Earlier tonight, the Paley Center hosted a discussion about social media and digital activism with celebrated artist, architectural designer, activist and blogger Ai Weiwei , Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and ReadWriteWeb’s editor and founder Richard MacManus. The discussion touched upon a large variety of topics related to social media and digital activism in China, including translating Twitter into Chinese and Google’s exit from the Chinese market. Sponsor Jack Dorsey joined the conversation via satellite from San Francisco. The conversation was moderated by Emily Parker, the Arthur Ross Fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, who is currently working on a book about China and the Internet. To start out the discussion, MacManus pointed out that it was the read/write aspect of the Internet that spawned the growth of social networks like Facebook and Twitter over the last few years. In the Western world, this development allowed users to connect and express their thoughts freely. In China, however, even though the same tools are available as in the West, a lot of them are currently blocked and censored. In addition to this, Ai Weiwei noted that sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, as well as TV channels like CNN, are currently blocked in China. Even though there are a number of Facebook and Twitter clones in China, Ai Weiwei argued that those companies work within the framework that the Chinese government has set for them with regards to what users can say on these services. Ai Weiwei’s name, for example, can never be used on these sites without getting censored. Indeed, said Ai Weiwei, using Twitter in China is “very physical and dangerous.” Translating Twitter Asked about the reason for Twitter’s popularity among netizens, Ai Weiwei noted that services like Twitter and blogs are easy to use, but once he got too popular, his blog was quickly shut down. Even though Twitter has a 140-character limit, Twitter’s users in China can easily express in-depth thoughts because the Chinese language allows Twitter users to express 140 words on Twitter and not just 140 characters. With regards to how Twitter is being used in China, Ai Weiwei noted that the most active Twitter users in China often use the service for political and philosophical discussions. Jack Dorsey, after recapping the basic history of Twitter and his fascination with maps, open, public databases, noted that messages on Twitter, even though they are often trivial, do show that “we are human” and remind us that we are all the same. Twitter, which he called a “utility,” was extended by the users and the developer ecosystem that grew up around it. Internet users across the world can now use it to communicate, talk to their governments, build a business and create political movements. Ai Weiwei, who told Dorsey that the “Chinese people think you are some kind of God” because Twitter allows people to express themselves without worrying about censorship. A lot of the discussion with Jack Dorsey focused on what Twitter can do to to help its users in China. Ai Weiwei directly asked Dorsey who Twitter doesn’t provide its users a Chinese-language version of Twitter. According to Dorsey, it is just a question of time and mostly a technological issue. Given Twitter’s problems with scaling the service, making it work for every character set creates some issues for Twitter because of the legacy framework that Twitter established in its early days. Currently, the company doesn’t really have the resources to devote to this. Doresey did, however, also argue that users who already know how the service is meant to work and understand the setup of the Twitter page. Dorsey also noted that Twitter isn’t sure that it really wants to move into the Chinese market, but would like to offer a Chinese translation of its service at some point. Indeed, Dorsey noted that he wasn’t even aware that Twitter was blocked in China until just a few weeks ago. Censorship and Twitter Richard MacManus then asked Ai Weiwei if the Chinese government couldn’t just censor Twitter or force Twitter to censor its service. Ai Weiwei, however, pointed out that Twitter could easily translate Twitter’s registration page to help Chinese users. He noted that he isn’t asking Twitter to set up an operation in China – he just wants Twitter to make the service easier to use for Chinese users and translate large parts of the service. The Internet companies in China, as MacManus noted, tend to “self-discipline” themselves and censor their own content. MacManus wondered what would happen to a Chinese language version of Twitter and if it wouldn’t just get blocked and censored just like other international services. Ai Weiwei noted that a lot of international companies would like to enter the Chinese market have a responsibility to not give up on the basic human rights. While the discussion didn’t go into depth with regards to the issues surrounding Google’s exit from China, MacManus noted that Google was one of the few Western services that entered the Chinese market, even though it faced a strong Chinese competitor. According to MacManus, leaving the Chinese market was a “brave move” by Google that sends a strong message that these companies are willing to stand up to the Chinese government. Twitter’s Moral Responsibility Twitter and other technology companies have, said Dorsey, a responsibility to follow basic moral guidelines and in his view, many technology companies have helped to push the messages of the U.S. government (and other governments) forward with regards to acknowledging human rights violations in China. Asked