It was surreal to watch the Egyptian revolution unfold as I sat at my laptop in the Philippines during a recent business trip.  It reminded me how a similar movement, known as People Power 2, brought down Philippine President Joseph Estrada in January 2001 (just a few months before my family moved to Manila).

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. Read more…

If there’s one thing many people who follow social media have witnessed over the past ten weeks of political unrest throughout the Middle East, it’s that YouTube is becoming a very powerful weapon when in the hands of the right people. Similar to Facebook (which is arguably receiving too much credit), YouTube has become the subtle giant slayer behind various uprisings/revolutions in that region, either by allowing users to post up to the moment coverage of what’s happening in the streets or by simply adding a necessary dose of humor at just the right moment.

The latest evidence is a new viral video put together by Israeli musician and journalist Noy Alooshe five days ago that has already amassed a staggering 1.25 million views online. It’s a spoof of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s ridiculous speech last week in which he threatened to hunt down protesters “inch by inch, house by house, home by home, alleyway by alleyway.” As Qaddafi finished speaking, Alooshe, 31,  sat down at his computer, played with the image, mixed in the beat from the popular Pitbull song “Hey Baby,” added some dancing girls, and put it online. Within a matter of hours, the “Zenga Zenga” video became immensely popular with both Arabs and Israelis in need of a good laugh.

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When a firewall blocking Facebook and YouTube was quietly lifted by the Syrian regime on February 8th, direct traffic to YouTube shot up.

This may appear to be the picture of four million Internet users scrambling to catch up on three years worth of viral videos.  But in reality, Syrians have freely accessed these services through proxy servers for years.

When I was in Damascus in December, upscale cafes in the city center were filled with people on laptops openly looking at Facebook. I found a browser plugin that automatically accessed pages via https rather than plain old http, which made Facebook work fine even without a proxy. The Syrian President himself even has a popular Facebook fan page with over 100,000 followers.

Still, while calls for an Egypt-style “Day of Rage” protest in Damascus in early February garnered 15,000 Facebook supporters, UPI reported that only about a dozen protesters actually showed up, and were promptly beaten away by plainclothes police.

So how much does online freedom actually equate to freedom in the streets? Read more…

Last week, a new “information experience” startup – Qwiki – received a fair amount of publicity after closing it’s first round of funding totaling $8 million and announcing some upcoming features.

Qwiki provides rich media to consumers by scrubbing the web for content and assembling it into a short presentation with narration. Users can suggest content, but unlike Wikipedia, users can not actually edit the presentations.

Qwiki was first demoed last September at TechCrunch Disrupt where it was selected as the top disruptive technology (keynote). Recently, several large news outlets including ABC’s Good Morning America discussed whether or not Qwiki will be able to “flip” Google. With a new round funding and several internet moguls at their side including a co-founder of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin and Jawed Karim, a co-founder of YouTube, it appears there’s nothing stopping them.

On Friday, MediaPost reported that later this year Qwiki will provide a service that allows people to merge their Facebook and LinkedIn data, along with other online content, into a nice little “Qwiki”.

I was a bit skeptical about Qwiki’s ability to auto-magically tell my story but after watching Robert Scoble’s Qwiki, I think this could be a possibility.

What are your thoughts?
Will you tell your story with a Qwiki?
Will you tell your client’s stories with a Qwiki?

From what I can tell so far, no — or it’s way too early to tell since January 14th, when Tunisia’s authoritarian leader fled the country in the face of a month of public protests [though please see my update at the end of this post].

I spent a lot of time reporting in the Middle East, but I haven’t been there since the rise of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, so I can’t pretend to be a first-hand expert on the use of social media there (I did give a Seattle Town Hall talk last year on Digital Media, Storytelling and the Repression of Communication and referenced Iran’s so-called “Twitter Revolution”).

So as I hear rumblings on the role of social media (and Wikileaks) in Tunisia’s recent uprising, I feel compelled to resort to those whose observations I trust on this matter: Ethan Zuckerman (Berkman Center), Evgeny Morozov (author, The Net Delusion) and Andrew Sullivan (The Daily Dish).

