RConversation

Hong Kong's first Barcamp - a great success!

Hong Kong's web community is full of some really fabulous, energetic people. The first ever Barcamp Hong Kong on Saturday left no doubt about that! Ryanne (the photo above is from her camera) sums it up:

i found myself surrounded by people in firefox, linux and all kinds of web 2.0 shirts; people handing out moo cards, showing off their flickr/cc stickers, giving interactive sessions on ajax, facebook, open social, desktop apps, digital printing, web service scalability...whatever you can think of. free coffee, cookies, chips and sandwiches were provided. it's surprising to see so many talented and generous people in HK who came here to share their love. or just to learn...like why i was there.

Daisy estimates there were probably just under 100 people:

It seems to me that almost 40% were developers, 30% were from business organizations (project manager, start up owner), 10% were from NGOs and 20% were unknown (maybe bloggers just like me?). This is just my wide guess, I am sure that someone could give me a better answer.

In terms of nationality, 70% were HongKongers and 30% were Foreigner. However there must be Singaporean because I heard the accent. Language used during the presentations were English while I heard that offline discussions were mostly in Cantonese.

In keeping with the global Barcamp tradition, Saturday's meeting was run as an "unconference": No pre-organized panels or keynotes or invited lectures. First thing in the morning, participants are greeted by a whiteboard indicating timeslots and rooms. Anybody who wants to lead a discussion or give an impromptu presentation writes their subject on a post-it note and sticks it on the board. Similar topics are combined and consolidated, then away we go. With the mix of people we had, the result was a really nice mix of technical sessions, sessions about business, and more philosophical discussions.

I learned a lot from many people about the web startup scene in Hong Kong, the mobile web, online communities, search engine optimization, and many other things. But like most conferences the most important part was getting to know a great group of people, sitting around talking in the halls and sharing all kinds of ideas.

Since the meeting was hosted by Yahoo! Hong Kong, I felt compelled to lead a discussion on "user rights," the lessons all of us should learn from the Shi Tao case, and how should the web community constructively proceed if we care about protecting users' rights to privacy and free expression? (For the record the local Yahoo! folk were good sports about it.) It was exciting to see how many people came to the session and showed that they care about building responsible web businesses. There was an especially thought provoking discussion about where to host user data. One person said you should just host all user data in the U.S. so that governments like the Chinese government can't get at it. Others questioned whether this is a cop out for local businesses especially: shouldn't local companies push to maintain and defend spaces where the rights of users can be protected in their home jurisdictions? Don't they owe that to their users? There was also the question of whether users from here or anywhere else can really count on the U.S. government in the long run anyway - or any government for that matter if nobody is pushing back. Several people who work in web startups said they would really like to see common guidelines developed for the industry about how to deal with governments that pressure them to control user speech or make unreasonable user data demands. We also raised the need to do a better job at informing the public about how e-mail and user content-sharing services work, and with whom their data is shared. Several people said they hope to see more discussions like this in the Hong Kong web community. In response to that interest, I set up a follow-on wiki page here where you can find out more and sign up on a "Hong Kong user rights" google group. 

Interested in getting involved with Hong Kong's next Barcamp, or in learning more about what happened on Saturday? Check out the BarCamp HongKong wiki page and Facebook Group.

Also, for anybody who may be interested, I'll be presenting a paper titled "Yahoo!, Shi Tao, and the Lessons for Corporate Social Responsibility" on Tuesday at the International Conference on Technology and Social Responsibility being held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I will put the paper online when it's ready for public viewing.

 

(photo by Daisy Fung)

China O'Reilly Foo Camp - no [email protected]#!

Tim O'Reilly is here in China for the first ever China Foo camp. I had to post this from my mobile because IBM, the local organizing partner, was somehow unable to organize a wireless internet connection!

Funny that China's grassroots bloggers are better at organizing a Web2.0 conference than a major U.S. multinational...

UPDATE: I managed to hook up to a landline and am now broadcasting a signal via my MacBook Pro to other people in the room.

UPDATE2: After lunch they finally got a wifi signal working in the main hall. For a while they were projecting a live chat via Jiwai (same as they used at CNbloggercon) but then it stopped. That conversation continues online though.

.Asia: New online real estate for the region

New virtual real estate is opening up for sale in Asia, as Edmon Chung, CEO of the new ".Asia" top-level domain, puts it.  .Asia officially launched here in Hong Kong on Wednesday.  They're a non-profit organization whose mission, they say, is "dedicated to the needs of the Pan-Asia and Asia Pacific Internet community... providing an online identity for people, organizations, and businesses who want "to express membership in the larger Asian community."