specifically if companies do have a moral responsibility, Dorsey said that Twitter – as a company – is focused on opening information as completely as possible and wants to ensure that everybody can participate in the conversations on the service. Twitter, which according to Dorsey was founded around the principles of immediacy and transparency, allows users to create a shared experience among users around the world and create more empathy. Towards the end of the discussion, Dorsey said that Twitter is just a tool and that it can’t change any governments itself, but that it is the users who can use it to change governments. As Richard MacManus noted during the discussion, it is people like Ai Weiwei that are using these tools effectively. One day, Ai Weiwei noted towards the end of the discussion, we won’t need tools like Twitter to change our governments anymore. Discuss

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ReadWriteWeb is pleased to be hosting a live-stream for tonight’s Ai Weiwei event at the Paley Center in New York City. You can watch it live on our site , where we will be discussing social media and digital activism. Ai Weiwei will be joined by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, our own Richard MacManus, and moderator Emily Parker. Make sure to tune in tonight at 6:30 pm Eastern. Special thanks to Conjunctured Coworking in Austin for hosting the RWW team during the event. To take part in the conversation on Twitter use the hashtag #aiweiwei . Sponsor Ai Weiwei and Digital Activism in China ReadWriteWeb has been actively covering events in China this year, in particular Google’s struggle to effect change regarding censorship in China. So I’m personally thrilled to join the conversation with these three smart and influential people: Ai Weiwei, Jack Dorsey and Orville Schell. Ai Weiwei is undoubtedly the star attraction. He is China’s leading digital activist and a pioneer in the use of blogging and Twitter in China. He’s also a renown international artist and architect. In the early 2000s, he collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron on the famous “Bird’s Nest” design of the National Stadium for the Beijing Olympics. Ai Weiwei later renounced that design as a “pretend smile” from the Chinese government. Details About the Participants This information comes from the Paley Center website : Ai Weiwei is a conceptual artist, curator, architect, social commentator, and activist. He was born in 1957 into the domestic political exile of his father, the noted modernist poet Ai Qing. Ai Weiwei’s birthright was simultaneously one of a cultural insider and a political outsider, and he quickly perceived the contradictions of his condition. Ai Weiwei’s art has been shown in museums and galleries internationally. As a curator, he is known for cutting-edge exhibitions. In the early 2000s, he collaborated with the acclaimed Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on the winning design for the National Stadium project for the Beijing Olympics, popularly known as the “Bird’s Nest,” which he later renounced as a “pretend smile.” Ai Weiwei has never sought foreign citizenship and maintains his credibility among a devoted Chinese following as a highly active blogger, with his finger on the pulse of modern China. Unafraid to spotlight injustices, he has documented the arbitrary conviction and swift execution of alleged cop-killer Yang Jia in Shanghai, investigated shoddy school construction in Sichuan, and led a movement to oppose the nationwide installation of Internet filtering software in new computers. He is critical of one-party rule and government corruption, as well as the nationalist tendencies of China’s citizenry, which allow state power to go unchecked. As a result his blogs are shut down, his home studio is under surveillance, and he’s had to have cranial surgery for injuries sustained during a recent altercation with local police in Sichuan. Jack Dorsey is the creator, cofounder, and chairman of Twitter, Inc. Originally from St. Louis, Jack’s early fascination for mass-transit and how cities function led him to Manhattan and programming real-time messaging systems for couriers, taxis, and emergency vehicles. Throughout this work Jack witnessed thousands of workers in the field constantly updating where they were and what they were doing; Twitter is a constrained simplification designed for general usage and extended by the millions of people who make it their own every day. Jack is dedicated to creating public goods which foster approachability, immediacy, and transparency, and is starting a second company named Square focused on bringing these concepts to commerce. Richard MacManus is the founder and editor in chief of ReadWriteWeb, one of the most popular and influential technology blogs in the world. New Zealander MacManus founded ReadWriteWeb in 2003 and grew his blog about the evolving Internet into an international team of journalists. ReadWriteWeb is read by millions of thought leaders and consumers, and is syndicated daily by the New York Times. From the early days of blogging, social networks and YouTube to the future of machine learning, aggregate data analysis and other meta-trends, MacManus is widely recognized as a leader in articulating what’s next in technology and what it means for society at large. Discuss

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What if we took the leading sensor-based products currently being developed or already on the market, put them all under one roof, and added a typical American family? Would they just be the techiest family on the block, or would it have a significant impact on their lives? Here are six ways this Internet of Things family can see their lives change. They exercise more, save energy and water, budget better, know where their kids are at any moment, and they’ll always have the right lighting for activities in the house. Sponsor Bank Account-based Motivation We

