The Day EveryBlock Came to Town
A fight just broke out down the street from my house. Yesterday, a dog in my neighborhood had one of its legs amputated. That’s the kind of news I like to know and so I’m very excited that MSNBC’s hyper-local news aggregator EveryBlock has expanded this week to include services in Portland, Oregon. EveryBlock is one of scores of competing services that serve up public records, social media content and local announcements on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood, or in this case block-by-block, basis. What does it mean when the most successful of these services rolls into your town? 12 hours into the experience, here’s what some people in the local (human) media geeks have to say about it. This conversation offers a unique view into the front-line battle to offer news consumers more and faster information about our own neighborhoods than we’ve probably ever had before. Sponsor Does existing local media consider EveryBlock a threat? Local TV news personality and new media experimenter Stephanie Stricklen doesn’t. “I can’t think of any reason why it’s not awesome,” she told us. “Any time you bring another source of information into a city, especially one where you can access info about such a small geographic perspective, I like that.” “No matter what you think of online journalism, everything is changing and the more players that come to the table the better we are all. We serve different audiences. The local TV stations could never have the time to visit every single block every day, there’s not enough people, not even the newspaper could.” Might local human reporters use a service like EveryBlock to find stories they should investigate and put in context? “Absolutely,” Stricklen said, “I can see myself using something like this.” As I write this story, some kind of animal problem has been reported at an intersection near where I live and an experimental short film screening was just blogged about by a neighborhood arts organization. The films aren’t my style, to be frank, but I love that I am aware of the event. In fact, many of the updates from public records are maddeningly unclear. Many others are so trivial that lots of readers wouldn’t consider them news. The health department visited the Chinese restaurant down the street and found the ice-scooper stuck handle-side down in the ice machine! Some lady on Yelp said she didn’t like the tapas restaurant. Someone just flagged down a police car, but EveryBlock has no idea what it was about. To this EveryBlock’s Dan O’Neil says: “Are there gaps in EveryBlock’s knowledge? Yes. Are there gaps in human knowledge in real life? Yes! There’s a comment field, help us out!” Is this a newswire of completed stories? No, this is something different. (But it is a complete publishing of the public records your taxpayer funded agencies make available, O’Neil points out.) To be honest, I like reading that kind of stuff. Maybe you do too. As O’Neil says, “we do have a wider definition of what news is.” Not everyone feels satisfied with the level of detail being provided or the absence of filtering the signal from the noise. It’s hard to imagine machines replacing the human storytelling that journalists provide. The machines could augment that journalism, though, and there’s lots of room for them to do an even better job of it. Where Humans and Machine Work Together EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty told us in January that the organization had hired a full-time editor to research various government agency codes in order to articulate public records in a more human-readable way. “It’s one thing to publish public records; it’s another to make sense of them,” he said. EveryBlock’s O’Neil told us that editor’s name is Paul Wilson and said Paul put in hours interviewing Portland municipal staff in order to translate the data fields the city publishes into the format EveryBlock now publishes. O’Neil says those municipal staff members are unsung heroes, especially Rick Nixon of the Bureau of Technology Services. “It’s a very complex endeavor to publish regularly updated data,” O’Neil says. “Portland has excellent meta data and contact info, but a lot of times it’s hard to get to the expertise and for those experts to explain it to someone else. When it’s not your job to answer phone calls from web developers and tell them what spreadsheets mean, it’s tough. We’re in a weird gap time. In the future the expectations and questions we bring to data will be more common and it will be a part of peoples’ job descriptions – but the people in Portland should be commended for already really trying to figure out what these things mean.” Portland makes a lot of this data officially available as part of its brand-new CivicApps program, but EveryBlock worked with the county restaurant inspection agency to get that data in particular through other channels. “We’re cycling through 5,000 restaurants on a nightly basis,” O’Neil says, “and the restaurant inspections in Portland are the most plain language content of all the cities we look at. It’s great to see those people speaking in human and not just municipal language.” Home-Team Geeks “What will be really exciting is to see what Portland’s indigenous community of developers and web journos do with the content the city is making available,” says Steve Suo, editor and executive VP of Portland’s real-time, white-label EveryBlock competitor NozzlMedia . Nozzl is made up of long-time newspaper guys, now building something for the future. (See our write up of Nozzl: ” Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters “.) EveryBlock’s arrival in town happened just days after the city’s celebrated