In itself this fact is worrisome. At the request of a government Facebook decides, at its own judgment, to curtail the individual freedom of 30 people (for though they are in prison and they are crime offenders, they are still people), without the intervention of a judge to guarantee the respect of fundamental rights. It seems that victims, government and Facebook (!) are the new authorities with regards to online freedom.

But it gets worse, for these new authorities are taking their self-assigned responsibilities very seriously, according to their declarations reported on today’s International Herald Tribune (print-version).

Gary Trodwell of Families United, a group founded by relatives of young murder victims, said:

When someone is convicted of a crime he loses his civil liberty through sentencing…We say he should lose his cyberliberty as well.”

Will Mr. Trodwell run for Parliament to get that law passed?

Even worse, John Straw commenting on the excessive time that took Facebook to take off the pages (48 hours!), he said:

What we’ve got to do is set up a better system with Facebook so that if they get a notice from us that this site is improper the all tehy have to do is not make a judgment about it but press the delete button”

What about given the same powers to China or Iran, Mr. Straw?

Even, even worse, Facebook wants to become the online sheriff, or at least that’s what Sophie Silver, a Facebook spokeswoman, is implying when she affirms that:

Facebook is absolutely committed to keeping its sites safe and clean…[the web could] be a wild an unruly place. Facebook tries to put some rules and protocols on top of the unruly Web.”

Wow, good thing we have Facebook, don’t you think? Otherwise we’ll be all online raped and smuggled by the scary people populating the “wild and unruly” online world!

Today, we know that the body claimed as Pilar’s is not hers (in English). Apparently, the United Nations Police, UNPOL, made a mistake in the recognition of her body. The Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs discovered the truth after checking the fingerprints. Her furious husband said that he was “disgusted” by this “very serious mistake.” He accused international organizations and donors of lack of proper channels of information and coordination among them.

Meanwhile, a relatively small organization called Ushahidi was mounting an impressive network of people to gather information on the field to help the coordination of aid assistance and rescue missions, which has been translated into a website (haiti.ushahidi.com) gathering all the reports they receive via SMS and web apps. On the Ushahidi Situation Room, Patrick Philippe Meier, one of the persons behind this effort of humanitarian crowdsourcing and writer of the blog iRevolution, tells us about a

live Skype chat between Anna here in the Sit Room and Eric Rasmussen (InSTEDD and former Chief Medical Officer of the US Navy). Eric skyping from tarmac of PoP airport asking for GPS coordinates of the most obscure addresses, sites, locations and Anna providing these in record time. She has wowed the entire team in PaP including military, UN, etc. Incredible to witness all this real time networking and collaboration.

Witness the gap between an international organization that is trapped in old bureaucratic, unnecessary and expensive procedures and the agility, low-cost efforts of a network of people sharing information. The gap is how they treat and respect information. One understands information as a secondary element of “action”, whatever the latter means. Ushahidi is born with information at its core. We need to understand that information is not what is written on a paper, stored in a computer or in a book, information is alive and it is the most essential element for action. Without information one is blinded. Information is not what an expert knows, it is what everybody knows and shares. The arrogance of bureaucratic organizations is their own nemesis, for they think they know, when they don’t. They thought they knew where Pilar was. The truth was unfortunately not theirs.

This morning I checked my twitter. Yesterday I checked my twitter. Until this weekend, most of the people I followed where in the US and other English-speaking countries. Basically it was mostly in English. After this weekend, after attending the PDFEU in Barcelona, I started to follow more people in Spain and, particularly, in Catalunya. Until now I was getting information about a variety of issues regarding internet, politics, culture… from the English world. Now I see information mainly from Spain and Catalunya. What happened? You will say that now I follow, in proportion, more people from there, but actually I don’t. What happened is that among all the new followed people there were US people and Spanish people, in more or less equal proportion. What happened is that I checked my twitter when the latter are awake and the former are sleeping. A time chamber is being created. It makes me think that geography/location is still very important on the Internet. Or even, location is becoming even more important than before, an apparent paradox, but it is not.

This makes me think about the question of acknowledging sources. Shouldn’t the journalist always acknowledge their sources of information? So the person writing the wikipedia article should have indicated that he/she did so. This also raises the recurrent question of credibility and quality of sources of information and knowledge on and off line.

What about a web site that uses participatory technologies to rate the credibility of media and webpages? Does it already exist? Could it be launched?

Our approach is to consider that uploading, tagging and disclosing the location of a photo can be interpreted as an act of communication rather than a pure implicit history of physical presence. For this purpose, we retrieved from Flickr, large amounts of photo taken by thousands of users in the world’s most photographed cities. Based on the time, explicit location and people’s description of their photos, we design geovisualizations. They reveal patterns of tourists and citizens consuming a city, such as the flow of people between city attractions (see figures below), the monuments areas of influence or what is happening with day/night and working/weekend periodicity

More info

The Internet has profoundly changed journalism, but not necessarily in ways that were predicted even a few years ago, a study on the industry released Sunday found.

