I ran across an interesting article in The New Republic about Jonathan Schilling - a man who monitors HRC’s Wikipedia page.  Near the end of the piece, the author does a bit of interviewing with another Wikipedia defender who monitors BHO’s page.  Both pages are long and full of references, but considering the viscous nature of this primary fight, I am surprised that only Obama’s page is locked.  Have the Wikipedia vandals already decided she won’t win and thus its not even worth vandalizing her page anymore?

I am quite impressed with the amount of time and energy these guys have devoted to their respective causes.   They have tasked themselves as editors of a system designed to not have a single editor.  I do not envy them; keeping the pages clean cannot be easy, especially with the heated primary we have right now.

Perhaps its a signal of what Senator Obama called the “political silly season” last night, but the New York Times ran another controversial story recently. Oh, perhaps its not quite as enthralling as sexual innuendo regarding presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, but it might be enough to get a few technogeeks to fisticuffs (or at least a LAN contest of World of Warcraft).

Simply put, Barack Obama is a Mac and Hillary Clinton is a PC.

The article, remiscient of attempts to read into the Bush campaign by analyzing their bumper sticker, looks at the Web sites of the Obama and Clinton camps. The metaphor is intentional, and (for obvious reasons) the interpretations of the campaigns will line up with the media-created story arcs.

That said, there is certainly an argument being made here. As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, we will expect a smooth, classy, high-tech, user-friendly….Mac-like experience? As the generation of narcissism and self-esteem classes grows into their 20’s and 30’s, we will expect to be catered to with nice visual effects and a user-friendly, “do-not-shout” pitch.

Obama-Jobs ‘08: The Wave of the Future.

This is almost entirely unrelated to technology, but I still think it is a great development.  Listening to NPR this morning, I heard that Stanford will no longer be charging undergraduates tuition if their parents make less than $100,000.  Looking at this article on NPR’s website expands it further and says that room and board will also be waived if the parents income is less than $60,000.

The tenuous tech tie-in, I suppose, comes from the fact that with the rapid development and continually falling prices of new technology, educational technology is always getting cheaper as well.  This is a great development all around, and hopefully other very well endowed schools will follow.

Not the forecasters.

George Anders recently looked back at some of the predictions Wall Street Journal published about what technology would look like in 2008. It looks like the crystal balls of five and ten years ago failed to predict one major trend in the way we use technology: our desire for interaction and interactivity.

The most elusive insight: the public’s desire to move beyond passive consumption of digital technology, in favor of active creation and sharing of personally shaped content. Forecasters didn’t foresee anything resembling the rise of YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace and incessant blogging.

In fact, Ambuj Goyal, then vice president for systems and software at International Business Machines Corp and one of the technologists interviewed by WSJ ten years ago, put it most correctly:

We have predicted the hardware speeds and feeds very well. We haven’t done nearly as well in predicting how these machines will be used.

This brings me, yet again, to what I have already noted on this blog as one of my favorite panels at the 2008 Politics Online Conference. The panel is called Pervasive Politics, and it looks at the ways in which ubiquitous, pervasive computing (think microchips embedded in watch, constant online surveillance, etc.) are shaping politics and public policy. We’re combining techno-futurists, like Adam Greenfield (author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing), Genevieve Bell (IBM) and Alex Pang (Institute for the Future) with representatives from the Beltway set (Garrett Graff and Tanya Tarr).

I’m Greece-blogging for this one, so it will be brief. I just wanted to follow up and note that the Slashdot interview of Garrett Graff I mentioned a few days ago has now been completed. Garrett’s answers are up here. I do like the 10 questions that won out, and his answers are pretty good as well. Check it out.

Back to the streets of Athens.

Slashdot is conducting an interview of Garrett Graff.  We had him over for a lunch earlier this semester; we discussed his upcoming book, the 2004 Dean campaign, and web trends in general.  The Slashdot interview is in the question submission phase, so if you have something you would like to ask him, go post it.  I browsed some of the current questions and there are some interesting ones.  Not surprisingly there are a quite a few Ron Paul related questions.

Thinking about blogging from the ’08 Olympics next year? Watch out – you could be putting yourself at risk. That’s what the Committee to Protect Journalists warns online and offline journalists as many media outlets and individual bloggers prepare for the summer games.

According to a report released by CPJ in August, nineteen domestic online writers are now imprisoned by the Chinese government. That report, Falling Short, largely looks at domestic accounts of press censorship – emphasis on the term “domestic.” In fact the Chinese government appears to have more of an interest in controlling domestic online and offline media than controlling messages in foreign press.

What’s startling about the report isn’t necessarily its depictions of censorship, jailings of journalists, or harassment from local political leaders (although they do provide a sharp contrast to what we tend to expect in our own country). Rather, what strikes one the most is the report’s list of suggestions for foreigners covering the Olympics, including recommendations of topics to avoid and a list of tips for detained writers.

