Social unrest
There's a lot of froth and hyperbole associated with the role of social media in civil unrest these days. You get the same kind of breathless voyeurism we used to associate with the foreign correspondents like John Simpson whenever it kicks-off in some country or other, and an extra frisson of moral gratification when that country has authoritarian rulers.
We don't normally cover these ‘Twitter changes the world' stories, but the technological response to Egypt turning off the Internet amid its own civil unrest seems to have been genuinely innovative and worthy of note.
Google acquired a company called SayNow last week that specialises in integrating voice with social media. Armed with its new acquisition, Google collaborated with Twitter to produce a simple solution for anyone to publish a voicemail message to the Internet.
All you need to do is call +16504194196, +390662207294 or +97316199855, say what you've got to say, and the message is automatically get tweeted on @speak2tweet.
Of course many of those messages are in Arabic, but TNW has written about an apparently spontaneous bit of crowdsourcing, in which volunteers are collaborating via a Google Doc spreadsheet to transcribe the messages in Arabic and translate them into English.
Whether or not all of this social media goodness makes an iota of difference to the outcome of the current problems Egypt is experiencing remains to be seen. But as an illustration of the power of the Internet as a medium for the unrestricted distribution of information, and of the futility of trying to shut that stable door after the horse bolted decades ago, this is a cool story.
