links for 2009-06-17

  • Kevin: Terry Flew, Professor of Media and Communication in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, writes about coverage of the Iranian election protests with what I call social media journalism. It's a hybrid of traditional media and newsgathering process and standards to filter social media and use social media as a source of contacts. There is a lot of opportunity here, and we're just scratching the surface.
  • Kevin: Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, tries to answer the question being asked by many in the media of whether Iran could shut down Twitter. He first describes Iran's control over the internet. Iran is "able to treat its Internet-using public the way a school can filter what its kids see on their PCs". But could they shut down Twitter, which is being used to report in real-time the events on Twitter. "So it’d be trivial for the Iranian government to block access to Twitter as it could to any particular Web site, and it could even block access to some Twitter user’s feeds there while leaving others open, by simply configuring its filters to allow some Twitter urls through while filtering others. But Twitter isn’t just any particular Web site. It’s an atom designed to be built into other molecules. "