12:45-
2:00pm
Networking Lunch
Workshop on “Social Media and Iran” with Katrin Verclas, Davar Iran Ardalan, John Kelly, Olivia Ma, and Nancy Scola

Morningside Analytics did social media monitoring and their findings predicted an oposition win, which didn’t happen. Before the election people self organized by social networks and then, only trusted the same people, after the crackdown. YouTube are having issues determing duplicate videos that have been downloaded, then uploaded, with additional information, invoking recipients to pass the media on, but that also makes it hard to know how much content is been copied, vs. Bring original.

Then, it’s been suggested, there need to be some social media conventions in place, in order for Social Media to spread.

Cyber Shia group, sponsering conserative clerics, have strengthened over the last 2 years, ESP in the last year. Also, based on the all the data, the opposition should have won, in a similar way Barack Obama won.

It struck me politics is rarely fair, the hard line governent in Iran, strengthed their position while deliberately weakening any opposition, at least, the data appears to show.

But it was brought up we don’t yet have a layer of metadata added to content explaining who, what, where, when and why, making accurate assesment problematic. A lady on the panel said retweets ought to link back to original tweet.

And while Iran in uprising was unfolding, our energy, enviromental biil, the most sweeping bill in a generation, was distracted, by Iran and Michael Jackson’s death, even though the the bill is more important to our way of life, ongoing.

Would what happened in Iran in the last 2 weeks have taken place without the Internet?

The guy from Morningside Analytics said their studies show bandwidth for video is very restricted. Also, the lady from YouTube said while YouTube has a lot of data, it hasn’t analyzed the video data in aggregate, though individuals have access to YouTube Insights, but probably can’t get at the data.

Frederic Guerino, sitting next to me, mentions the original Iranian Revolution in 1979 used Casette Tape, to spread the word, as the technology of the time.

NPR Social Media expert, in audience, wrote about how often hashtags have been used around the election, but it has made it harder to tell how much of that traffic comes from within Iran.

And finally, a warning, the metadata needed for Social Media Attribution, also makes the creator of such content much easier to track by the Governments that often want to limit information.

Ha, interesting.