Category: technology

The Internet President

Crossposted on The Morningside Post.

Obama_internet
Image from Desmond Blog

Barack Obama has been called, by everyone from Columbia Law School professor Eben Moglen to media expert Jeff Jarvis, “the first candidate elected by the internet.” By all accounts, online fundraising was a major factor in propelling Obama to the top, and his new Change.gov site lets Americans share their vision for the next administration.

Now, as the Presidential transition is in process, Obama’s team is taking Internet awareness one step further. If you’re interested in working in a top position in the White House, the New York Times reports that you’d better be willing to divulge your blog, your Facebook profile, and “all aliases or ‘handles’ you have used to communicate on the Internet” in the past decade.

I gave it a shot, and realized my list would include not just profiles on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn but also accounts with Delicious, Twitter, BigSight, FriendFeed, Dopplr, Metafilter and Last.fm (and an unfortunate experiment with Xanga at age 14). Will a recently-loved song on Favtape become a “possible source of embarrassment” to me, me family, or the president-elect? Will a two-year-old blog post of awkward photos of George Bush seem less sarcastic than fawning, casting me into the ranks of suspected Republicans?

I don’t have to give up as much as the Big O himself, though. (Side note: calling the president-elect “the Big O” will likely embarrass me, my family and Obama himself. This is the part where I kiss my Secretary of State aspirations goodbye.) Due to security concerns, Obama’s being asked to surrender his beloved BlackBerry before stepping into the Oval Office.

jackfruit of the week (10.22.08)

Some research I’m doing on crowdsourcing in crisis is starting to take (nebulous, uncertain) shape via my Delicious account. Some highlights:

  • The “crisis mapping” section of iRevolution, the blog of Fletcher School PhD candidate Patrick Meier, is a glorious treasure trove of histories, plans and possibilities for digital mapping based on crowdsourced information in conflict early warning and prevention systems. Meier is writing his dissertation about the effects of the information revolution on social resistance movements in authoritarian societies. In other words, I would very much like to buy him dinner.

  • FrontlineSMS isn’t exactly new (I first heard about it in 2007, when it was being used to help monitor the Nigerian elections), but the more I read about mobile phones, the more excited I get. Frontline allows anyone with a laptop and a phone to create a “central communications hub” that can use text messages to communicate with large groups of people: to send out an alert and get feedback on a specific crisis situation, for example, or to aggregate information during a natural disaster. The less altruistic could use it to organize flashmobs.

    Later today some friends and I are going to help advocate for Frontline by becoming an icon for them. Interested? Take a picture of yourself with your arms above your head, imitating the Frontline logo, and sent it to photo@frontlinesms.com with your name and country. They’ll put it in a slideshow that will be used to generate awareness and support.


    FrontlineSMS supporter Erik Hersman becomes a Frontline icon

AfrigatorIn other news: this week I was named one of the top 45 female bloggers in Africa by Afrigator. I’m happy that two blogs about Uganda are included, but I’m sad not to see Tumwijuke, Antipop or Magintu on the list. If you’re not a member of Afrigator, head over and register to submit your blog and to see what’s happening all over the African blogosphere.

That’s all for this week. Coming up next Wednesday: plans for quadricontinental liveblogging of the US presidential election returns at The Morningside Post.

jackfruit of the week (09.17.08)

This week I was offered a spot on the editorial staff The Morningside Post, Columbia University’s international affairs blog. I’ll be working a lot with outreach and video, as well as helping to roll out a shiny new design that will better showcase the variety of our content. I’ll also be blogging about media, technology and development (and maybe a celebrity or two). Meanwhile, I urge you to check out the wealth of archived posts on everything from climate change to Cambodia.

Jon Gosier wonders why Barcamp Uganda focused on selling, rather than discussing, new technology: “Barcamp Kampala was organized by myself (an American), a Dutch person, a Brit and a New Zealander with help from three Ugandan students. Thus it definitely had tons of Western influences. Alternatively, Barcamp Uganda was organized for and by Ugandans. Maybe the idea of Barcamp is a western thing that isn’t relevant to Ugandans?”

And lastly, another zinger from Vijay Prashad’s Darker Nations, which I mentioned last week: “The darker world contributed greatly to the development of Europe, and based on this evidence it is clear that the invisible hand is white.”

GVO Summit: Quick note on tools

The Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Budapest two weeks ago was a whirlwind of new ideas and information. Among them: a list of handy Web 2.0 tools for liveblogging/covering conferences.

Throughout the summit I used ScribeFire to blog within Firefox. It is my new favorite blogging tool, hands down: a quick window that opens in the bottom half of your browser window and lets you save drafts, publish directly to multiple blogs, edit old posts, tag and categorize, all without leaving the precious set of relevant sites you’ve carefully opened and arranged in tabs.

During the summit, I also posted quick updates to my Twitter account. You can follow me and everyone else who tagged their posts with gvsummit08 using Summize or Hashtags. Summize picks up more from Twitter than Hashtags, but Hashtags aggregates photos, video and blog posts as well as tweets.

The summit liveblog used CoverItLive, which allows readers to comment in a chat-room-esque atmosphere. Livebloggers can also post relevant polls, and the liveblog window can be inserted into any web page. I liveblogged the last session on the GV Summit blog and posted it on Jackfruity as well.

Other tools
The presence of so many skilled photographers intimidated me (the few touristy Budapest photos I did take are on Picasa), and I didn’t get any shots from the summit itself, but you can check out the wealth of photos from other attendees on Flickr. SlideShare was used as a hub for many of the Powerpoint/Keynote presentations. Summit videos are on YouTube, and recordings of each presentation can be viewed on Ustream.

Update
The lovely and invaluable Leonard has reminded me that video clips of the conference are also available on Blip TV, thanks to GV Advocacy director Sami ben Gharbia.