Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Youtube Propoganda and Political DDoS -- And History Over Time

UPDATE: This post began as a conspiracy theory and lesson for how decentralized information warfare is upon us, but now it seems to be true.  See below.

Participating in a Wikipedia article (Bronze Soldier) that is a breaking event where you understand some of the historical context and can gain access to needed language skills is a greater participatory experience than anything I've participated in by blogging.  Except when I'm generating first-hand reports.  But the interesting thing is the potential modern propoganda at play.  I wanted to share this with the obvious caveat that you can get a more conservative story from mainstream sources, it might help Wikipedia literacy for a breaking event and that it might be a form of modern propoganda. If I was truly conspiratorial would think stems from political institutions, and I do need to disclaim that the following may just be a conspiracy theory.

As of edit 04:07, 1 May 2007 the page took two interesting turns around a disinformation angle:

A number of video clips, usually taken via cellphone camera, have appeared on Youtube under the keyword 'eSStonia', ostensibly to corroborate the police brutality claims.^[68] Interestingly, most of them are mislabelled, apparently in an attempt to frame the incidents recorded in the clips in a pro-rioter way. For example, the clip labelled "eSStonia - Police car crushes pedestrians crowd" features no pedestrian-menacing cars.^[69]

I noticed these clips at the top of YouTube's most viewed the day after and thought the same.  If you want to deceive in time-based media, a cheap tactic while things are breaking is to send the quick and dirty message to people who won't really spend time.  This is similar to the episodic framing that mainstream media is prone to, and I hoped blogging could counter.  But this disinformation, potentially from one random idiot, is otherwise of great effect at low cost.

Since the riots took place in the centre of the city, after hours of tense situation, many thousands of frames of photographic and video material of the events are available, both from journalists and security cameras and from witnesses among general public (who usually used cellphone cameras). The police have gathered a number of such photographs depicting unidentified suspects on a website at [2] (not available from outside Estonia while a foreign DDoS attack on Estonian government servers is underway^[79]) and asked the public to identify such unidentified people.

The President's website (which I started a long time ago) and others are indeed inaccessible, but the above footnote is DDoS inaccessible, which may be a clever disinformation edit in-and-of-itself. this claim can be verified through other means than an Estonian TV broadcast found in the discussion page (time-based and language barriered comprehension).

But really, I share this because many people don't know how Wikipedia works, or have that bullshit detector that starts to blink in the corner of their eye when things don't make sense.  Because I would expect such tactics not only out of individuals for no good reason, but institutions for good reason, and you should assume it is the case.  If you can follow the evolution of a page, and understand that something breaking could be broken, you will otherwise find this Wikipedia article to be one of the very best sources for understanding the event.  But it is one source and you have to give it, and yourself, time.

These things happen every minute on Wikipedia.  Meanwhile my edits have survived because they were factual and well sourced.  And I'll be happy to find them and other good ones there in the future.  It was interesting to read how Clinton opined that "History may be kind to my friend Yeltsin."  I hope history is kind to how I wrote it when everyone is my editor.

UPDATE: The Estonian government says Russia is behind the cyber-attacks, according to the BBC.  For more see Robin Gurney, David Phillips and F-secure's weblog (a Finnish security company, source of the chart to the right).  For perspective, just consider how 50 years of occupation and being lied to in the news and history books would sensitize you to the Russian government's accusations and this kind of cyber-warfare.  As I've covered, Estonia has leap-frogged in its adoption of the internet, especially as a source for news.  Zone-H reports of widespread email outages, as well as the web:

Considering that in Estonia technology  and the Internet is covering a role more and more relevant in ordinary life ,  we cannot be surprised that the Net has become the public screen of this conflict. Several governmental web sites have been DoS attacked from abroad. Ddos attacks has been led from simple pings with large packets . Other attacks were carried out from botnets with syn and udp floods.  Finally, some prominent Estonian websites - such as Foreign Ministry site, that is very useful for foreigners -  have been completely inaccessible from abroad for some hours. 

However, the most creative successful attack was carried out  against  www.reform.ee, the website of Prime Minister Ansip political party. A fake statement that pretended to come from the Prime Minister himself  was placed on the home page, telling that "party apologises and promises to bring monument back to its location".

