Over most of the past week, I have been trying to at least pay attention to the events unfolding in Iran, mostly via Twitter and the #iranelection hashtag.

Watching things unfold on Twitter has been interesting. Seeing how people are using Twitter, in whatever attempt to feel connected to or part of the events in Iran has also been interesting watch. But at the same time I have seen some real issues caused by the weakness of using Twitter as the solution for this type of communication. Specifically, this is about trying to use Twitter as a communication medium from within a restrictive and hostile national environment that owns all the ways out to the public Internet and does not want information to flow freely.

The first thing I noticed about the #iranelection and related traffic was the sheer number of retweets (RT) happening. Overall, there were tweets reporting that the number of tweets per second for #iranelection were in the hundreds of thousands. If those numbers are true, then Twitter has really come a long way from this time last year when it seemed that there were a lot more outages from a lot less traffic. But the RT to new content ratio, while it does intend a purpose—keeping information recent—does not seem to completely satisfy this as the newest information is now competing with the very information that it seeks to replace, resulting in what appear to be multiple competing messages appearing to come from the same source but saying very different things at the same time. The community around the hashtags really needs to come up with another convention that provides a way for the community to know how old a specific piece of data is when the RT occurs. Add this to the issues where the source of information is being intentionally obfuscated to protect those originating the messages (I did say hostile national government), and it becomes easy to see how anyone trying to use this information to stay alive during the crisis becomes difficult if not impossible.

So, how does anyone know which messages to trust? This is almost impossible to know. This is another place where Twitter seems to work against how people are trying to use it.

It is believed that the Iranian government is actively trying to limit the message protesters are trying to send about what they say is happening with the protest. All the reports I have seen suggest that right now there is functionally only one network path out of the country for traffic flowing to the West. Last I checked, Twitter only showed up on one IP address, and this it seems is already blocked. The result is a grassroots campaign of people setting up bridges and proxies to allow protesters to get to Twitter and any other blocked sites.

But which of these proxies can be trusted? Which of these proxies are secure enough to defend against possible attack and subversion by a determined national power? Can entities aligned (officially or not) with the Iranians subvert the purpose of the proxies and capture the login information the people involved? So now what message do you trust?

They really don't even need to go that far. False accounts for a number of Western reporters and accounts claiming to be people participating in the protests, but sending very different messages are being reported every couple of hours.

There is no web of trust anyone has beyond their own follower/following lists.

I have seen traffic that suggests that people are trying their best (one set of people are trying to get potential contacts to capture video of current events with that day's newspaper to verify that someone is even in Iran). But as the situation becomes worse, will any form of verification be possible as protesters move to new accounts, and parties in Iran hostile towards the protest move towards more violent tactics to stop the message?

And back to Twitter only appearing on small set of IP address (at least here where I am). Let's face it, Twitter is not about supporting national scale protests and revolutions. They did postpone a maintenance that would have taken their system down. But can they be depended on to limit maintenance for every event of this scale?

I like Twitter. I think I understand it's value. Twitter is one of the central microblogging systems in my own personal constellation of services. But the dependency on Twitter for events like what is happening right now in Iran is a risk. Twitter is there now, being used right now.

But it's not the only service.

I can only wonder how much harder it would be to disrupt the message stream coming out of Iran via a federated microblogging service (like laconi.ca) matched with something like a federated OpenID or a verifiable identity service that can support multiple layers of proxies. A system that can be setup quickly, and get the messages moved around.

I'm sure that over time, as more people sit back and actually look at how we used the tools available here, there will be improvements to the tools available to dissidents.

I guess the issue is more the casual participant that only is going to use the most recent “site of the week” (flickr, facebook, twitter, youtube) and not going to continue to participate after the current situation has lost it's recentcy.

I hope I'm wrong about participation falling off once this thing is over.

I had really wanted to post something today, but I decided that the best use of my day off morning was to get some more sleep.

Getting up at 10:00 didn't actually stop me from getting anything done. But having to be at Sam's school for his 4 ^th grade D.A.R.E. graduation was something that prevented me from getting other things done. And, as I brought Sam home from school, I decided to get Jacob from his bus. Decided it was best to give Natalie and our friend Dawn a short break.

I do have a short queue of topics I want to get posts written for. But I decided to be lazy today.

Right now, I'm testing the Sun WebLog Publisher with OpenOffice.