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I was interviewed recently by Associated Press on a story on Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ –

Gaurav Mishra, the 2008-09 Yahoo Fellow at Georgetown University, said he hasn’t seen any evidence in past events such as the Moldova elections that Twitter was the dominant way people are organizing.

“It’s sometimes difficult to differentiate the hype from the media,” he said. “Just because people are tweeting about something doesn’t mean that there’s actually coordination involved.”

The story was also reproduced in The Guardian, The Independent, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, CBS News, Forbes, Huffington Post and Boston Globe.

I have previously written about why the term Twitter Revolution is already a cliche, after Moldova and Iran.

I had earlier written about the use of social technologies in the 2009 Iran presidential election campaign.

Now, Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s supporters are disputing the overwhelming victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the elections (Hamid Tehrani at Global Voices).

Various observers have called the protests ‘Facebook/ Twitter protests’, claiming that social media tools have been critical in organizing these protests (Clay Shirky on TED Blog, Lev Glossman in Time, Mark Ambinder at The Atlantic). The #IranElection Twitter feed has indeed been hyperactive all week (Ben Parr in Mashable).

Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Delicious have also been used to organize DDOS attacks against government and pro-Ahmedinejad websites, including Ahmadinejad.ir (Noah Shachtman at Wired). It seems that some US bloggers are also promoting these DDOS attacks (Nancy Scola at TechPresident) and a DC based political firm is actually participating in them, in a misguided (and illegal) attempt at digital activism (Evgeny Morozov at Foreign Policy).

Some Ahmadinejad supporters are also using blogs and Twitter to explain why they believe he legitimately won (Hamid Tehrani in Global Voices).

In an attempt to quell the protests, the Iran government has blocked several social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, apart from several international news websites (Richard Sambrook at BBC, Associated Press).  Read More

I was interviews by CBS News yesterday for a story on the role of citizen journalism in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

A small clip from the interview was shown on The Early Show at CBS News today morning (YouTube)–

Here is the full text of the CBS News story –

Web A Reliable Resource In Mumbai Madness
New Media Allowed The World To Look In On A City In Crisis
NEW YORK, Nov. 28, 2008

(CBS) The reach of the Internet proved a reliable resource when madness took to the streets of Mumbai on Wednesday as new media allowed the world to look in on a city in crisis and receive real-time information from citizen journalists as events were first unfolding.

Before the sights and sounds of the attacks in Mumbai could be televised, cell phones and the Internet were abuzz, both in blogs and with images as the horror unfolded, reports Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith.

“What’s important is to get a quick sense of what’s happening,” said social networking expert Gaurav Mishra. “One of the first real photographs of the scene was posted by somebody on Flickr.”  Read More