From its establishment in 2005, the website KnowThyNeighbor.org has been mired in controversy by its primary goal: to publicly publish the names of those who signed and sponsored petitions for the passage by referendum of anti-LGBT laws or the rescinding of pro-LGBT laws.

This tactic is an expansion upon the logic behind “outing”, whereby openly anti-LGBT politicians and other figures are exposed as enjoying their sexual orientations under cover of darkness or secrecy. However, KnowThyNeighbor.org took the approach of publishing the names of the signatories behind anti-gay petitions in a number of states, primarily on the premise that such people, however private, were acting as initiators of legislation, an action which is usually the reserve of elected representatives who sit in standing legislatures.

This approach was decried as verging on “intimidation” and was judicially challenged, ending in a victory for KnowThyNeighbor.org in the U.S. Supreme Court’s July 2010 8-1 ruling of Doe v. Reed. Constitutional Law Prof Blog’s Ruthann Robson quoted Scalia’s opinion that:

“Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed,”

while Lyrissa Lidsky commented that the worry about chilling effects upon democratic participation is

outweighed by the need for disclosure, where, as in Doe v. Reed, the speaker is taking action which has “direct legislative effect,” to borrow a phrase from the Ninth Circuit.  The petition signer is not acting merely in his role as citizen but in his role as citizen-legislator.  When he steps into this role, the public’s interests in transparency and accountability in the legislative process arguably trump the rather weak First Amendment speech interest involved, at least where there has been no credible showing that disclosure will result in harassment of or violence against the petition signer.

KnowThyNeighbor.org declared this to be “a major victory” and continues to remain up and running.

But the worry over New Media’s intersection of privacy and transparency has manifested in a number of cases – both civil and criminal – where intimidation has been cited as a motive or implication for the publication of names or contact addresses onto the Internet. One of the most famous examples was the Nuremberg Files published by Neal Horsley, a Georgia anti-abortion activist who published a directory of abortion providers in various states, at least one of whom was murdered. Long story short, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where a prior bar upon the publication was rescinded on First Amendment grounds.

Anonymity vs. transparency has continued to be debated into the present, with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Eric Schmidt of Google having criticized the notion of anonymity on the Internet on the matter of integrity in interpersonal communication, and both have been eviscerated by various commentators for their favorable, business-flavored stance towards “radical transparency” in online social networking.

But does transparency and full exposure – especially over the Internet – necessarily lead to a self-assessment of integrity, of higher thresholds of tolerance, of self-control over one’s choice of expressions (a notion which is often described as “self-censorship”)? Or is a regime of radical transparency always, perpetually unsafe from the occasional breach by an anonymous party?

From the logic of KnowThyNeighbor.org, which used New Media to expose the names of would-be legislators who had already signed their identities to petitions in order to affect the lives of others through the ballot box, to the logic of individuals who compose “(s)**t lists” of individuals who do not intend to negatively affect anyone’s lives without consent, to the logic of individuals who operate and manage opt-in directories of content and identities but maintain a belief in full, unfettered transparency as a prerequisite to integrity, the clash of privacy against transparency continues to bedevil the ongoing discussion on the weighing of the importance of contributors against their own contributions, and whether “responsibility” is as valid in the day and age of quickly-trafficked information (and lingering instances of vigilante retribution) as it once was.

My name is Harry, and as my About page explains, I am many things both in my free time and my non-free hours.

However, I continue, above all, to think, imagine and then think some more.

I also employable as well! Hit me up if you need help with web maintenance and I will thrash out solutions for your website.

Since the movement for free, open web video began around 2005, a number of companies and projects have emerged which are tackling the issue of HTML5-accessible open web video with a growing body of tools for capture, editing and publishing. Some of this number are listed here:

• One of Mozilla’s family of projects is “Web Made Movies“, a project encompassing a number of web-based applications, such as Popcorn.js, which allow for the remixing of video playback to incorporate synchronized web elements, among other features. It has been extolled and used by such names as Jonathan McIntosh, who achieved fame through his “Right Wing Donald Duck” parody of media personality Glenn Beck.
• Another is Kaltura, an Israeli startup which has partnered with such clientele as the Wikimedia Foundation to provide a better, HTML5-based web video player for articles on the Foundation’s projects, such as Wikipedia.
• Google, of course, has made huge strides toward the promotion of open web video with WebM, utilizing its Google Chrome browser and Android operating system as leverage for open standards against competing, non-supportive browsers (including Internet Explorer – until version 9 – and Safari).
• Opera was the first browser to support HTML5 video, and was eventually joined by Mozilla and Google in eventual succession.

