Download van Worldbank aantal cell subcribers and internet user per 100. Dit is een van de twee kaarten:
Internet users

Link http://tables.googlelabs.com/DataSource?snapid=68220

Cell phones
link http://tables.googlelabs.com/DataSource?snapid=68219

Academic research about Twitter reveals some important characteristics of the topology of the social network. The impression that the tweets are sent from a closely connected network, representing a virtual community is wrong. Participants are sending there tweets to followers. These followers could respond, re-sent the message, or send their own. But the questions is whether this process of communication represents a debate within a structured community?

1. Friends and followers
For understanding the network structure of Twitter the distinction between followers and friends is important. Friends are defined as persons who actually have responded to a tweet. It appears then that users have a very small number of friends compared to the number of followers and followees they declare. This implies the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and followees, and a sparser
and simpler network of actual friends. The latter proves to be a more influ-
ential network in driving Twitter usage since users with many actual friends
tend to post more updates than users with few actual friends. On the other
hand, users with many followers or followees post updates more infrequently
than those with few followers or followees. Many people, including scholars, advertisers and political activists, see online social networks as an opportunity to study the propagation of ideas, the formation of social bonds and viral marketing, among others. This view should be tempered by our findings that a link between any two people does
not necessarily imply an interaction between them. That is:  most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view. Thus there is the need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend in order to understand for example the political impact of Twitter.  See for example: Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope by Huberman, Romero and Fang Wu. (http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2317/2063)

2. Predicting the future
Twitter is not about knowledge; it is a  thermometer deep into the buttocks of society; it is about the mood; popular hash tags tell us what is cool and what is hot. But if you know the mood about a certain topic, perhaps you can predict an outcome on basis of the number of tweets. This is the idea behind the study of Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman,  Predicting the Future with Social Media. (http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.5699) . The researchers, both working for  Hewlett-Packard, analyzed in the beginning of 2009 2.89 mill tweets about 24 movies send by 1.2 mill users. A statistical analysis learned that there was a relationship between the number of tweets in the week before the movie was released and the first weekend Box-office revenues. For the horror movie The Crazies for example the statistical model predicted a revenue of 16.8 mill. The Box-office revenue was 16.06 mill. Compared to the Hollywood Stock Exchange, where people can bet on success or failure of a movie, the model performed significantly better.
After the first weekend people had actually seen the movie, and of course they twittered: they were positive or negative. Including the content of the tweets improved the model for prediction. For the second weekend the number of tweets and their content showed that positive responses improved the sales and negative responses decreased the revenue.
One could argue that the number of tweets is a measure for the interest in political issues and the elections. Therefore the number of tweets could be a predictions for the turnout of the elections, and weighing the number of tweets related to a party leader could perhaps predict the outcome of the elections.

3. Reciprocity is low
The distinction between friends and followers revealed a hidden network. This is confirmed by looking at the reciprocity. Twitter shows a low level of reciprocity; 77.9% of user pairs with any link between them are connected one-way, and only 22.1% have reciprocal relationship between them. This means that the tweets about the debate where just broadcasted, but had no follow up: opinions were only aired. No resulting in a structured debate reaching conclusions. This also confirmed from the content or character of the tweets. If one looks at Tweets following a trending topics, single tweets are most common, followed by Replies and Re-tweets.

4. Network distance between the Twitterati is short
Twitter users are all in a social network, but they separated. It could be that a user is a follower, or a follower of a follower etc. So there is distance between the Twitterati which can be measured in the number of hops needed to reach a person. In a political debate an interesting question is how far is the distance between a user and a political leader? In how many hops can a certain user of Twitter reach a specific political leader.
In social network analysis the average degree of separation is a measure connectedness. How far are Twitterati from each other? This indicates how many steps are needed for the information to reach others in the work. The outcome is astonishing short, according to research of large amounts of tweets. The 90th percentile distance, known as the effective diameter, is 4.8. For 70.5% of node pairs, the path length is 4 or shorter, and for 97.6% it is 6 or shorter. There are 1.8% users who have no incoming edge, and the longest path in our samples is 18. We note that information is to flow over less than 5 or fewer hops between 93.5% of user pairs, if it is to, taking fewer hops than on other known social networks.

