Crowdfunding Citizen Journalism in Cairo

A video explaining the work of Mosireen, an Egyptian media collective engaged in an online crowdfunding campaign on the site indiegogo.

Mosireen, a media collective in downtown Cairo that offers equipment and training to citizen journalists, was born out of the effort by activists to document the Egyptian revolution online. As the group's mission statement says, that was vital during the street protests that drove Hosni Mubarak from the presidential palace 21 months ago, when, “Armed with mobile phones and cameras, thousands upon thousands of citizens kept the balance of truth in their country by recording events as they happened in front of them, wrong-footing censorship and empowering the voice of a street-level perspective.”

Sin ce The Lede exists in part to draw attention to firsthand reports on news events posted online, regular readers will be familiar with Mosireen's work. The group produced several important video reports featured on this blog during the period of military rule that followed Egypt's 2011 revolution. Video posted on the Mosireen YouTube channel documented, among other incidents: a massacre of mainly Coptic Christian civilians late last year outside the headquarters of state television, known as Maspero; a brutal attack on a female protester by Egyptian soldiers two months later; the violent dispersal of a sit-in outside the country's Parliament in February.

As chaotic street battles have become less common, the organization has evolved into a vital source of reporting on social issues - like the need to deliver justice to victims of torture, adequate healthcare, decent housing and a clean environment to Egyptian citizens.

In keeping wit h its ambition, to provide independent reporting by and for the citizens of a country where state control of the media remains largely in place, Mosireen has been engaged in a crowdfunding drive with a page for donations on the site indiegogo. So far the filmmakers have raised more than $30,000, which is three-quarters of the total they hope to raise by the end of the campaign, at midnight tonight, Pacific Time.

If you haven't donated to @mosireen yet, you still have time. Help keep this great media collective independent http://t.co/1KCgjXU5 #Egypt

- Nora Shalaby ن. شلبي (@norashalaby) 4 Nov 12

During an interview in Mosireen's office in a ramshackle building on Adly Street in Cairo this summer, Salma Said, a leader of the collective - who was riddled with birdshot pellets by the security forces while filming one attack on protesters - explained how the group's activities expanded in the aftermath of the revolution.

The activists initially came together to build an archive of clips documenting the street protests of early 2011, Ms. Said said, but then, struck by the lack of independent reporting on the post-Mubarak government, they began to make their own reports, often incorporating video recorded on phones by witnesses. Given that the airwaves were still dominated by state channels that were loathe to air any critical reports on the country's new rulers, the Mosireen activists staged a series of public screenings of video that challenged official accounts of clashes, like that the security forces only used force against “thugs,” not peaceful protesters.

According to the call for donations from supporters, the group hopes to get the resources to expand its activities to other parts of Egypt, keep its collective workspace open for free, stage more outdoor screenings, buy hard drives to hold the expanding archive of the revolution, and, “keep making films, f ilms that support civilian campaigns, films that press for social justice, films that expose state narratives.”

Disruptions: Twitter\'s Faster Gantlet of Truth

Everybody lies.

My 6-year-old nephew lies about brushing his teeth. Politicians stretch the truth in the heat of a campaign. Newspaper reporters have been caught lying, as have best-selling book authors; corporations; spouses and, of course, government officials.

And so have lots of people on Twitter.

It might seem that lies on social networks have become as common as the truth. Fabrications and sham pictures spread via Twitter during Hurricane Sandy and propaganda during the presidential campaign.

But is it a cause for worry? I don't think so. Twitter, in its own way, has a self-correcting mechanism.

David Livingstone Smith, associate professor of philosophy at the University of New England in Biddeford, Me., and author of the book, “Why We Lie,” said online ecosystems like Twitter and Facebook were actually helping define the truth more quickly than ever before.

“In the past, confirmation as well as disconfirmation took a lo ng time to verify,” he said. Now, just as information spreads quickly, inaccuracies are corrected with the same celerity. There is also more accountability today, as a digital record can now be tied to the creator of falsehoods as they unfurl.

Where things have changed is in what we consider an egregious lie. “In electronic media, lying has become less serious. We seem to have a more cavalier attitude to the truth than we did a long time ago,” Mr. Smith said. “There's no longer a clear distinction between reality and fantasy because with social media, the distinction between news and entertainment has been so eroded, that this clear and important difference has been lost.”

As a result, Mr. Smith said, the truth-seekers online - often journalists - do what they have always done offline: use their “morally basic responsibility” to ensure people are telling the truth.

This happened during the storm when the Web site BuzzFeed exposed a Twitter us er who was deliberately spreading dangerous lies about hospital fires and floods. (He apologized and hasn't been heard from since.) On The Atlantic magazine's site, Alexis C. Madrigal, a senior editor, set up a blog that went through images of the storm, determining which were real and which had been plucked from disaster movies, like “The Day After Tomorrow.” A Tumblr page called Is Twitter Wrong? collected and verified images and Twitter messages, too.

Still, the question many people keep asking is, isn't it Twitter's responsibility to ensure that the things shared on it aren't fabrications? In one simple answer: No.