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When hundreds of clueless commenters decided mid-February that ReadWriteWeb was the place to log in to Facebook, alerts went off in my personal network like alarms at a fire station. For the past few years I’ve been doing research on misunderstandings online; since it’s the subject of my doctoral thesis, all my friends know I eat, sleep, and breathe this topic, and was likely to be so buried in it that I’d miss new developments. It’s a good thing they woke me from doctoral sluggishness; with thousands of comments, this is the biggest such thread I’ve seen. The ReadWriteWeb/Facebook thread looks a lot like previous threads, but it has some interesting new developments. Sponsor Guest author Gillian Andrews is finishing Gumbaby.com . She channels her Internet literacy energies into the hacker radio show The Media Show on YouTube, an irreverent, puppet-fueled stab at mass education. As ReadWriteWeb readers have learned, misunderstandings like these never fail to entertain and astound. They’ve been a repeat topic of interest on community blogs; MetaFilter, for example, has scratched its collective head about this many a time. Accusations always fly: these “strangers” (as I’ve come to call them) are idiots, illiterates, came from AOL, shouldn’t be allowed out on the Internet without someone to hold their hand. Less often, a few voices speak up from the development community and say, Wait a minute, we build the software the Internet runs on – isn’t this partly our fault? The ReadWriteWeb thread lays the blame to some extent on search engines, as ReadWriteWeb writer Mike Melanson has already written. But it also points to the rise of social networking services as a culprit. Social Networking Software Changed the Landscape Examples of misunderstandings abound in listservs, blog comment threads, newspaper article comment sections and even Wikipedia. Blogs where people ask to get an account canceled are pretty common. The login fiasco on this website is the first time I’ve seen a firestorm of misunderstanding sparked specifically by people trying to log on to an unrelated website. But then, the ability to log into a service from an unrelated website is only a few years old. Is it any surprise that people are thrown by it? These commenters arrived from a search engine, looking for Facebook. At the bottom of the page where they landed, ReadWriteWeb offered them the opportunity to “Sign in with Facebook.” They did – many comments link directly to a Facebook profile. What happened when they signed in? They were dropped right back on the ReadWriteWeb page where they started, with no indication of what had happened save for the line “Thanks for signing in, X. Now you can comment.” Text Boxes: They’re Confusing When commenters signed in to Facebook on ReadWriteWeb, it rewarded them with a text box labeled “Comments (You may use HTML tags for style).” Where do these comments go? It doesn’t say. It’s down at the bottom of a huge window, which means when you’re looking at it, you can’t see most of the page’s identifying information at the top of the page. (Except for the URL, but I’ll get to that in a minute.) Many text boxes around the Web are woefully under-labeled. When I was beginning my research, a guy who worked at Blogger said to me, “People will put just anything in a text box,” and it seems to be true. Evidence abounds that people interpret comment boxes in any number of ways. Some think they are sending private email. Some think they’re sending a chat message, and get belligerent when nobody responds right away. A few seem to think it’s a word processor, and “Submit” means the same thing as “save.” A comment which really blew my mind was posted to a blog by a woman who appeared to confuse comments on a blog with “online prayer” – an Internet activity which is probably unfamiliar to most denizens of high-tech blogs. Google it, though, and you’ll find numerous pages, with Pat Robertson’s organization ranking among the top ones . Online prayer sites provide a form that lets you include your name, contact information, and a comment about what prayers you need – a form which looks startlingly like a blog comment form. The idea is that your message will be sent to Robertson or other church staff, and they will pray for you. Sometimes the form includes a promise that your message will be kept confidential; other times, there is no such promise, but it seems to matter little to those who don’t understand where a comment form goes anyway. Online prayer may be new to you. Logging in to Facebook through another site is new to most of us. It’s worth keeping in mind that the vast majority of people alive today were never taught to read a webpage in school, the way they were taught to read the title, author information and pages of a book. This brings us to another theme in the ReadWriteWeb thread which is repeated across most other misunderstandings of this type. Literacy is Not the Problem – New Kinds of Literacy Are ReadWriteWeb readers and other “natives” call errant commenters any number of nasty names (and use an upsetting amount of eugenic language, suggesting these “idiot” commenters should be “weeded out of the gene pool.”) One favorite insult is “illiterate.” As stated, this is a little unfair when most of these people never had a chance to learn