an indication of how important the Internet is, even to countries whose relationship to communications is antagonistic. Currently, virtually no private Cuban citizens can secure an Internet connection. To blog, Cuba's small blogger community must copy their posts onto a thumb-drive and sneak into a dollar-only hotel to post, or to email the post to compatriots outside the country.

Cuba's Bloggers

According to a leaked diplomatic cable, the Cuban government is more afraid of this small but powerful group of bloggers than it is of its entire old-style dissident population.

Nevertheless, according to the press release:

"Cuban officials say the country's priority will be to build more public telecentres and improve Internet access at schools, hospitals and scientific institutions."

Look for Hugo Chávez's government to provide its Cuban counterpart with extensive filtering tools, perhaps by passing on software and hardware made by American companies like Cisco and McAfee.

Siboney photo by Klaus Schaefer | Île de Batz photo from Wikimedia Commons | other sources: BBC, AP/TMC, Cuba Standard

There are a couple of ways: audio tweeting and dialup.

Dialup: a number of people and groups are providing dialup numbers for those inside Egypt trying to get out to Tweet, email and so on.

If you have additional methods, please let us know in the comments.

Thanks to Carl Levinson

Among the communications vehicles closed off today are the Internet, SMS, mobile phone systems, Al Jazeera news network and even the country's train system.

Schools, universities and the court system have also been shuttered.

Gas stations have been closed.

Information is a watermelon seed and Mubarak's hands are wet.

It seems clear that all the bans on every imaginable way that people can exchange information in Egypt is in hopes of stopping the protests, which are huge, inclusive and getting bigger. It's not just the tech types in Egypt who have been - apparently - hamstrung. It's also students, the pesky judiciary, and the everyday folks hoping to drive into cities or take the trains to various protests.

Given that the Egyptians have proven extraordinarily resourceful, printing fliers to avoid electronic surveillance, plugging into dialup connections when the Internet was shut off, it seems a little incredible that the government believes the latest shutdowns will result in shutting up the people involved.

I am not being facetious when I say I anticipate people in donkey carts and on camels will resort to using semaphore if all else fails.

Update: Several sources have indicated that the last remaining ISP to remain up in Egypt, Noor, is now down.

Train photo by ömer erülke

Although too much can be made of social media's role in political activities, it certainly is not unimportant in the Egyptian uprising. The young, digitally literate Egyptians have made good use of them to bring the actions of disparate groups together.

Protests Continue Despite Block

Egyptians have used social media for years to organize protests and yesterday was no exception. In particular, the Facebook account We are all Khaled Said, dedicated to a man killed last year in Alexandria, called for, and reported on, the protests.

The block does not seem to have effected the turnout on this second day of protests. Yesterday, the protests were successful not merely due to the numbers but by the distributed nature of the gatherings. Flashmobs gathered in numerous parts of the larger cities and moved at a moment's notice. This may be harder to coordinate today, though it is not certain social media was used so much to move the groups as to report on their having moved.

Since yesterday, protesters have used proxies, Tor and other services to get around the Twitter block. Cairo resident Ahmed Zidan, editor of MideastYouth Arabic, posted on his Facebook that he is using Al-Kasir.

The blocking of additional services is hardly unexpected. The apparently abject failure of that blocking to stop the crowds gathering must be, at least to the government.

Anonymous Targets Egyptian Government Sites

Anonymous has announced Operation Egypt with a press release in Arabic.

It says a main government information and tech ministry site, www.mcit.gov.eg, is down, though that does not appear to be the case as of this writing. Another targeted site, http://www.moiegypt.gov.eg/, does seem to be down.

Resources

The #jan26 hastag on Twitter is augmenting, if not altogether replacing yesterday's #jan25. To follow the events unfolding today, consult any of the following. If you have additional sources, please post links in the comments.

• We are all Khaled Said
• #jan26
• Al Jazeera Live (Storify)
• Guardian Live Updates

We asked three people building cutting-edge social software what they think the relationship between relevance, popularity and filtering is going to be in the future. They offered three very different responses. What do you think the future of information filtering will look like?

Nick Halstead is the founder of Twitter-tracking service Tweetmeme and data mining startup DataSift. He thinks that both relevance and popularity will be important for filtering information in the future, but that what these concepts mean is changing dramatically.

"Relevance is changing," he says.

"We used to think of relevance as matching a query with a result, in most part via search engines performing keyword searches. And popularity was based on single metrics (such as Pagerank) that were based on global behavior.

Nick Halstead

"What is evolving is the next evolution of both, and both are being changed by the social graph. Relevance is defined now by an understanding of a person's likes and dislikes - Facebook and Twitter both have immense data on behavioral patterns around what you like. And content is now understood and categorized semantically. So relevance in the future will be determined by how your likes match content.