SFgate has a very detailed article about .Asia and its prospects. They describe a launch process which Edmon says he hopes will become a model for future top-level domains:

...unlike previous TLD launches, DotAsia is setting itself up to take maximum benefit from this opportunity, while forcing a leveling of the domain-registration playing field. Rather than simply opening the floodgates for speculators to register domains -- which makes winning a particular domain a matter of the fastest finger -- they've laid out a unique "sunrise" process for the first six months of their operation. After restricted names are reserved by governments and administrative organizations, valid international trademark holders and companies seeking to protect their operating names will have an open window to submit applications for those respective domains. When conflicts emerge -- the number of companies that can legitimately claim to have rights to names like "Sun" and "Star" in Asia is staggering -- verified stakeholders will have the right to participate in an open, Internet-based auction, designed to ensure that the entity that values the domain most will end up controlling it.

The same application and auction process will be followed for the first 30 days of open registration as well. Want a nifty generic domain name? Be prepared to bid on it. How much is porn.asia worth to you?

Before .Asia opens up in phases to governments, trademark holders, and then the general public, they are seeking applicants for their ".Asia Pioneer" program. The idea is to give out premium domain names to organizations, businesses or projects that will help build a quality and diverse Asian Internet community - rather than just selling everything to first-comers and highest bidders. According to the .Asia Pioneer website:

Breaking the mould of disinterested allocation of domains in a first-come-first-served race, the .Asia Pioneer Domains Program entrusts the most prestigious cyber real estate in .Asia to those who show genuine commitment to this community. The objective of the program is to immediately create active and relevant content on .Asia domains for the benefit of Internet users around the world. The program builds on the value of .Asia to provide a natural name for users to easily navigate and find the information they are looking for. Through the Pioneer Domains Program, DotAsia is giving out millions of dollars worth of domain names.

One journalist had some questions about how transparent this process will be. Edmon insists it will be very transparent. It will be fascinating  to see what comes out of this process.

At the launch party .Asia had these cute napkins (pictured at right) inviting people to scribble their ideas down and help populate Asia's new cyber-real estate. I actually scribbled down an online media idea (which I'm not showing). Unfortunately I don't have time to implement it this year given my other commitments and I certainly don't have the resources...  but maybe somebody else out there might be able to do something with it... 

Talking Web 2.0 in Hong Kong

Web2.0 is starting to pick up in Hong Kong - at least in certain quarters. Angus Lau, Hong Kong's main Web2.0-blogger, reported on Hong Kong's first-ever Web2.0 conference earlier this month - which I missed. Angus said that while it went better than he expected, it was mainly an intro to Web2.0 for people who know little or nothing about it.

Today I went to a Hong Kong Web2.0 seminar in Cyberport organized by Diantang Communications. It was a small event - just a few dozen people in the audience, and it seems that a good number of those came from Web2.0 startups. The seminar program was unfortunately posted on Diantang's site in the most blog-unfriendly format, PDF, so you'll need to download it in order to read the whole thing.

(<rant>I dream of the day when every Web2.0 conference organizer actually uses a Web2.0 media platform to publicize the conference - it need not cost anything in web development time, they can just throw something up on Wordpress or Typepad or Blogger...link to the websites belonging to the speakers, link and trackback to the bloggers you want to attend, try to get a discussion going beforehand about who will be going and what they're interested in discussing. Using Web1.0 tools to publicize a Web2.0 conference gives the impression that the organizers don't understand Web2.0 themselves, which impacts attendance.</rant>)

Web2.0 guru Tim O'Reily was invoked frequently. Somebody pointed out that Web2.0 is more than using lots of Ajax - rather, it's about creating and facilitating conversations, and enabling the user to use, combine, define, create, and react to content the way he or she chooses. 

A major focus of the afternoon was on how to find more effective ways to monetize the participatory, user-driven, mash-up aspects of web2.0.  Is there a business model beyond getting bought by Google or Yahoo? How do you become the next Google instead?

The most interesting talk to me was by Keith Li from m-gen.com, a "mobile 2.0" company. He described how mobile users use the web very differently than people who access the web from computers. They tend to be the people who aren't doing white-collar office jobs with computers at their desks, but rather people with the kinds of jobs that require them to be outside or on the road or running around a restaurant, or whatever it is, and don't have much internet access at home either - or not the kind that makes private or personal conversations and interactions possible. These people find it worthwhile to pay subscriptions for mobile web services. His company developed a mobile blogging site which they then sold to a company targeting Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. He commented that it's interesting how companies in South East Asia seem to have more "insight" than those in Hong Kong when it comes to utilizing these technologies.