It was believed at one point that the Net would democratize the media, offering many new voices, stories and perspectives. Yet the news agenda actually seems to be narrowing, with many Web sites primarily packaging news that is produced elsewhere, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual State of the News Media report.

I don’t know whether journalist is taking a liberty by saying that “the news agenda actually seems to be narrowing” or the report is actually concluding this. I haven’t read the report, but the two examples this article is using to illustrate this change are not really convincing:

Two stories – the war in Iraq and the 2008 presidential election campaign – represented more than a quarter of the stories in newspapers, on television and online last year, the project found.
Take away Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, and news from all of the other countries in the world combined filled up less than 6 percent of the American news hole, the project said.

What about the previous situation? Where is the comparison to measure a change? Is there a narrowing movement or a resilience of the old situation at the top, that is, no change in the big stories, and a change at the bottom, namely a booming in different types of small stories? How many different stories represent these 75% and then 6%? These figures count the number of stories, what’s their audience? And of the 25% reporting the war in Iraq and the elections, how diverse are these stories? Too many questions.

Besides, for an article that includes this paragraph:

Most news Web sites are no longer final destinations. The report found that many users insist that the sites, and even individual pages, offer plenty of options to navigate elsewhere for more information, the project found. Rosenstiel said he’s even able to reach Washington Post stories through the New York Times’ Web site

It is rather disappointing that I had to go to Google to find a link to the State of the Media report.

They should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price. Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic, and will be alike influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.

Corruption is one of the matters that interest me the most. Corruption is at the root of the fundamental problems that affect democracies. Corruption is a historical malaise of human civilization. Corruption is a product of human action, its elimination will only be by human action. The informational empowerment offered by the Internet to the individuals is part of the solution. If we use the Internet to be aware of cases of corruption, denounce them and react against them, we will be making the culprits’ lives much harder. Information is very powerful; together with rapid communication and seamless interaction, it can be an effective weapon against those that “purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price.”

The Internet’s current trajectory is one of lost opportunity. Its salvation, Zittrain argues, lies in the hands of its millions of users. Drawing on generative technologies like Wikipedia that have so far survived their own successes, this book shows how to develop new technologies and social structures that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and become true “netizens.”

Following the trend at the OII, I feel like blogging about Facebook (see Jonathan Zittrain and Ian Brown‘s posts on it). My perspective is, however, a bit different. It is more related with the stickiness of this successful web app. It seems that in order to delete your account in Facebook you have to go through considerable pains according to a NYT article. Facebook archives the information you entered in the past, and even if you deactivate your account your data stays for a “reasonable amount of time” in the company’s servers.

Facebook’s terms of use state that “you may remove your user content from the site at any time,” but also that “you acknowledge that the company may retain archived copies of your user content.”

Its privacy policy says that after someone deactivates an account, “removed information may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time.”

Apparently, the rationale of this policy is too gather as much demographic data possible for the use of advertisers, basically to “monetize the investment.” Sometime ago, I blogged about this kind of behaviour on Blog of Change’s post titled “Startup hubris and the commercialisation of the Internet.” Then I said that

[t]hese startups are managed by thoses kids that think and act with lots of self-confidence, to the point of hubris. For that’s the only way they can be heard and survive in this wild world of Internet business. Unfortunately, I reckon they control and manage the information given to them by the users/customers with the same hubris. They do think it is their information and they should use it for getting their businesses right. Indeed, they need to respect certain principles to get the confidence of the users/customers, but beyond that the information is theirs.

Facebook is certainly behaving this way…

The New York Times reports that several major libraries in the US have rejected offers from Microsoft and Google to digitilise their books because ” they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.” They are instead signing with the Open Content Alliance (OCA), a non-profit project to  make the books available to the broadest number possible, though the libraries have to pay the cost of scanning the books.

“The Open Content Alliance is the brainchild of Brewster Kahle, the founder and director of the Internet Archive, which was created in 1996 with the aim of preserving copies of Web sites and other material. The group includes more than 80 libraries and research institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution.”

It seems that those that work with Google and Microsoft “must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services.” While the OCA makes the material available to all. Oxford is currently working with Google.

The main worry among academics, researchers and librarians is that companies could exploit commercially the digitilisation if any or some of them control the process. The commitment to openness is very important for some of the libraries that have signed with the OCA, like the Boston Public Library.

The likely outcome is a mix between private companies and non-profit organizations to make it as open and effective as possible. So not a single one can control such an important process. As Brewster Kahle says

“Scanning the great libraries is a wonderful idea, but if only one corporation controls access to this digital collection, we’ll have handed too much control to a private entity.”