I was quite pleased when I read in a posting to a mailing list that the British government was no longer going to use the phrase “war on terror.” [SPOILER ALERT: The posting was wrong.] The post pointed to an article in the Daily Mail quoted at length by Military.com). It said:

The words “war on terror” will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public, the country’s chief prosecutor said Dec. 27.

Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless “death cult.”

The Director of Public Prosecutions said: ‘We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language.”

London is not a battlefield, he said.

“The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers,” Macdonald said. “They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way.”

His remarks signal a change in emphasis across Whitehall, where the “war on terror” language has officially been ditched.

Ah, someone speaking sense! Except it seemed odd to me that the Director of Public Prosecutions would get to decide how the British government is going to characterize issues of defense. So, I checked the Daily Mail site and the best I could come up with was an article from last January in which Sir Ken talked about the language he thinks the government should use, not a decision by the government about the language that it will use.

If you can come up with an actual source for this, I’d be very happy to be acknowledge your superior googling skills and celebrate this one small step towards a sensible approach to peace and security.

(BTW, I think the Military.com article got to posted to the mailing list I’m on via Dave Farber’s high-visibility mailing list.) [Tags: war_on_terror ken_macdonald uk politics marketing blogs journalism citizen_journalism berkman ]

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Hoder is asking his social network to publicize the lawsuit that threatens to bankrupt him. Ethan Zuckerman has posted about this with his usual cogency and moral insight. You don’t have to agree with Hoder to see the suit against him as an attempt to shut out a voice and ideas. You don’t have to agree with Hoder to support him in this.

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Michael Anti was a NY Times correspondent in Beijing and was a well-known Chinese blogger until the government shut the blog down. He is now a Niemann Fellow at Harvard. He’s giving a Berkman lunchtime talk. (As always, I’m typing quickly, paraphrasing, and missing stuff. You can hear the entire talk at MediaBerkman.)

Michael speaks informally. What happens when decentralized, open blogging meets the centralized, closed Chinese society? From 2004-2005, most dissenting news of China came through blogs. After that, it comes through chat rooms. Chat rooms started in Chinese in around 1998. Now China has gone back to that — very Web 1.0, Michael says. Email and mailing lists are also important for sharing dissenting news about politics, religion, etc. “We don’t use Web 2.0. Why not?” Web 2.0 is democratizing and decentralizing. But blogs aren’t really decentralized because they need centralized servers, which make them easy for the government to control. It is much harder for the government to find chat rooms and shut them down.

Before the Internet, the media were propaganda. With the Internet, people can do the job of traditional media in providing another voice. Michael finds this a more useful way of thinking about the Internet than considering it to be new media.

Sina.com aggregates Chinese newspapers for free. In 2005, they set up their own blog service. The bloggers are VIPs: journalists, professors, celebrities. Blogging has become very mainstream. Like the HuffingtonPost, it’s invited and not really the voice of the people. Bloggers there are like traditional columnists. The bloggers don’t serve as a check on the media; the media are the bloggers.

Michael was a hotel receptionist. He began writing on the Net about the Net. He got hired in 1999 as a journalist on the basis of that. H Thousands of netizens were hired as journalists. Journalism therefore “has an Internet heart.” Journalists welcomed bloggers during the “golden years” of 2004-2005. After that, bloggers and journalists couldn’t post anything sensitive.

The Chinese blogosphere is about recruiting people into the old media, not about new media.

“The guy who censored my blog… we’re close friends.” They talk frequently. “Sorry I have to close down your blog.” “I understand. How about if this weekend we go kayaking?” It’s his job to shut down blogs, but inside he is very liberal.

If you want to find citizen journalism in China, turn to the geeks. And they have “copycats” of the services on the Web that are easier to censor. (Michael says that gmail is popular and very important to the Chinese. It’s too important to government and business to block it.)

There is a network of elite blogs and there are chat rooms. These are the two faces of the social Internet in China. The dark side is that the government has successfully controlled the Internet. Everything is free to talk about except politics.

He doesn’t see any immediate change. China is becoming Singapore, not the US. He hopes that social networking and chatrooms will eventually steer the country towards freedom.

Q: What percentage of the Chinese people are involved in social movements and social networking?
A: Only the middle class and those committed to social change. That’s why I say “elite networking.”

Q: Is most blogging urban or rural?
A: I think blogging happens only in the cities.

Q: What’s the government doing to try to monitor and control chat rooms?
A: Conservatives like chat rooms, as well as liberals do. (In 2005, the anti-Japanese movement spread via chat rooms.) Anonymity is easy in chat rooms.

Q: (doc) Is Red Flag a knockoff of RedHat?
A: Yes. The government doesn’t trust RedHat. It only uses Red Flag. Microsoft gave much of the Windows source code to the government so the government verify there are no back doors.

