Iran's Disputed Election - The Big Picture - Boston.com
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/06/irans_disputed_election.html

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Incredible and brutal images of the protests in Iran. Photos like these truly reaffirm the oft-heard cliché that "a picture is worth a thousand words."

The Big Picture - News Stories in Photographs from the Boston Globe

"The key force behind this is the next generation, the Millennials, who elected Obama in America and may oust Ahmadinejad in Iran. They want freedom; they are sick of lies; they enjoy life and know hope."

Is twitter the only network to survive in Iran?

The Revolution Will Be Twittered

It's increasingly clear that Ahmadinejad and the old guard mullahs were caught off-guard by this technology and how it helped galvanize the opposition movement in the last few weeks.

As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived. With some remarkable results. Those rooftop chants that were becoming deafening in Tehran? A few hours ago, this concept of resistance was spread by a twitter message. Here's the Twitter from a Moussavi supporter: ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and shout ALAHO AKBAR in protest #IranElection That a new information technology could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.

The purpose of this guide is to help you participate constructively in the Iranian election protests through Twitter.

Some interesting information and guidance that gives some insight into how social media is being used by both sides in the Iran election protests.

"The purpose of this guide is to help you participate constructively in the Iranian election protests through Twitter." - Power of networks.

Shirky on how Twitter and social tools have enabled global focus on the Iran protests in a new way.

Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran

reading @cshirky on twitter and Iran, fascinating. thanks :) http://blog.ted.com/2009/06/qa_with_clay_sh.php [from http://twitter.com/evrenk/statuses/2212437449]

Someone tweeted from Tehran today that "the American media may not care, but the American people do." That's a sea-change.

as a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think - That push model of one message for all is an incredibly crappy way of linking supply and demand.

NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events.

"NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events. As protests in Iran exploded over the weekend, we decided to rush out his talk, because it could hardly be more relevant. I caught up with Clay this afternoon to get his take on the significance of what is happening. HIs excitement was palpable."

Show support for democracy in Iran add green overlay to your Twitter avatar with 1-click - http://helpiranelection.com/ [from http://twitter.com/EdwardRobins/statuses/2238952589]

Green overlay over twitter

"Every digitized packet of online data is deconstructed, examined for keywords and reconstructed within milliseconds."

more on Deep packet

Deep packet inspection

How it's done.

The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale.

Les autorités iraniennes disposent de grande capacités de surveillance sur Internet (technologies Siemens + Nokia), expliquant pourquoi elles n'ont pas "coupé" le réseau...

'This forum aims to be a secure and reliable way of communication for Iranians and friends. Use it to discuss what is happening in Iran. Post in the forum either anonymously as a guest, as a registered user, or login with your facebook-account.'

The fine folks at anonymous - the people who brought you those scientology protests - offer online bulletin boards and messaging services for Iranian activists. Points for solidarity, but unclear if these will remain accessible to Iranian dissidents very long.

World wide protest planing forums and current news on the Iran crisis

media twitter

PBS MediaShift

..."Twitter is now a vital journalistic tool for both reporting events and breaking down barriers between legacy media and its audiences, there are still multiple questions around professional journalists' activities on Twitter that require thoughtful, open debate".... [really intersting post from Julie Posetti]

Top 20 Take Away Tips for Tweeting Journos

Persepolis 2.0 - great web comic. Must read!

Since the Revolution in 1979, Iranians have coped with an increasingly repressive regime. Attempts for greater social and political freedoms have resulted in brutal crackdowns by the hardline government. The ensuing apathy and significant boycott of the 2005 presidential elections led to the election of the ultraconservative mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Four years later Iran has become increasingly alienated and its people more polarized than ever before. The campaign of former Prime Minister Mir Hussein Moussavi galvanized voters hoping for change, especially among the youth – two thirds of Iran’s population is younger than 32. On June 12th 85% of eligible voters cast their ballots and what happened next changed Iran forever…

Images from Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis were provided with new captions and dialogue to illustrate the day before and the first few days after the election in Iran.

The authors of Persopolis 2.0 were inspired by the work of Marjane Satrapi.

