"This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.

"And for the first time in history, we're building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future." -James Bridle

Of the printed collection, Bridle says: "It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes 'Saddam Hussein was a dickhead'."

Of Wikipedia, Bridle says: "It's not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot."

I think that's pretty awesome.

Below: Bridle's talk at dConstruct, The Value of Ruins. Audio thanks to the wonderful podcast curation tool HuffDuffer. (Which, incidentally, was built by Jeremy Keith, author of HTML5 for Web Designers, who recently shook hands with James Bridle himself.)

Ads with political content are subject to restrictions on the YouTube.com homepage. Update: YouTube contacted us and said that to the contrary: "Provided the ads do not involve accusations or attacks relating to an individual's personal life or character, they can run on the YouTube homepage." Interested parties should read the Terms of Service for themselves.

One of the forbidden categories is "Political & Religious Content" that includes "inflammatory or exploitative uses of political or religious issues."

But Google, which owns YouTube, hopes to see mainstream politicians spend about 10% of their advertising budgets online.

"In stream ads are probably the hottest thing in political advertising right now," says a Google advertising executive told Fast Company.

Candidates can place targeted ads in videos based on a user's interests, location and demographic information via Google's DoubleClick platform. Videos can be up to 30 seconds long.

YouTube is clearly getting more attention from political campaigns, which in the past have re-posted TV ads and created online-only ads to collect views and vitriolic comments.

Report author Ole Ole Olson focused on a group called Digg Patriots, which he alleges used a now-deleted Yahoo Groups email list to distribute bury orders for more than 40,000 stories over the past 15 months. In addition to explicitly liberal political articles, "articles about education, homophobia, racism, science, the environment, economics, wealth disparity, world events, the media, green energy, and anything even slightly critical of the GOP/Tea Party/FoxNews/corporations are targets," Olson writes.

The group appears to be generally paranoid that they are themselves subject to a liberal editorial agenda and need to make this kind of concerted effort in order to fight back. Digg's corporate leadership seems to have made little effort to challenge this group in particular, but believes that a nearly launched new version of the site will render such conspiracies impotent.

Michele Husak, Director of Communications, told us she thought the Alternet article was "certainly an interesting look into the lengths people will go to create the Digg experience they think is best."

"Meanwhile," she continued, "we're getting ready to launch our new platform which removes the 'bury' feature and focuses much more on a relevant and personalized news experience by allowing users to follow profiles of people and content curators that they know and trust."

While tens of millions of people visit Digg each month to read crowd-sourced content, the path to the front page of the site is crowded with opportunists acting in self interest or bad faith.

The Extent of the Conniving

Olson's investigation unearthed extensive measures taken including the creation of hundreds of fake Digg accounts by each of many different users. At least 70 Digg users participating were explicitly identified.

In addition to stories being buried because of their subject matter, the group targeted stories and comments from particular users they believed were politically left-leaning. One user targeted for indiscriminate burying was Andrew Sorcini, Mr.Babyman. Mr. Babyman is far and away the most successful user Digg has ever seen, in terms of stories submitted that hit the front page of the site.

"While I'm not surprised to learn I'm on a list of users to be buried," Sorcini said when we asked him about the investigation, "I'm amazed that the number of participants is so vast and organized."

In theory, the very soon-to-launch new version of Digg should greatly diminish the ability for conspiracies like this to succeed. Many participants in the Digg Patriot group seemed to believe there never has been an algorithm determining which stories hit the front page.

One message on the Digg Patriots mailing list was indicative of that belief:

There's no 'algorithm' at digg. The 'algorithm' most likely consists of a bunch of liberal, bi-sexual, emo-types, who drink mimosas all day, and engage in a circle-jerk by night. When they're not doing that, they pull a few levers to get a banana payoff from a machine, which they call the digg 'algorithm'.

Such ogre-like behavior may inevitably overwhelm any kind of social news site. Or there may be an arms race between site owners and groups acting in bad faith.

The day kicked off with a presentation about the future of the World Economic Forum's influential Global Information Technology Report, a 400-page annual study of the information and communication technology preparedness of every country in the world. Report co-author Soumitra Dutta said the rise of digital and social media calls us to consider social impacts, such as happiness and social cohesiveness, beyond mere GNP, and other factors like ecological sustainability require a reformation of the metrics in the report.   Discussion quickly illuminated, however, that such changes could get complicated - and controversial - if the organization goes beyond counting how many bits can be shot through the tubes in Tunisia or Tehran.

