Martin Moore

Ali Abdulemam is a blogger. He has blogged for Global Voices Advocacy and elsewhere. He created, managed and maintained www.bahrainonline.org (from Global Voices). He is an advocate of free speech and human rights.

He is also unlucky enough to live in Bahrain. Unlucky because Bahrain has decided that Abdulemam should not be allowed to blog. Specifically, the Bahrain government is today (Thursday 28th October) putting Abdulemam on trial for:

‘diffusing fabricated and malicious news on Bahrain’s internal situation to spread rumours and subvert the Kingdom’s security and stability’ (from Bahrain News Agency).

This is the same ‘business friendly’ Bahrain that appeared to be making an effort to open up over the last decade and allow greater freedom of speech.

Abdulemam’s case has been written about in The Atlantic (‘In Bahrain, a vital moment for liberal Arab grassroots‘), and the Wall Street Journal (‘The Real Bahrain‘). In the WSJ Joshua Colangelo-Bryan writes that Abdulemam has not been allowed to speak to lawyers and, when his family tried to visit him they were told there was no record of his arrest. After the intervention of Human Rights Watch Abdulemam’s family were subsequently allowed to visit him, with security personnel present.

The Wall Street Journal and Al Jazeera set Abdulemam’s arrest and trial in the wider context of a crackdown on dissent within Bahrain.

There is a campaign to free Abdulemam at http://freeabdulemam.wordpress.com/, and you can read some of his previous posts at Global Voices Online here.

I’m grateful to Adrian Monck for alerting me to Abdulemam’s case and trial today.

Links to stuff I’ve read this week about where news may – or may not – be going:

The AP’s new ecosystem for news distribution (from Nieman Lab)

• Martin Langeveld explains – better than I did in my PBS blog in August – how metadata can create new business models for news on the web. The AP is setting up a B2B independent rights clearing house for news, built on its news registry which is itself based on the hNews microformat we developed with the AP (thanks to grants from the Knight and MacArthur foundations)

Editorial guidelines for linking and commenting

• The Guardian released guidelines for its journalists on commenting and blogging, hot on the heels of the BBC’s new editorial guidelines – that include (rather complicated) guidance on linking. The Washington Post also published bizarrely censorious rules constraining its journalists from engaging in discussions on twitter
• Guardian’s 8 blogging & commenting guidelines, BBC’s new editorial guidelines, Washington Post memo (on TBD)

Why journalists should be aiming for 100%

• Jay Rosen proposed a 100% solution for gathering news which was as much about the journey as the destination. Paul Bradshaw then built on this with a template outlining how Rosen’s plan might work
• PressThink, The 100% solution: for innovation in news. Online Journalism Blog, A template for 100% reporting

A mega organogram – the one that keeps Cameron up at night

• A mash-up of organizational charts from all across government, put together by Conrad Quilty-Harper (@connee) for Telegraph.co.uk

Crowdsourcing news on the spending cuts – Wherearethecuts.org

• The Open Knowledge Foundation started crowdsourcing information about where the cuts are happening in the week of the UK spending review – powered by the mapping platform recently made famous by Clay Shirky – Ushahidi

Proposal to open up council budgets for comparison

• Chris Taggart, of Openly Local, proposed making council budgets – that are currently difficult to access and a nightmare to compare – openly available in a re-usable format on the web
• Opening up councils… and open procurement

Finding journalism outside journalism

• Great post by Judith Townend about how only if it stops being so introverted can journalism reinvent itself

Words & phrases I learnt this week:

Bloviator (Rupert Murdoch): someone who speaks pompously

Google surge: buying up all ads on all Google products in a specific geographical area on a specific date (e.g. election day)

Facebook social power play: the same thing but on Facebook

Imaginary cosmopolitanism: Ethan Zuckerman’s phrase to describe our shallow knowledge of world affairs

The interview starts very low key. Owen Bennett-Jones asks US pastor Terry Jones, the Christian pastor who threatened to burn 200 copies of the Koran, how he feels about the episode now. The pastor replies he has no regrets and that he believes the escalation of the episode was simply an indication of its importance.

Bennett-Jones moves gently on to ask the Pastor about his congregation in Florida (previously 50-strong, now down to about 30), his small town background, his conservative Christian upbringing and the development of his faith. By the time the World Service interviewer has begun asking about his religious qualifications I was wondering where it was all going and was about to switch over.

But then the tone of the interview starts to change and, over the next 20 minutes, Bennett-Jones brilliantly exposes the Pastor as unrepresentative, uninformed, and entirely unqualified to make any substantive comments about Christianity, let alone Islam. In doing so the World Service journalist also shows up the absurdity of elevating such a shallow bigot to the international stage.

The slow opening turns out to be a platform on which Bennett-Jones can show the Pastor’s astonishingly limited exposure to other faiths and lack of qualifications. It means the interviewer can then ask Terry Jones how he has come to his views on homosexuality (that ‘it is not right’ and ‘leads to death’). The Pastor cites the Bible and confirms that Leviticus is one of his sources.

“I notice you have a trimmed neat beard” Bennett-Jones then says. Yet “Leviticus states that you shouldn’t cut the hair at the sides of your head. Why are you in breach of Leviticus?”. The Pastor pleads ignorance; ‘I am not a theologian’. Bennett-Jones persists: “Do you ever wear garments of mixed fibres?” The Pastor tries to laugh this one off. But Bennett-Jones does not let go. If you do these things, he asks, “On what basis do you choose various bits of Leviticus [e.g. to condemn homosexuality] and not others?”

