Tonight’s most interesting observation

Courtesy of Dr. Ted Kohn of Bilkent University, who delivered a concise summary of the 2008 horserace at a panel discussion earlier this evening:

“The Obama campaign has been very adept at using YouTube, which didn’t even exist four years ago. And, as Ersin Bey [the moderator] reminds me, it doesn’t exist for you in Turkey, either.”

YouTube came up again, during a discussion of Hillary Clinton’s 3am phone call ad. It’s hard to tell just how pervasive those sneezing pandas are until they’re banned by the government.

A brief list of things I cannot do on the Internet in Turkey

"Access to this site has been prevented by court order"

1. Watch videos of sneezing pandas and cats playing the piano. A Turkish court banned access to YouTube in March 2007.
2. Download Ubuntu Linux for my laptop. A Turkish court blockaded the Pirate Bay and other torrent trackers in September 2007.
3. Visit the crappy website I made in middle school. A Turkish court censored Geocities in February.
4. Read the writing of one of my favorite thinkers, Richard Dawkins. A Turkish court blocked his website last month.
5. Keep up with my friends Dan, Anne Marie, Ke, Angela, Janet, Will, Paul, Jess, and Kasia. A Turkish court banned their blogs today.^[1]

The Turkish government has censored over a thousand websites since May 2007, when the parliament passed Law No. 5651, which banned sites containing criminal content, violating Turkish law, or “infringing on the personal rights” of Turkish citizens. It also gave the state Telecommunications Board power to directly ban sites it deems obscene and offensive, and censor others with a judge’s approval.

Since the law went into effect, the board has received 24,598 ban proposals from the public, automatically censored 861 sites, and blocked 251 more by court order. Tayfun Acarer, president of the Telecommunications Board, explained the ban to daily newspaper Today’s Zaman earlier this month: “The duty of the state is to protect its citizens and warn them against harmful Internet content.”

Still looking to Europe as they drift further and further away.

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[Back] There might have been one more entry here, were it not for an amusing typo on the part of the censors. The website “imbd.com” has been blocked since last April, which prevents access to a parked linkfarm rather than the Internet Movie Database.

Clearing up campaign word clouds

Graphics known as tag clouds, which summarize chunks of text by weighting the font size of words based on frequency of use, have long been used to navigate the Web. Now they’re gaining traction as tools for armchair analysis of political rhetoric, thanks to Wordle, a tool that generates elegant word clouds from websites and blog feeds.

The Washington Post took word-cloud geekery mainstream this weekend, printing a pair of word clouds generated from the campaign blogs of John McCain and Barack Obama. The results:

Washington Post word clouds

As the mystery bloggers at Democracy In America note, it’s evidence that the presidential race is squarely focused on Barack Obama — “from afar both blogs look like they could belong to Obama girl.”

That’s a safe conclusion, considering the two biggest, bluest data points in the graphic. But are there other insights further down the size scale? One might be tempted to conclude that McCain’s big purple “Pentagon” is evidence of his emphasis on national security (or, on closer reading, that it’s more likely a reference to the campaign’s latest attack ads). A look at Obama’s cloud shows a curiously big “president” after the standard trope-trio of “hope,” “change,” “can.” Proof that he really is the “presumptuous nominee?“

Not quite. As with any visualization of a complicated data set, attention to detail is critical. Are the inputs being compared completely equal? Is the visual representation unbiased? Does the graphic quickly convey useful information?

The above clouds aren’t too bad, but they could be better. Each shows the top 150 words, which is Wordle’s default setting. But the number of words represented could be a bit bigger. Half the words are horizontal and half vertical, arranged in no particular order. Any bias created by this arrangement is probably random, but it does mean finding words of interest is a bit of a scavenger hunt. (Quick, where’s “Iraq?”)

Most important, although the author of the article in the Post does link to the two blogs used as data sources, there’s no indication of the range of dates used to generate the clouds. This is a problem, at least if one wants to use the clouds to analyze the rhetorical current of the presidential debate. A quick look at the two blogs shows that McCain’s is infrequently updated by a few staffers, whereas Obama’s is frequently refreshed by a variety of contributors (perhaps not a surprise in a race between a Blackberry addict and an analog candidate). Thus, Obama’s feed ends July 26, and McCain’s concludes a full month earlier. Comparing them directly is an exercise in apples and oranges (although to be fair, it’s not clear whether the Post considered this, and it’s difficult to tell now that the campaign blogs have moved on to the week’s latest inanity).