Foreign Policy published thought pieces from both Morozov and Zuckerman yesterday. Read more…

Like blogging, vlogging (video blogging) is a way to share your insights on a subject with an online audience. However, vlogging goes beyond the text of a blog post, transforming your content into an audio-visual broadcast. If you’re interested in vlogging, but don’t know how to start, here are some tips:

The first thing you’ll need is the right equipment, and the good news is you don’t need much, just a camcorder or a web camera and a good microphone. Also, for a vlog that has a more polished look, you’ll want to learn how to use video-editing software. This will enable you to add music, subtitles, etc. to your vlog. There are numerous online programs like Wax or Zwei-Stein Video Editor that you can download for free. Also, Apple iMovie and Windows Movie Maker are both easy to use and come pre-installed on Macs and PCs.

Once you’ve assembled your equipment, I recommend experimenting. Test the sound quality of your microphone; make sure there is sufficient lighting where you’re recording your vlog and figure out how you want to look on camera. Remember that vlogging is a form of communication, so you want to not only be visible (no low lighting), but also intelligible. Most vlog “episodes” should be one to three minutes, keeping the amount of bandwidth needed to host them to a minimum. Therefore it’s a good idea to rehearse your content. At the very least, I recommend preparing a script or some type of plan before each video so that you can deliver concise, focused content. Finally, don’t be afraid to have fun with your vlog. Depending on your audience, you’ll want to be more than just informative; you’ll also want to be candid and entertaining. Like blogging, it’s important to pick subjects you love and can explore in a series of posts. One episode doth not a vlog make.

Read more…

For years, I only knew of George Lucas’ 1977 cinematic sci-fi breakthrough as “Star Wars.”  Then I found out that it was part of a trilogy. But wait, Lucas had a plan all along; this tale of an oppressed rag-tag alliance looking to overturn a hierarchical, monopolistic political system (aka “The Empire”) was always meant to be “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.”

Of course, in a multi-part saga, if the good guys get their way initially, the Empire is always going to have to Strike Back to make it a good story. When I read Groundswell co-author Josh Bernoff’s The Splinternet Means the End of the Web’s Golden Age, that’s what immediately came to mind.

We’ve been declaring an end to media monopolies for a while now, thanks to networked communities who no longer require institutional intermediaries to share, collaborate or take collective action.  This ability to produce and consume media for almost free threatened the very economic model that media moguls had taken to the bank for over a century. As I made my own transition from corporate media journalist to independent content creator, I took advantage of new, inexpensive tools that we saw as the great democratizer of production.

Apple was part of this rebellion, helping us to crash through the barriers to entry with the digital weaponry of firewire, USB, Final Cut Pro, iDVD — this filmmaker’s “secret plans to the Death Star,” so to speak.  As digital content proliferated, The Empire writhed in agony, from The New York Times to Conde Nast to NBC, desperately in search of new business models.  Now, with renewed focus on pay walls and walled gardens, Bernoff sees Apple’s new iPad as the turning point as we leave the Web’s hopeful first age of universality and openness:

…[M]ore and more of the interesting stuff on the Web is hidden behind a login and password. Take Facebook for example. Not only do its applications not work anywhere else, Google can’t see most of it. And News Corp. and the New York Times are talking about putting more and more content behind a login…Each new device has its own ad networks, format, and technology. Each new social site has its login and many hide content from search engines. Read more…

Animation is a very unique art form; it allows the filmmaker to control their story down to each individual frame. Each object, shadow, and line must be created and placed. The camera does not capture unintentional backgrounds, extra frames, or incidental light, there is only what the animator chooses to show.

The digital revolution in media production is dramatically changing the techniques, forms, content, and function of modern animation and is actively remixing it with other media forms so much that digitally-created animation is now nothing short of a new mode of cultural production and a totally unique form of motion-graphic storytelling of its own right.

The diversity of software tools available for creating moving images on a screen has contributed to the rise of a tremendous and diverse number of styles, techniques, and looks. The multitude of distribution channels further enforced the trend of convergence towards forms more suitable for display on multiple screen sizes and configurations.

As Manovich puts it in his review of Adobe’s AfterEffects, a popular suite for creating digital animations: “[A]s software remixes the techniques and working methods of various media they simulate, the result are new interfaces, tools and workflow with their own distinct logic. In the case of AfterEffects, the working method which it puts forward is neither animation, nor graphic design, nor cinematography, even though it draws from all these fields. It is a new way to make moving image media. Similarly, the visual language of media produced with this and similar software is also different from the languages of moving images which existed previously (Manovich, 2006).”

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