ViKi.com, Singapore based startup, is making international TV and movies more accessible to world-wide audiences via crowd-sourced sub-titling - in approximately 160 languages. Yes, even Klingon.

ViKi acquires the rights to programs, uploads them to viki.com and then leverages the power of its translator community. These willing translators provide real-time subtitling of world TV and movies–from Japanese Anime to Spanish Novelas to Korean dramas to Egyptian movies to the latest from Bollywood as well as TV series from Hong Kong, Venezuela, Russia, Korea and the UK.

According to TechCrunch.com, ViKi is attracting around 8.5 million unique visitors with approximately 36 million visits per month, representing a four-fold increase over the past year.

Since coming out of Beta at the end of 2010, 150 million words have been subtitled in 160 languages by the ViKi community. The site features 5,000-plus hours of content with over 1 billion videos viewed.

ViKi leverages the power of its translator community who provide real-time subtitling of world TV and movies–from Japanese Anime to Spanish Novelas to Korean dramas to Egyptian movies and the latest from Bollywood as well as TV series from Hong Kong, Venezuela, Russia, Korea and the UK.

The company is working on adding more premium content, including a new licensing deal with BBC Worldwide. ViKi also launched an international TV series this year on Netflix with subtitles, and is expanding content on Hulu.

Translators subtitle shows into their native languages under a Creative Commons license agreement. This includes revision history and user-generated edits. The more popular programs show remarkable translation times. As CEO and founder Razmig Hovaghimian explained in a recent interview, popular shows can have up to 10 different language translations in the first few hours after the content is uploaded. The number of translations can double in the first 24 hours and increase up to 40 translations in three to four days from submission. Normally, around 500 people contribute to any given translation.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The company is working on adding more premium content, including a new licensing deal with BBC Worldwide. ViKi also launched an international sub-titled TV series on Netflix and is expanding its content on Hulu. The company has also just debuted an iPhone app with an Android app soon to follow.

In an interview with the LA Times Caroline Hacker, a spokeswoman for ViKi, said ViKi’s current model is to license videos from producers and then share advertising revenue with them. There are plans to expand into fee-based video on demand in the near future.

Crowd-sourcing translation services such as ViKi means that language is not necessarily the barrier it once used to be for content creators. While those of us in the English-speaking world may be relatively unused to sub-titled content, it’s fair to say that many countries are not.

According to a press release from Viki, Playful Kiss, a Korean drama, reached US cable-sized audiences after an exclusive 10-day US run on ViKi, and then via Hulu.  ViKi licensed the content for other regions and the series was subtitled in over 40 languages – 20 of which were completed in the first 24 hours. “ViKi helped Playful Kiss find its audience” said Song Byung Joon, CEO of Group 8, the production studio behind the series.  “We’ve partnered with ViKi on several series, and are extremely happy to see how our old and new shows are generating significant new revenues for us from new markets.”

The appeal for content providers is obvious – they can leverage their product into markets all around the world creating new revenue streams at little to no extra cost.

The video streaming market is a crowded one. Everyone from individual content producers through to the large aggregators such itunes and youtube are looking to find ways to capture the largest share of the viewing public. For now, it seems that Viki may have found an interesting point of differentiation for itself – the ability to watch any program in your own language.

Investors seem to think this is a profitable leverage point for the company. In October 2011, ViKi announced $20m in new funding from investors around the world including SK Planet, a South Korean IT convergence platform provider, BBC Worldwide, and Greylock Partners a leading Silicon Valley private equity firm.

The question for the future is can Viki sustain its translation based competitive advantage? The key will be its ability to convince the leading content providers around the globe that it has a lock on a large translation community that will be loyal to its platform. Then it seems a no-brainer for producers seeking to leverage existing and new content into new markets at very little cost.

However, if the platform is easily replicable what’s to stop content providers or distributors from crowd-sourcing the translation themselves?

But perhaps crowd-sourcing translations on properly licensed content can help battle the video pirates and illegal down loader? At the very least, consumers should be more comfortable to stream or download free, high quality translated content without infringing on a producer’s copyright.

