"Social media and other methods have been used to organise these levels of greed and criminality ... That investigation is already under way and that is exactly the sort of thing we are looking at."

More to the point, and less dramatically, photo-sharing and video sites, as well as text tweets and social networks, may serve as evidence for police to identify, apprehend and charge - and for prosecutors to secure verdicts against - looters and those involved in smashing windows and starting fires.

Blackberry

In other social media-meets-London riot news, attention has been focused on Blackberry's private messaging service, known as BBM. London tech and media specialist Jonathan Akwue wrote a post on his blog outlining the case for Blackberry as the messaging vector of choice for the rioters.

"BBM as it is known, is an instant messenger system that has become popular for three main reasons: it's fast (naturally), it's virtually free, and unlike Twitter or Facebook, it's private... I don't know the extent to which the police are able to monitor the BBM network, but Canadian police officers have previously complained that criminals prefer using Blackberry Messenger because it is harder to wiretap."

Although many of the messages seem organizational in nature, many also seem criminal, with exhortations to rob and information on areas unprotected by the police.

In a subsequent post, Akwue said that "BBM is the social network of choice" for "the urban young people I'm connected to." One user told him, "BBM is standard issue... Of course. It's all about BBM. This is our network!"

I agree with Akwue that, just as Egypt's was not a Facebook revolution, this too, for better or worse, was a story of people acting on their environment, not of technology acting on people.

Riot police photo by Steve Jackson, video by Alan Stanton | other sources: New York Times | thanks to Deane Rimmerman

YouTube

The Neda video in Iran was one of the most politically powerful online videos in history. Look for YouTube to play a role in Belarus as well. While the government of Belarus is reported to have blocked all major social media and opposition media outlets like Charter 97, Belarus Partizan, and Solidarity, videos like the one below are likely to keep going online:

Twitter

The Belarus election is the most recent instance of where online new platforms allow new insight into a country's turmoil. While mainstream media outlets are now covering the story, Twitter provides a real-time stream of news, aggregated with the #electby hashtag on Twitter and, notably, curated by the U.S. State Department's eDiplomacy account, @eDipAtState. Along with retweeting many other accounts with relevant reports and information, @eDipState also shared an official statement: "US Embassy Minsk condemns election-day violence, excessive force by authorities."

In 2010, of course, the online audience doesn't have to rely on government accounts or blog posts to track what's happened. Using Twitter's advanced search, anyone can see geolocated #electby tweets with 500 miles of Belarus. Just click "translate" on the right sidebar to read them in English.

Ushahidi

An instance of Ushahidi, the powerful crowdmapping tool that was originally developing to track elections in Kenya, has been deployed at ElectBy.com.

Global Voices

In 2010, getting the full spectrum of information about international news means going beyond standard online mainstream media outlets or cable news. The Global Voices blogging network is an important collection of views, reports and media from around the world, including a comprehensive review of Belarus presidential Election Day protests and crackdowns.

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty is also covering the aftermath of the election, including a photo gallery of scenes from the crackdown.

Storify

As Vadim Lavrusik pointed out in his predictions for media in 2011, a new role of journalists in events like the Belarus election is to act as a real-time curator of information, sifting, filtering, vetting and verifying information for a distributed audience. NPR senior social strategist Andy Carvin has been one of the best in the world at this task, as evidenced by his work during the Haitian earthquake. Below, he used Storify to curate images, links, videos and tweets from the Web.

One man in particular is staging a protest against the censorship: He is calling for everyone in China to abandon the Internet on the day the new rule takes effect. According to GlobalPost, Beijing artist and prominent political critic Ai Weiwei wants other Chinese citizens to realize their own power.

Weiwei has a reputation for being a hugely prolific blogger, generating around 3,000 posts in his first three years of writing online. He also uses Twitter, Chinese microblogging service Fanfou, and other sites to spread the word about freedom of expression and overt criticism of the government in China.

On July 1, he is calling for all of China's 300 million Internet users to completely log off for the day. In the original post, even Ai noted, "Chinese people are very practical. They think 'Oh, what's that going to do?'" He is aware the action he's requesting is huge; however, he feels that even a small gesture of protest will have an impact.

In his own words, "A small act is worth a million thoughts."