This may just be modern life with individuals behind the cyber-attacks.   An un-sourced claim on the Wikipedia discussion page says attacks came from a range of Russian government IP addresses.  But if you wanted to change perception of such a fast moving event in a coordinated fashion, wouldn't such tactics be employed?   I'm sure large governments are prepared to counter such moves.  But small countries, even if they are members of, say, the EU, should prepare against dis-information and to have their own communications with their peoples and the world not denied.

Web 2.0 Expo Podcasts

Dan Farber posted a full podcast of our panel on Enterprise 2.0 with Google and Zimbra to complement the brief video clip.  Stowe Boyd posted his talkshow, where I dialed in late enough for him to play a short conversation he recorded from the week before during Web 2.0 expo.  We then discussed adoption of Enterprise 2.0, and what might be different this time, and not.  Stowe suggests that since we have public examples like Wikipedia that are more visible, discoverable and persistent than email or IM, something might be accelerating.  We also talked about the role of rogue users today, and analysts for that matter.

Monumental Symbolism

An old Baltic joke that helps explain the differences of peoples is how each country got rid of their Lenin statue upon independence.  Lithuania gathered en mass and beat it to a pulp.  Latvia formed a committee and after much machination  dismantled it.  Estonia called a Finnish crane company on a mobile phone and had it hauled away quickly.

Now we are back to the same old story, but with Russian minority riots and great bear posturing.  The Estonian government decided to relocate the Bronze Soldier memorial, to Soviet soldiers who died fighting the Nazis at a time when Estonia was independent, from outside the national library in downtown Tallinn.  The international press is all over it, friends and colleagues are a little scared, and Pravda has their version of the news.

Practically, this was a nationalist fuck-up.  It didn't have to happen right before a Soviet holiday (yes, they still celebrate those, great way to tease out former soldiers and zealots living on the poverty line), and Russia has no problems causing a stink about it and calling Estonians Nazi zealots.  The Estonian government's reaction has been to tighten local security and stop selling booze after 2pm.  Hopefully both sides will sober up before this escalates.

UPDATE: Wikipedia and YouTube:

A Commune for Geeks

Salesforce launched an incubator for startups.  It is a similar proposition to the Socialtext Coworking space, but has a cost for the startup and is structured as a partnership program.  A BusinessWeek article interviewed me about it:

The corporate wiki firm Socialtext, for instance, just took on more office space in Palo Alto, but isn't using it all yet. So it's offering some of it to software developers who will write open-source wiki software that supports Socialtext's and other companies' wiki software.

"Real estate is the leading cause of death for startups," notes Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield. "This is sort of a commune for nerds." That's the vibe Salesforce will need to create if it wants to hatch its vision of a new software industry.

I think I said geek instead of nerd, but no matter.  And I stand by my fear of real estate not being put to use effectively.

We started Socialtext virtually, and most of the company remains distributed.  When we got our first office space over two years into the company, we had some extra room.  So we hosted the first Barcamp and gave space for Podtech and Mozes to get started.  Now we have some new room next door and the coworking practice (check out coworking spaces in a town near you) provides a more unstructured way of opening the door to others.  A couple of folks stop by and cowork regularly now and the we just finished the noisy construction.  If you are ever in downtown Palo Alto, just stop by.

Social Technographics and a Power Law of Participation

Charlene Li at Forrester just came out with a report on Social Technographics that surveyed user engagement.  The framework is very similar to my Power Law of Participation, but it is an entirely different thing to have some data behind it.

I haven't seen the report itself, but Steve Rubel says "this is the first report I have seen that really delves into what drives and motivates people to engage with the web."  I'll get a copy of it and see.

But I still contend that a more ideal community is scale free in structure.  What I wonder is if you could benchmark these levels of engagement against a power law -- not just to test Forrester's findings, but to help a given company realize -- "we are under-weighted in critics!"