ReadWriteWeb readers may remember that we've written before about the Tunisian government's authoritarian control over its own citizens online. If, as was suggested today, social media and the resulting free speech were to be included as a metric in the World Bank's evaluation of various country's economic preparedness, what would that mean for investment in Tunisia or other similar countries?

Things get a little sticky when something so democratically potent becomes a part of economic metrics. Economics is much simpler when it's just cold hard cash and the ability to produce it that's being counted. The times are changing, though. The line between technology, economics and values discussions are being blurred (thankfully), and not everyone around the world is likely to be happy about that.

Is it appropriate for freedom of speech to influence the metrics an organization like the World Economic Forum publishes concerning the technological preparedness of various countries for investment and engagement?

You can read my longer coverage of the World Economic Forum's changing metrics at the Techonomy blog.

Elena's Inbox is a thought-provoking project that could inspire future efforts to facilitate citizen evaluation of public records, and the Sunlight Foundation has open-sourced the code used to build it. As it stands, the microsite is a fun and interesting peek inside the Clinton administration's day-to-day operations. It's hard to imagine any previous political nominee facing this degree of public transparency.

Full Text Search is a Start

Some of the emails are amusing, others enlightening, others still are both. This is a fun interface for looking through these texts, but the limitations are quickly evident as well. Full text search works well when it's your own email you're searching through, but when you don't know what language someone else uses to discuss certain topics, full text search feels inadequate. If a site like this incorporated collaborative user tagging of emails into topical buckets, that would make it all the more interesting. It would also be in character for the Sunlight Foundation.

It's interesting, for example, to read that the policy focus Kagan recommended the President consider regarding race and crime was "systematic underprotection of minorities (segregation of safety)." That does sound more politically palatable than focusing on inequities in sentencing.

As a public service, Elena's Inbox is quite helpful. As Kagan faces debate and questioning over her nomination, the site will offer a very easy way to see what she said about topics 10 years ago, and how she said it, while in a position of substantial political power. That's certainly a historically unprecedented degree of transparency around a Supreme Court nominee.

So far the reaction has been almost entirely positive. That's because you have to "like" Bush in order to be allowed to comment on his wall. For a large portion of the world, putting "I like George Bush" into their newsfeed would be like garlic to a vampire. You are, remember, either with him or against him.

That is all. Go now, and write messages on his wall.

Update: As one reader pointed out in comments, this is a Fan page, not a personal profile. So the requirement that a user "likes" the page before commenting is just a convenient part of how Facebook works. As a Fan page, the account does not have a field for making friends. In other words, George Bush may be on Facebook, but he does not have any friends. Is it better to have Fans than to have Friends? Such are the question for the ages that our former leader must now ponder.

Although Google's politely-worded blog post doesn't come out and directly blame the Chinese government for these attacks, many have suspected that is the case, including, apparently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Now even more sources are coming out to confirm the Chinese government's involvement. According to Verisign, their sources within the defense-contracting and intelligence-consulting communities also believe "agents of the Chinese state or proxies thereof" are to blame for these recent attacks.

Google has stated that the attackers unsuccessfully attempted to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. However, only two Gmail accounts were accessed and only account information and the email subject lines were seen, not the content of the emails themselves. The company also said that at least 20 other large companies were attacked as well. Now Verisign reports that number is 33.

In light of these attacks, Google boldly declared they are reconsidering their decision to do business in China - a surprising turn for the Internet giant who once claimed that operating in China didn't violate the company's motto, "Don't be evil," despite the fact that it required censoring search results according to the Chinese government's wishes. That controversial act, though hotly debated at the time, was not all that surprising. Many Western firms ultimately have to cave in to Chinese demands in order to gain access to the 300 million plus Internet users the country holds. Google, for all their proclaimed high ideals, appeared to be no exception.

Until now.

The company has changed its course, stating that they will no longer censor the search results for their Chinese portal google.cn, launched in 2006 with the lofty goal of providing reliable access to information, albeit filtered information, for millions of Chinese citizens. Google is leaving the next move up to the Chinese government. If officials do not accept Google's decision to provide unfiltered information, Google says they will have to withdraw from the country.

Policy Change Hints at Government Involvement in Attacks

So what has changed between then and now? The Chinese government hasn't altered their position on Internet censorship, nor have they asked Google to make any changes to the agreement already in place. Many immediately suspected that the sole reason for Google's decision has to do with the attacks themselves - attacks that hint at government involvement.