Even if the company could monitor every Tweet - close to a billion every two days - is it Twitter's duty to decipher what is real and what is not? We don't expect bookstores and libraries to verify every word on the nonfiction shelves.

Twitter could offer better tools to help people identify canards. Mr. Madrigal for example, used Goog le image search to find the origin of photos, relying on algorithms to help with the verification process. “The only way to compete with these falsehoods is to use the same tools to fight back,” he said in a phone interview.

Twitter could also help people who share accidental inaccuracies in tweets by giving people them the ability to edit or mark a Twitter message as wrong. Currently, trying to note that an earlier message is incorrect is like announcing something in a restaurant and then coming back a few hours later, when there are all new patrons inside, to say your earlier statement was wrong. Ineffective, to say the least.

As Mr. Smith told me, there are often times that it's O.K. to lie, like telling your boss he is funny when he is not, or complimenting a spouse's outfit when you really think it's hideous. “But there is also a lot of surplus and dangerous deceit,” he said, “and that's something that we all have an obligation to try and prevent.â €

The Evolution of Google\'s Search Page

When users search for local results, Google shows nearby businesses with addresses, Zagat ratings and Google reviews from its Google Plus Local service. (Google owns Zagat.) Regulators have interviewed competitors like Yelp, whose executives say that Google has filled prime real estate on the search results page with its own listings.

In that same search, by hovering a mouse over a listing (in this case, the top result), the right side of the page shows a Google map, reviews and ratings of the business from Google Plus Local and photos of the store, some shot by Google. Below that are links to reviews from other review sites that compete with Google Plus Local. Under the "People also search for" header, users are shown similar listings and photos from Google. Places.

The Government Looks at Life in Google\'s World

Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites

Annie Tritt for The New York Times

Jeffrey G. Katz, the chief executive of Wize Commerce, seen with employees. He says that about 60 percent of the traffic for the company's Nextag comparison-shopping site comes from Google.

STARTING in February, Jeffrey G. Katz grew increasingly anxious as he watched the steady decline of online traffic to his company's comparison-shopping Web site, Nextag, from Google's search engine.

Graphic

Hal Goodtree, left, is the editor of CaryCitizen.com.

In a geeky fire drill, engineers and outside consultants at Nextag scrambled to see if the problem was its own fault. Maybe some inadvertent change had prompted Google's algorithm to demote Nextag when a person typed in shopping-related search terms like “kitchen table” or “lawn mower.”

But no, the engineers determined. And traffic from Google's search engine continued to decline, by half.

Nextag's response? It doubled its spending on Google paid search advertising in the last five months.

The move was costly but necessary to retain shoppers, Mr. Katz says, because an estimated 60 percent of Nextag's traffic comes from Google, both from free search and paid search ads, which are ads that are related to search results and appear next to them. “We had to do it,” says Mr. Katz, chief executive of Wize Commerce, owner of Nextag. “We're living in Google's world.”

Regulators in the United States and Europe are conducting sweeping inquiries of Google, the dominant Internet search and advertising company. Google rose by technological innovation and business acumen; in the United States, it has 67 percent of the search market and collects 75 percent of search ad dollars. Being big is no crime, but if a powerful company uses market muscle to stifle competition, that is an antitrust violation.

So the government is focusing on life in Google's world for the sprawling economic ecosystem of Web sites that depend on their ranking in search results. What is it like to live this way, in a giant's shadow? The experience of its inhabitants is nuanced and complex, a blend of admiration and fear.

The relationship between Google and Web sites, publishers and advertisers often seems lopsided, if not unfair. Yet Google has also provided and nurtured a landscape of opportunity. Its ecosystem generates $80 billion a year in revenue for 1.8 million businesses, Web sites and nonprofit organizations in the United States alone, it estimates.

The government's scrutiny of Google is the most exhaustive investigation of a major corporation since the pursuit of Microsoft in the late 1990s.

The staff of the Federal Trade Commission has recommended preparing an antitrust suit against Google, according to people briefed on the inquiry, who spoke on the condition they not be identified. But the commissioners must vote to proceed. Even if they do, the government and Google could settle.

Google has drawn the attention of antitrust officials as it has moved aggressively beyond its dominant product - search and search advertising - into fields like online commerce and local reviews. The antitrust issue is whether Google uses its search engine to favor its offerings like Google Shopping and Google Plus Local over rivals.

For policy makers, Google is a tough call.

“What to do with an attractive monopolist, like Google, is a really challenging issue for antitrust,” says Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and a former senior adviser to the F.T.C. “The goal is to encourage them to stay in power by continuing to innovate instead of excluding competitors.”

SPEAKING at a Google Zeitgeist conference in Arizona last month, Larry Page, the company's co-founder and chief executive, said he understood the government scrutiny of his company, given Google's size and reach. “There's very many decisions we make that really impact a lot of people,” he acknowledged.

The main reason is that Google is continually adjusting its search algorithm - the smart software that determines the relevance, ranking and presentation of search results, typically links to other Web sites.

Google says it makes the changes to improve its service, and has long maintained that its algorithm weeds out low-quality sites and shows the most useful results, whether or not they link to Google products.

