Behind the scenes: How to upgrade a citizen journalism website

Updated 22nd December 2010 with list of plugins used on the site. Groundviews launched its new version today. It was a radical departure from the look and feel of the old and first version to the new avatar. Old / original version Current version Counting articles and comments, Groundviews has, at last count, well over […]

Commonwealth Expert Team on social media use during presidential election

The Final Report on 2010 Presidential Election in Sri Lanka by the Commonwealth Expert Team issued on 15th February 2010 interrogates briefly the use of social media during the campaign, This election campaign saw the two main candidates and their supporters make wide use of social media sites such as Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, as […]

How to identify a fake Facebook profile. Not.

Sri Lanka Watch reports that, According to intelligence reports, a massive fake facebook scam is underway by certain individuals to collect personal photos and information of people for commercial and other purposes. This is the latest Internet scam that is common in Colombo and Kandy areas. Sri Lanka Watch, in a remarkable display of sheer […]

Facebook and Google Maps in Iran

Following up from my previous post on the use of new media and citizen journalism in Iran recently, I came across two more powerful examples today. Facebook it seems, in Persian, is now an important means of mobilising and disseminating information produced by polity and society opposed to the Presidential election outcome. The very fact […]

Facebook for Good

“Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” That may or may not be Facebook’s mission. But at 200 million users, there’s no denying that the social network has some appeal. The new Facebook for Good page asks users of the network to share their […]

Sri Lanka’s first mainstream media article on Facebook activism

Image from Sunday Times Smriti Daniel’s article last Sunday in the Sunday Times is to my knowledge the first article that appears in the print media in Sri Lanka dealing with growing web based activism via the social networking platform Facebook. It’s a well written and researched piece that deals with a phenomenon I most […]

Pissu Poona: The new face of activism on the web in Sri Lanka?

Facebook’s appeal as a platform for political activism in the Middle East is well known. Far fewer people access it in Sri Lanka, even amongst the handful in the country who are connected to the web and Internet. And yet, I received an invitation yesterday from Pissu Poona, an anonymous identity I befriended whose only […]

Behavioral patterns on Facebook: We are still intimate beings

The average male Facebook user with 120 friends: Leaves comments on 7 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall Messages or chats with 4 friends The average female Facebook user with 120 friends: Leaves comments on 10 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall Messages or chats with 6 friends The average male Facebook user with 500 […]

Facebook for humanitarian aid?

Eduardo Jezierski, the brilliant Director of Engineering from INSTEDD and I recently exchanged some emails about the usefulness and advisability of Facebook as a platform for humanitarian aid. First some context. The conversation arose after I emailed him details of the BBC’s recent expose of Facebok’s flaws with its applications platform / framework, which is […]

Secure your Facebook privacy

As the BBC’s technology programme Click recently uncovered, Facebook is outrageously open to applications harvesting information that you have classified private. What is more disturbing is that an application installed on a friend’s account can remotely harvest your private data without you even having to install the same application. As the BBC report notes “It certainly seems […]