Student 'Twitters' his way out of Egyptian jail: CNN

April 25, 2008

By Mallory Simon

CNN

James Karl Buck helped free himself from an Egyptian jail with a one-word blog post from his cell phone.

Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were arrested April 10.
On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.
The message only had one word. "Arrested."
Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt -- the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier -- were alerted that he was being held.
Twitter is a social-networking blog site that allows users to send status updates, or "tweets," from cell phones, instant messaging services and Facebook in less than 140 characters.
Hossam el-Hamalawy, a Cairo-based blogger at UC-Berkeley, was one of the people who got word of Buck's arrest.
"At first I was worried about his safety," el-Hamalawy said.
Then, el-Hamalawy took to the Web and wrote regular updates in his own blog to spread the information Buck was sending by Twitter. Nobody was sure how long Buck would be able to communicate.

See Buck describe what he saw and captured on film during the protests »
Don't Miss
James Karl Buck's Twitter page
Buck's Web site, statement and petition

But Buck was able to send updates every couple of hours saying he was still detained, he had spoken to the prosecutor, he still had not been charged, and he was worried about Maree.
"Usually the first thing the police go for is the detainees' cameras and cellular phones," el-Hamalawy said. "I'm surprised they left James with his phone."
Twitter is normally used to keep groups of people connected in less urgent situations. Watch how Twitter works »
But Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, said he and others knew that the service could have wide-reaching effects early on, when the San-Francisco, California-based company used it to communicate during earthquakes.
Stone said that as the service got more popular, they began to hear stories of people using Twitter during natural disasters with a focus on activism and journalism.
Buck's urgent message is proof of the value of Twitter, Stone said. Buck's entry set off a chain of events that led to his college hiring a lawyer on his behalf.
"James' case is particularly compelling to us because of the simplicity of his message -- one word, 'arrested' -- and the speed with which the whole scene played out," Stone said. "It highlights the simplicity and value of a real-time communication network that follows you wherever you go."
Initially, the Twitter message was a precaution -- something people could trace in case anything went wrong, Buck said.
"The most important thing on my mind was to let someone know where we were so that there would be some record of it ... so we couldn't [disappear]," Buck said. "As long as someone knew where we were, I felt like they couldn't do their worst [to us] because someone, at some point, would be checking in on them."
Buck began using Twitter as a way to keep up in touch with the bloggers at the heart of his project and the events going on in Egypt that he intended to cover. Buck was working on a multimedia project on Egypt's "new leftists and the blogosphere" as part of his master's degree thesis.
Buck found out from a Twitter message that a planned protest against rising food prices and decreasing wages in Mahalla had been shut down by Egyptian authorities April 6.
The next day, tensions rose as family and friends of protesters who had been detained took to the streets, eventually throwing Molotov cocktails and setting tires on fire, he said.
On April 10, Buck returned to Mahalla, where protests continued.
"I was worried about getting arrested, so I made sure to stay at a distance from the protest so there was no way I could be accused of being part of it," Buck said. "Mohammed and I had a bad sense; it was really tense."
When the men tried to escape, they were detained. That's when Buck thought of Twitter and sent out his message.
Buck and Maree were interrogated, released and then detained again by the same police officers.
"We are really worried that we are off the radar now," Buck said.
Eventually Buck was released, but Maree was transferred to another police station.
As he left the station, Buck reached into his pocket, as he did less than 24 hours earlier.
Another one-word blog entry said it all: "Free."
As happy as he was to be free, Buck said, his biggest frustration was leaving behind the translator who helped protect him during the riots.
Although the Twitter message helped him find contacts to get out of prison, he says it was more the power of the network he had as an American that enabled him to be released so quickly.
"Mohammed was sitting next to me," he said. "But he didn't have the network to call. I tried to use my network to shield him until they tore us apart."
Twitter may not have been able to secure Maree's release, but Buck hopes his initial reason for using Twitter will help find his missing friend.
"It was my big hope that people would get [the message] right away and at least put a thumbtack on the map as far as our location," Buck said.
There has been no official confirmation regarding Maree's whereabouts.
Attiya Shakran, press counsel for the Egyptian Consulate in San Francisco, said Maree was released April 13.
Maree's brother Ahmed Maree said that he had not heard from his brother and that he believes he is still in jail.
Government officials in Egypt could neither confirm nor deny Maree's release, despite repeated requests for comment.
Buck is now using his story and Twitter page as a way to rally people looking for answers about Maree's status. He's gone as far as publishing the phone number of the press counsel of the Egyptian Consulate in San Francisco and posting a petition for Maree's release.
For Buck, the main story is no longer about his quest for freedom from jail; it's a quest to find answers and, eventually, find his friend.

