Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog

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...

Ethan Zuckerman has just posted a powerful and compelling essay on his reasons for (co-)founding Global Vocies. It is more a social history of the Internet than an "about us" post. In it he suggests that the utopian ideals and values that were held last century (okay, last century sounds dramatic but remember this is internet time!) has failed to scale as the internet became more broadly available. This is because this utopian vision didn't factor in the rich and complex nature of the history, culture, langauge, religion and experience that is deeply ingrained in societies across the globe.

I remember reading Barlow and Stallman during the late nineties and the cultural underpinnings resonated deeply within me. I remember when I co-founded #islam on ZAnet IRC server in 1997 I used to constatly get messaged with "a/s/l" which was the classic opening line which asked what is your "age, sex and location"? I used to constantly respond saying "This is the internet - those things are irrelevant here. Here you are judged only by your ideas..."

Ten years on it is clear that just being connected to a global network doesn't make a/s/l (well, at least the "l") less significant. Facebook, MySpace and the profileration of local social sites has proven that people want to connect at a very local level. What the global network does offer is the ability to amplifiy local voices and serve to make the world a smaller place.

Ethan elequoently sums up his essay saying

The dreams articulated by pioneers like Barlow, Rheingold and others are a proud legacy of the Internet. But we need to ask whether they saw the Internet bringing people together into a single, unitary net culture, or whether they saw that the Internet could be a space that allowed people from all different cultures to meet on common ground. The former is a fun club to belong to, where we can trade All Your Base jokes and cat macros. But the latter is powerful, political, and potentially transformative. It’s something worth fighting for.