Visualizing Millions of Iran Tweets - computational history of news using twitter

At its peak, a search for "Iran" on Twitter generated over 100,000 tweets per day and over 8,000 tweets per hour. The plot just below shows the growth in volume of information in the number of tweets per hour. How does an Internet junkie, news organization, or political operative monitor rapidly evolving real-time events, from the crucial details to the bigger picture? More importantly, how can a data stream be turned into real-time action, reaching the people who need it, when they need it, and in a form they can easily digest?

Article describes effort aimed at more sophistcicated analysis of twitter trends. Author is co-founder of Infoharmoni - startup building knowledge interfaces for real-time data sets.

How to algorithmically discover and deploy novel social structures is perhaps the billion, or trillion, dollar question. With Twitter, the data and API are in place. And if the history of computation is any guide, once programming a system becomes possible, progressing from a hack to an application to a platform is only a matter of time.

'...how can a data stream be turned into real-time action, reaching the people who need it, when they need it, and in a form they can easily digest? At the most abstract level, history and computation are the same thing: the evolution of systems over time. Twitter has several remarkable properties that allow us to finally leverage this correspondence in tangible ways. The simplicity of its data, the openness of its system, and its extreme time resolution make it possible for us to detect atoms of history, those moments when something is triggered and society is reconfigured ever so slightly. Simply tracking the volume of various phrases gives us a sense of what is happening on the street, literally and figuratively. But that signal is but a shadow of a far more complex and intricate reality, an interwoven web of individuals and actions. -- Disruptive events lead to information elites.'

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past http://bit.ly/118DuN [from http://twitter.com/robinhowlett/statuses/4629005159]

Nothin' like a little self-hate to fan the flames

I didn't see that coming...

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots. A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.

Code Release: Language Detection and Translation

The Web Ecology Project is an interdisciplinary research group based in Boston, Massachusetts focusing on using large scale data mining to analyze the system-wide flows of culture and community online. In addition to the task of understanding culture on the web through quantitative research and rigorous experimentation, we are attempting to build a science around community management and social media. To that end, we are building tools and conducting research that enable planners to launch data-driven campaigns backed by network science. twitter archive.

Researching Quantized Social Interaction

Easy for the average citizen to use and hard for any central authority to control, Twitter is practically ideal for a mass protest movement. But its strengths are also its weaknesses

Time article about the coverage of the 2009 Iranian election on Twitter.

for utk essay!

Easy for the average citizen to use and hard for any central authority to control, Twitter is practically ideal for a mass protest movement. But its strengths are also its weaknesses

Is it the beginning of the Asimov's psychohistory ? Ted Talks: http://bit.ly/1CBp #TED [from http://twitter.com/LoXD/statuses/1470242301]

Once he stated as a premise that people are rational I kindda lost interest. Everybody CAN be rational, but not everyone is rational and definitely not all of the time. Just like his example, some people sometimes revert to being like 2 years old.

TED Talks Bruce Bueno de Mesquita uses mathematical analysis to predict (very often correctly) such messy human events as war, political power shifts, Intifada ... After a crisp explanation of how he does it, he offers three predictions on the future of Iran.

virtualni javni prostor

One of the striking aspects of the #IranElection crisis has been the heavy use of social media. Iranians have relied on it to spread information on protests and to communicate their situation to millions of concerned people worldwide. In fact, so much has been recorded via social media that it is possible to understand the progression of events through it. Thus, we have built a timeline of events utilizing information recorded via social media. This timeline uses Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia to paint a broad picture of the situation, as well as the growing conversation around it.

As more negative stigma is attached the the younger generations relying more heavily upon social networking sites to form relationships, could it be possible that some sites; such as twitter, feel that they are more capable of providing insight into the world than the mainstream news corporations? Maybe because they have less political bias and promote freedom of speech they could, in fact, be better equiped to present the truth.

RT @shimritben @dannysullivan via @boingboing, a super filtered site for reliable iran tweets & other info http://bit.ly/PoeiP #IranElection [from http://twitter.com/talgalili/statuses/2276663978]

Why Iran has such a sh1t government

concise and straight forward explanation of a decidedly complicated government

How Iran is ruled

Note:50% of the adult population is missing. So that's all what they call democracy

- added by harper reed's google reader

In the ten days since Iran's disputed presidential election, street demonstrations have taken place every day. Many of the photographs here were taken and transmitted at great risk in the past week, in the hopes that others would be able to see and bear witness. [...]

Fotografias de temas da actualidade

Iran pictures on The Big Picture.