Q: (ethanz) What percent of Chinese people do you think are aware of the levels of restriction and censorship, and are inclined to find a way around them?
A:The personal life of Chinese is so free that the first time I came to Europe and America I found it so conservative. In China we have sex before marriage, are more tolerant of homosexuality, we have no conservative party, we have no God, it’s very easy to create new companies. The Chinese government allows the people to have so much freedom about sex and business so they’ll accept the political restrictions. The new generation accepts this exchange. Only very weird people care. At least 95% of people don’t care about censorship. I don’t see any hope to change this. In the US, the Internet is Che Guevara. In China, it’s an harmonic ship.

Q: What do you mean by making China into a “big Singapore”?
A: Happy citizens without any political ideas.

Q: (colin) What’s next?
A: Forget anything centralized. E.g., Twitter won’t work. The elites will get further networked. If the political situation changes, China will become liberal very quickly because the media is already liberal on the inside. And if there’s an organizational collapse, the social networks on the Internet will come to the fore. I’m very confident about the future of China because of the Internet.

Q: (me) If there were anonymous blogging, would more people do it?
A: No, because in China it’s all about the name. If you don’t have a recognized name, who cares what you say? Tom Freidman without that name would be no one.
Q: Pseudonyms that gain traction by getting links, etc.?
A: Sometimes a blogger will break news, but after the media picks it up, the blogger is out of the picture.

Q: (colin) Anything that international companies can do?
A: If Congress banned Google from doing business with China, what would happen to gmail? If Microsoft left China, what about Messenger? For Congress, it’s easy to be black and white. But the Chinese people depend on these tools to communicate about freedom and rights. The real cost is Chinese freedom. (Yahoo is different. It’s “a real bad thing.” It “didn’t do any good to China.”) The Chinese authorities want to embrace the Internet, to be part of the international community, not like North Korea. So we should encourage them to do more with the Internet and to continue to say that the Internet is good. The outside world should encourage as well as blame the Chinese government. The Chinese people don’t like blame and don’t like being told what to do. [Tags: michael_anti china blogs censorship berkman ]

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Jessamyn West, who has been putting the rarin back in Librarian since 1999, posts about the fact that someone she respects has started doing pay-per-post postings. And then she goes all meta on the topic. Quite amusing. As she concludes: “Ten dollars well spent, I think. Don’t you?” [Tags: jessamyn_west, mat_honan pay_per_post, blogging, blogosphere libraries -berkman]

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This site is now officially under construction as I switch it from Movable Type to WordPress. So, pardon the glitches, and, no, I haven’t finished moving my blogroll over yet.

Why am I switching? It comes down to no good reason. I like MT as software and admire it as a company. But, I have it configured for maximum host churn. So, I could work on configuring it better or I could try something new. I’ve been using WP for my Everything Is Miscellaneous blog, and have been enjoying it. I’m also fairly comfortable with it now. So, I opted to try something new.

My only regret comes from mt sense of loyalty to MT. The company is a good contributor to the community and I recommend MT wholeheartedly. In fact, if bradsucks weren’t doing the WP install for me, I’d absolutely fail at it; WP is easy to get up in its default state, but much harder to configure and personalize than MT, at least in my experience.

So, now for the tweaks, the fixes, the general annoyance, and the post-installation regrets…

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Two members of the Bush cabinet have blogs: Mike Leavitt of Health and Human Services and Michael Chertoff of Homeland Security.

And that concludes this month’s Say Something Nice about the Bush Administration feature. [Tags: blogs mike_leavitt michael_chertoff ]

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Jeremy Wagstaff on Jiglu for auto-tagging your blog and its archive…

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I like Jaiku both because as the second entrant, it learned from Twitter, the first entrant, and because Jyri Engeström is one of those brilliant, sweet people who make the world better in several dimensions at once. (Disclosure: Jyri is a conference buddy.)

It’ll be interesting to see where Google surfaces the UI for entering Jaiku microblog posts and where it surfaces the posts themselves.

And most important, of course, is whether Jaiku will be renamed Jaigoo or Jookle. [Tags: jaiku twitter google blogging Jyri_Engeström everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Soctt Kirsner has started a as the online side of his Boston Globe “Innovation Economy” column. He says:

My goal with both the column and the blog is to cover the most interesting people and companies involved in the tech, VC, and life sciences scene here in New England…ideally before they’re written about elsewhere.

So, New England innovators, start your PR engines! :) [Tags: scott_kirsner innovation ]

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The Daniel Kovach Scholarship Foundation awards a $10,000 scholarship to some lucky and worthy US college blogger. Get the details here. (Thanks to danah for the link.) [Tags: blogging scholarships]

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