Below, I’ve regenerated the clouds with a few improvements. Each contains 250 words, displayed horizontally and arranged alphabetically from left to right. The color schemes are identical, and I’ve tried to ensure that the graphics are roughly congruent. Finally, I used Yahoo Pipes to ensure that they both cover the same timespan — posts after July 27. That’s not a lot of time, but short of scraping both blogs with unscrupulous Internet tools, I’m not sure there’s a better way to get an equal data set. The results:

Obama

McCain

(visualizations via Wordle)

Even equalized, it appears that the argument that it’s all about Obama is still sound, although this time McCain does show up as a tiny red squiggle at the top of Obama’s cloud. It’s clear that this week’s debate is all about “drilling” for “oil” versus how to “make” “new” “energy.” And it looks like Obama’s blog covers more topics with more words than McCain. Beyond that, readers will have to draw their own conclusions.

Tag clouds are great tools, but in order to convey useful information, their parameters must be correctly aligned. Consider them critically, lest they mislead.

Here comes the nanny Net

Today’s FCC ruling slamming Comcast for throttling BitTorrent traffic over their network is an indicator that more extensive government regulation lies ahead for that wild, anarchic thing we used to call the Internet. But college students across the United States may be logging onto a series of terrible dystopian future-tubes far sooner than everyone else, thanks to the 1,158-page Higher Education Act, which Congress approved yesterday and President Bush will soon sign into law.

Among the slew of new regulations in the bill is a provision originally inserted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that requires all universities to develop “plans to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material,” including technological tools like network monitoring and packet shaping, and to “offer alternatives to illegal downloading” like the industry approved, DRM infected services from Napster and Ruckus.

That’s right — universities have now been deputized as copyright cops, and the alternative services (which happen to pay big licensing fees to the record industry) have just received a subsidy by fiat. Public choice pressures, anyone?

The law is ambiguous on actually requiring colleges to implement any sort of network surveillance or traffic management tools, although as Will Patry notes, “there is likely to be an effort in the next Congress to mandate these technologies.” That means that although campus networks might not yet be monitored, students should expect more of the fun creative solutions designed by schools like the Missouri University of Science and Technology, which requires students to take an inane “copyright quiz” before allowing limited access to peer-to-peer network connections. Or the slew of schools that now give students a crash course in copyright law at freshman orientation — a complicated subject usually covered in, um, law school.

Shoot me now. In fact, I think I’d actually prefer school snooping to some of the awful anti-piracy programs designed by the academy. After all, our lovable federal government is already listening, so what’s another set of prying eyes?

Copyright is a deeply flawed system, but individuals ought to reasonably respect it, as they do with any other law. What deserves no respect, however, are efforts by media lobbyists to strongarm schools into doing their dirty work with the power of the state.

Republicans ask Internet for platform ideas; LOLicy proposals to ensue

Looks like the GOP is hoping a series of tubes can pump new policy ideas into its national platform. Today, the Republican Platform Committee launched a website and facebook application seeking comments from the Internet at large on seven central policy issues, as part of the platform-drafting process that will culminate at the convention in Minneapolis in September.

The website modestly describes itself as “the most grassroots-driven platform development effort in the history of American politics.” There may be room for disagreement on that point (looks like someone overlooked the 1831 Anti-Masonic nominating convention!) but it’s a novel experiment nonetheless. Users can upload videos and post comments in each policy category, and although the interface is a little clunky, the site itself is nicely designed (this glowing ‘08 evokes Obama’s hope-hazy style).

But are the Republicans actually reaching out, or merely opening an avenue for disaster? Considering the Web supremacy of Ron Paul supporters, with the uncanny ability to utterly dominate most every avenue of online discussion, I don’t see the new site producing anything of substance to mainstream Republicans besides another reminder of how far they’ve strayed from their limited-government roots. As of this afternoon, the Paulites were already in action. Like Barack Obama’s now-failed FISA group, this tool could quickly become an embarrassment — especially if anyone tries to moderate the conversation or delete comments. That’s just what today’s GOP deserves.