"Popularity is changing as well - services like Klout, PeerIndex etc. are proof that social authority is becoming important. The first company to find that magic 'rank' that suddenly means 'ad-targeting' (and therefore cash) will become huge.

"So the same combination of relevance plus popularity will still drive the future. See what Quora wrote about how they plan to choose content, for example. But it is going to be based on new social metrics - and fundamentally you won't 'search' - you will 'follow' content that is matched to you. With or without needing to tell the computer.

Relevance vs Popularity in Filtering, Throughout History

Pre-press days: Religious leaders kept the content on-topic by selecting it themselves. But at the same time, they had to keep their audiences in mind. As Sy Safransky said in the most recent Sun magazine, if Jesus had been a sourpuss, he wouldn't have been able to draw a crowd.

Days of the Printing Press: The battle between editorial responsibility and the need to sell papers pitted relevance against popularity. The most popular content subsidized the most relevant, though.

The Early Web: Easy publishing enabled so much niche content that observers worried people would become insulated in self-justifying info-ghettos. Hyper-personalized, with no counter-balance of concern for popularity?

Early Social Web: The promise of mega-distribution through Facebook and Twitter has prompted publishers to emphasize link-bait and other content that's all about popularity.

The Future?: Nearly infinite data, through easily published content, exhaust data from online behavior and meta-content built by people and machines, based on the patterns manifested online. That's a whole lot of content to choose from in serving Web users. How should relevance and popularity be used in deciding which of it to deliver?

"I think Google knows it needs to adapt, quick."

Edwin Khodabakchian is the creator of Feedly, a magazine interface for content subscribed-to from around the web. Feedly released its iPhone app this week and we called it possibly the best iPhone feed reader on the market.

Khodabakchian says that there are different kinds of web users and they need different kinds of filtering. Feedly uses relevance for discovery of sources and popularity of items for filtering and prioritization.

"We break users into 3 categories," Edwin told us.

• Facebookers - they spend hours in Facebook. They love to connect with friends and content is just an excuse to interact, be cool, feel part of the tribe.
• Passionate Users - They care about topics, they have a specific connection with the author and brand they read. They love predictability.
• Twitter Users and Bloggers - who live in information and crave for real time.

"I think filtering is different for these different classes of users of information. For Facebookers, relevance and popularity is about: can I find something really funny or different which I can share with my friends and be cool. For passionate people, they have already sources or sites they trust - this is what make it predictable. Filtering for them is a mix of their favorite sources, what is popular, and suggestions.

"Twitter is more interesting because it has an implicit interest graph under the hood and it is time based. It is great to know what is happening right now...and it is great to get content from sources you might already know and feel passionately about.

"We focus on passionate people who want to feed their minds. Who look for a predictable experience...with a tiny bit of discovery.

"When you are on a source page in Feedly desktop, there is a 'you might also like' list of sites. This is collaborative filtering...similar to the Amazon you might also like.

"In doing that, we are trying to create a relationship between a user and a source or author, not a one-off article display. About 70% of the new Feedly users do not know about RSS or Google Reader. The hard part of the personalization nut is that you have 30 seconds to help them build something relevant and you can not ask them because people go blank. And it has to not feel like work."

Ouriel Ohayon is a serial entrepreneur, most recently the founder of mobile app recommendation service Appsfire. He argues that this emphasis on user experience is so important that it overrides both relevance and popularity as a concern when it comes to filtering information.

"The problem is not algorithmic or metrics," Ohayon says.

"The problem is experience. You can build the best filters [but] it does not matter if the tools for experimenting them and UI for displaying them are awful. For example: Google Reader vs Flipboard.

"People care more about presentation and packaging than the actual set of parameters behind the info feed. It requires of course elements of contextual serendipity and personalization: social graph, geography (very important), freshness, interestingness (rated if you will). But eventually users don't want to hear about that - they want a nice experience. Especially on mobile."

As a technologist, I find that a little bit depressing. I don't think I agree with it. I like parts of all three of these responses, but feel most closely myself like reality lies somewhere in between what Halstead said and what Khodabakchian said. I'm drawn to processes that determine quality sources of information through relevance detection, personalized as appropriate, but then filtered on the item-level by popularity or variable weight of sources.

I also want to be able to lift the hood and fiddle with the calculations as appropriate. Perhaps that points to the subjectivity of this question - because most people certainly don't want to do that.

I expect that information overload will be dealt with in a variety of ways in the future, and for most people the end result will be to kick back and have the best content sent to them automatically, however what's best is determined.

Do you think there's a relationship between relevance, popularity and filtering content? What do you think it will look like in the future?

Trash photo by ericortner; Nick Halstead photo by Loic Le Meur.