See also What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media?
Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue Moon
Proceedings of the 19th International World Wide Web (WWW) Conference, April 26-30, 2010, Raleigh NC (USA)
5. Geography and popularity
A social network on Twitter could physically be very extended. Internet has no borders and Twitterati could be in various parts of the world. But looking at the hidden network of friends, that is looking from reciprocity, the international dimension is quite limited. Research shows that Twitter users who have reciprocal relations of fewer than 2, 000 are likely to be geographically close. Users with followers 1, 000 or less are likely to be geographically close to their r-friends and also have similar popularity with their r-friends. So average Twitter users are in the same geographical space Secondly they have the same status on Twitter, generally they have the same numbers of followers and the sent the same number of tweets.

6. Spreading information or social networking
Twitter can be viewed fro two different perspectives. Either Twitter is used for spreading information. That is ending a message to others and informing them, or  it is a way to build a relationship. Facebook is an example of the last one. Twitter is an example of the former. The act of following as subscribing to tweets, serves more as an information spreading medium than an on line social networking service. Twitter is therefore less used for maintaining social contacts, connecting to friends, then  for spreading and sharing information. Twitter is in the first place an information service and not a social networking tool, because the reciprocity is low.

7. Twitter is about news
Journalists have discovered Twitter as an interesting news source, especially in cases where the news develops so fats that the main stream networks cannot cover the development of the news. Twitter is therefore an interesting source for breaking news. This is sustained by the finding that Twitter is about spreading of information and not about social networking.  Secondly research reveal that trending topics on Twitter are related to for example headlines. Twitter is more a media for breaking news. Comparing trending topics on Twitter with Google trend and with CNN headlines, the conclusion was that trending topics followed more headlines than the Google trend. Only 3% of the trending topics on Twitter are represented in Google Trend. Half of the time Twitter trend followed CNN Headlines. Some news broke out on Twitter before CNN and they were on live broadcasting nature such as sports events or accidents.

8. Trending topics last shorter then a week
News comes and goes like the tide. If Twitter is news service it should also have a news cycle. And the questions is how long lives news on Twitter? What is the average life time of a Twitter trend. About 15% of topics have 2 active periods and 5% have 3. Very few have more than 3 active periods. Most of the active periods are a week or shorter.  31% Of periods are 1 day long, and only 7% of periods are longer than 10 days. Concluding therefore that Twitter users tend to talk about topics from headline news and respond to fresh news.

9. Power of re-tweeting
Although single tweets are most common, re-tweets have a special power. The mechanism of retweet has given every user the power to spread information broadly. Retweets reach a good number of people no matter many followers the tweet source has.
The  influentials by the number of retweets are dissimilar with those by the number of followers. Individual users have the power to dictate which information is important and should spread by the form of retweet, which collectively determines the importance of the original tweet.

Flightradar24.com shows live aircraft traffic in the airspace above Europe.

Let me start with two examples in order to get problem of internet and censorship clear.
http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

Turkey
The first example is based on the experiences of one of our correspondents of a national newspaper- de Volkskrant 2009-12-7- based in Istanbul. This story is about Turkey, country that is a stepping stone between Europe and the Arab world. Turkey is part of the Council of Europe ( and has signed the European treaty  on human rights) and has also applied for membership of the EU. And Turkey shares religion, the Islam with the Arab world. This correspondent received a mail including a link to YouTube. He clicked on the link and saw a blue screen. At the bottom of the page was information of the Ministry of Information saying that this site was blocked.  Probably YouTube contained offensive information about the army, or Ataturk, or gave information about the PKK. When he told the operator of the internet café about the blue screen and the censorship, he clicked a few times and the  movie of YouTube appeared on screen. What he did was simple, connecting to a proxy server outside and avoided the fire wall. He said, everybody knows this trick, and even our prime minister, who put a video of himself on YouTube, watches this blocked site. I quote: “ Turkey has strict rules, but we are masters to go under the radar”.
During a summit of the Worldbank and IMF at Istanbul only the foreign correspondents  could access the uncensored internet, the computers of Turkish colleagues  were censored. Of course this causes trouble with the EU, about human rights. The government is using two standards. Therefore Turkish government has asked Google to build a special Turkish version of Google that filters for example critical information about Ataturk from YouTube. So far Google has only done this for China.