CNN Cairo's Housam Ahmed and Aneesh Raman contributed to this report.

Original Link: Student 'Twitters' his way out of Egyptian jail

Delivering the bits: Economist

Apr 18th 2008

From Economist.com

"Fear not, the dumb old internet can still cope

A DOZEN years have passed since David Isenberg, then a distinguished engineer at AT&T Labs, wrote his seminal essay “The Rise of the Stupid Network”. In it, he outlined how a new philosophy and architecture were changing the communications business, and pointed to some of the cataclysms ahead.
Far from being a scarce resource used intermittently, Dr Isenberg argued that future networks would be “always on”, with their intelligence located in the end-user’s equipment rather than within the network itself. They would make no fancy routing or traffic-management decisions; they would just “deliver the bits”.
Unlike the telephone circuits of the day, which used their built-in smarts to determine where messages were to be delivered, the data would tell the network where they wanted to go. In short, the data would be boss.

The stupid network Dr Isenberg had in mind was, of course, the internet we know today. Central to his vision was the radical notion that end-users—or customers—would be free to do as they pleased, and the network would make no assumptions about the kind or content of data being transmitted.
The engineering community applauded the idea. The phone companies (AT&T especially) thought it stank. And Dr Isenberg wound up working for himself.
Dr Isenberg will likely be watching this week’s deliberations by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with interest. As your correspondent was scribbling away, the FCC was preparing for its second hearing on network-management practices. The meeting, held at Stanford University on April 17th, concerns whether internet service providers (ISPs) should be allowed to shape, filter or even block content travelling over their networks.
The hearing stems from a complaint filed last autumn alleging that Comcast, America’s largest cable-TV company and one of its biggest ISPs, was blocking a perfectly legal file-sharing program called BitTorrent. Ever since, Comcast has been scrambling to prevent the FCC from rewriting its rules about peer-to-peer (P2P) software like BitTorrent, which is widely used to download video and other large multimedia files."

For more on this article please click on the following original link: Delivering the bits

Photo from Shutterstock

Semantic video analysis, Finding the right picture: Economist

Apr 22nd 2008

From Economist.com

"Engineers are making progress with the old problem of getting computers to recognise what they are looking at

A PICTURE may be worth a thousand words, but as far as a computer is concerned it is worth exactly none. One of the biggest impediments to the web-video revolution has been computers' reluctance to understand images. To a microprocessor, a photograph of James Bond might as well depict a cat in a tree. That can make tracking down a video on the web or searching through a film archive a painstaking task, unless someone has written a full and accurate description of each item being examined. Anyone who has tried to find a clip on YouTube will know how rare that is."

For more please click on the following original link: Finding the right picture

Pain in the aaS: Economist

Apr 24th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Online crooks adopt the software industry's new service-based model
IT WAS bound to happen. One after another, pieces of software have been moving online in a trend towards “software as a service” (SaaS). You can now manage your e-mail, write documents and edit spreadsheets using online services that run inside a web browser. This month Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, an accounting program, said more Americans filled out their tax returns this year using the online version of its product than the traditional one in a box. But now the trend has reached the darker corners of the software universe. Computer-security firms say criminals have adopted the new model too, and are offering “crimeware as a service” (CaaS).
Once the remit of malicious hackers vying for bragging rights, cybercrime is now about making money. “Criminal attacks are moving upmarket—they're now real businesses,” says Bruce Schneier, a security guru. A few years ago online outlaws started selling e-mail addresses, credit-card numbers and other personal information. Then they began trading information about weaknesses in computer systems and selling software kits to exploit them, complete with technical support and updates. More recently they have taken to setting up and then renting out “botnets”—huge groups of hijacked computers, infected with malicious software, that can be activated remotely to flood a website with bogus requests or send millions of “spam” e-mails.