opening of a substantial amount of new data through CivicApps, and with help from the city. Nozzl thinks it can do a better job of putting this data into context. “The more eyes you have on the data, the more insights we’ll see brought to bear,” Suo says. “We’re currently adding all the same Portland data for our Portland metro news customers,” Nozzl co-founder and CEO Steve Woodward says. Woodward says that in addition to prioritizing context and serving white-label customers, Nozzl pulls from more sources of data, covers a broader geographic area, and focuses on real-time data. “EveryBlock will tell you what crimes occurred near your home over the last several days. Nozzl will give you information about that siren you hear at this very moment.” EveryBlock’s O’Neil basically says bring it on , pointing to Portland’s mere five minute delay on 911 call data and his site’s real-time bulletin feature. These are remarkable times. There are services like EveryBlock, Nozzl, Outside.in , Fwix and more all battling it out to best serve us users with new and innovative ways to drill down into more details about our immediate physical surroundings. EveryBlock is the biggest player in the game, though, and our awareness of hyper-local news here in tech-savvy Portland has probably been changed for good. Discuss
Google Brings Twitter Search Results to China
It’s been nearly a year since China first shutdown access to Twitter in preparation for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre , but today Google has opened up the doors again, in a way. According to an article this morning in the Los Angeles Times, Google has added Twitter search results to its search engine there, “in effect, lifting a nine-month blackout of the microblogging service in China.” Sponsor Earlier this week, Google announced that it would stop censoring search results and would redirect visitors from mainland China to Google.com.hk from Google.cn. Already, China has worked to censor search results provided on Google.com.hk. This latest move by Google is sure to further aggravate an already tense situation, but we have to wonder, as we have before , if it really matters or if we’re looking at it from an ethnocentric point of view. Twitter may have been blocked, but China has several of its own Chinese Twitter clones . So now China can see tweets, which are predominantly not in Mandarin, in Google search results. Then again, the Los Angeles Times points out that the search results are already bringing sensitive topics into view of Chinese citizens: The tweets do not show up for all searches, but only for terms that appear to be popular on Twitter. On Thursday morning, that included discussions on such taboo subjects as how to circumvent China’s Internet firewall, why Google decided to exit China and a vaccine scandal unfolding in central China. The move seems more like a principled slap in the face than anything else. But then again, so does much of this situation. Discuss
GoDaddy Follows Google’s Lead, Abandons China
Returning to a lesson we recently learned from the dancing hippie , we have to wonder if today’s move by GoDaddy.com , the world’s largest domain name provider, means there’s more trouble in store for China and western Internet companies. According to an article in today’s Washington Post, the company will follow Google’s lead and cease registering websites in China. As we learned when studying the case of the dancing hippie, it’s the first follower that “transforms a lone nut into a leader.” Sponsor Google co-founder Sergey Brin called for the U.S. to stand up against Internet censorship in China this morning, criticizing Microsoft for its stance on the issue. While Brin’s own stance has been called into question , it seems that the lone dancer has found a partner. The Post quotes Rep. Christopher Smith, the man behind “a bill that would make it a crime for U.S. companies to share personal user information with ‘Internet-restricting’ countries”, as saying that “Google fired a shot heard ’round the world, and now a second American company has answered the call to defend the rights of the Chinese people.” GoDaddy’s move, however, is not the purely altruistic act of solidarity it might first appear to be. A new Chinese policy enacted last December upped the ante, requiring registrants of .cn domain names to submit photos and business identification, which would then be forwarded to the government. The law would require GoDaddy to retroactively gather information from domain registrants. While this certainly has extremely ominous implications in terms of human rights, we have to wonder how much the law implies in financial terms. GoDaddy is currently responsible for more than 40 million domain names, a number that is three times the nearest competitor. We don’t know what percent of that is in China, but it could be quite the endeavor to go back and acquire extra registrant information before sending it to the government. On the other hand, we can hope that this is all being done for the good of humanity. And even if not, if it has that result in the end, does it matter what the reasons for the actions were? All skepticism aside, Google has found a friend, and the hardest part may be behind it. As Derek Sivers, the man behind the dancing hippie video , told us last time, “When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in.” GoDaddy, it seems, has stood up, joined in and now we’re wondering what big player might be next. Discuss
What Google Will Do in China (SXSW Presentation)
