My husband just sent me a link to this article about ways to gather information from twitter. He has been using it for a few months as part of his new project www.lookbackmaps.net and has found it essential to finding others who are interested in public history. Some of the tools for how to track how far a tweet is traveling (via tweetreach) and to visualize how a topic is being characterized is also pretty amazing. Check out a visualization of LookBackMaps and the topic of Tibet. Not the most recent tweets on the subject at the bottom.

NY Times article about how repressive governments like China block social network ways of organizing and creating media savvy responses.

Nice quote from Xiao Qiang (who was an organizer at Tienanmen, spoke at one of the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, and is now a prof at UC Berkeley...amongst other things): “For Twitter or the Internet, when they see too many factors they cannot completely control, they shut down and block. But for foreign journalists, they feel that as long as they can keep those people under control, it may serve better the government’s purpose.”

Makes me wonder what it would be like if the Googles of the world didn't allow for special blocking of "sensitive content" and demanded the democratization and equal access to information. Would change happen quicker?