Egypt
The second example comes from Egypt, one of the Arab countries that has a strict security policy that hinders the quality of reporting. The case of blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil, who seems to have offended President Mubarak and the Prophet on his blog, is well known. (http://karam903.blogspot.com/ accessed 2009-12-30)  Nabil was in 2007 convicted to imprisonment, that this verdict was confirmed according to Reporters without Frontiers. Reported by the NRC Handelsblad on December 23 2009. His followers started on a blog a campaign for the release of Nabil. (http://www.freekareem.org/ accessed 2009-12-30)
On the internet site of Reporters without Frontiers is detailed information about the situation in Egypt and in other Arab countries as well. See for example:  http://www.rsf.org/en-rapport149-Egypt.html (accessed 2009-12-30).

Problem
What is the problem when we are talking about Internet and censorship?
Generally states have the jurisdiction and control over their territory. However the free flow of information on an international network like Internet transcends this control. Let’s take a simple example. When an offense to president Muburak is expressed on a machine-a computer server- on Egyptian territory , the Egyptian government is able to close down that server, because it is within the borders of Egypt. However if this server is in the US, where this type of information is protected by the first amendment, it can be published. However access to this information is not restricted to the US but because of the international character of internet, it can also be accessed in Egypt. There is nothing that the Egyptian government could do. Because the US server is outside the Egyptian jurisdiction. So the problem of controlling information on the internet is totally different from the spread of information by traditional system  like newspapers and broadcasting. In this case, controlling the printing press or the broadcasting station will do the job.

Control
What is the solution to this problem?

Of course Egypt could disconnect from the internet, but that is not a good solution, simple because of the economic consequences.
Egypt could try to limit the number of computers and access to computers, but this also will restrict the economic development.
Or one can try to create an international organizations which controls the content. The WSIS, World Summit on the Information Society- a UN Conference – a few years ago (Geneva 2003 and Tunis 2005), tried to go in that direction but failed. See for more details the website of WSIS: http://www.itu.int/wsis/index.html (accessed 2009-12-30)  Of course because it will be impossible to come up with international standards.
Or finally Egypt could try to filter the information at the borders, by surrounding the Egyptian part of Internet with a firewall. That is an electronic border, which checks all the information coming in and going out.

Last US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized in her ‘internet speech’ at the Newseum in Washington, countries that hinder or block the free flow of information and the right to access. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f0c3bf8c-06bd-11df-b426-00144feabdc0,_i_email=y.html . She spoke about a new “information curtain (reference to Churchill iron curtain) descending on the world. ”

Arab World
The situation of the free flow of information on the internet in the Arab world is problematic. Clinton mentioned explicitly the case of 30 bloggers in Egypt which were detained, mentioning one of them Bassem Samir. She also mentioned Saudi Arabia, where blogs about Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism were blocked.
The following comes from the website of  Journalists without Frontiers.
Bahrain: Against this background, the Internet gives the kingdom’s journalists a highly valued space for freedom of expression. But this space is now being brought much more under official surveillance and control.
Egypt: In the face of such restrictions, the Internet has become a refuge for freedom of expression. With 20% of the population going online, Egypt has one of the highest rates of Internet penetration on the African continent. Out of concern for its image abroad, Egypt decided long ago not to block websites. But it has started to tighten is grip again as the online craze has grown. Since 2008, it has changed the conditions for using wireless (Wi-Fi) Internet….. Many bloggers were arrested as a result of the “6 April” protest movement launched on Facebook in 2008. The year was marked by hounding of the press and Internet users as the government sought to keep control over the country’s image.
Iran: Iran is also the most repressive country in the Middle East’s when it comes to the Internet, even though the Iranian blogosphere is one of the region’s most combative. The authorities have been stepping up control online in the run-up to presidential elections on 12 June 2009.
Syria: Syria is one of the world’s most repressive countries towards Internet users. The authorities have stepped up Internet filtering, making many websites inaccessible, including Arabic-language opposition sites and those linked to the country’s Kurdish minority.