Internet skills in school, where skills might be broken down into simple elements that most of us don’t even remember learning. (When you learn to read a book, for example, you learn which way to hold the book, how to turn pages, reading left to right, chunking letters into phonemes and words into sentences.) But beyond being unfair, it’s not wholly correct to call them illiterate. They do read and write. They just don’t always do so in ways that are considered appropriate by the technologically skilled (and the code they write). Literacy has never been a single monolithic skill. It involves both reading and writing, and these two skills are independent of each other. More to the point, literacy involves reading and writing differently in a range of situations. You may consider yourself literate because you have read Shakespeare, or because you can write a coherent quarterly report. But you don’t write your quarterly report as a sonnet. Different forms of literacy apply at different times, and people can be good at some kinds of literacy while needing assistance in others. Basic decoding (reading) and writing are rarely the problem in these misunderstandings. While many comments left by strangers on the threads I have studied are misspelled, use bad grammar, or are written in all-caps (or, even more confusingly, All Initial Caps), plenty can’t be distinguished from the comments left by tech-savvy commenters when it comes to writing skill. In fact, “strangers” are more likely than natives to write their comments in ways we all learned in school. In most of the threads I have studied, they make it clear who they are addressing (“Dear Facebook,”) who is writing (“Thanks, Linda”) and even how to understand where they are coming from geographically. They do this to the point of redundancy, sometimes entering this information into more than one comment field. One stranger, trying to reach Maury Povich on a classic thread dug up by MetaFilter, writes a spellchecked-perfect traditional letter, right down to the formatting of the date and greetings. (When was the last time you spellchecked a hastily written comment?) Other errant commenters are published authors, or even have advanced degrees. Again, their problem is not traditional literacy; the problem is that the Internet demands new kinds of literacy, and they haven’t had the training yet. Mocking them in a comment thread doesn’t improve their skills. Reading-wise, there are plenty of indications in my data that strangers have read other parts of the page. There seems to be a general trend that they are less likely to directly address a celebrity (for example) when the comments right above their own come from natives who say “ommfg, this is not Maury Povich’s website!” My favorite example of a stranger demonstrating her reading skills is a commenter on a thread where a blogger wrote about his joy at learning that all kinds of things – M&Ms, ketchup bottles, soda, etc – could now be customized. The blogger titled his post “Ketchup of the People.” The commenter wrote: I found the order for custom printed m & m’s in the coupon section of the providence journal sunday paper. It said nothing about ordering ketchup first or anything about the blog. All I wanted was to surprise my 80 year old aunt who loves m & m’s with this special custom order. What is this a scam or something? If it is, it’s pretty cruel? Please respond. Through some referral-log forensics, the blogger and his readers determined that this commenter had, in fact, entered the URL provided by her newspaper. The problem was, the offer had expired, and the only remaining reference to this URL was on the blogger’s page, where she landed. So she set about trying to make sense of what she found in the best way she could. Would she have to order ketchup first? Was the blog somehow a gatekeeper to the order? This all sounded fishy – was it a scam? Presented with apparent nonsense, all of us do our best to make sense of it; that’s just what the human brain does. On the Web, people don’t always have the information they need to understand what’s going on. Next page: What is a URL? What is a URL? One of the most important elements errant commenters aren’t using, which the tech-savvy have at their command, is a page’s URL. Internet-illiterate commenters generally don’t know what “URL” means, or what one does. Check the URLs attached to their names in blog comments; you will often find they have entered an email address, subject line, their name, or something to the effect of “I don’t know what this is” in the URL field that went with their comment.The fact that many errant commenters seem to enter “Facebook” into Google’s search field to get to the page also suggests that URLs aren’t a part of their Internet literacy skills. Interface designers aren’t helping. Most URL bars now resolve into search results. This may seem like a good UI solution, but it is a catastrophic mistake from a literacy perspective. URLs aren’t just how we get to a page; they are involved in how we judge its content, accuracy, point of view, and most importantly who owns it. Obscuring or drawing attention away from URLs keeps people from understanding how to judge the quality of material on the Internet. Considering that most people have not had schooling to help them understand the Internet – and it’s unlikely that even kids in school today have formal opportunities to learn about URLs, considering the number of schools which limit Internet access – these steps taken by UI designers simply compound the problem. Which leads me to my final point: They’re Not Illiterate – You Are As crazy as it sounds, Melanson makes a certain