The new offerings, which go by names such as NeoSploit and 76service, take commercialisation to the next level by allowing criminals to use and pay for such nefarious services via a web browser. Just as companies that adopt SaaS no longer need armies of support technicians, says Yuval Ben-Itzhak of Finjan, a computer-security firm, criminals using CaaS no longer need to be hackers. One web-based service he found even allows customers to specify a target group, such as British lawyers or American doctors. Once enough of their machines have been infected, documents and other data are siphoned out of them.
Renting a website that distributes malware to personal computers costs a few cents per target machine; access to a computer infected with software that grabs personal information (such as credit-card details) can cost $1,000 or more a month. How much money is made through such services is anybody's guess, says Raimund Genes of Trend Micro, another computer-security firm, but he has no doubt that the market will grow. Yet as in the case of benevolent SaaS, there may be a limit to the business model for CaaS. Many companies are wary of SaaS for security reasons: they do not want an outside firm looking after their customer lists, for example. Similarly, some criminals may be reluctant to use CaaS providers, which need to market their services—and hence may attract the attention of the authorities.
One thing seems clear. CaaS is proof that everything and anything computer-related will end up being offered “as a service”. There are now at least a dozen kinds of “aaS”, including data mining (DMaaS), virtualisation (VaaS) and even hardware (HaaS). Perhaps, as with the “.com” suffix, overuse of the term will put people off. A revolt is already brewing. Nicholas Carr, author of “The Big Switch”, a book about how computing power is turning into a utility, vowed recently on his widely read blog that he would no longer use the term “aaS” at all. “Join me in this crusade,” he wrote: “Death to aaS!”