From the superficiality of his knowledge of the Bible, the interviewer moves on to his knowledge of Islam. On this subject you would have thought Terry Jones would be quite well-versed. He has written a book called ‘Islam is of the devil’ (2010), and he has threatened to burn 200 copies of it publicly. Yet, when Bennett-Jones asks him if he has read the Koran the Pastor confesses that he has not (“I do not need to read the Koran” he says, since all he needs to know is in the Bible). He cannot explain Ramadan. He cannot even say how many times a day a Muslim prays. He has not tried to speak to Muslims, and the only country he has been to with a Muslim majority is Egypt.

Therefore, Bennett-Jones shows, the Pastor’s ideas about Islam are based on nothing but his own prejudices. So why on earth did the world media (with notable exceptions) focus so much attention on him ? Why did it get to the point that the US Secretary of State and President had to intervene?

Trying to be very charitable one could say the media believed Terry Jones’ threats highlighted broader US public concerns, animated by plans to build a mosque near the 9/11 site in New York.

But why the poverty of journalistic scrutiny? Bennett-Jones may have provided a masterclass in interview technique, but where was the journalism three weeks before? Did anyone spend the time to work out that there was no reason to focus on Terry Jones’ threat since he was almost entirely unrepresentative?

This interview is a terrific justification of good journalism. It’s just a shame no-one did it three weeks ago.

‘The Interview: Pastor Terry Jones‘ – was first broadcast on the BBC World Service on 2nd October 2010

There are weeks where you learn a lot. This, for me, has been one of them. I’ve been immersed in talks and discussions about the future of the web – first at the Royal Society in London, then out at the Kavli Centre out in Buckinghamshire (a sort of Bletchley Park type retreat for scientists).

I’ll let others much smarter and more tech-savvy than me talk about the tech stuff (which you can read about here, and here, with more to come). My particular interest was with what the future of the web means for journalism and public interest news.

On this I learnt two big things. One about the importance of metadata (which I’ve written lots about already). The other about the value of collective attention. Journalists think a lot about individual attention (ie how you grab someone’s attention), and have begun thinking about collective intelligence (ie how the public can help fill the role of the Fourth Estate), but much less about the value of collective attention.

Collective attention, in the sense of lots and lots of people around the world focusing on the same thing, has come of age with the internet. It is one thing to have 10 million people watching an episode of a soap opera on TV. It is another order of magnitude to have 500 million people updating their Facebook profiles.

Luis von Ahn, a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, has thought a lot about collective attention. Ahn has spent the last decade or so mulling over how to use people’s collective intelligence for useful and constructive ends, as he told the audience at the Royal Society on Tuesday.

It started with captcha. You know, that annoying distorted text you have to reproduce when you’re signing up to a web service like gmail.

von Ahn invented captcha to help stop spamming. But, having invented it, he started feeling guilty. Guilty that he was taking up 6-10 seconds of millions of people’s time to do something pretty useless in the bigger scheme of things. Indeed he felt so guilty that he decided to reinvent captcha so that it would do something useful.

Captcha uses human intelligence to interpret something a computer can’t. A computer cannot read horribly distorted letters and numbers, a human can. What else can a human read but a computer can’t, von Ahn asked himself. Old books. Old books and manuscripts are often hand written, or typed in fonts that are incomprehensible to computers. This doesn’t matter if you’re sitting in a library reading books but is a real problem if you want to digitise them and make them widely available on the net.

But what if you could take the words from old books that a computer can’t read, and put them into captcha? That way you can harness human intelligence towards a constructive end. So this is what von Ahn did.

Having come up with the idea and how to do it he then did a deal with Google, which made captcha (now renamed ‘re-captcha’) freely available to others – provided it could collect the words people typed in for use in digitising books.

There are now 750 million people a year typing re-captchas. That means 750 million people interpreting words scanned from old books. That translates into about 2 million books now being digitised each year.

Luis von Ahn is not alone. Many others are trying to harness the collective attention (nb see The Social Computer experiment), but what about public interest journalism?

Spot.us has recently started using collective attention to help fund stories. The site (run by the endlessly creative thinking David Cohn) enables people to donate money for news stories they want investigated. The problem is, it turns out lots of people want things investigated but don’t have much money to donate (e.g. students). So Cohn got around this by asking them to donate time rather than money.

If they take the time to fill in a survey then they earn ‘credits’ which they can then donate to an investigation. The credits translate into real money thanks to partnerships spot.us has organized with various companies.

Collective intelligence is slightly different. With collective attention you’re not asking too much of the public, outside a little bit of their attention. With collective intelligence you’re asking the public to perform a task – scrutinize public documents for example. The Guardian has done this with MPs expenses. The Straight Choice did this in a different way by crowd sourcing election materials. In the internet age there is clearly a big role for collective intelligence, but so is there for collective attention (though the line between the two will often be blurred).

Many news websites now count their audiences in the tens of millions each month. Yet despite these astonishing numbers they find it very hard to earn enough in advertising revenue to fund original journalism. Maybe they need to be more creative about how they harness collective intelligence.