Related Posts

• October 21, 2011 -- Viral Video of the Week: Baby with an iPad (6)
• July 19, 2011 -- Why Netflix is Moving our Cheese (18)
• April 4, 2011 -- Content is King. Long Live the King! (2)
• March 8, 2011 -- Are You A “Storyteller?” (3)
• September 3, 2010 -- Storytelling, the new Studio System and the “Death” of the Web (4)

A video of highlights from the conversation with MCDM students and a complete transcript are available on the KCTS 9 website.

According to Sreenivasan, who is a proponent of the growing “slow news” movement, “The value of breaking news is going down faster than you can post it.”

Sreenivasan’s basic message is that there is no point in trying to compete with the wire services on breaking a story. It is more important to be accurate than first. “Do people remember who broke the story first? Hardly. But they will remember if you get it wrong,” Sreenivasan pointed out.

Emphasizing an anyscreen/anytime approach Sreenivasan says: “70 to 85 percent of my job is to move NewsHour to news consumers who don’t come to the six o´clock news show.” Noting that he doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel or create channels, he continues “The challenge is to use the tech tools to distribute the news content to where the audience is already. With Tivo we have gotten used to watching the content at different times than when it airs. Now we are getting used to getting the content where we want it. The challenge is to create a story that is when and where you want it to be and still (be) relevant.”

“iPad, iPhone, TV, online… Share content – so much of the YouTube content that PBS produces is embedded in shared content”, Sreenivasan says.  The NewsHour also increases the value of slow news in the digital world by building widgets and storify versions of the news.

For instance, during the Gulf oil spill in 2010, PBS built a web site widget where users could plug in their guess of how much oil was gushed into the ocean each hour. Later that fall, when full body scans were introduced a various American airports, they built a widget that tracked added wait times at TSA checkpoints for 52 airport. All of this was done with almost no overhead budget.

“I don’t care where you see my content. But I want to get my content to where you are already,” Sreenivasan says.

Sreenivasan argues that one of the most important tasks of journalists working in professional media is to help people cut through the clutter. “Sending a link is lazy. There is value in blog posts that save time, that summarize long reads and help me not (to) have to read it.”

It’s interesting to note that Sreenivasan’s argument is the opposite of the theory Clay Shirky espoused in his landmark 2008 book “Here Comes Everybody.” According to Shirky, with the Internet and social media, everyone is able to publish and market their content at anytime and on any screen. Shirky identifies the old rule of publishing as “filter then publish,” and the new practice is “publish, then filter.”

Sreenivasan believes that people are increasingly unwilling to do the filtering. There is so much news and so many updates, and much of it ends up not being worth the time. A new rule of journalism, Sreenivasan says, is show your work – take the time to verify and confirm the facts, interpret it and make it relevant. Show them how you’ve done the job for them, and added value to the report.

According to Sreenivasan, “We don’t think enough about how we consume the media. We need to be informed about the ingredients,” noting that this is yet another case for slow news and that the “slow news movement” is growing.

Going even further, Sreenivasan says, “There is a large and growing population of smart people who are fed up with what is presented as news today. Commercial networks disenfranchise the audiences the advertisers want to reach.”

Sreenivasan mentions NPR journalist Andy Carvin as the epitome of a crowdsourcing Twitter journalist. Carvin´s Twitter feed is literally a sea of hashtags asking for confirmation of news, independent sources of news, verification of events and so on. For some, this is obviously a worthwhile project, but for Sreenivasan, the constant stream of news items pending verification and interpretation is leading to frustration.

In Sreenivasan’s opinion, Tweets that contain links to useful content rule, while tweets that just lead to chatter make users frustrated. “If I read a blog that isn’t worth anything, I feel like you wasted my time,” Sreenivasan said, noting that wasting time – even if it is only 45 seconds – is almost the biggest no-no of the new media world.

With so many sources, so many channels and so much information out there, people have come to expect that what you lead them to, will be worth their time. That is particularly true for professional journalists, who are there to interpret the news landscape and help people make sense of the information. That is also one of the most valuable assets journalists have over citizen reporters, Sreenivasan argues.

According to Sreenivasan,“You can always make more money, but you can’t earn more time.” The new technology has made almost professional grade tools available to everyone and significantly lowered the barrier of entry for anyone to publish their content. In theory, this makes everyone a reporter, everyone a journalist and everyone a publisher. “But that doesn’t mean that all submitted content adds to the news story,” Sreenivasan says.