Original Link: Pain in the aaS

Pakistan: Where Billions Vanish : Dawn

By Pervez Hoodbhoy

GEN (retd) Pervez Musharraf, aided by his trusted lieutenant and chairman of the Higher Education Commission, Dr Atta-ur-Rahman, lays claim to a ‘revolutionary programme’ that has reversed the decades-old decline of Pakistan’s universities.The higher education budget shot up from Rs3.9bn in 2001-02 to an astounding Rs33.7bn in 2006-07. But, in fact, much of this has been consumed by futile projects and mega wastage. Fantastically expensive scientific equipment, bought for research, often ends up locked away in campuses.An example: a Pelletron accelerator worth Rs400m was ordered in 2005 with HEC funds. It eventually landed up at Quaid-i-Azam University, and was installed last month by a team of Americans from the National Electrostatics Corporation that flew in from Wisconsin. But now that it is there and fully operational, nobody — including the current director — has the slightest idea of what research to do with it. Its original proponents are curiously lacking in enthusiasm and are quietly seeking to distance themselves from the project.Now for the full story: in his article published in Dawn (June 25, 2005), Dr Atta-ur-Rahman announced the HEC would fund a ‘5MW Tandem Accelerator’ for nuclear physics research with an associated laboratory at Quaid-i-Azam University. It was shocking news. First, nowhere in the world of science is a major project approved without a detailed technical feasibility study, and without full participation of those scientists who would be expected to use it for their research.Second, this machine — whose original form dates back to the 1940s — had long become practically useless for decent nuclear physics research. Whereas it can still be used in certain narrow sub-areas of materials science and biology, to my knowledge there are almost no active researchers in those specialties anywhere in Pakistan.Immediately upon reading Dr Atta-ur-Rahman’s article, I telephoned him. His answer: Dr. Riazuddin, director of the National Centre for Physics, had approved the machine. That was stunning! The soft-spoken and diffident Dr Riazuddin, at 77 years of age, is not only Pakistan’s best nuclear and particle physicist, but also a man of great integrity. How could he have agreed to such folly? Why did he sign a flaky PC-1 proposal put together in less than an afternoon?The answer was to come soon. On Sept 8, 2005, a nation-wide meeting was held in the physics department of Quaid-i-Azam University to look into the possible uses of the Pelletron. But the project’s proponents clearly had something else in mind, and probably not a work plan. They bussed in supporters who filled the auditorium. Most had no clue of what a Pelletron was but they seemed to have had instructions to hoot down all who questioned the need to buy one.And so, when Dr Riazuddin expressed his reservations, and sorrowfully admitted to having signed the PC-1 under pressure, the assembled crowd burst into taunts and jeers. Some demanded that he resign as director. It was depressing to see Pakistan’s best scientist and a decent man thus humiliated.The sad part of this story is not that the machine has arrived, but that in the intervening 30 months the original proponents gave no thought to making use of it or to assembling a group of scientists who could be persuaded to do research using the Pelletron. Still sadder, a second Pelletron was purchased, again with HEC money, for Government College University Lahore. No one can fathom what to do with it either.The equipment fetish can be followed all the way to the much-advertised HEJ Institute for Chemistry. HEJ consumes the lion’s share of research funding in Pakistan today and boasts of the finest and most expensive equipment. For example, even good chemistry departments in the US rarely have more than one or two NMR spectrometers but the HEJ Institute has 12. Well, why not, if that is the price of excellence? Aren’t the 3,000+ research papers proof of public money well spent?The answer is, no. There is little evidence to support HEJ’s claim that it has strongly impacted the Pakistani pharmaceutical industry. Readers may have more luck than I did in searching the otherwise elaborate HEJ website for its role in discovering new drugs or processes. But without this, all else is hot air. Only one international patent, registered in the UK and Germany, is listed. Two processes are mentioned as submitted for a US patent. This is not a high record for an institution that has been in existence for over 40 years and claims to be world-class. A good US or European applied science university department typically files several patents every year.As for the thousands of HEJ research papers, the question is how many of these really matter? A paper is considered important by other scientists only when it contains new ideas or facts. Significant papers are cited frequently in professional journals. But an overwhelming number of HEJ publications, which are largely based upon routine aspects of natural products chemistry, have zero or few citations. The reader may find citation counts by accessing the free database scholar.google.com, or other more comprehensive databases.My point is not to denigrate the HEJ, or other academic research in Pakistan, but to make the case that such research is consuming a disproportionate amount of resources at the cost of a desperately impoverished educational system. The real problem is that Pakistani students in government schools, colleges, and universities — as well as their teachers — are far below internationally acceptable levels in terms of basic subject understanding.Current salaries militate against improvement. As a result of Dr Atta’s determined intervention, a professor at a government university can earn up to Rs325,000 per month but a government school teacher has a maximum salary of less than Rs10,000. This is highly unwise. Similarly, funds-starved government colleges and schools lack basic infrastructure such as laboratories and libraries but most government universities are awash in so much money that they do not know what to do with it. At QAU, for example, so many air-conditioners have been purchased with HEC research funds that the electricity bill has shot up by 50 times over the last six years.A balance is desperately needed. Instead of over-funding universities and research, we need to focus resources on creating good quality schools and colleges. We need to encourage creative and skilled people to become school and college teachers, and for this we need to pay them well. We need teachers who can educate young people into becoming good citizens and with skills valued in the economy, and who can train the few going on to higher education.The winds of change are blowing across the country. The Musharraf years are over. It is now time for parliament to carry out a full and complete public inquiry into the irresponsible and crazy policies that have hitherto been the hallmark of decision-making. Finally, there is a chance to reset priorities and use resources for a comprehensive reform of our education system. nThe author is chairman of the physics department at Quaid-i-Azam University.

Source: Pakistan: Where Billions Vanish

Has Economy Hurt Google Search Ads?: WSJ

First-Period Net, Out Today, Will Show Whether Worries Affecting Stock Are Justified
By KEVIN J. DELANEYApril 17, 2008; Page B1


