Web 3.0 Lab: Twitter analysis predicted demos in Pearl Roundabo...

Overview

By analysis the tensity and pattern of geo-location tagged tweets in Bahrain we were able to confidently predict a mass demonstration in Northern Bahrain several hours before it began.

Our Prediction

Based upon our experience and analysis of the twitter trends on the ground in Bahrain this morning, we were able to make this prediction at around noon Bahrain time:

Web 3.0 Lab: Anticipating more protests in North Bahrain today:

"From our morning analysis of the intensity of tweeting in North Bahrain, the pattern and spread of this intensity, and the content of #Bahrain and #lulu hashtag on Twitter we are predicting that there is a high probability of continued civil unrest and protest in North Bahrain, and that the Regime will again likely not be able to contain or control the scale or extent of protests."

Track tweeting from around Lulu Pearl Roundabout in real time with this tool.

This is significant because at that time news reports we were reading from journalist inside Bahrain were saying that it was uncertain what would happen. We were reading some reports of people being scared after recent killings and even of smaller turn out.

This contradicted what we were seeing on the ground with our twitter analysis tools. We could see a massive crowd of people who were twitter so much that there must have been 10,000s of them. They were mass in high concentrations near Bilad Al Qadeem. At one point this morning tweeting levels from that location were almost as high as those in the center of NYC.

How we made the prediction

On previous days we had seen this pattern before mass protests on Pearl Roundabout. We could tell that a massive number of people were collected and were motivated to communication. Our observations of Bahrain people living in London is that protests involve heavy levels of social networking. Protesters in Bahrain are making extensive use of various social networks to coordinate and inspire protesters, and to keep in touch with large families.

People in Bahrain have far more extended families than most westerners. People preparing to undertake a risky protest against a violent regime would also want to keep their family informed. Twitter is an ideal tool to broadcast status to a large group of people.

So from these factors we ignored the cautious statements from major media sources and predicted that a mass demonstration would take place in Northern Bahrain and that the regime would not be able to control it without resorting to mass killings.

The protesters would have had a mixture of deep determination and concern for their safety and the safety of their families. We have spoken with many people from Bahrain who struggle constantly to keep in touch with their extended families. Social Networks on the Internet work well for this.

So this spike west of Pearl Roundabout could only mean a group preparing to confront the regime.

Several hours later the news reports came in that this is precisely what happened.

Limitations of our current model (and yes we are working on these)

But there were certain things we could not see with our tool. We could not see the retreat of the Army for the Roundabout or peaceful strategy protesters would take. We continue to explore semantic analysis to give us a more nuanced understanding of what large mean.

But we are pretty confident that we have demonstrated the value of this kind of analysis, and this will be part of the news gathering and reporting of the future.

Also our model has been useless in Libya, were events are moving very quickly. Our analysis of Libya has been based on semantic analysis of the #Libya. This has lead us for some time to believe the regime there was weaker than many people imagined in the west, but we are still developing the solid model to make more firm predictions based on Twitter content in this area.

Conclusion

By using our Twitter density analysis model we were able to see people massing this morning west of Pearl Roundabout. From our previous observations and our analysis of the related Twitter and Facebook content we were able to confidently predict a highly probability of a protest starting today in Northern Bahrain. Several hours later this is what happened.

We feel this has helped demonstrate the value to journalists to this kind of analysis in the right conditions. There is a requirement that a society have a high level of Internet adoption. Our tool has been useless in trying to see what could be happening in Yemen and Libya. But for Bahrain it has proven very effective.

Web 3.0 Lab: Twitter analysis predicted demos in Pearl Roundabo...:

The Egypt SIM in revolt

The Egypt SIM in Second Life is owned by some Mubarak supporters. They have been banning people for protesting Mubarak. Right now the SIM is overrun by people celebrating Mubaraks fall, but the SIM owners are still banning people for protesting.

But who cares!!!! As they say in Second Life, RL over SL!!!!




Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

Second Life celebrates Mubarak leaves

Egypt SIM in Second Life was being run by a Mubarak supporter. I have to use one of my Alts because Rober1236 Jua is banned. Well the people have taken the SIM over and are now celebrating.





Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

Assange and Virtual Reality

BBC News - Assange criticism by Sweden PM 'damages trial process'

How many of you who RP in Second Life have had this happen: you meet someone at a dance or event and you simply can't stop thinking about them. You spend a few months utterly obsessed about their avatar and crave spending time in front of your computer staring at a poor quality UI in order to "be with" that avatar.