“News should be of value to you,” he explains, noting that some networks are already experimenting with letting users submit their stories right from their iPad screens for without pay. But Sreenivasan cautions people to stop and think about their actions for a second. “Facebook and Twitter makes it so easy for us to share and upload, but the cost is that you lose the ownership of that intellectual property once it lives on their servers,” he said.

Harkening back to a sentiment that long defined the news industry, Sreenivasan concludes, “The value of the work we do is the basis for journalism.”

Related Posts

• May 2, 2009 -- Twitter & Skype classroom coverage of Paul Gillin (4)
• February 7, 2009 -- MCDM group on Yammer. Reasons for failure (3)
• February 2, 2009 -- Videos of UW Insight: The Digital President event (0)
• November 9, 2008 -- Amazondeals on Twitter (2)
• October 12, 2008 -- Bye tweme, here comes GroupTweet! (5)

On Thursday night, 10 protestors were arrested in the park when they refused to dismantel and leave a tent structure in the park. On Friday some of the protestors did move to City Hall Park, which the city had offered as an alternative to Westlake Park where protestors have been for nearly three weeks. The city has stated that the occupation was in violation of the park’s terms of use and for most of the previous week, occupiers have been in the park without a permit for demonstration activities.

Accompanied by a light contingent of bicycle police, city sanitation workers began arriving at the park around 8:00pm, but by 10:00pm the sanitation workers and police had disappeared, leaving the protesters alone in the park without incident. Numbers in the park remained high late into the evening with protestors at one end of the park dancing around a large drum circle while the protest’s biggest General Assembly to date met at the other end. A joyous and festive mood among protestors held steadily through the night.

Along with the increased numbers, there was a marked rise in the visibility of communication strategy and technology among the protest organizers.  In the protest’s information tent, volunteers huddled over laptops tweeting protest updates and checking on the Occupyseattle.org website and online Livestream video feed. Wearing a taped yellow band around his arm one media volunteer said that there were at least 40 people signed up as media liaisons with as many as six on–site on any given day.   Identifying himself only as “William” he said that he regularly worked a 7:00am until 7:00pm shift at the park answering questions from reporters and curiosity seekers.

There was also a roving protest reporter holding a laptop in one arm and a webcam in her hand who was documenting the protest activities live to the Occupy Seattle site.  She could be seen making continual circles around the park for most of the evening.  She was finally spotted resting on a bench long after the daylight had disappeared from the park. Other protestors used Flip cameras, cell phones and all varieties of handheld video cameras to document the protest. As of Sunday, a search on Youtube for “Occupy Seattle” yielded more than thirty pages of mostly user–generated videos of the Seattle occupation.

There were other signs that the occupation is becoming more organized. A contingent of union stage–hands were on hand Saturday providing and operating a donated PA system for protest speakers to use throughout the day. The nightly General Assembly included reports from protest “working groups” with agendas ranging from the hip-hop music coalition to the social media outreach group. Indeed it seems like the most popular working groups involved outreach through social media and technology.

Hoping to support the growing movement, army vet Mike Johnston made his first visit to the occupation on Saturday afternoon coming down from Lake City Washington, a suburb just north of the city. A Metro Access bus driver and not much of a social media user,
Johnston had been keeping up with the protests on Seattle’s lone AM progressive talk radio station. Dressed in a light military style jacket with camouflage pants, Johnston looked like someone who would be just as likely to attend a Tea Party rally, but Johnston was particularly upset with the number of vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who couldn’t find jobs. At the festival he joined a contingent of military veterans who have maintained a visible presence at Westlake throughout the occupation.

Young mother of four, Toni James has been following the protests via Twitter since its inception. She was also making her first visit to the protest where she spent most of the afternoon and early evening mingling with protesters and checking out the scene. Worried about her children’s future, James had made the visit in a sign of solidarity with a movement she believes is just going to get bigger. One of her teenage sons has also expressed interest in the movement and she is considering bringing him down to Westlake with her in the future.
By 10:00pm the police presence in the area dwindled to almost nothing. Protestors flirted with filling 4^th Avenue every time there was a lull in traffic. They would spill into the streets dancing and shouting and then quickly retreat when the traffic light turned green again. Despite reports of police ticketing drivers who honked in support of the protestors, there was a steady stream of drivers who honked or raised an outstretched fist. These displays of solidarity drew loud cheers from protestors lining the sidewalk.

