virtualeconomics

Time waits for one man

Now that Julian Assange has won the popular vote for Time Man of the Year (with twice as many votes as the Turkish Prime Minister in second) there seems little doubt that Lieberman, Palin et al will be hammering on the editors' doors demanding this honour not be confirmed by the magazine. 

The cool thing for Time to to do now would to publish in full any and all communications it receives from representatives of the Federal Government in this matter. It seems Time readers are big fans of crusaders for open government. Why not join in?

Press release from Anonymous (probably)

Under the grandiose headline "attention all media" Anonymous just issued a press release (pdf) which attempts to both clarify some popular misconceptions about the make-up of what they are calling not a group but "an Internet gathering", as well as outline the intentions of that gathering.

The whole thing is worth a read. The relatively formal language seems like a deliberate strategy to shift the public image of Anonymous away from mitteleuropan teenagers and make the whole thing seem more credible; if so, it works, insofar as the release sounds like any other association making a reasonable case for what its members are doing and why. The key message is what Operation Payback is intended to achieve:

"The point of Operation: Payback was never to target critical infrastructure of any ofthe companies or organizations affected. Rather than doing that, we focused on their corporatewebsites, which is to say, their online "public face". It is a symbolic action - as blogger andacademic Evgeny Morozov put it, 'a legitimate expression of dissent'." 

Wikileaks tips over one million Facebook "likes"

Some time in the last hour Wikileaks passed the one million Facebook "likes" mark. In the world of investigative journalism, Wikileaks is now ahead of the New York Times and every other major newspaper in terms of Facebook popularity, and behind only The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, both with "likes" in the 1.5m to 2m range.  

Is it a big deal? It's a significant milestone, and one that other news organisations have so far failed to reach so nods to a shift in the journalism landscape. And if you see the Wikileaks drama in terms of power vs The Internet, which is a popular enough narrative, then of course it matters that Wikileaks can raise this level of popular support. Power vs the Internet only makes sense if the Internet is really on board and this is one of the key markers that it is (or, one should say, we are). As John Naughton wrote in the Guardian (HT Emily Bell)

"The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet."

It's perfectly clear where they stand. Let's make sure they know where we do. 

Never mind Twitter's strange trends: Wikileaks on course to become most "liked" source of investigative journalism in the world

Correction: EasyDNS has done nothing of the sort, and I stand corrected on this point. For more details see their blog or Techdirt. In fact they have been added to the new DNS delegation for Wikileaks.ch and are in this case on the side of the angels. 

Original post: Not only is Wikileaks a media entity: given its current trajectory, it is on track to very shortly become the most "liked" source of investigative journalism in the world.

At more than 913,000 "likes" at time of writing, and with its phenomenal rise* from nowhere to one of the most popular pages on the social graph, Wikileaks should now touch a million likes before the New York Times (hovering around 980k) does, putting it in global first place for serious investigative journalism "liked" by Facebook users voting with their clicks. Amongst comparably serious journalism practitioners the Guardian's main Facebook page sits at 54k likes, BBC News at 51k, HuffPo at 171k. Only crypto-serious news satire like the Onion, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report are ahead with likes in the 1.5m to 2m range (nothing to sneeze at, since satirical news audiences are the best informed in America); the biggest media channel of any sort by likes is Disney at 14.5m, assuming we exclude Facebook's own almost 30m.  

Yesterday it looked (a lot) like Twitter was censoring Wikileaks from trending - see this excellent research for details, though Twitter has a semi-plausible, Googley "our algorithim is really quite complicated" explanation for why it's all above board. (Google itself has refused to respond to enquiries from The Atlantic as to whether it would take down Wikileaks cables if they were published on Blogger.)

But even if Twitter doesn't want to show, or for complex and thoroughly counter-intuitive reasons uses an algorithm that doesn't show, the fastest-rising social media trend of the last fortnight, Facebook's likes show the trend unambiguously.