Given Westerners' sudden bout of green-tinted solidarity with Iranian protesters, we do wonder if Weiwei's call to action (via online inaction) will spread beyond China. What effect do you think Weiwei's protest will have? How can those of us in other countries best express our own disapproval of that nation's censorship policies? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

The blackout is part of a week of action against S92, declares a press release by the Creative Freedom Foundation, a non-profit group in NZ that has similar copyright concerns to those made famous internationally by Lawrence Lessig. The Creative Freedom Foundation will also announce a S92 song remix challenge this week, and "various other initiatives including video commercials and radio broadcasts will follow."

Creative Freedom Foundation Director Bronwyn Holloway-Smith said in the press release that "if the [New Zealand] government choses to keep this law, they will be going against international trends, treating NZ as an international lab-rat for this kind of legislation". Similar legislation has already been rejected in other countries, such as Germany and the UK. Juha Saarinen on The Techsploder calls S92 "arguably the world's harshest copyright enforcement law". He argues that the new law is "there for the large entertainment organisations to terrorise Internet users" and that it "isn't going to help artists and others rights holders."

It is important to note that the law only applies to telcos and ISPs, but that copyright holders (e.g. the entertainment industry) can demand that ISPs disconnect internet access for those people they accuse of copyright infringement. P2P users and website owners who allegedly have copyrighted material on their websites are most likely to be the target. While some of those people may actually be copyright offenders, what has upset the Creative Freedom Foundation is that disconnection can occur simply by accusation - the phrase 'innocent until proven guilty' becomes meaningless.

If you think the protest is worth supporting, you can sign an online petition here - and of course black out your social network profile!

UPDATE: Here's a video about the issue, made by Chelfyn Baxter from theg33kshow.com and voiced by Oliveroo.

In many ways, the reactions from Google's users are quite typical. As Lou Cabron points out, since Google updated iGoogle, its users have started the obligatory online petition that urges Google to allow users to keep the old version of iGoogle, created Greasemonkey scripts to roll the layout back themselves, and started a Facebook group that protests 'forced website redesigns' in general.

On Google's own discussion board, users posted the phone numbers and email addresses of a number of Google engineers and product mangers involved in the iGoogle project.

Most users especially disliked the move of the tabs from the top of the page into a sidebar on the left of the screen.

Not Just Google: Yahoo Profiles

Google was not the only company suffering from this over the weekend. While the New York Times lauded Yahoo for only making small, incremental changes to its homepage, Yahoo's radical switch to a new profile page (while also resetting everybody's profile at the same time) upset quite a few of its users. Yahoo's own blog post about the switch has over 600 negative comments.

Give Users the Option to Go Back

Users, for many reasons, tend to resist change. Even though it is often only a very vocal minority that really takes issue with these changes, companies need to take these complaints seriously.

As more software moves into the cloud, one of the most lauded aspects of cloud computing - the fact that a company can quickly make updates to a product - can now also become a publicity nightmare.

Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google usually allow users to use the old version of their more popular online products for a while after a new version is released. Lately, however, we have spoken to quite a few product managers who were quite adamant that their new product was so far superior to their old offering that they were planning to release it to all of their users without a roll-back option. Judging from the user reactions both Google and Yahoo saw over the weekend, it would seem that they do so at their own peril.

The current planned strike is being organized mainly over the Internet via social sites. A MySpace page for the strike has over 1900 friends, for example, while two Facebook groups (here and here) have over 5,000 members each. A Topix thread on the strike has over 4,800 replies, and a dedicated strike forum at TruckerForum -- a site with over a thousand members -- has 1,500 replies.

Unfortunately for protest organizers, who are aiming for May 5th as a potential strike day, as impressive as those numbers are on paper, they're not nearly large enough to effect the nation's shipping industry that much. If 75,000 truckers in 1994 didn't do much, a few thousand in 2008 won't have anyone calling for Congress to intervene.

But that said, in the past year we have begun to see movements that were started online take hold and have a serious impact. A protest organized on Facebook in Columbia a couple of months ago drew as many as 2 million people, and there is some evidence that the eBay protest organized via MySpace and YouTube in February had at least a small effect on the auction site.

What we're seeing over the past few months is the emergence of social networks as incredibly powerful organizational tools. Due to the inherently viral nature of most social networking sites, people are figuring out ways to leverage these networks to organize quickly on a massive scale and potentially effect real social change.