UPDATE: I got a copy of the report, which is a pragmatic approach that starts by valuing different kinds of participation.  A given site could survey its users to understand existing psychodemographic profiles, then review participation points.  It may discover latent potential in the Creator category and create a participation point for them.  How the profiles vary by age is interesting:

• Teenagers create more than any other generation. Youth between 12 and 17 years old are avid
  users of Social Computing technologies, with more than one-third engaging as Creators. But
  this is a fairly self-centered age group — while very likely to create their own content, they are
  less likely than Gen Yers to be Critics and Collectors...
• Joiners dominate Gen Yers. While this age group has higher percentages in each category than
  every other age group (except for youth Creators), it’s their sky-high participation in social
  networks that stands out. In fact, there are slightly more Joiners than Spectators — meaning
  that Gen Yers are less likely to passively read, watch, or listen to social media, even when it’s
  created by their peers...
• Gen X Spectators form the foundation for future participation. While significantly fewer
  members of Gen X are at the top of the participation ladder, that four out of 10 are already
  using social media as Spectators means that they are well positioned to take the next step...

Also note that Creators self-identify themselves as leaders (38% say "I am a natural leader") than any other group, and those who participate in social software are greater influencers (Active categories range from 52-56% saying "I often tell my friends about products that interest me, compared to 33% for Inactives).

UPDATE: Phil Wolff's remix is seriously funny:

Wikis, Blogs and Health Care

Two years ago we facilitated a wiki for the World Health Care congress, an experience that gave me a deep dive into the health care industry.  A laggard in adopting technology, there was significant focus on electronic medical records as a cost cutter, less to slice through bureaucracy, but compared to alternative reforms it required zero political courage.

So it is refreshing to find someone in health care talking about blogs, wikis and transparency:

Openness causes accountability. I’ll never forget the first time I heard that hospitals are killing hundreds of thousands of people each year through medical errors. It was a chilling reality that clearly demonstrated that every hospital should publish its mortality rates, infection rates and readmission rates. It was a telling story of the power of secrecy and conversely of the power of transparency.

So, the national electronic medical record is already predictably doomed to a loss of 6,020,000 human souls as we simply calculate the 2 percent miss rate. The equivalent to 40,000 757 airplanes dropping out of the air each year, fully loaded.

Let’s force transparency in health care, and insurance, and the building industry and the investment industry and law. Well, you probably see where I’m coming from on this one.

I'm sure the vendors of electronic medical records sold increased accuracy as a primary value proposition, just like how Diebold sold votes electronic voting.

Unpacking the Sound Bite

Mike Gotta rightly points out that there is more to the story than what I said in the 5 minute outtake from my panel on Enterprise 2.0:

A quick video snippet from the conference can be found below (enjoyable to watch over morning coffee). Some comments:

Ross makes a point on "enterprise 2.0 tools" changing organizational culture. While there is clearly an co-relationship between tools and cultural change, tools themselves do not change culture. You can throw blogs out there and see them succeed or fail - there is no defacto guarantee of cultural change. Cultural change does not rest with technology alone - other methods and practices that address organizational dynamics are equally (I would argue more) important. Change is a complex choreography and as new ways of doing things takes shape, new tools are one facet of that emergence. So tools can indeed help enable all types of transformation (expected and unexpected), but there is no silver bullet, you need to do more than deploy technology.

I think Mike knows how I (and Socialtext) value practices as a more than necessary condition for deriving value from tools.  But I'll also make one argument, about how the change in tools may be deterministic for changing culture and about cultural spillover.  Blogs and Wikis are inherently more transparent than email, where 90% of collaboration occurs.  Users are first gaining exposure to these tools as consumers, within consumer culture.  The default in that culture with these tools is transparency and sharing.  Corporate cultures vary. I can say that we see earlier adoption by corporations with healthy cultures and management practices such as 360 degree reviews, and adoption practices matter.  But it should be noted that consumer culture spills over to corporate culture.  And because this culture shift aids practice building, I'd assert that these tools will trend us towards transparency.

But to violently agree with Mike, when a deployment invests in practices and management shares a goal of changing culture, the transformational opportunity is significantly greater.

Web 2.0 Expo and Knowledge As Power

With 10,000 people at Web 2.0 Expo, a curtain was pulled back to reveal the room adjoining the echo chamber.  With more people than Techcrunch subscribers, you had to ask, "who are these people?"  Oh, right, our markets and communities.  People of the web, perhaps with more zeal or entrepreneurial interest than people who "get their news from the web."  The diversity was really refreshing although after helping out on both the Socialtext and SuiteTwo booths, it was exhausting.