Kaiser Kuo presented today at SXSW about Google in China. He spoke about how the Google situation will impact Chinese Internet users, other companies and the Chinese government. In the presentation, Kuo (who also spoke to ReadWriteWeb a week ago) clarified how censorship in China works. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the Great Firewall that has the most impact in China – but something China calls “self-discipline.” Kuo also discussed what the next moves will be from Google, since he believes that the ball is in Google’s court and Beijing won’t push the situation. Sponsor History of Google in China Before getting down to the nitty gritty of the current Google-China standoff, Kaiser Kuo gave some valuable context to Google in China. In 2005 Google started to hire aggressively in China, he said. Google’s decision to enter China with a censored product immediately brought grief to Google, with some pundits describing it as a “black day for Internet freedom.” Google defended its actions at that point by saying that not providing search to a fifth of the world’s population would be a greater loss than having censored results. At first Google had a notice on their search results stating that they were censored. Kuo also pointed out that Google only omitted results that users wouldn’t have been able to view anyway had they clicked through (because the pages or sites were blocked). At that point, Google didn’t host Gmail, personal search history, Blogger or other services that had personal information. Google in China also protected their employees, Kuo noted. Google never had an easy time of it in China. For example, many Chinese users couldn’t spell the word “Google.” Regulators made it difficult for them, as did their Chinese competitors. Google did manage to make good revenues and market share, but never “moved the needle” against its Chinese search competitor Baidu. Kuo remarked that Google was not singled out for any special treatment by the Chinese government. In 2009 Google got into trouble due to pornography in its search results, and it went dark for a short time as a result. There has been a massive growth in Internet users in China in the four years since Google entered that market. There were 2-3 million Internet users in China when Google began operations there; now there are 384 million Internet users in China. Google has around 35% market share in China, which has not been matched by any other Western company. Its annual revenues in China is around $300-400 million in revenue, which is nothing to sneeze at. In mid-December 2009 there was a hacker attack on Google, which in January Google claimed on its blog came from China. At that time Google also announced it would stop censoring search results on google.cn. Kuo doesn’t believe this announcement was a cynical retreat from China due to its being defeated by Chinese competitors, which many pundits suggested at the time. Kuo said that the challenge to Google’s business model is around trust, for personal data in the cloud. So Google’s blog post in China was appropriate, Kuo believes. Some people have suggested that the Chinese government used the strategy known in China as “Using Quiescience to control action.” The government has however unblocked Google Docs and Groups, and has not blocked any further Google services since January. Currently Google is still hiring in China and is in the midst of negotiations with the Chinese government. Kuo believes there is deliberate confusion right now.”It’s impossible to grasp what Google is up against without having a better grasp of how censorship in China works.” The Great Firewall There are two main types of Internet censorship in China, said Kuo. The first is The Great Firewall of China, which has been nick-named “Iron Curtain 2.0.” It’s a system of filters at domain name or page level. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger and other western sites have been blocked at this level. Kuo said that it’s fairly simple for Chinese Internet users to “hop the firewall ” using proxy services, free VPNs. So The Great Firewall is more of an inconvenience. Kuo pays for a VPN that allows him to access Western websites. Self-Discipline The second form of censorship is “more pernicious and effective,” according to Kuo. It is carried out by Internet companies, on instructions from Chinese government. All Internet sites in China have to practice what is termed “self-discipline.” Failing to adhere to this form of censorship means having your website or service shut down. There are some 30,000 “Internet police.” Two cartoon avatars are wont to show up if a Chinese user visits pages with content offensive to the Chinese government. Most Internet users in China don’t come across the Great Firewall, because most Chinese Internet users don’t use Western services like Twitter and Facebook. But, Kuo said, “Google is different.” It has become “a real part of the Internet culture in China.” Kuo then talked about how Chinese censorship nowadays is almost all social media sites, such as social networks and microblogging sites. How Chinese Netizens Use The Internet Kuo mentioned that the Chinese Internet is more “entertainment superhighway” than “information superhighway.” Online gaming is big in China. Most Chinese Internet users, Kuo said, enjoy the Internet that they have – rather than worry about the one that Western pundits think they should have. The Internet has also emerged as a de-facto public sphere in China. As long as you don’t overstep certain boundaries (political activism and so forth), then the “will of the masses” is often expressed on the Internet through the likes of bulletin boards or social networks. Regularly, Chinese netizens are exposing public officials. However Kuo warns that there are “very very serious limits” to what is emerging in the public sphere. For example, anonymity