As an autumn chill descended on the evening, dancers, protestors and campers showed no sign of leaving or giving up. Despite ultimatums from city officials, the tent city that now dominates Westlake Park makes it look like the Occupy Seattle movement will be at Westlake Park for sometime to come.

Related Posts

• October 9, 2011 -- Occupy Seattle Takes Another Step (5)

Content farms are essentially clearing houses for cheaply created or “linked-out” content that are tagged and curated around popular search terms.  The growth of metadata tagging (which will only grow more sophisticated in HTML 5) within web pages and discrete assets (like video) embedded in pages has made the gaming of search results very successful for some marketing strategists and virtually transparent to the end-user.  The implications for small changes in search algorithms have potentially deep consequences, but the stakes are rarely discussed in technology and MBA programs that have invested in strategies aimed at the status quo.  These issues go to the heart of much of what we think about how the Web works and what value web searches actually have.

Within a decade, the ubiquity of content online has significantly eroded the publishing industry’s longstanding print-based revenue model. Newspaper, print book, and magazine sales have all experienced steady declines as people turn to the internet for its surfeit of free and instant information. Internet technology expert Clay Shirky frames the dilemma like this: “The core problem publishing solves —the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public— has stopped being a problem.”

The question of how to profit from digital content has, so far, produced two general strategies: a digital restriction model requiring direct consumer payments, such as Apple’s iBooks app and The New York Times paywall, and the pay-per-click advertising model employed with great success by Google, whereby free content is accompanied by paid advertisements. In the former model, content for sale reflects traditional, curated models of publishing quality: known authors, established journalists. In the latter model, content is written by anyone (or in the case of Wikipedia and other aggregated sources of information, no one in particular). The authorship and quality of this free information is not of primary relevance as far as ad revenue is concerned. Content is simply the bait for display ads, and needs only to rank high in Google search.

Enter the content farm. Content farms are web sites that solicit search-optimized content from low-paid freelance writers and then display or license the content, accompanied by ads. Although content farms are controversial, they’ve done big business thus far: Yahoo bought the prolific content farm Associated Content for approximately $100 million in 2010, and Demand Media, the most successful content farm to date, reported revenue of $79.5 million in the first quarter of 2011, a nearly 50% increase over its revenue in 2010, and is currently valued at 1.5 billion dollars (a valuation placing the worth of Demand Media above that of the New York Times).

Demand Media’s content creation strategy, unlike that of traditional media companies, starts with data: an algorithm that analyzes the value of search terms, advertising keywords, and existing related content to determine content topics likely to drive search demand — in other words, what people want to know more about. These topics are then turned into videos and articles by a vast network of low-paid freelancers, and unleashed on the internet at the volume of 4,000+ pieces a day. (This infographic explains how it works.) Daniel Roth, in his 2010 profile on Demand Media in Wired Magazine, highlights why this strategy is working for Demand: ”…what Demand has realized is that the Internet gets only half of the simplest economic formula right: It has the supply part down but ignores demand. Give a million monkeys a million WordPress accounts and you still might never get a seven-point tutorial on how to keep wasps away from a swimming pool. Yet that’s what people want to know.”

If you’ve used Google, the success of Demand Media’s data-driven approach appears routinely in your top search results: ehow, a Demand Media property, frequently lands above the fold in searches beginning with “how to.” (Try it now: How to stop wrinkles. How to jump-start a car. How to carve soap.) The 4000+ daily articles and videos published by Demand Media’s assembly-line system, however, are frequently accused of adding to internet information pollution due to poor writing and production quality, keyword-stuffing, and superficial subject matter. The low quality charge has potentially become the Achilles’ heel of the content farm model, and has drawn widespread criticism of Demand Media in particular.

The questionable quality of content produced by Demand Media and other content farms is, however, a logical consequence of the algorithmic authority that Google has enjoyed for most of this decade, described by Clay Shirky as “the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying ‘Trust this because you trust me.’” Demand Media’s own algorithm is designed to produce content topics that will succeed according to the algorithmic authority of Google, and it works, without the need for any human readers to weigh in on the content’s actual value to people. This emphasis of machine over human wisdom was the subject of virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier’s book, You are Not a Gadget. ”It is increasingly disheartening to write about any topic in depth these days,” says Lanier, “because people will only read what the first link from a search engine directs them to” — frequently an article from a content farm.