According to Verisign's sources, that does appear to be the case. The company says they've confirmed with two independent sources that both the source IPs and drop server (the server used to host malicious code and store the stolen files) of the attack correspond to a single foreign entity consisting of either agents of the Chinese state or those acting on their behalf.

Verisign also notes that these recent attacks resemble a similar July 2009 incident against 100 or so IT-focused companies. At that time, the hacks involved an emailed PDF file that contained an unpatched Adobe Reader vulnerability, which allowed the attackers to deliver the malicious code. That vulnerability remained unpatched until just yesterday, notes Rick Howard, director of security intelligence for VeriSign iDefense.

While July's attacks were detected early and were largely uneventful, December's attacks did find some success. In addition, these same sources claim that the files in both cases share similar characteristics. For example, both attacks used a backdoor Trojan in the form of a Windows DLL, and both share two similar hosts for the command-and-control (C&C) communication. In layman's terms, if the cyberattack was a ground assault during a war, the C&C would be the general barking out the orders. Also in both incidents, the IP addresses used for C&C are in the same subnet and only six addresses apart from each other. That means both attacks are likely to have been instigated by the same entity and may imply that the recent victims' technology infrastructure has been compromised since July.

While none of these findings are a true smoking gun pointing to the Chinese government, it is believed that China encourages their hacker community to attack foreign entities while publicly denying any involvement in such attacks. That may be the case now. Or it could be that this time, the attacks are not just being state-permitted, they're being state-directed.

"In iDefense's press announcement regarding the recently discovered Silicon Valley compromises, we stated that the attack vector was likely "malicious PDF file attachments delivered via email" and suggested that a vulnerability in Adobe Reader appeared to have been exploited in these attacks. Upon further review, we are retracting our initial assessment regarding the likely use of Adobe vulnerabilities. There are currently no confirmed instances of a vulnerability in Adobe technologies being used in these attacks. We continue to investigate this issue."

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Specifically, Sysomos' Alex Cheng, Mark Evans and Nick Koudas were interested in examining who the most followed politicians on Twitter are and "how those within the political Twittersphere behave in terms of their follower/followed patterns." In order to do so, they created a list of 168 accounts of influential politicians, reporters and bloggers from the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. that comprise the core of the political Twittersphere.

Obviously, we can't really know if the fact that somebody follows somebody else actually means that they are reading all the updates and the political Twittersphere is arguably a bit larger than the sample that Sysomos looked at here. For this study, Sysomos only looked at accounts that had over 5,000 followers and the team acknowledges that it had to make some editorial choices to keep the study manageable. The fact that the map of all the connections between the 168 accounts weighs in at 16 MB shows the complexity of this study, so some editorial control was obviously necessary.

Here are some of the highlights from the report:

The President

With over 2.33 million followers, President Barack Obama is the most followed politician on Twitter, though he is only being followed by 56 members of the 168-member political Twittersphere. Among Obama's followers are Al Gore, Portland's Mayor Sam Adams, London's Mayor Boris Johnson and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Newt Gingrich also follows Obama's updates, as does blogger Marc Parent (@mparent77772)

There is probably a reason why relatively few political influencers follow Obama. After all, if you want updates from the president, his Twitter account is probably one of the worst ways of following him and most of the updates on Obama's account aren't very interesting. Other politicians like Schwarzenegger and John Boehner also update their accounts far more regularly.

Politicians and Political Reporters

Among politicians and reporters, ABC News' George Stephanopoulos follows 105 members of the 168-member political Twittersphere Sysomos analyzed, followed by the Newshour (104), followed by John Boehner (98), the Huffington Post (98), and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (92).

Within the political Twittersphere, Schwarzenegger is also the most followed politician and Stephanopoulos is the most followed media personality.

Daryl Cagle, the cartoonist for MSNBC.com, is the #1 media personality that other reporters follow on Twitter.

News Organizations

Besides looking at individual reporters, Sysomos also examined the larger news organizations in the US. CNN's Breaking News account (@cnnbrk) has over 2.75 million followers, followed by NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) with 1.51 million and Good Morning America (@gma) with 1.37 million. CNN doesn't really follow anybody back, though, while the NPR Politics account follows close to 117,000 Twitter users and Newsweek (@newsweek) follows 97,000.

The members of the political Twittersphere as identified by Sysomos that are most likely to be followed are the PBS Newshour account, the Huffington Post and the LA Times.