Above is a dynamically updated chart from Trendistic.com, a service that tracks trending topics on Twitter. It shows how much Twitter users have been using the hashtag #flotilla over the course of the past week, and naturally this includes a peak since this morning. According to Trendistic, #flotilla is one of the top trending topics at the moment, accounting 0.78% of tweets worldwide.
But you wouldn’t know that from Twitter itself, which has #4wordsbeforedeath trending. It was popular last night, but as this time only accounts for 0.18% of tweets. So what gives?
There is some speculation that Twitter may be banning #flotilla from its trending calculations. Twitter can ban common words so as not to give false results. But #flotilla is hardly a common word. Last June, Twitter intervened (at the request of the State Dept.) to keep its servers going when #iranelection was trending. It was rightly applauded for doing so. So what’s up with not allowing #flotilla to trend, and redirecting searches on the word to the homepage (just try it from your account.)
Go to Source
Facebook keeps promising to lift the 5000-friend limit, but has not done it. So my account over there is more or less full. Just to let readers who are interested know that the Facebook Informed Comment fan page works nearly as well, and that I’ve been trying to spend some time there, making a few extra postings and comments.
Also, you can follow IC at Twitter.
Since social media is so important to what used to be called blogging, and some action has shifted to news upvote sites, I’m always grateful to readers who submit postings to Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, etc.
For the moment, since I have switched to WordPress, I have lost the capability of sending out the blog posts to a mailing list by email. There must be a free plugin that will do this work, but I haven’t found it yet. But I am hoping to do so.
Go to Source
You probably have heard that Twitter was down for an hour or so today. It seems the whole problem started when a Turkish user discovered that if you simply typed “Accept” followed by a famous person’s Twitter name, said famous person would be following you. Naturally, the information went viral while the whole world was making Bill Gates and Madonna their followers, and the system was shut down. Or so it says here. It sounds like a ridiculously simple glitch that somehow only just was discovered. I think I’m glad I’m too talkative to keep to 140 characters. Though I could have had lots of celebrity followers for a while there.
Go to Source
A grab bag of reports on today’s 6 April protests and the government’s heavy handed, but apparently successful, attempts to neutralize them:
On the whole, like last year, those attempting to protest were met with a show of state force, and as some of the reports note, the absence of ElBaradei is apparently leading to criticism by many. As for Ayman Nour, he was reported holed up in the Al-Ghad Party HQ, which was surrounded by police.
Cairo is not Tehran, and while the April 6, 2008 labor protests were spontaneous, the 2009 and 2010 efforts to repeat them have fizzled in the face of determined state power.
Go to Source
Dubai Le Meridien Mina Seyahi denies Twitter campaign had anything to do with scrapping Vanilla Ice concert.
Go to Source
I have been lax in posting these links — remember the latest ones can always be seen on the sidebar, at my delicious account and are automatically posted on my twitter account.
Go to Source
Added: Don’t forget Twitter, the key Iranian communications medium last summer. #22 Bahman is probably the most important, but #bahman, #iran, #iranelection, .and others are worth following. I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of Facebook traffic too.
We’re still snowed in and the Federal Government is closed again tomorrow. I’ll keep blogging, however.
Since tomorrow is the big celebration of the Revolution and the day of expected confrontations in Tehran, and since the government is threatening some very serious crackdowns, I thought I’d point you to some on-the-eve pieces at Tehran Bureau, at The Daily Beast, and at Enduring America. These are sites that, from varying perspectives, have followed the opposition movement closely. I’ll be posting my own reactions tomorrow as well, but they will be devoting more time to it than most.
Go to Source
ONI, Bahrain, Tunisia Filtering Individual Twitter Pages, 4 Jan 2010 "Over the past few weeks, reports have trickled in to Herdict and via Twitter, alerting us of the filtering of individual Twitter pages in Tunisia and Bahrain (as well as, possibly, China). In Tunisia, the accounts of exiled activist Sami Ben Gharbia (@ifikra), engineer @Ma7moud, and popular independent news source Nawaat (@
Go to Source
Just to let all the Informed Comment readers who use iPhones know that there is now a dedicated app for it. Search ‘Juan Cole’s blog’ in iPhone apps and it comes right up. It lets you favorite posts and share them on Twitter and facebook.
It was generated by Motherapp.com, to whom many thanks.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Go to Source
Views from the Occident (Twitter Specials), Ansar al-Mujahideen English Forums’ Statement on Fort Hood Attack, 24 Nov 09
Go to Source
Reader Reactions