amount of sense when he lays the blame for the Facebook flap at Google’s feet . Google is the best search engine going right now, but it’s not perfect. The shift to real-time results and its underlying popularity-contest mechanic make it ineffective in specific settings. (“Specific” being key; the other problem with search engines, and the subject of extensive research in schools of information, is their inability to respond to a given user’s context. But that’s a topic for another article.) Facebook – and even ReadWriteWeb – are also somewhat to blame, considering how the cross-site login service is presented to users; as I noted, the messages sent to those signing in are unclear (thanks for signing in to what? Now you can comment where? What does it mean to sign in to Facebook on ReadWriteWeb, anyway? Is this a scam?) Literacy is a two-way street. They may be dumb for not reading the pages right, but some of the code, search algorithms, and interfaces involved aren’t perfect, either. Not to mention the way “savvy” commenters and other bloggers write. The more people linked to the original ReadWriteWeb thread with the words “Facebook login” in the link, the more the ReadWriteWeb thread appeared to Google to be relevant to Facebook login. As has been noted, blog posts with “Facebook” in the title were likely to see more unwanted traffic as well. This even spread the problem to other blogs linking to ReadWriteWeb, some of whom also started to see login requests in their comment threads. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has noted bad titling among a number of we see what you did there ) is not the same thing as a solution to the problem. Photo by Miguel Ugalde Discuss

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Would you broadcast information about your credit card transactions publicly on the Internet? That might sound frighteningly irresponsible, but serial entrepreneur Phil Kaplan says his new social network Blippy does that and represents the way of the future. I thought he was crazy – until I sat down and talked with him today at SXSW. In just a few minutes Kaplan melted my skepticism and got me excited about what Blippy is doing. You may have read about Blippy on sites like TechCrunch , Venturebeat and CNN . Kaplan shared a few things with us today that haven’t been published anywhere else though, and the story of Blippy is generally interesting. Here are seven things you probably don’t know about Blippy, a very far-out social network. Sponsor 1. Users can manually review each item before it’s published or set up certain substreams that do different things – like automatically publish my iTunes transactions but ask me before publishing my Amazon purchases. Kaplan has two credit cards, one with a Blippy sticker on it to remind him that purchases made with that card are posted immediately to the web. 2. It’s not about the money. Kaplan says he wants Blippy to be a way for offline activity to publish online conversation. The things you buy are often convenient signals for activities that are important to you. The conversations that go on around the items are quite interesting… at least on Kaplan’s profile. He can buy a movie on iTunes and find a conversation about it swarming around his automatic Blippy post before the opening previews are over. Other users often don’t see any comments on their activity at all. Jason Calacanis sees some good conversation. 3. Blippy now sees $2 million worth of user transactions streaming through the site per week, Kaplan says, and has seen close to $15 million in transactions total since it launched publicly January 15. 4. Kaplan doesn’t think sharing credit card data is that big a deal. He cites LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman’s argument that people will share anything if there’s enough of a benefit to sharing it. Friendster was the first site where people used their real names on the Internet, and people weren’t comfortable with that at first, either. “The more insane someone thinks something is, the more value they put on the data. People say ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this, it’s so insane I’m going to jump out the window!’ Then I ask them, ‘Do you want the data?’ And they say ‘Yes!’” 5. Data portability: Kaplan is working on a Blippy App Programming Interface and “it’s going to have everything.” Data caching policy is something “we have to think about still.” Imagine a website that recommends recipes based on the food it knows you have in your refridgerator. That’s one example of the kind of service that could be built on top of Blippy. 6. Aggregate data analysis isn’t something Kaplan is personally interested in , he says. It’s hard to believe but he says he’ll leave that kind of thing up to third parties using the Blippy API if they want to. The company will focus all its energy on making Blippy a good experiene for users. Really, that’s what he said. 7. Location data is something Blippy sees but doesn’t expose right now. Kaplan says it’s coming, though. He thinks the current location-based social networks need to deliver more value to users, and says that’s something Blippy can do. People these days produce all kinds of data streams, Kaplan says – from Facebook to Twitter to Smart Grid utility use and electronic medical data. Some of those streams you wouldn’t want to be public about at all, but some of them you can benefit from partially exposing. He thinks that at least some of your credit card transactions are better shared than kept private. Time will tell whether or not other people agree with him. Discuss

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