Then, after a few months, the person just vanishes, or you just vanish on them. Maybe they type something that is so intensively racist you are shocked. Maybe they say something in chat that strikes you as dumb, maybe they let you see something of their true selves and you feel they have been lying to you.

Suddenly its like you wake up, you were in love with a internet constructed identity which presented very little solid evidence to you. The very silence of Second Life avatars give them a power over our imaginations. We can't smell them, since we generally don't hear them much, since we don't have to see them waking up in the morning or worry about issues like condoms. They are presented to us as mostly silent electronic illusions, commodities for our own dream world.

This is what seems to have happened with Assange.

He presented a certain trained silent look over the last year that many in the cyber community feel for. There has been great frustration with users of the Internet that this great communication tool has really done nothing to increase freedom or democracy in the western world. The same cynical authoritarian powers are there now that were there 30 years ago.

Assange presented a vision many of us wanted in our imagination. A face connected to our desire for cyber-liberty. But also a persona which Assange had perfected in online dating. One that Violet Blue noted was loaded with sexual reference and, for many people, the power of desire.

Now we are starting to hear "the truth". Today to defend Assange, as Assange wants you to defend him, is to accept a conspiracy between the NYT, the Guardian Newspaper, members of Wikileaks, Leftist activist in Sweden, the Government of Sweden and its courts and the CIA.

Assange is, and probably always was a kind of madness.

And that is the danger of our age. A rumor that we all want to believe is spread on Twitter and RTed over and over again until the cable news is reporting it and then BBC is reporting. Our delusions can get ahead of our more leveled and compromised thinking very quickly.

And we can end up like Micheal Moore. He came out as an early defender of Assange. Assange returned the favor by leaking an unvetted leak that made Moore look like a propaganda tool for Castro. The report turned out to be untrue but raised a number of serious questions about Assange's judgement. Did a man you demanded such loyalty form others not even think to fact check leaks from one of his biggest allies and financial supporters? Was Assange and Wikileaks doing any fact checking at all? And what was the story? Why did it matter if Sicko was shown in Cuba or not? Given current world events why did the fact that something was leaked by Assange simply make it major news.

Before the Cable Leaks thing died down I was tweeting a number of the more silly or banal Cable leaks. Its hard to remember which ones are jokes and which ones really were leaks. They ran like "people in dictatorships don't have much freedoms", "America has concerns about China", "war kills people." It was mostly a set of inconsequential observations which one could much better information from journalists familiar with that area.

But a brown skinned 34 year old African woman is not as interesting to many of our imaginations in the West as the light skinned, fair haired freak. The West, even the Left Radical West, is still the West.

One thing I am learning right now is to even mention Assanges name in Twitter is to invite people to stop following you. Right now most of his former supporters are turning off that part of the Internet. Not so long ago people were willing to break laws to show support of him, now we are left with someone we know is a disturbed freak, who should never have gotten this level of attention.

I guess the big question will be what the Internet did to Assange? Why was someone who was so mentally unbalanced, so clearly out of touch with reality and disturbed become such a massive hero so quickly only to be dumped just as fast.

In the future, which may involve jail time in Sweden, Assange will certainly suffer because from his experience, his life will not be a happy one but a lonely twisted experience that separates him more and more from his fellow humans, while the rest of us will just forget him.

More bodage building in Second Life

House Of Dragovar

BDSM communities in Second Life are almost always finished, no open fields of grass or big square prims with wooden textures. The intense motivtion that comes from desire drives the production of detailed and rich virtual spaces.




Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

Bondage and the execution of Virtual World

The Slave Gardens is a bondage SIM for adults in Second Life. Through my voyage to see almost everything in Second Life I have noticed time and time again that bondage communities tend to be some of the best executed spaces in Seocnd Life. Sometimes a little heavy on the castles and Middle Earth thing for my taste, but from Gorian communities to simple bondage role play SIMs players who want to engage in BDSM virtually are creating some well executed detailed SIM.



That there is a lot of content produced on the Internet around Porn is not new. This pornographic intensity is spreading from the 2D web to the 3D collaborative web.




Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

Virtual Medical Doctor - MadPea Productions

Ancient Egypt Simulation in Second Life

Ancient Egypta /Amarnahttp://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Terra%20Egypta/205/207/22

Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

A place in Second Life to celebrate Egypt and support revolt

Ancient Egypta/Amarna


http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Terra%20Egypta/205/207/22

TERRA EGYPTA - NOW OPEN - three regions of Ancient Egypta with the large walled city of Amarna/Egypta, rental houses, a 1/3rd scale Great Pyramid (with interior) and a full-sized Great Sphinx.

Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

Sex and Second Life

South Side Snakepit is one of many "dirty" sex Sims in Second Life, which feature animation balls for different sexual acts set in a dirty run down urban setting. Kind of sounds like where I used to live in London.

Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

Introducig Clima, mapping the emerging Virtual Real World

Above is Google Earth's 3D map of downtown Chicago. As you can see most of the area is fully mapped. Below is the new tool Clima beta measure of the web density for Downtown Chicago.



Clima measures the climate of Web 3.0 data associated with a specific location. The information of cyberspace is becoming more and more geo-located and Clema gives you a way to measure and evaluate the intensity of this data.

Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

The kind of strange genre of SL porn

sl porn: the drechsler files - chapter one (buggster)
brought to you by xxxbunker.com - the worlds largest xxx tube site

Well today in a real world conversation about porn I learned that people are making porn in SL and distributing on hard core pornographic sites. I am not sure if I can take this very serious, but it is true.

The sad truth of owned space, Second Life Egypt shows the limits of free market model of virtual reality

The Egypt SIM had been a seen of major protests against Mubarak, in keeping with the democratic hopes of the vast majority of the people of Egypt and the world. Even this blog posted about the Egyptian people gathering there. Well it turns out the owner of the SIM is a reactionary authoritarian former Egyptians who both lives far from the country and supports Mubarak!



Unlike Tahrir Square, where an overwhelming show of popular support has taken the Space, Second Life (and most of the Internet) is constructed in such a way to facilitate censorship of space. A SIM owner or administrator has magic powers to establish who can or can not occupie a space. It is not possible for the SIM protesters to take the SIM.

This ownership of all spaces and control by administration is one of the major reasons why the Internet is a terrible space for democratic movements. It is simply impossible to oppose the owner of a Internet space.

People will say "well the guy pays for the SIM so her has a right to do what he wants", which is not entirely true (he has no right to commit crimes per say). But the real probably is that Computer Mediated Culture which is not provided by a state of charity (say Wikipedia) is governed only by property rights.

This has had a chilling impact on free speech throughout the entire Internet. Internet supporters are far far too quick to think they are somehow empowering democracy: there is no evidence of this at all. In fact the more likely outcome is that they are handing all communication rigths to companies.

Take for example Flickr's mass deletion of criticism of Obama, or PayPal's holding funds from Wikileaks. Companies now posses a mass control over what we can or can not say. If we want real freedom we have to go to people in person and say what is on our mind.

Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

A Google Earth Analysis of the Tactial Situation in Cairo, 2 Feb

The analysis I created was using Google Earth, my own Experience with Cairo just a month ago, watching AlJazeera and a New York Times graphic

Above the deployment of the two groups. The Mubarak thugs were heavily dependent up logistical support to bring in and organize. So they needed to organize behind the Cairo Museum, where they have access to roads.



But in a battle of stones and sticks the Mubarak supporters were initially deployed at the low ground. The Anti-Mubarak forces had higher ground and a better view and better position to fight a hand to hand battle. Anti-Mubarak forces could attack down hill, they could throw stones further.



Front the start the Mubarak thugs were at significant tactical disadvantage. Firstly they were in lower ground. They had to come from here because they needed to keep open roads clear to the area in the North where elite live. But his bottle necked them between the Cairo Museum and high rises. Coming up the bottle neck they had to charge up hill.

Their only hope would have been a rapid surprise attack to take the square. Once the demonstrators stopped the Mubarak thugs and the battle formed in the bottle neck between Cario Museum and high buildings the "battle" was essentially lost.

The one major weakness of the Pro-Democracy position is the high buildings around the Square. It is clear that Mubarak forces took some of these roofs and used them to throw on the people. But by night a massive green laser was deployed in the Square and being used to blind Mubarak's forces on the buildings.

Without heavier arms this situation will inevitably flow in favor of the people. They have more forces, are more motivated, and hold the high ground. So in the coming days Mubaraks last hand to play may be a rise of violence and use of armed forces.

Almost certainly when they


Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

Avatars united for Egypt

Second Life avatars united for #Egypt!

Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

Site of Egypt protests in Google Earth

This map shows the Google Earth 3D model of Cairo's Tahrir Square where 2 M people are protesting the regime in Egypt




Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

Egypt in Seocond LIfe

People are rallying to show thier support for #Egypt in Virtual World Second Life


Bringing furries, barbies, and other various avatars together united for Egypt!!!




Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life