There are also new developments, which create new possibilities.

Twitter
Internet technology develops fast. Ten years ago hardly anyone had ever heard of blogging. And this year Twitter experienced an exponential grows.  Both technologies contribute to the free flow of information and are therefore important to journalists. Twitter has shown its value in two interesting cases in the Arab world. The first is related to the Israeli attack on the Gaza strip. And second one to the protest in Teheran in Iran after the elections in June this year  and its aftermath even continuing this months.
During the Israeli attack on the Gaza strip, no journalist could enter the territory. Of course the Israeli government tried to control information about this operation. However mobile phones and access to the internet from mobile phones was still possible. Twitter became the source of information. Palestinians were sending short messages  (140 characters) about the attack using Twitter based on their own experiences, acting like ‘citizen reporters’. Al Jazeera London collected these messages on a webpage which became the newswire from Gaza.
The second example is more or less the same. Student demonstration in Teheran after the elections could not be covered by the international press. Students were using Twitter as a tool for reporting. The collection of messages generally labeled with the #teheran, could be retrieved from the Twitter server and again give a newswire like overview of the events including photo’s and video.
There is also a counter tendency. A group claiming to be the Iranian Cyber Army managed to redirect Twitter users to its own site displaying a political message. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8420233.stm
Before I come to a conclusion and outlook for the future we have to look at on other example, outside the Arab world but very important for the future development.

China
China’s government censors have taken fresh aim at the Internet, rolling out new measures that limit its citizens’ ability to set up personal Web sites and to view hundreds of Web sites offering films, video games and other forms of entertainment.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/world/asia/18china.html?scp=1&sq=china%20internet%20controls&st=cse
Google is also under pressure. Google had accepted China’s preference and created a special, Chinese version of Google, www.google.cn which filtered information. Because of an attack on mailboxes of Google mail, Google considers to close down this search engines, and China will creates its own search engine Baidu.
In the Financial Times (20-1-2010) http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a7bdfbae-054b-11df-a85e-00144feabdc0,_i_email=y.html   Kathrin Hille writes that Google does not understand, that “ China has developed its own cyberspace…..which include cultural preferences and social structures that were very different from those in the west.” For the average Chinese citizen even a filtered internet is “ the freest space in Chinese society”.  And  secondly the Chinese are more interested in music and games than information about Tiananmen( famous square in Being) and Zhongnanhai(the residence of the Communist party leaders).

Conclusion: regionalization

From the above I come to the following outlook.
There is a growing tendency among countries and groups of countries to control the flow of information on the internet.
1. First we have the economic reasons. I just mention the following EU countries:
Google looses a French copyright case, A French court ruled on Friday that Google infringed copyrights by digitizing books and putting extracts online without authorization, dealing a setback to its embattled book project. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/19/technology/companies/19google.html?scp=1&sq=google%20french%20copyright&st=cse
the Spanish Government published the latest draft for the Sustainable Economy Act, which would enable a Commission dependent of the Ministry of Culture to take down websites without a court order, in cases of Intellectual Property piracy http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/12/04/038259

2. Secondly we have ideological and religious motivated proposes for regulation. The Chinese and Arab examples belong to this case.

3. Third we have crime: for example the Russian mafia is using the internet for stealing money from credit cards. Also we have attacks from hackers on mailboxes and servers.

So the demand for regulation of the net comes from various area’s: economic interest, crime and political interest. Although their motives are quite different together the pressure for regulating initiatives is growing. For the Arab world I expect that these countries will create, like China, their own version on the Internet, adapted to their preferences and social structures. For lots of people in the Arab world a filtered internet is a very interesting place for finding new and different information. Like the new satellite TV channels which can be received by a dish, they open up the world.
We, as journalists, have to watch this process of growing regionalization of the Internet, and have to find out how much the free flow of information is limited.