When Google Inc. reports first-quarter earnings after the market close Thursday, investors will find out whether their worries about the impact of the softening economy on Google search ads are justified.
Data from research firm comScore Inc. showing a drop in the number of times people click on the ads have fueled the jitters, which have already knocked almost $75 billion off Google's market value since the beginning of the year.
ComScore released new data late Tuesday estimating that U.S. consumer clicks on Google search ads in the first quarter declined 9.3% from 2007's fourth quarter, and rose just 1.8% from the 2007 first quarter. That compares with the 30% increase in fourth-quarter clicks from the year before that Google reported in January and a roughly 50% average increase during the previous four quarters. This "paid click" volume matters because Google gets paid for the small text ads it shows on Web search results pages only when a user clicks on one of them.
Investors worry that the Mountain View, Calif., Internet giant has finally grown to the point where its core U.S. search-ad business is more vulnerable to swings in the economy and less capable of producing the outsized growth that boosted the company and its shares in the past. That issue also has implications for the outlook for online advertising revenue in general, as well as Microsoft Corp.'s effort to double down on its exposure to Internet ads with an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo Inc.
Some analysts have concluded that U.S. consumers are clicking on ads less frequently because economic problems have made them less willing to buy things. "It's very similar to the shopping mall, where it's full of traffic and you see people window shopping but they're not buying anything," says Sandeep Aggarwal, senior Internet analyst at Collins Stewart LLC. He says people are using the Internet for email and reading news, but they're doing fewer searches for things like "cruise to Bahamas."
ComScore says its data don't support the idea that the economy is significantly affecting consumer search-ad clicking. "If it is, it's to a minor degree," says comScore Chief Executive Magid Abraham. (Google, like other Internet companies, is a paying client of comScore, though Mr. Abraham says comScore didn't have any contact with Google during the first quarter to discuss its search-ad data.)
Instead, Mr. Abraham and some analysts cite Google-initiated efforts that are affecting the number of clicks, such as a change that made it harder for consumers to accidentally click on ads. They also note that the click data don't take into account other factors affecting Google's revenue, such as the price paid for each click and international activity, which represents close to half of Google's revenue.
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Mr. Abraham says comScore's data are "compatible" with first-quarter Google revenue growth of 5% to 10% from the fourth quarter, depending on such factors. According to analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial, Google is expected to report first-quarter revenue of $3.61 billion when certain payments to partners are factored out, a 6.5% increase from $3.39 billion on that basis in the fourth quarter.
Google declined to comment on the comScore data or its earnings report. When it posted its fourth-quarter earnings on Jan. 31, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the company hadn't seen any impact from macroeconomic softening. In public comments since then, Google executives have said it isn't clear yet whether those problems will hurt its business.
Since going public in 2004, Google has sworn off giving any detailed public earnings guidance, which increases the difficulty of assessing any risks to its performance. That's a major reason investors turn to comScore's search-ad click data, despite analysts' warnings that the data haven't always predicted Google's results reliably in the past.
"The comScore click data has been a huge focus for the investment community and probably has been one of the bigger influences on the stock this quarter," says John Aiken, managing director of Majestic Research in New York.
ComScore's Mr. Abraham says some people have jumped to conclusions that comScore's data don't support. "People automatically assumed Google's revenue is going to be missing their target," he says. "People were assuming we said something we didn't say."
In 4 p.m. trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market Wednesday, Google shares rose 1.8%, or $8.19, to $455.03. They are down about 34% since the start of the year.
Mr. Aiken says his analysis of search-ad activity and conversations with search-ad buyers indicate that small- and medium-sized search advertisers are pulling back. Such a development would probably drag on Google's search-ad revenue, because about 99% of its more than one million advertisers and the majority of its revenue come from that category, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Aiken says large search buyers are spending the same or more, and ad firms that work with large advertisers support that idea. "We don't really have any instances where we're seeing clients pull back their search ads," says Steve Governale, senior vice president and managing director of SMG Search, a unit of Starcom MediaVest, itself a unit of Publicis Groupe. If anything, big advertisers are shifting dollars to search ads because it can be easier to measure the revenue generated by them than it is for ads like glossy magazine spreads, some ad executives say.
Still, some analysts say ad spending is dropping in some industry areas most affected by economic problems, such as financial services. Spending by advertisers in the financial, travel and retail areas declined or grew more slowly in the fourth quarter, compared with a year earlier, Yahoo President Susan Decker told analysts in January, though she said that overall the company had seen "a solid start to the year."
It remains unclear how online advertising beyond search is affected by any consumer slowdown. Search advertising is the largest category of U.S. online ad spending, expected to account for 40% this year, according to research firm eMarketer Inc. Other forms of online advertising, such as graphic display ads and video ads, are generally priced using different models than per-user clicks.
EMarketer last month reduced its 2008 forecast for U.S. online spending because of concerns about the softening economy. U.S. advertisers will spend $25.8 billion on Internet ads, eMarketer says, down 6.2% from earlier estimates but up 23% from $21.1 billion in 2007.

--Emily Steel contributed to this article.

Write to Kevin J. Delaney at kevin.delaney@wsj.com

Source: Has Economy Hurt Google Search Ads?

