Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Michael Rubin
The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, and Washington Post have dubbed it a “Twitter Revolution,” speculating about whether new technology will enable Iranian protesters to overcome government forces. The role of technology in the current unrest is well-covered elsewhere. What is lacking in much of the coverage, however, is a sense of context.

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From MESH Admin
The Internet and Democracy project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society (which graciously provides hosting services for MESH) has produced a map of the Arabic blogosphere. Click on the thumbnail to enlarge, and download the full report here. The key finding:
Most bloggers write mainly personal, diary-style observations. But when writing about [...]

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From MESH Admin

Information Week publishes a story on the Internet Mapping Project:
2008 is the tenth anniversary of a project to map the Internet. Undertaken by Lumeta, the effort was undertaken as a long-range research project to study the growth of the online world…. The project gathers routing data to all backbone routers hosted by ISPs. [...]

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From MESH Admin
The Internet and Democracy Project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School, has just published a new study, Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere. The image below is the resulting map of the Iranian blogosphere (click on the image for a larger view). From [...]

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From Hillel Fradkin
According to Philip Bennett, managing editor of the Washington Post, Americans lack a proper understanding of Islam. Contemporary media practice is to blame, and it is the job of the same media to fix it. His immediate proposals: hiring more Muslim journalists, better translations of Arabic words or terms and greater descriptive precision. [...]

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