Activism

Mashable has a story about Israel-based Blue Security's new product Collactive.

Blue Security are best known for their aggressive anti-spam service which they had to shutdown after the spammers hit back at them and took out Six Apart's Typepad blogging platform as collateral damage.

They have now created a new web app called Collactive that allows users to easily "game" social news features by enabling you to co-ordinate large groups of friends/supports to skew online results. It does this by letting you send out "All Points Bulletins" to supporters urging them to take some sort of action on social sites like Digg, YouTube, Reddit, BBC News, etc. The action the end-user needs to take ranges from just viewing a story to voting on a story (or "burying it") or to e-mail it in order to promote it to the most e-mailed stories list.

Of course, this sort of thing has been going on for a while - people have been e-mailing lists saying "Hey! BBC has a poll so please go and vote for side X" but a tool like Collactive makes it so much more "organised".

Interestingly, they offer an "enterprise version" as well...I can see lobby groups and net activists making heavy use of this sort of tool in order to promote their cause or to give "their side of the story" more prominence. This has serious trust implications - we somewhat trusted social media systems because our peers recommended what they thought was interesting or honest. This sort of organised gaming used to be the domain of SEO's out to make a buck. Now that politics is involved the stakes are so much higher than just a few clicks or back links.

So out goes the "wisdom of the crowd" and in comes "information warfare" Web 2.0 style...

I woke up this morning to an invitation to join the Facebook group "Bullardgate". It seems that David Bullard, the pompous Sunday Times coloumnist has kicked up a storm with a scathing piece on blogging and bloggers. Vincent Maher didn't take kindly to Bullard's piece - not only did he rip it to shreds pargraph by paragraph but also kicked off a campaign to get Bullard to apologise.

I'm all for kicking up a storm and fighting The Man yet I can't help but wonder if David Bullard has just successfully link-baited us all. Maybe next week he'll announce how many links his article got. :)

Of course, this isn't the first time someone has gotten blogs so wrong. At least Bullard admits to having read a few blogs. At the 3rd AlJazeera Forum, straight after Lawerence Lessig's keynote I heard a senior executive from a big news corporation ask the person next to him "what's a blog?".

It seems everyone is talking about the new Barack Obama campaign site. It's full of Web 2.0 goodness - from "on-site" social networking tools (user profiles, blogs and location based event planning and volunteer co-ordination) to "off-site" viral media tools (Flickr, YouTube and Facebook) to a shiny Brightcove powered video channel.

More interesting than the fact that a US Candidate is riding the Web 2.0 wave are two issues that Michael Arrington almost pointed to in the two TechCrunch posts about http://www.barackobama.com - the history of social networking tools in US Presidential Campaigns and the difficulty that everyone faces when hosting open communities online:

1. While TechCrunch pointed out that the site "launched basically feature - complete and bug free", not much was written about the forerunner to this sort of lobbying - the Howard Dean campaign. Guys like Zack Rosen put together DeanSpace (which later became Civicspace) to essentially take the choas that was the grassroot support for Howard Dean and provided a framework for activists to use to manage volunteers, events and even whole campaigns. I'm certain that the DeanSpace (which was built on everyones favourite CMS, Drupal) experience provided valuable insight and lessons to whoever envisioned the Barack site.

   While the technology is important, the vision to fully exploit it is something different all together.

2. TechCrunch then went all crazy about a derogatory group that someone formed on the site (alluding to all sorts of mysterious explanations like hackers or pissed off developers). Gosh! Someone abusing an online community? Who would have thought...

   Now one would have thought that Michael, the "gatekeeper" of Web 2.0 companies would have at least pointed out that the formation of this derogatory group on the Barack site is one of the main issues that user-generated communities have to deal with on a daily basis. The question of what is acceptable and what isn't; of what is allowed and what isn't; of whether to censor or whether to allow complete uncensored and unmonitored free speech; the issue of the limits of that free speech are all issues that anyone who has a blog that allows comments or a discussion forum has to deal with on a regular basis. Dealing with these issues isn't always easy - moderate too much and you lose your community. Moderate too little and you lose your community.

What I would really like to see is how effectively this fancy shiny website translates into on the ground action. I guess it's time to find a few new RSS feeds to watch.

This is a great social engineering story with a twist. The aim wasn't to get information out of the BBC, rather to get info into it!

Link: BBC Issues An Apology After Hoax (washingtonpost.com).

I usually warn about ideas getting "bigerised" at the organisations I'm involved in. It's a sure way to derail a great idea. Of course, the concept is not my own - so I present another cool story from from Michael Hiltzik’s “Dealers of Lightening – Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age", where I first read about "biggerism" a few years ago:

The Berkley Computer Corporation (BCC) pioneers were about to become victims of the “second-system effect”. The theory of the second systems was formulated by an IBM executive named Frederick Brooks, whose career supervising large-scale software teams taught him that designers of computer systems tend to build into their second projects all the pet features that tight finances or short deadlines forced them to leave out of their first. The result is an overgrown, inefficient monstrosity that rarely works as expected. As he put it in his pithy masterpiece, The Mythical Man-Month: “The second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs.” The BCC machine could have sprung full-blown from the pages of Brook’s text. As Lampson recalled, the designers of the economical and practical SDS 940 regarded their next machine as an opportunity to “look at all the things you could make much more wonderful, and plan to make them all more wonderful by creating a system that could handle a lot more users and much larger programs and was much faster and used computing resources much more efficiently and was better and more wonderful in every possible way. “It was not a very realistic enterprise,” he acknowledged. “But at the time is seemed great, the proper next step, as second systems often do.”… Some of the workers, including Thacker, could tell early on that the project was getting out of hand. The engineer’s engineer possessed the unique trait of aiming for less, not more, in his systems. “This was so unusual for an engineer,” recalled Charles Simonyi, a young immigrant from communist Hungary who assisted Thacker, watching as he chain-smoked through the night designing the machine’s logic, “He had this word for what was happening. He called it ‘biggerism’. I heard this word from him and my English was not that good and I always thought it sounded slightly obscene, because he’d say, you know, ‘This project has been biggered.’”

This lesson goes beyond systems - it applies to any activity which requires a bit of planning.

I read this essay essay titled "What you can't say" by Paul Graham earlier this week. I thought it was great and used part of it to make a point regarding the importance of prioritising issues and choosing ones battles at a workshop that I was invited to facilitate today (it was for newly elected student leaders). I think excerpt below is a great articulation of this concept:

Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.

...I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet. When I read about the harassment to which the Scientologists subject their critics, or that pro-Israel groups are "compiling dossiers" on those who speak out against Israeli human rights abuses, or about people being sued for violating the DMCA, part of me wants to say, "All right, you bastards, bring it on." The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky.

....The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it's also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.