Google is well aware of the charge that Demand Media and other content farms have gamed its algorithm, and the company has taken several steps to respond. In early 2011, Google changed its algorithm (referred to as the Panda update) to, among other goals, de-prioritize “sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful,” a move that negatively affected the search rankings of content farm properties like Suite 101, Mahalo, and Demand Media’s eHow. Perhaps resultingly, Demand Media’s stock dropped in value by 13% shortly thereafter.

Search engines are also moving toward incorporating human curation factors into search ranking results, a possible sign that the era of total algorithmic authority is on the wane. Google and Bing have recently incorporated social search features into their ranking results, meaning that search results are impacted by content that is liked, Tweeted, or shared on social networking sites. Search engine startup Blekko bans content farm results outright, acknowledging what Google does not: that human judgment plays a major role in assessing the quality of information online.

Possibly in response to these developments, Demand Media announced the launch of its Talent and Experts Network in June 2011, an effort to sign up contributors with name recognition or acknowledged expertise in particular subject areas. Published travel writer Rolf Potts is an early recruit. This is an interesting move toward the established expertise model relied upon by content providers like Apple and the New York Times, and raises the question of whether web content will eventually trend toward the traditional publishing model’s focus on highly curated name brand authors. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, predicts that Demand Media, while currently occupying a successful niche, may have a limited future as “better quality models emerge.”

Related Posts

• February 8, 2012 -- Nevada GOP’s fail whale: A warning to all political organizations (0)
• February 1, 2012 -- Google Analytics Adds New Insights (0)
• December 5, 2011 -- Infographic–Google (5)
• July 2, 2011 -- +1 Takes on New Meaning With Launch Of Google Plus (4)
• April 27, 2011 -- iPad’s Days on Top of World Are Numbered (6)

Here’s the full Q&A:

Q: What’s the story behind Rootmetrics? How did it get started?

A: RootMetrics began in 2008 and was founded by a team of folks with strong ties to and many years of experience in the mobile community. The goal of the company was to break the historical convention of mobile performance residing in a black box, where it was completely unavailable to the public or to mobile suppliers. RootMetrics continues to promote transparency by putting the consumer first. We measure mobile performance from a consumer’s point of view and ensure that everyone has access to the data. Put simply, by downloading and using our app, you are creating the most up-to-date, publicly available map of mobile service and carrier coverage.

Q: How do you help people find the best cellular carrier for their needs?

A: Through our smartphone apps and the maps that you can find on our website and at CNET, we arm consumers with the true picture of mobile performance based on millions of data points. Using these tools, anyone can review signal strength, data speeds and overall mobile performance at a broad regional level, or down to your own street level. Each view of our maps compares carrier data side-by-side, so that you can see how carriers stack up against each other at that location.

Q: What has the demand for your service been like and what do you for-see the demand will be in the future?

A: We’ve seen great demand for our service and have received numerous positive press reviews. As smartphone adoption and mobile technologies continue their steep trajectory of growth, we foresee increased need for our application. We know that consumers are increasingly frustrated with mobile performance and are confused by the conflicting carrier messages in the marketplace. Because we source our data directly from the consumer rather than the carrier, we can provide mobile performance clarity and deliver data that is objective and accurate.

Q: We noticed that you seem to have a lot of data for major US cities, but how do you plan to gather more data in rural areas?

A: Every day, consumers from all across the country send us new data points that add to our mapping of rural areas. The more that people across the country send us samples, the more representative our maps and reports become of the true consumer experience at any location. We will continue measuring mobile performance in major U.S. markets and also look forward to seeing the hyper-localized areas of the maps fill in as word of our application spreads.

Q: Are there any other services with similar functionality?

A: There are a few other services that offer some elements of our functionality, but we are the only app available for iPhone and Android that offers views of both signal strength and data performance and allows consumers to test their networks to add samples to our maps.

Q: Has tracking and publishing this data pressured companies to expand coverage in poorly served areas? Do you think it will in the future?

A: We are just beginning to see how carriers are responding to this data. Infrastructure changes and coverage expansions are often time consuming and expensive propositions, so we don’t expect changes to happen overnight. However, carriers are very interested in the data that we are reporting and are using it to identify challenges in the ways that consumers experience their networks so that they can make changes and improvements.

Q: Are we moving toward a future of “best” mobile coverage on all networks everywhere? When will we get there?

A: At this point, it’s hard to say. Some of the regulations in the US in the mobile industry make it a bit more difficult to do this quickly; however, with our data, everyone will be equipped to make the best choice of carrier no matter their location.

Q: Are you currently working on a WP7 or Blackberry app or have you decided to stick with Android and iPhone only? If no WP7 or Blackberry, why?

A: We are focused on the Android and iOS systems right now as they are the platforms showing the most significant growth and the strongest consumer adoption. However, should BlackBerry and Windows gain deeper consumer adoption in the near future, we will look into apps to support those platforms.

More about RootMetrics:

RootMetrics.com | Facebook | Twitter | Download App

Signed a new contract lately or in the market? Let us know how it’s working out…

Most Commented Posts

• November 21, 2008 -- Crowdsourcing: Name the New MCDM Center! (37)
• November 9, 2009 -- An Ode to Contemplation (32)
• October 14, 2011 -- MCDM’s Toast to a Bully (30)
• February 25, 2008 -- Flip Video Vlog: Codecs and You! (25)
• November 9, 2010 -- Windows Phone 7: Could Mobile Gaming Be Microsoft’s Ticket? (21)

Last night, popular Seattle-based music group Blue Scholars threw a thank you party/secret show for a throng of their fans who financially supported the creation of the group’s new album, Cinemetropolis. Contrary to far more traditional avenues that many musicians use to fund their albums such as record labels or scraping together personal finances, Blue Scholars opted for the relatively new and increasingly popular digital fundraising tool Kickstarter do the job and it greatly exceeded their expectations.

Over the course of a 45 day campaign, Blue Scholars aimed to raise $25,000 and yet garnered over $62,000 in personal donations from 2,243 loyal fans who wanted to help their favorite group put out a new album. It’s worth noting that these are not casual supporters of the group and there is a level of super fandom involved in order for something like this to work. But under the right conditions, this could be the future of bands further connecting with their audiences and raising capital in the process. One of the women at last night’s thank you party, Anna Meyer, says she donated $100 despite being out of work and wishing that she could have donated more. “I’d never heard of Kickstarter until of [Blue Scholars] and it seems really cool,” Meyer said amidst dancing at the party. “If I could have given more, I would have.”

It’s possible that what helped Blue Scholars exceed and nearly triple their intended donation goal was that this was by no means a one-way charity campaign. Fans that donated over $100 received the album early and a variety of other personal mementos from the band to help make the experience worthwhile for both sides. Many Kickstarter campaigns encourage people to give for the sake of giving without receiving much in return. In this instance, Blue Scholars got to witness the spending loyalty of their fans in the digital age and a worthwhile album such as Cinemetropolis was created in the process. Check out footage above from the event last night as Blue Scholars address their strategy of digital fundraising via Kickstarter and what it means for loyal music supporters.

You can stream Cinemetropolis for free via the group’s Bandcamp.page.

Blue Scholars perform Friday and Saturday night at Neumos. Both shows are sold-out.

Most Commented Posts

• November 21, 2008 -- Crowdsourcing: Name the New MCDM Center! (37)
• November 9, 2009 -- An Ode to Contemplation (32)
• October 14, 2011 -- MCDM’s Toast to a Bully (30)
• February 25, 2008 -- Flip Video Vlog: Codecs and You! (25)
• November 9, 2010 -- Windows Phone 7: Could Mobile Gaming Be Microsoft’s Ticket? (21)

Morozov challenges the widespread belief that social media and the Internet are inherently tools of democracy and argues that these tools, while useful to help the oppressed organize rallies and unify their efforts, can also be abused by authoritarian leaders as tools of surveillance, repression and control.

It is hard to argue that social media and the Internet haven’t been instrumental in the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, but the debate over who the use of social media for political change continues.  On January 15, 2011, even before the recent political upheaval, Morozov wrote a blog post arguing with social media guru Clay Shirkey, about the role of social media in revolutions.

Many have opinions on the topic. In his New Yorker article from October 2010, “Why The Revolution Won’t be Tweeted,” Malcolm Gladwell argued that “(social media) makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo.”

Fareed Zakaria, journalist and author, disagrees, arguing that the current revolutions in the Middle East are enabled partially by the combination of three information revolutions that have taken place over the past 15 years: Satellite TV (which broke government monopolies on information), the Internet revolution (that made it possible for people to post information and opinions anonymously) and then the social media revolution (that has allowed people to organize ideas and rally.)

Most importantly, continues Zakaria, social media is not limited to those who have access to computers. All you need is a cell phone, which drastically lowers the entry barriers. Zakaria points out that this has to be good for the people and therefore bad for dictatorships. Going from a “one-to-many system” of dispersing information to a “many-to-many” system has broken the government monopolies on information.

Join the conversation! MCDM associate Director Anita Verna Crofts will be moderating Tuesday’s event, which will take place on the UW campus. The networking reception starts at 6pm, the lecture starts at 7pm. Get tickets to the event here.

Most Commented Posts

• November 21, 2008 -- Crowdsourcing: Name the New MCDM Center! (37)
• November 9, 2009 -- An Ode to Contemplation (32)
• October 14, 2011 -- MCDM’s Toast to a Bully (30)
• February 25, 2008 -- Flip Video Vlog: Codecs and You! (25)
• November 9, 2010 -- Windows Phone 7: Could Mobile Gaming Be Microsoft’s Ticket? (21)

What made that Philippine revolution unique was that citizens spontaneously organized the mass protest through mass text messaging—the Philippines was an early adopter country.  It was spectacular by all accounts. Within hours 100,000 people had gathered at a popular shrine in a non-violent protest against the president. Within 24 hours, that number had tripled. By the third day, the crowd was reported to have swelled to two million.

A decade after People Power 2 – almost to the day – Tunisians ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, following weeks of demonstrations, fueled by high unemployment and then shared around the country and the world through photos, videos, and updates sent by mobile texts and posts to Facebook and Twitter. The BBC reported that organizing the protest network online worked in Tunisia, because more than a third of the country’s 10 million people are online. Nearly two million Tunisians use Facebook.

Right on the heels of the Tunisian protests came the demonstrations in Egypt and Libya. Frustrated populations with limited ability to form any type of effective opposition to the ruling party also gravitated to their most popular communications tools to organize the expression of their discontent, which again happened to be Twitter and Facebook in Egypt and YouTube in Libya.

While traveling, I was reading Charlene Li’s Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead, for my Leadership in the Digital Age: Establishing Authenticity through Story class as part of the MCDM program. In the context of the Middle East upheaval, her book struck a chord. Li argues that you can “control how authentic you want to appear, depending on the situation you find yourself in.” I agree that for authentic leaders this is for the most part true.

But for disingenuous leaders, appearing authentic is getting harder and harder to pull off.

When  country leaders pretend to be something they are not , there are now too many forums to expose their duplicity. Try as they might to muzzle the press, forcibly mute the opposition, and control their image in many recent cases, these strategies have only backfired.

Just before I closed my laptop to head off to my conference, a Google alert popped up that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had fled Cairo and he has since resigned. Now we see Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar Gaddafi, resisting the protests and unleashing a ferocious battle on protesters, with UN estimates of more than 1,000 people dead in nearly three weeks of unrest and an estimated 200,000 people – mostly foreign workers – having fled the country.

It would be naïve to say that digital media has sparked these protests. But it has played two important roles. First as is a platform where inauthenticity of leaders has been revealed, unveiling corruption and contradiction. Second, digital media channels, which enjoy pre-existing networks among populations, have been used as a tool for action.

Related Posts

• January 17, 2011 -- Did Social Media Propel the Tunisia Uprising? (11)
• January 17, 2012 -- Why I think CES matters (3)
• October 11, 2011 -- Sexists, Bad Tippers, and Jerks of the World Beware: the Internet Will Catch You (11)
• July 2, 2011 -- +1 Takes on New Meaning With Launch Of Google Plus (4)
• June 6, 2011 -- Kids on Facebook: Educational or Harmful? (0)