Well, hello.

Image: A young golden snub-nosed monkey in China’s Qinling Mountains. Cyril Ruoso via the BBC.

Internet censorship is growing throughout the world, according to a study conducted by the Canada Centre for global security studies and Citizen Lab, and the BBC.

“This problem of Internet control is becoming an issue for more than human rights concerns,” Ronald Deibert, director of the Centre, tells the New York Times.  ”The fact is that you have dozens of countries not just filtering for porn, but political filtering and key events as well.”

Called Casting a Wider Net (PDF), the study focusses on China and Iran where the BBC has a pilot program to provide proxy services to citizens in an attempt to to get around censorship barriers.

Key takeaways from the report include understanding circumvention tools such as Web proxies as publishing tools or “channels” in and of themselves that help drive content to audiences; an understanding that blocking is unpredictable and often occurs when particular news breaks; and that different methods should be simultaneously deployed such as Web proxies, email newsletters and Twitter posts in order to reach core audiences.

Images: Web Proxy and Twitter logins, and replacement proxy logins circa July 2011 in China.

Report (PDF). 

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project

This fall I’ll be teaching at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. This will be very different from what I’ve done the past few years at the Graduate School of Journalism and I’m excited about the opportunity.

For starters, the semester-long course lets me deep think about a variety of issues. In particular, how NGO’s can leverage the Internets, how commercial and governmental restrictions are limiting the Tubes and how the Interweb really functions as a small world network; and what that might mean for all of us who communicate through it.

I’m calling the course Tubes, Code and Content and will be both creating and curating content around it over the next few months. Some of it is below. It’s thoughts and podcasts heavily influenced by the BBC and NPR with some FLOSS thrown in for good measure. I’ll make sure these are better organized as we move into the future but the audio files below include the themes I believe important in this day and age.

• Lawrence Lessig on Culture
• One Laptop Overview
• Clay Shirky on Social Netkworks
• Africa Connectivity
• Africa and Google Maps
• Africa and Microsoft vs Open Source Solutions
• Tibet: Someone’s hacking their computers
• Chinese Web censorship.
• France creates laws to ban sharing information
• France Law comes into being

I’m currently considering different platforms to present the course on. Current candidates include Drupal, Elgg, BuddyPress/WPMU and Pligg.

I don’t choose lightly. I believe the platform choice is as important as the actual content that ends up on it. That is, what students can actually do on the platform is as important as what content they can actually contribute to the project. Or put another way, functionality, collaboration and content creation are all one and the same.

When and as I create the course Web site, these presentations will all be modified. Hopefully, they’ll be modified with what we as a collective are continuously creating and producing.

That said, I’d like to hear what you’re thinking about and who you’re listening to as you consider your ideas about how the internet can best be used as a distribution platform and communications medium.

Either way, or anyway, we can do better than what has previously or currently occurred. Let’s connect and try. And let’s communicate and demonstrate a better path forward.

BBC Assailed for Refusing to Carry Gaza Appeal

In more than 80 years as a publicly financed broadcaster with an audience of millions at home and around the world, the BBC has rarely been buffeted as severely as it has in recent days over its decision not to broadcast a television appeal by aid agencies for victims of Israel’s recent military actions in Gaza. — NY Times

Meanwhile, China’s state run CCTV reported to the New York Times that 100 million people accessed video streams on its Web site. Gotta be gold in there somewhere.