To refer to the worldwide protests of 2011 as the Arab Spring is to mark a serious misnomer.

"Gladwell's distinction between hierarchical vs. decentralized movements is a very necessary one-- but the claim that all offline activism is centralized while all campaigns that rely on digital tools are ad hoc and without direction, is a rather sweeping and strange argument."

Food for thought.

"the Obama administration will permit technology companies to export online services like instant messaging, chat and photo sharing to Iran, Cuba and Sudan"

"For all the sound and fury, citizen journalism once again did nothing but spread misinformation at a time when thousands people with family at the base would have been freaking out already, and breach the privacy of those who had been killed or wounded. We learned not a single new fact, nor was a single life saved."

"Last week’s riots led to something of a phenomenon in Uganda. In a country that has only recently gotten access to a fibre-optic cable and where a tiny fraction of the population are online, the Internet, for the first time, played a central role in disseminating information."

"It was scary, it was fun, it was deadly, it was beautiful. It was in essence, a coming of age. We were seeing technology in Uganda rise up to fill a gaping void and empower social change. It was the start of something wonderful, amazing, and big."

TechMasai gives Ugandan netizens a C-

"@rmugabe–Karibu! Twitter is the new revolution! Mbasongo & Biya are already on. Convince Mubarak, Compaoré & other comrades 2 join. A luta continua!"

"We face at least three filters in the voices we hear - access, language and bias."

"It's now been more than two weeks since the election, and although the prospects of the Iranian protest movement remain uncertain, the future of the world's armchair revolutionaries looks bright."

when saving lives trumps open "democracy" online

"What’s really interesting to me is the extent to which news reporters seem to have chosen Twitter as the go-to source for reactions to news events. It makes sense - there’s a premium in the news business on speed, on having a story faster than anyone else does, so the need for the quick quote makes Google hours to slow to help you. And the 140 character limit guarantees that whoever you quote will be pithy and limited to a single soundbite.

This, in turn, also increases the chance that you’ll be wrong."

"Look for sources that disprove your thesis. Go outside the country and outside your comfort zone. See what, say, China's news agency reports about the protests."

"Imagine, for a second, if banks had been run by Tweet instead of by executive suite: would Wall Street have been able to loot its depositors silly? Nope. Authentic value doesn't hide in the shadows."

wondering why I haven't seen this until now

",,,the medium is hard to dismiss as a reporters' tool, particularly in countries where cell-phone networks reach farther than the internet. At 4:53 am local time on January 18th Juliana Rotich, a blogger in Kenya, tweeted in her own cablese, “in town n