Semi-connected: Economist

Apr 17th 2008From The Economist print edition
British politics is missing out on the potential of new media
Illustration by David Simonds

EVEN the least fogeyish of politicians have been flummoxed by the internet. Tony Blair, champion of all things modern, paid no end of lip service to the potential of new media as prime minister but was comically technophobic himself. Still, the internet plays a role in huge areas of British public life: party politics, punditry and government itself. But web aficionados lament a yawning gap with America, and with the most go-ahead corners of Europe.
The official websites of the main political parties—Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats—get less web traffic than the most popular political blogs, and much less than even the far-right British National Party. No surprise, say cyber enthusiasts; they do a passable job as repositories of information but offer little scope for users to get involved beyond signing up for e-mail distribution lists.

The Tories want to transform their online presence, and Gordon Brown, the prime minister, has recruited new staff to overhaul Labour's. Both parties have wised up, it seems, to foreign examples of what new media can do for fund-raising and campaigning. Ron Paul, a former candidate for this year's Republican presidential nomination in America, raised a record of nearly $6m online in one day in December—recalling Howard Dean's spectacular efforts in the 2004 Democratic race. NSTV, the video website run by Nicolas Sarkozy, France's president, proved hugely popular during his campaign for the Elysée Palace last year. By contrast, Webcameron, a video blog starring the Tory leader, David Cameron, has run out of steam since it was launched in 2006.
More vitality can be found in the British blogosphere, which has changed how many people tap in to punditry. But shortcomings remain. Whereas there is broad parity between right and left in the American blogosphere, in Britain the left has yet really to get going. There is no agreement on the best way of measuring web traffic but few dispute that right-wing websites such as Conservative Home, Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale's Diary are more popular than left-wing rivals such as Liberal Conspiracy, Labour Home and Bloggers4Labour (see table). Some say this is because the party in opposition can usually count on more motivated activists than the party in power. Others contend that right-wing politics are more suited to the punchy, pithy medium of blogging.
And true “civilian journalism” has been slower to emerge in Britain than in America: Britain's main political blogs are mostly written by insiders, such as former party staffers and established journalists. Blogs also seem to scrutinise politicians and the mainstream media less fiercely in Britain than in America, where senior politicians and big newspapers sense the blogosphere's watchful eye on their every remark and news report. Guido Fawkes, roughly speaking the British equivalent of America's Drudge Report, boasts of breaking stories and is certainly resented by some mainstream journalists. But few major scalps have been claimed.
One area where Britain is showing tentative signs of stealing a march is in the use of the internet by government to involve citizens and improve policy-making. Since 2006 the Downing Street website has allowed the public to create and sign online petitions. In amongst the calls for the drummer from The Stranglers to be honoured, Jeremy Clarkson (a mouthy motoring journalist) to become prime minister and Arsenal football club to be “closed down” have been some serious and hugely popular petitions. One in 2006 calling for the government's road-pricing policy to be scrapped ended up attracting 1.8m signatures.
Mr Brown is not much more web-savvy than his predecessor but some of Westminster's rising stars are evangelical about the internet's potential for government. In a speech to the Google Zeitgeist conference in London last year, David Miliband, the blogging foreign secretary, looked forward to the internet allowing people control over public services, not merely access to them. Policy wonks talk excitedly of “Public Services 2.0”.
George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, is another who is thought to “get it”. He wants much more information put online, including American-style crime maps and every item of government spending over £25,000 ($49,000). More radically, he is flirting with “open-sourcing” policy: some companies now go online to solicit solutions to stubborn problems, so why not the public sector?
Of course, there are caveats to all this fervour. One reason why American political parties have snazzy websites is that they can afford to; there is far less money sloshing around in British politics, and few regret that. America's vibrant blogosphere has emerged partly in response to relatively staid mainstream media, whereas Britons seeking partisanship and wit can get it from a host of newspapers. Some also say that the publicly funded BBC's well-nourished website crowds out other potential players. And online consultation still leaves the structural political problem of how to respond. A million people moderately interested in a particular issue may have less influence on the government than a smaller but more passionate bunch willing to lobby in the old way.
Yet web gurus insist that British politics could be doing much more with the internet, and the idea of open-sourcing policy particularly intrigues them. Government efforts to solicit the public's ideas are often clunkingly non-specific: asking people what they think should be done about, say, crime is unlikely to result in much new thinking. Narrowing the question to particular problems, often in particular locations, is cannier. “You may only get one truly workable idea out of a thousand,” says Tom Steinberg, a former government-policy adviser who set up the e-petitions website and now runs mySociety, a charity operating websites designed to foster civic engagement. “But that one idea makes it worthwhile.”

Original Link:

Semi-connected