John Palfrey

Red Herring’s Mitch Ratcliffe responds to Jay Rosen’s piece (”Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over”) in advance of our conference on web credibility:

“Bloggers are beating the crap out of journalists, because bloggers are giving away what writers used to be paid to produce. That doesn’t mean bloggers are going to win the market, because there have been plenty of industries assailed by the price-busting assault of massive commoditization. It does mean that journalists—all writers—are being pressed to come up with new and better ways to get their work into the market. It means that the centers of mass media distribution are melting like centrally heated igloos—the infrastructures are simply too big.”

Ratcliffe says it’s all about economics.  He calls for “an eBay of content.”

Always worth listening to, David Weinberger strikes me as particularly dead-on in his post of this evening about the blogging and ethics debate that has raged this weekend.

There are many aspects of what’s happened in the past few days –
loosely swirling around a conference that hasn’t happened yet and
around a “disclosure” that is disputed and which was public
(though, I admit, I had not focused on it) long before it hit the WSJ
this past week — that still merit working through, in my view.

But one key aspect of this narrative, which David W draws out, seems perfect plain to me.  The people
involved — Markos Zuniga, Jerome Armstrong, and Zephyr Teachout (and,
to greater or lesser extent, others in the Dean campaign world) — each
deserve an enormous amount of credit for their service to making
politics more robust, real, and forceful than anyone could have
reasonably imagined a few years ago.  Their contributions have
been enormous and heroic.  It’s heartbreaking to think that any
aspect of the swirling dispute, especially anything that I’ve written,
might suggest anything to the contrary.  The overall story of
civic engagement by people using new technologies is much the most
important part. 

(In the spirit of the season: my disclosure: I was an active supporter
of John Kerry’s campaign for the presidency, during the both the
primary and the general.)

At the OpenNetInitiative
(a joint project of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab at the Munk
Centre; the Advanced Network Research Group in the Cambridge Security
Program at the University of Cambridge, and the Berkman Center), we
released a new bulletin
regarding the extent to which, and means by which, the Chinese
government filters posts to weblogs via three major domestic weblog
providers.  The filtering occurs by keyword.  From the
bulletin:

“While Blogbus and Blogcn filter 18 of the 987 and 19 of the 987
keywords, Blogdriver filters 350 of the 987 keywords tested. The
filtered keywords generally fall into five categories:

* National minorities’ independence movements: the well known Tibetan
cause is represented as well as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. The
inclusion of some Taiwanese politicians’ names also fall into this
category as they are all people who are known to support Taiwan
independence.

* Tiananmen Square incident in 1989: it is referenced both by the full
name, “Tiananmen massacre,” the Chinese custom of referencing important
events by the number of the month and the day (in this case, 6-4), and
also by reference to people involved — a mother of one of the victims
who has been campaigning for human rights. The name of Zhao Ziyang,
former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general, is also included in this
category.

* Chinese communist leaders: a list of the top leaders, past and
present, are included along with a particularly creative rewriting of
Jiang Zemin by replacing one of the characters of his name by the
character for “thief.”

* Falun Gong: a list of different names for Falun Gong including
various spellings with characters that sound the same, often used to
circumvent filtering.

* Sensitive words: a list of words referring to uprisings or suppression.” 

The full list of keywords is here.  These findings underscore the increasing importance of weblogs as a means of political speech.