“Our first and highest goal has to be to get the user the information they want as quickly and easily as possible,” says Matt Cutts, leader of the Web spam team at Google.

But Google's algorithm is secret, and changes can leave Web sites scrambling.

Consider Vote-USA.org, a nonprofit group started in 2003. It provides online information for voters to avoid the frustration of arriving at a polling booth and barely recognizing half the names on the ballot. The site posts free sample ballots for federal, state and local elections with candidates' pictures, biographies and views on issues.

In the 2004 and 2006 elections, users created tens of thousands of sample ballots. By 2008, traffic had fallen sharply, says Ron Kahlow, who runs Vote-USA.org, because “we dropped off the face of the map on Google.”

As founder of a search-engine optimization company and a recipient of grants that Google gives nonprofits to advertise free, Mr. Kahlow knows a thing or two about how to operate in Google's world. He pored over Google's guidelines for Web sites, made changes and e-mailed Google. Yet he received no response.

“I lost all donations to support the operation,” he said. “It was very, very painful.”

A breakthrough came through a personal connection. A friend of Mr. Kahlow knew Ed Black, chief executive of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include Google. Mr. Black made an inquiry on Mr. Kahlow's behalf, and a Google engineer investigated.

A version of this article appeared in print on November 4, 2012, on page BU1 of the New York edition with the headline: Living, and Dying, in Google's World.

How New Yorkers Adjusted to Sudden Smartphone Withdrawal

While Hurricane Sandy left hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers without electricity or heat, the loss of one utility left some especially bewildered: cellphone service.

“Not having hot water is one thing,” said Kartik Sankar, 29, a technology consultant who lives in the East Village. “But not having a phone? Forget about it.”

With only sporadic access to text messaging, Facebook or even landline phone calls, Mr. Sankar and others like him in Manhattan's no-power zone quickly cobbled together more primitive systems for passing along information and arranging when and where to meet, so they could take comfort in each other's company in the dark.

On the scale of hardships suffered in the storm and its aftermath, these were more like minor annoyances. But the experience of being suddenly smartphoneless caused some to realize just how dependent on the technology they had become.

“The lack of information was unnerving,” said Tay McEvers, 27, a television producer, who was celebrating the return of power with Mr. Sankar and other friends at Niagara Bar in the East Village on Friday night. “You would hear that the water wasn't safe to drink or that the lights were going to come back at 4 and have no way to verify it.”

Another friend, Christy Claxton, 30, who lives on the Bowery and works in digital marketing, talked about adjusting to a life that was like something out of a time before cellphones made connections far more fluid.

“You had to make plans and stick to them,” said “It felt so old-school, like we were back in 1998.”

With the power out, people gathered in the few bars that were still serving beer, albeit warm and occasionally flat. These became more than watering holes; they were crucial spots where neighborhood residents could exchange bits of news and information gleaned from others and picked up on trips beyond the dark zone.

The lack of connectivity led to a l ot of missed connections.

“On Halloween night, we thought everyone was going to be at one bar, but when we showed up no one was there,” said Steve Juh, 32, who lives on the Lower East Side and works in finance. “They left a note with the bartender telling us where they were, but we didn't get it.”

On a stretch of Bleecker Street in the West Village that was still draped in darkness on Friday night, local residents - and a few disaster tourists - gathered at Wicked Willy's, a sports bar that siphoned power from a generator and offered free charging stations and landline phone calls to patrons.

Joshua Diem, 21, a student at New York University who was at the bar, said that during the storm he left the city to take care of his ailing grandmother in Connecticut. They were without power for most of the week. He said he felt as if he had missed nothing in his time offline.
“I've been texting with my ex all night,” Mr. Diem said. “I kind of regr et that, to be honest.”

For some, regaining cell service as the power came back on was bittersweet. Although they were relieved to be reconnected with their families and friends and to begin edging toward normalcy, they said that the brief break from their hyperconnected lives turned out to be welcome.

Amelia Erwitt, 32, and her husband, Kamil Kaluza, 36, who live in the West Village, said they enjoyed life offline - waking up with the sun, exploring their neighborhood, checking in on friends, cooking by flashlight and going to bed soon after sundown. They got their news from a battery-powered radio and checked e-mail by walking two blocks to a spot in front of a nearby deli that somehow offered a cellular connection. They would wave their phones in the air until they felt them buzzing with messages and alerts.

Sometimes news updates came from unusual sources. “I stood on line for a payphone for 30 minutes to call my dad,” Ms. Erwitt said. “And t he man in front of me was a tourist from France, and after calling home to check in, he hung up, turned around and said, ‘I just heard, from Paris, that we're getting power back in three days.'”

“We haven't left each other in five days because we're afraid of not being able to find each other again,” she added. “Without cell service, who knows if we would?”

Both lamented the inevitable return of electricity. Their block, as of late Friday, was still one of the ones without power, although all around were streets humming with bright lights and boisterous people.

“It feels like the light is closing in on us,” Mr. Kaluza said.

Mr. Juh also admitted to mixed feelings. “It's strange, how in the end you feel like a prisoner to your device,” he said. “It's the one thing you wanted to work, more than anything.”