While the ecosystem for HTML5-based video and free, native web-accessible codecs is still young and under construction, it promises to increase from strength to strength as better, more attractive applications of HTML5 continue to bud forth.

Well, the tweets continue to flow these days, and microblogs such as Twitter, Facebook, identi.ca and others continue to make the news. This, however, has historically been treated with kid gloves by news journalists and news gathering organizations.

In news journalism, news items containing any mention of an application of Twitter tend to veer towards “soft news” in which the subject matter is, at best, distracting rather than potentially impactful upon the general public. This trend in news journalism tends to change around the time of serious crises or major events, where the coverage expounds upon how Twitter is being used by victims, participants or other parties involved with the event. Statistics are hardly presented as meaningful or necessary news items, compared to other television news segments such as “Sports”, “Weather”, “Business” and the occasional “Polls” which are subsumed under the general coverage of “Politics”.

However, this has gradually begun to change in light of the development of better tools and applications for the measurement of Microblogs. In particular, one of the more recent innovations on Twitter analytics has been the Dashboard, which has been applied by at least one organization.

Al Jazeera English’s Dashboard

Al Jazeera English, the English-language sister of the famed Doha-based cable channel, made a strong name for itself in its coverage of the 2010-2011 protests and internal regime changes in West Asia and North Africa, having kept its eyes and cameras trained on such densely-populated hotspots as Cairo’s Tahrir Square. However, such coverage only received its well-deserved boost in recognition and visibility through the usage of social media in order to promote its live streaming video of the channel. The organization bought a “Promoted Tweet” ad containing the hashtags “#Libya”, “#Yemen”, “#Egypt” and “#Tunisia” in order to propel readers to the AJE’s website.

The organization further elevated its harnessing of social media after the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak was replaced. Beginning in February, Al Jazeera English set up a Twitter Analytics dashboard which measures and graphically displays the frequency of tweets containing any mention of “Egypt”, “Libya”, “Bahrain” or “Yemen” in real time.

While not the first to create a Twitter analytics dashboard, it is one of the first news organizations to display such a sophisticated tool on its website as an aggregation of the public mindshare and interest concerning an ongoing event.

But is AJE’s real-time analytics dashboard a sign of things to come for news journalism, not just for means of reporting the news but also for sources of such news as well?

The Next Segment of “Numbers”

I can imagine that AJE, CNN or some other news organization will come to further enhance their Sci/Tech news desks and staff  in order to not only give reviews and observations on technology, but also numbers, graphics and hard data (or “The Numbers”) which can be aggregated from such sources as Twitter.

One such application of The Numbers for this newer incarnation of the Sci/Tech news desk is the aggregation and comparison of the top websites currently being linked (directly or indirectly) from Twitter posts. Another application is the “ReTweet value” of such links, or whether content hosted on the linked websites are more or less likely to be retweeted. Finally, yet another application of The Numbers is the zeitgeist of top terms and hashtags, their interrelationship with each other, and how they currently fare in comparison with other search terms.

When broadcast on specialty news channels, such information could be shown as a news ticker or “scorebar” in order to retain a constant flow of information to the viewing audience.

Why Pay Attention to these “Numbers”?

There is a growing body of reasons for why we should pay more attention to the Web as a focus of news and information.

For marketers, campaigners and other advocates, the Web as both a source and shuttle for mass media-oriented information is especially relevant; in search of the current “Cool” hotspot(s) of communication, seeking out the websites which are most frequently linked on social networking services and planting a subtle, attractive advertisement which can be spread in a viral manner is a gamble which has to be made carefully.

For individuals who are charged or employed to keep track of incoming messages being posted regarding a sensitive or timely issue, viewing which linked websites rank the highest in the number of incoming links provides a broader implications and effects of such events.

There are many more ways in which this Analytical data can be observed and used, and there is a greater opportunity for Sci/Tech news television to become better fleshed out and substantive. All thanks to Twitter and real-time social media analytics.