The publication includes the following dialogue, taken from an English phrasebook for police. The handbook uses a scenario of a police officer trying to stop a reporter for covering the Falun Gong:

Chinese Police Officer: “Excuse me, sir. Stop, please. It’s beyond the limit of your coverage and illegal. As a foreign reporter in China you should obey China law and do nothing against your status.”

Foreign Reporter: “Oh, I see. May I go now?”

Chinese Police Officer: “No. Come with us.”

Foreign Reporter: “What for?”

Chinese Police Officer: “To clear up this matter.”

Reporters representing major media outlets are one thing. After all, they are often backed by large, prestigious corporations. What might happen if an individual online journalist replaces the reporter in the scenario?

To view CPJ’s list of tips and to read more about the media in China, visit http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2007/Falling_Short/China/.

There’s a creepy scene at the beginning of the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in which Charlie and a strange man stand outside the gates of the chocolate factory. The man, referring to the factory, says “nobody ever goes in; nobody ever comes out.”

This is all well and good in factories. But what’s a government to do when information about the goings-on instead its borders appear to threaten state security? The same thing: shut down the gates.

That’s what the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) did in Burma a few weeks ago when the less than 1 percent of its citizens who do have Internet access used it to post camera phone pictures and blogs about protests in Rangoon. The power of citizen media, the stirring images it produced, and the growing support for the protestors within the global community, led the government to shut down the country’s two ISPs, Myanmar Posts and Telecom (MPT) and Bagan/Myanmar Teleport (BaganNet) sporadically, then completely, then sporadically between September 29 and October 16. The idea was to prevent citizen coverage of the protests from reaching outsiders and outside signs of support and solidarity from reaching its citizens.

Now, the OpenNet Initiative tells you how the government did it in its latest report, Pulling the Plug. Author Stephanie Wang writes,

Burma provides a rare example of a government also taking extreme measures to keep information from escaping its borders. In pulling the plug on the Internet Burma became only the second country to resort to such drastic action; in 2005 King Gyanendra of Nepal declared martial law and briefly shut down the Internet, along with international telephone lines and cellular communications networks.

Like any factory with a security threat, the government didn’t stop at shutting the gates. It also started identifying protestors using protest footage. Wang reports that security forces in Mandalay checked motorcycle registrations against footage of the protests, pinpointing and cracking down on protestors using the same medium as the citizen journalists.

The point of the crackdown might have been to prevent nothing from coming in and nothing from going out, but that doesn’t mean that something wasn’t circulating from within. Wang alludes to the incident as an illustration of the power of citizen journalism to share up a nation and a global community.

But there is something else, something just beneath the surface, something about a government watching and adopting the tactics of a dissident citizen force. If a government wants to keep up with techno-powered dissidents (even in a country with one of the smallest Internet populations in the world), it behooves the government to quickly, nimbly and quietly (or not so quietly) think and even act like a dissident.

Last Thursday I went to the Senate Hart building to mingle with Americans for Prosperity.  They had been running around the Hill all day and were there to hear Senators McCain and DeMint speak; I was there for McCain and some schmoozing.  I couldn’t find the registration table where my credentials were at, so naturally, I walked around as if I didn’t need them.  I spoke with a few people, all of whom were friendly.  I talked politics with a couple of ladies from Ohio.  They, like a lot of people, were undecided and unimpressed with their choices.

The rest of our conversation was cut short by McCain taking the podium.  He spoke for a bit and received a few rounds of applause.  He got a round of applause, from myself as well, when he called on Congress to permanently ban the Internet tax before the moratorium ends November 1.  I then proceeded towards the entrance/exit hallway so I could watch McCain get mobbed on his way out.  And that’s exactly what happened.  To his credit, he took plenty of time to shake hands, pose for pictures, and answer questions.

All in all, not a bad way to spend a Thursday afternoon.

The junta regime in Burma is facing massive protests again, this time led by the country’s monks. Unlike the last major protests, people around the world are paying attention this time. The Burmese government tries to be secretive and control communications, but with the spread of blogs and other new media, it is proving too difficult.

This Guardian Unlimited piece details some of the blogging going on in Burma. A search on Facebook for “Burma monks” shows 40 groups wanting to support these protesters. Over on the BBC website, some news pieces are using video footage that has been sent to them from inside Burma. Some people inside Burma were saying the government has decreased internet bandwidth and cut phone lines to slow down and prevent communications with the outside world. A lot of the footage and reporting coming from Burma is done through networks of underground individuals who risk being arrested on the spot. They believe the story must be told, and the rest of the world is watching.

Images and blogging are here.

Minute-by-minute accounts here.