My keynote panel seemed to go well, here's a five minute video clip.  We announced that VisiblePath is joining SuiteTwo to go beyond wikis, blogs and RSS into Social Networking for the Enterprise.  In a breakout panel we had a chance to explore it further, but the interesting part was the participation from Cisco and P&G, two leading companies that are pragmatically adopting best-of-breed social software.  Both of them agreed with the need for further standards in this area, such as Amo.

Thanks mostly to the effort of Tara Hunt and Chris Messina, Web2Open was a success.  My favorite session was learning about KnowledgeAsPower, something that wouldn't have made its way to the big stage, trying to apply Web 2.0 to a real problem in politics.  How elected representatives interface with their constituency.

Sarah Schacht noticed a significant disconnect from the policies made just miles away between New Hampshire and Vermont.  Vermont has a greater number of representatives to citizens and potentially as a result was able to develop some better health care legislation in touch with citizen needs.  In the pre-progressive era (1890s) we had the highest voting rates in US history, between 90-94% of eligible voters did.  Largely because elected officials were closer to their constituents.  Town halls were actually held in town halls, or even barber shops.  The Civil Rights movement was borne of this era.

Today the population relative to elected officials has grown, and technology has become more of a problem than a solution.  The media has decreased their role in helping communicate on state issues to constituents. The best help for a citizen who wants to engage on a given issue is the website of a legislative body, but they are just official factual messages that have a 48 hour lag from staffers to website.  So they created a site for the State of Washington that lets a citizen subscribe to a specific issue or bill they are interested in and participate by sending Legislators email.

But the other problem is your average politician is consumed with email.  They use Outlook, and only have 1.5 staffers to help manage 800-1,300 demails per day.  With 90-120 day legislative sessions and lobbyists consuming time -- their outbound communication is limited to once or twice per session -- via newsletters, mass emails and town hall meetings.  She demoed their potential solution for the first time.  Citizens send email through a slightly structured web interface.  The legislator gets a dashboard for their email, with a row for each bill, enabling them to scan relative interest in different issues, number of emails pro/con and the ability to respond directly to different emergent groups.  I shared Politicopia with the session, which could be a great complement to their effort.

Sometimes we get caught up in the hype of cool social tools and forget that what we are doing is providing alternatives to email for social interaction, armed with backlinks, pings and feeds.  And the real value is when you can apply them to solving a specific problem. 

While my personal interests tend to draw me to such projects, if it wasn't for Web 2.0 Expo trying a hybrid open source business model with Web2Open, I wouldn't have found it or a way to contribute.  One person told me that a session by a guy who runs a comic book store was the best he saw in the event overall.  Wouldn't it be interesting if it became a feeder for the big stage.

Personalized Panopticon

I love it when people start debating the trivialness of social software content.  After all, isn't that how blogs got their start?  Can't we all see the logical progression from blogging to social networking to twitter to jaiku to justin.tv to scoblecam everyone having their own personalized panopticon?  Al Franken's One Man Mobile Uplink is inevitable.

Happy Sunday.

Web2Open

People felt left out of Web 2.0 in past events because of the cost of attending such a high-powered professionally produced program.  Similar to how some people felt left out from FooCamp by not being invited, but channeled their energies positively to create Barcamp with an open door principle.

Last year I had a conversation with Jen Pahlka about having a Barcamp-style event in parallel to Web 2.0, calling it Web2Open.  Chris Messina and Tara Hunt were similarly lobbying.  With Jen's effort, the good graces of Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle, some help from Brady Forrest -- it's all happening.

Free and open for you to participate:

• Sunday, April 15 - Ignite!Expo 7-9 pm
• Monday, April 16 - Community Roundtable 10am - 5pm
• Tuesday, April 17 - Web2Open 1pm - 7pm
• Wednesday, April 18 - Web2Open 1pm - 7pm

Throughout Web2Open, the Mashroom will be open for people to bring their APIs and do something together.

 

Web 2.0 Expo is going to be quite an event itself, of course.  We're talking Moscone scale now.  I'm on a keynote panel about Enterprise 2.0 alongside Satish Dharmaraj, Dan Farber and Subrah Iyar. Later Wednesday afternoon holding a workshop with Rob Rueckert, Michael Lenz, David Meyer, Joe Schueller. 

There are also a couple of parties.