Upstarts
Here are a few interesting examples. Sam Apple started last year with less than 20.000$, The Faster Times (http://thefastertimes.com/) , a new newspaper, published on-line using open source software. Contributors are paid 75% of the revenues of the advertisements placed next to their articles. True/Slant (http://trueslant.com/) is another upstart, created  by Lewis Dvorkin, using the same business model. The interesting thing is that an advertiser could ask to publish the add next to an article that has an estimated number of readers. Associated Content (http://www.associatedcontent.com/)and Demand Media (http://www.demandmedia.com/) are really turning the business model upside down because they base their stories on search engines queries and optimization; they are feeding Google’s appetite. These new newspapers are all working with a small staff in a simple newsroom, and the contributors are free lancers. They don’t get rich. The Faster Times paid between 5-75 $ per story, and Demand’s free lancers can make around 15-20 $ per item. So you have to attract millions of page views to get decent income.
In fact we don’t go to the other side of the pond to watch new experiments, because Memeburn (http://memeburn.com) resembles these business models. And watching the development of stories and click rates, I would conclude, this is a nice start up! With the dropping Euro of less than 10 Rand , I was just wondering: He Matthew Buckland, when are you going to sent that cheque?

Last week together with a colleague, I was ‘ashed in’ at Amsterdam airport; he could not fly to Johannesburg and my flight to Cyprus was cancelled, all due to the ash cloud from that famous Iceland volcano Eyjafjallajokull. Twitter proved to be a good help; following the tweets gave us an idea who was flying to where or not; what is the ash cloud doing, moving to where, what is weather report, favorable or not. Ah you can’t get home, let’s share a ride, or take the train together. On Twitter we could easily find some answers.

Invisible hand
Journalists who followed the tweets got a good picture about what was going. Searching in the piles of tweets, brought up interesting links to sources  from explaining the background of this phenomenon, to the amount of losses of the companies and the number of people involved. We were surfing the crowd in order to discover some truth.  Is there a collective wisdom in the twitter cloud?  Although I like Adams Smith ‘s  simile about the ‘invisible hand’  which creates order in the market, the twitter cloud is more like a huge pub were everybody is talking and shouting while the music is playing loud. In some corners interesting things are happening more or less spontaneous and uncoordinated. Think for example about Wikipedia or open source software like Linux.
Last year I tried to analyze the tweets about an airplane crash of Turkish Airlines at Schiphol airport near Amsterdam and compared that collection of tweets with several CoverItLive sessions about the same event also using Twitter as input. The collection of tweets did not show any clear pattern of topics or consensus about what happened. The CoverItLive session on the contrary showed after some time consensus about number of death, number of people in the plane etc.  So I concluded that surfing the crowd, trying to establish some truth, is difficult if there is not a minimum sense of community and direct interaction between the Twitterati. Other research showed that the social network of followers and followees does not reveal a structure, but underneath it is a structured interactive network of friends (persons who were sending direct message). See for example: Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope by Huberman, Romero and Fang Wu. (http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2317/2063)

Buttocks
Perhaps I was expecting too much. Twitter is not about knowledge; it is a  thermometer deep into the buttocks of society; it is about the mood; popular hash tags tell us what is cool and what is hot. But if you know the mood about a certain topic, perhaps you can predict an outcome on basis of the number of tweets. This is the idea behind the study of Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman,  Predicting the Future with Social Media. (http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.5699) . The researchers, both working for  Hewlett-Packard, analyzed in the beginning of 2009 2.89 mill tweets about 24 movies send by 1.2 mill users. A statistical analysis learned that there was a relationship between the number of tweets in the week before the movie was released and the first weekend Box-office revenues. For the horror movie The Crazies for example the statistical model predicted a revenue of 16.8 mill. The Box-office revenue was 16.06 mill. Compared to the Hollywood Stock Exchange, where people can bet on success or failure of a movie, the model performed significantly better.
After the first weekend people had actually seen the movie, and of course they twittered: they were positive or negative. Including the content of the tweets improved the model for prediction. For the second weekend the number of tweets and their content showed that positive responses improved the sales and negative responses decreased the revenue.

Herbert Blankensteijn, a Dutch journalist and blogger for one of the national newspapers, wondered if you can apply this model to the stock exchange to predict the rise and fall of the stock. Asur and Huberman had no answer. And for the moment I don’t want to bet my money on that.  The application of the model for marketing is obvious. With Twitter a company can try to predict the sales of their product.  It also proves that there is some wisdom in the  Twitter cloud.