As is almost always the case with any conference, I got as much out of my brief interactions with people sitting around me and hanging around afterwards than I did from the talks themselves. It was great to finally meet Angus Lau in person. It was also fun chatting with a group of people who are doing some very interesting work for Outblaze here in Hong Kong. They are now running a blogging platform for Sanrio - which means Hello Kitty and everything in her family. I bet you didn't know that Hello Kitty fans are now blogging in droves on a pretty sophisticated Wordpress Multiuser platform, with video editing and other media creation tools included.  And they're not all fluff all the time.. one of them writes about Hong Kong censorship and the environment when not enthusing about the latest Hello Kitty gear. (Disclosure: Outblaze CEO Yat Siu is a friend of mine and Sanriotown sponsors the Japanese translation section on Global Voices.)

I hope that these guys (or somebody) will eventually launch a more general blogging community for Hong Kong - one which local professionals and aspiring journalists would feel comfortable using as a platform for sharing their ideas and work.  I'd also love to have my students using something more local than Uniblogs.org, which is what we're mainly using now. Uniblogs.org is has some good features but is a little buggy, and at the height of the semester when lots of universities are using it all at once it gets really slow.  (We don't want to have the university hosting student blogs at this point for a bunch of reasons, and Wordpress.com is blocked in Mainland China - where half of my students are from - so if I want to use a Wordpress-based hosted platform I don't have a lot of other stable options at the moment.)

Many times, what potential users want isn't nearly as fancy as startup guys think.

The power of Cyber-Grannies: Gender equality and the Internet

The woman in this photo is a 77-year old Ugandan grandmother named Anastasia. She is illiterate, but managed to get "hooked" on computers thanks to an interactive CD full of pictures and sound explaining how women in Uganda can use technology to make money. According to Nancy Hafkin, a leading scholar on technology, development, and gender, Anastasia "used the information on the CD to raise her income from raising chickens and now travels through her district to promote awareness among women, especially those without formal education, on how new information technologies can improve their well-being."

Anastasia's new career as cyber-granny didn't just happen because somebody donated money for a bunch of computer centers and cyber cafes in Uganda. Her new-found role is thanks to an organization called WOUGNET (Women of Uganda Network), an organization that has put a lot of effort into figuring out how to make computers accessible to women who are badly educated or illiterate, how to make technology relevant to solving problems in women's daily lives, and how to create female-friendly environments in which women have the opportunity and time to learn. Here is a video shot by WOUGNET, documenting the challenges that women in one community in Uganda face in trying to use the local computer center:

These stories were part of a luncheon talk on gender and technology at the Berkman Center by Nancy Hafkin editor of a new book called Cinderella or Cyberella? Empowering Women in Knowledge Society. She posed several challenges to common assumptions that technology is "gender neutral."  Many people assume that the introduction of computers and the Internet into a society will transform everybody's lives positively, and that the technology naturally "trickles down" to benefit both women and men.

Colleagues Ethan Zuckerman and David Weinberger have both blogged the talk in detail, but here are my major take-aways:

• Just because you introduce the Internet into a society doesn't mean that it will be used equally by men and women. Interestingly, the percentage of women vs. men using the Internet vary widely from country to country  - where there are statistics on this at all. In some countries with widespread Internet penetration (the U.S., Canada, and Hong Kong for example)  Internet useage is split fairly evenly between men and women. While in other countries with high levels of Internet penetration there is significant disparity (France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK). Same in developing countries with low Internet penetration: in some developing countries with low Internet penetration, there are nonetheless relatively equal numbers of men and women using the Internet, while in other countries with similarly low Internet penetration levels, the relative proportion of men and women using the Internet is badly skewed. What this shows is that there are lots of social and cultural factors that dictate the extent to which women will take advantage of the Internet's existence in their country. It also means that choices made by people with power and money - education policy choices, business model choices, and development project funding choices - can all make a difference. Unfortunately Hafkin believes that policymakers, NGO's, and businesses tend to lack awareness about the gender implications of their decisions about how technology will be implemented, taught, or marketed.  Hopefully, her ongoing research will help make them more aware.

• You can't assume that technology - just by virtue of existing in a society - will bring immediate positive benefits to women's lives. In fact there may be ways in which the technology might worsen women's lives in the short term. Hafkin brought up the fact that the Internet has fed the growth of the porn industry and the child porn industry, which in some parts of the world increases the victimization of girls and women. She also pointed to studies in some parts of Africa that indicate increased domestic violence arising after women attempt to use the Internet or mobile phones, because their husbands and fathers tended to interpret this as an effort to communicate with other men. She did not raise this as an argument against the spread of technology, but rather to point out that women in some communities may first come into contact with technology via negative experiences such as these, which may in turn cause women and their parents to view technology as a male realm that they had best avoid in order to be safe. This context needs to be understood and kept in mind when we are thinking about questions of gender equality in the use of technology. How do you create opportunities for use of technology that will not feel threatening to women or to family members who may control what they can or can't do?

• In communities where Internet and computer resources are scarce, women and girls will be left behind if they don't feel safe or if circumstances to use the technology are stacked against them.  It appears that in developing countries where there is relative gender parity of Internet use, one major reason is that a lot of women are working in the formal economy - i.e., in offices that have computers. Many "ICT4D" (internet and communication technology for development) projects created in rural communities by well meaning non-governmental organizations often fail to create environments that are conducive to women and girls being able to use that technology as easily as men and boys. Parents and husbands tend to be leery of a woman's reasons for wanting to go and spend a few hours a week in a computer center. Cyber-cafes are often full of men watching porn and playing violent games, creating an environment in which women don't feel comfortable and or which parents forbid their daughters from entering.

Hafkin argues that women can basically have a "Cinderella" relationship with technology or a "Cyberella" relationship with technology, hence the title of her book.  According to two of her slides which she generously shared:

Cinderella:

• Works in the basement of knowledge society (if she works at all)
• Has little opportunity to reap its benefits
• Waits for "her prince" to decide the benefits she will receive

Most women around the world today are Cinderella. Hafkin believes the goal is for Cinderella to become Cyberella, who is:

• Fluent in the uses of technology
• Comfortable using and designing computer, technology and communication equipment, software, and in working in virtual spaces
• Devises innovative uses for technologies across problems and subjects
• Finds information and knowledge to improve her life and expand choices
• Active knowledge creator and disseminator 
• More than a user, designs information and knowledge systems to improve all aspects of her life.

Will Cinderellas magically transform into Cyberellas over time? Initial research indicates that the answer is not necessarily.

This is where cyber-granny comes back into the picture. Hafkin mentioned the Grameen phone project, in which village women in Bangladesh and elsewhere are given micro-loans to create businesses in which they rent out uses of mobile phones. What if women like Anastasia could get capital and support, systematically, to run computer and Internet kiosks in their villages? Would that create environments that would feel more friendly to women, and less threatening to their parents and husbands? Hafkin said that in India and elsewhere there are village Internet kiosk projects, some of which are run by women. She pointed out that it would be interesting to see some statistics comparing the number of female customers at women-run cyber-centers versus the numbers of women using other cyber-cafes and computer centers in similar areas.

Why am I writing about all this at such length? Because I've been thinking a great deal lately (in between packing and winding up various projects before I move to Hong Kong) about the question of how policy and business choices affect the extent to which the Internet is or is not transformative for different kinds of people.  Hafkin's work is important because it highlights how - if we really want technology to make the world a better place for everybody - spreading computers and Internet access around as widely as possible is certainly a start, but it's probably not going to be enough.

Innovating on the Live Web

Earlier this week I attended an off-the-record meeting (i.e., no blogging about the details of who was there and exactly what was said by whom) with a group of executives from various news and media organizations to discuss the future of news. These news organizations are all trying to figure out how to rethink pretty much everything: the way they report and deliver the news, how they interact with their audiences, how they interface and collaborate with citizens' media,  PLUS re-invent their business models - so that they can find a way to pay the salaries of quality journalists and newsgathering operations. Put it this way: assuming that reliable, factually accurate and thorough journalism that informs the public discourse on important issues is something that society values - how do you provide it to the public it in a way that can be monetized, and how do you pay to support the kind of journalistic work that is difficult, dangerous, time consuming and expensive?

The fact that nobody has found any good answers - at least not for the American newspaper industry - was demonstrated on Thursday when Los Angeles Times Publisher Jeffrey Johnson was forced out of his job by the Tribune Co. As the L.A. Times itself reported, his ouster came "a little more than a month after he defied the media conglomerate's demands for staff cuts that he suggested could damage the newspaper."  After reporting the circumstances of Johnson's ouster, the L.A. Times describes the larger context: "The turmoil at Tribune's largest property comes at a time of marked uncertainty for many media companies, which have seen their audiences and advertising revenues declining with competition from the Internet and other news outlets."

Doc Searls believes newspapers are in crisis because they "are resolutely clueless about how to adapt to a world that is increasingly networked and self-informing. And Wall Street knows that." He then offers ten recommendations for how newspapers might turn themselves around. There is a lot of sound advice in there - much of which was discussed at the above-mentioned meeting (which he didn't attend though I wish he had). Click here to read all his recommendations at length. His ninth recommendation emphasizes an issue that many news execs are just becoming aware of: with a few notable exceptions, most news media websites are struggling to evolve from the "old Static Web" of the 1990's to today's "Live Web." This "Live Web" - or Web 2.0 as techies and venture capitalists like to call it - just happens to be the natural habitat of blogs, wikis, YouTube, and MySpace. As Doc writes:

Ninth, get hip to the Live Web. That's the one with verbs such as write, read, update, post, author, subscribe, syndicate, feed and link. This is the part of the Web that's growing on top of the old Static Web of nouns such as site, address, location, traffic, architecure and construction. Nothing wrong with any of those static verbs. They're the foundation, the bedrock. They are necessary but insufficient for what's needed on the Live Web, which is where your paper needs to live and grow and become more valuable to its communities (as well as Wall Street).

Lemme unpack that a bit. The Static Web is what holds still long enough for Google and Yahoo to send out spiders to the entire universe and index what they find. The Live Web is is what's happening right now. It's dynamic. (Thank you, Virginia.) It includes all the stuff that's syndicated through RSS and searched by Google Blogsearch, IceRocket and Technorati. What I post here, and what others post about this post, will be found and indexed by Live Web search engines in a matter of minutes. For those who subscribe to feeds of this blog, and of other blogs, the notification is truly live. Your daily paper has pages, not sites. The difference is not "just semantic". It's fundamental. It's how you reclaim, and assert, your souls in the connected world. ...

Dan Gillmor, who was at the same meeting I attended earlier this week, made a great point during the discussions about how news organizations are compounding their inability to innovate by slashing their staffs and investing little or nothing in research and development - the kind of "R&D" investment that's obligatory for any technology company. Blogging later from the J-Lab's Citizens' Media Summit, Dan expanded on this idea, pointing out that much of the most ground-breaking technology innovations in the news media field are coming from small citizens' media startups:

One thing they have in common: they all developed their own software to run their sites — and now they’re selling that software. The social networking software developed for Bakotopia — which goes beyond letting users blog and add photos and gives them MySpace-like profile pages, and the ability to add other users to “friend lists” is now for sale. Morris Digital now sells the mdSPOTTED photo gallery software that enables reader-participants of Bluffton Today to upload photos to the site. And YourHub, a community platform in a box for newspapers, is now licensed in nearly a dozen markets.

Dan also sees an exciting opportunity for journalism schools and journalism students:

My sense is that journalism is becoming a high-tech profession — not just in using the net as a distribution mechanism but developing new software. Which brings me to another point: J-schools should start thinking about technology transfer. Tech schools often make quite a bit of money licensing technologies developed in university labs. J-schools should start creating the next-generation technology platforms — and fund new innovations from licensing revenues.

This is a great idea. As I wrote in a blog post here last December, technology has now evolved to the point at which the most interesting innovations are happening at the edges: users are experimenting with open-source software and creating "hacks" that enable them do what they want.  You don't need a huge corporate budget and casts of thousands behind you to innovate in media anymore - in fact having a large organization to manage (and shareholders to answer to when things don't pan out) increasingly looks like an impediment to experimentation and creative thinking. I've had conversations with people who work in the web departments of news organizations whose understanding of RSS, tagging and other standard features of the read-write web (or semantic web or Live Web, or Web 2.0 or whatever you want to call it) pale in comparison with that of many self-taught bloggers who learned by playing around with the free and/or inexpensive software tools. Dan's right, there's no reason why journalism students couldn't be the source of some of the next big innovations in news - if journalism schools would do more to support and encourage them in doing so.

Virtual identities

I can't resist sharing part of an email I got today from a friend who has found it very easy to keep up with my activities by doing web searches:

You crack me up with your searchable database of self.
...
I am wondering where Rebecca MacKinnon ends and your
digital history/consciousness/self/soul begins.

Hmm....

And now a new tool, Grokker, can make a picture out of a Yahoo search of my digital history. I'm not sure how useful it is if I want to find information on a subject quickly, but it's fun to play around with when procrastinating, plugging in the names of various people I know and seeing what kind of picture comes up...

Gmail issues

Interestingly, when you type "gmail down" into Google, the first search result is my recent blog entry posted last time it went down. I knew it had gone down again this morning because that entry has suddenly started receiving lots of comments by frustrated Gmail users. A couple of people are also defending Gmail because, after all, it's just BETA and people who are taking advantage of this free service shouldn't expect it to be perfect. 

Fair enough. I moved anything important off Gmail last time it went down.
I just wish the Google people would provide some notification or explanation about what's going on when Gmail goes down. We all know it's BETA, and most users are willing to forgive problems since we're getting a free service, but I think we'd be more likely to pay for their service in the future if we felt we could count on them to be open about what they're doing and keep users informed.

One user's perspective.

UPDATE: It's back up at 12:30pm EST. Seems like it was down for only about 30 minutes this time. Last time it was a few hours. I still think information to users would be a good idea. How to keep users informed so that they'll stay happy, calm and trusting despite unexpected problems (which everybody has) should be part and parcel of a BETA testing phase for any commercial service or product. IMHO. But then what do I know. I'm just a user.

Internet & Society conference begins

The Berkman Center's Internet & Society conference has brought together an amazing group of people. (Friday will be webcast with more details here.) An influential group of international bloggers will be gathering for a daylong workshop called Global Voices Online - where we will discuss how to further the global conversation between citizens of different countries through blogs and participatory media. Hoder the Iranian blogger is here, and so is Oh Yeon Ho of Ohmynews, plus many others (check the Global Voices blog for links to blogs of all the participants). We're also excited to have Omar and Mohammed from Iraq the Model joining us for Saturday. Spirit of America will use the occasion to unveil their new Arabic Blog tool. 

Unfortunately we won't be able to webcast the Saturday meeting live, but an audio recording will be made available online. It will also be extensively blogged. Jeff Jarvis is all over it, among many others.

This conference will mark a seminal moment in the participatory media movement in many ways. Today Dan Gillmor announced he is leaving the San Jose Mercury News to launch a new citizen-journalism project. This is big. Congratulations, Dan!  It's the right time for journalists who want to shape the future of news to leave their old-media organizations. 

A long post: China, internet discourse & censorship

The English-language blogosphere has been awash with optimism about the rise of Chinese blogs as an alternative form of citizens' media, thanks to two excellent articles, "The 'blog' Revolution Sweeps Across China," by  Xiao Qiang of China Digital News, and Dan Gillmor's China Bloggers Emerge, But Not Too Loudly.  Their timing couldn't be better from my perspective, since I just so happen to be putting together a conference presentation about blogs, online discourse, and internet censorship in China.

As a journalist who spent 9 years in China (1992-2001), and who was there for the birth of China's Internet Age, here is my take on the situation:

Yes, blogs are enabling ordinary Chinese to discuss ideas and inform each other about events inside and outside China in ways that weren't possible before - and as Xiao points out, blogs are harder than chatrooms to police. This will make a difference politically. Blogs and chatroom conversations are already pushing greater media openness and influencing mainstream news reporting. SMS text messaging outed the SARS story.

BUT, before anybody gets too overly excited about the impending democratic revolution...

• Don't expect the Chinese blogosphere to bring down the Chinese Communist Party any time soon.  The Great Chinese Firewall and China's internet police will see to that - and they have  plenty of help from major U.S. tech companies, including Cisco. Shame on them.  My Berkman Center colleagues have done some excellent research on China's sophisticated system of internet filtering in conjunction with the Open Net Initiative. Most recently, China has been blocking access to the English-language Google News, but Google censors itself in Chinese anyway. Shame on them too.
• Don't assume that the expansion of freedom of speech in Chinese cyberspace will necessarily strengthen international peace and brotherly love between China and other countries - the opposite is also possible.  In fact, the bulk of voices in Chinese cyberspace today are more anti-American, more anti-Japanese, and more inclined to go to war against Taiwan than the Chinese government is. This is made more acute by the skewed mix of information Chinese internet-users are exposed to thanks to the Great Chinese Firewall - and it's also why U.S. corporate assistance in building that firewall is especially heinous. But there are other factors - like good old-fashioned Chinese nationalism - at work as well.
  

Read on for more details if you're interested...