leads to a lot of trolling. It’s ad-hoc, reactive and informal – however it is a “squeaky wheel that is regularly getting grease.” Also, a minority are pro-democracy – most of the netizens in the public sphere are pro-Chinese government. Next Moves from Beijing and Google Kuo said that the Chinese government will wait for Google to make the next move. It realises it has nothing to gain by pushing Google or being openly hostile. The ball is in Google’s court and it will probably keep to its word that it will stop censorship in China. It may still shut down operations in China, which in practice means closing google.cn. But this has a lot of problematic scenarios – including the difficulty of having translations done for Google.com and staffing issues of closing down. The pros of pulling out of China include saving face and appeasing western users. But the cons are significant. They include a backlash from tech-savvy, urban Google users, a setback to scientific research, a global black eye for their image, and ceding the virtual monopoly in search in China to Baidu. The moderate scenario is that Google.cn is shut down, but continues to work with its mobile partners in China, R&D and sales continue to operate in China, and Google services will be unblocked. The best case scenario, Kuo believes, would be if Google stopped censoring google.cn – but the service stays online. Discuss
‘Enemies of the Internet’: Not Just For Dictators Anymore
Reporters Without Borders released its annual report [ PDF ] on online access today. They call it Enemies of the Internet, and it shows a world where online censorship, intimidation and worse is increasing. It’s not surprising that as access to the Internet expands, more and more dictators and tyrants will try to suppress it. But what’s troubling about this year’s report is the inclusion of two democratic countries: Australia and South Korea. Sponsor Both countries were included in the report’s Under Surveillance list – a sub group of the main Enemies list. Australia’s proposed online filtering system is something RWB says it has “never before seen in a democracy.” Additionally, in the state of South Australia it’s now against the law to be anonymous online if it’s in the context of an election. In South Korea, a new censorship law allows for five-year prison sentences for anyone found using the Internet “to disseminate false news intended to damage the public interest.” The same law requires online visitors to register their real name and national ID card number when visiting sites with more than 100,000 members. Here are a handful of the worst violators of online freedom of expression on the Enemies of the Internet list: Burma Two high-ranking government officials have been sentenced to death for having e-mailed documents abroad. Net censorship is a serious matter in Burma. Massive filtering of websites and extensive slowdowns during times of unrest are daily occurrences for the country’s Internet users. The legislation governing Internet use – the Electronic Act – is one of the most liberticidal laws in the world. China As its polemic with Google and the United States on the Internet’s future unfolds, China continues to intensify Web censorship, faced with an increasingly forceful online community.The much-vaunted promises made by organizers at the open ceremonies of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games have proven to be mere illusions for the world’s biggest netizen prison. Expanded dissemination of propaganda, generalized surveillance and crackdowns on Charter 08 signatories are commonplace on what has become the Chinese Intranet – with significant consequences for trade. Egypt More than a mere virtual communications tool, the Egyptian Internet has become a mobilization and dissension platform. Although website blocking remains limited, authorities are striving to regain control over bloggers who are more and more organized, despite all the harassment and arrests. Iran Iran, one of cyber-censorship’s record-holding countries, has stepped up its crackdown and online surveillance since the protests over the disputed presidential reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12, 2009. The regime is demonizing the new media, which it is accusing of serving foreign interest.While a dozen netizens are serving out their terms in Evin Prison, bold Internet users are continuing to mobilize. Saudi Arabia An emerging bloggers’ community is up against harsh censorship. These bloggers are confronting the traditional forces of Saudi society, which are attempting to prevent the Internet from becoming a forum for free discussions. Saudi Arabia is one of the first countries to have been authorized to write Internet domain names in Arabic.The Internet penetration rate, currently estimated at about 38% of the population, is rising. How- ever, it is still one of the most repressive countries with regard to the Internet. Syria Syria is reinforcing its censorship of troublesome topics on the Web and tracking netizens who dare to express themselves freely on it. As a result, social networks have been particularly targeted by omnipresent surveillance. The promised technological improvements are slow to materialize. The authorities’ distrust of the potential for dissident online mobilization may be playing a role in this delay. Vietnam The progress made by Vietnam in the domain of human rights, which allowed the country to become a member of the World Trade Organization in 2007, is nothing but a distant memory. As the 2011 Communist Party Congress draws nearer, the regime is muffling dissident views on the Internet, and its first target is critics of the country’s policy toward China. Discuss