Astounding. Twitter gets a network upgrade rescheduled because a country's fate is, you know, in balance. http://bit.ly/10Z8zo [from http://twitter.com/pkedrosky/statuses/2184901019]

A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran.

jm: from twitter's mouth Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fblog.twitter.com%2F2009%2F06%2Fdown-time-rescheduled.html

RT @biz NTT America proves again why they are such an awesome partner and reschedules urgent network maintenance http://bit.ly/nwPNv [from http://twitter.com/KeithDriscoll/statuses/2188647497]

Our partners are taking a huge risk not just for Twitter but also the other services they support worldwide—we commend them for being flexible in what is essentially an inflexible situation. We chose NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services early last year specifically because of their impeccable history of reliability and global perspective. Today's decision and actions continue to prove why NTT America is such a powerful partner for Twitter. - via Gaultier

RT @znmeb: Twitter Blog: Down Time Rescheduled http://bit.ly/FozaU [from http://twitter.com/commonsense4/statuses/2185865443]

A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight's planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).

- State Dept. says keep tweeting... ( http://bit.ly/rwobD ) [from http://twitter.com/aphofer/statuses/2196162891]

State Department to Twitter: Keep Iranian tweets coming http://bit.ly/b4WX7 [from http://twitter.com/KeithDriscoll/statuses/2200387369]

The importance of social networking

While officials would not say whether they were communicating with Iranians directly, one senior official noted that the US is learning about certain people being picked up for questioning by authorities through posts on Twitter.

パネルは更に、メディアが載せる記事・載せない記事という論点に進みます。

・イランでは情報統制が従来から非常に厳しかった。それをかいくぐってきた人たちだからこそ 　今回のように情報統制が行われてもネットで情報を出せているのではないか。 ・メディアでは「イランから起きたTwitter Revolution」的な取り上げられ方も多い中、 　実際はTwitterユーザはイラン国内には少なく、メディアリテラシーが高い人ばかりではない。 　イラン国内でデモを組織する等の情報交換は、あくまでSMSや電話、口コミといった従来型のツールが使われているらしい。 ・Twitterは情報を世界中に伝播するツールとしては極めてパワフル。 　イランからの少数の情報の元、アメリカでTwitterを使って情報がどんどん増幅されているというのが実態であるもよう。 ・ただし、Twitterにはデマや誤情報も多く、伝播してしまう場合もあるので要注意。 ・現在、既存メディアも多くの情報をTwitterから得ている。 ・イランではTwitterよりFriendfeedの方が使われていたのだが、真っ先にアクセスブロックされてしまった。 　現在proxyを経由して使えている人たちは、Friendfeedをプライベートモードで使っており、 　我々には不可視なコミュニケーションが粛々と行われているらしい。 ・Facebookはお知らせをするには最適で、Mousavi氏もFacebookを使っている。 ・現在なぜか情報統制がゆるんでいるのでこんなに情報が出されているのではないだろうかという専門家も。 　政府は現在の抗議活動の情報を記録して、落ち着いた後に逮捕していくのではないかとの懸念が囁かれている。

"（※ちなみに私は日本の報道機関がどれだけ厳しく事実確認をしているのか詳しく知りませんが、米国の報道機関はとても厳しいような気がします。私の前のボスへのインタビューが掲載されるときも編集の方から××という記者がこういう記事を掲載する予定だが、これは事実か？これは事実か？という質問を送って来ましたし、私が書いたブログ記事をネタに記事を書いた記者の方がいらっしゃったのですが、そのときも編集の方から詳しい事実確認メールが送られてきました。日本の報道だとあまりそういうことをやっていないような気がします。）"

本当に良記事です。この記事を見ていたら身震いしてきた。ReTweet や各種 twitter 関連サービスによるネットワーク外部性により，もはや完全な検閲は不可能というところか。twitter などのミニブログからジャーナリズム革命を感じる。「本当の大変化はこれから始まる」 by umedamochio "しかし、Twitterの情報の広がるスピードはあまりに速く、間違いもそのまま広がっていってしまう可能性が高い。スピードと会話をとるか、事実確認をとるか。" "Twitterはツールであり、twitter.comのサイトが全てでない点においてFacebook等のSNSと比べて検閲しにくい"

さらに続編、すごいまとめです

Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities.