Bittorrent as a Free Access protocal
I had a good talk with Ashwin Navi, COO of Bittorrent.com, who was visiting China in the passing week. We talked about China’s internet market and some business features, as well the Free Access issue. We brainstormed some ideas to use bittorrent as a distributed protocal to access blocked web sites without proxy. The ideas is yet to be confirmed by Bittorrent’s father Bram Cohen, anyway, it’s a possible way in some longer future.
Xiaoqiang: China’s First Web-Organized Protests
Andrew forwared me Xiao Qiang’s article on AWSJ( THE ASIAN WALL STREET JOURNAL), “China’s First Web-Organized Protests”. Of course, it’s about the anti-japan protests over China in last several weeks:
> From an organizational point of view, the Shanghai
> demonstration was a decentralized, bottom-up event, organized by
> taking advantage of the opportunities presented by digital
> communication technologies. Chinese authorities may have initially
> given the demonstrators some political space because it wanted to let
> out some of the virulent nationalistic steam. They may also have used
> this demonstration of Chinese “public opinion” as a lever to support
> Beijing’s diplomatic goal of opposing Japan’s bid for a seat on United
> Nations Security Council.
> But whatever political space the anti-Japan activists were
> initially given, the success of their technology-enabled protests now
> poses a serious challenge to the Chinese authorities’ traditional
> mechanisms of social control. That was demonstrated by the failure of
> Shanghai authorities efforts to use such technology to dissuade
> students from attending the march. According to information posted on
> Chinese online bulletin boards and Web blogs, Shanghai authorities
> broadcast text and email messages in the run-up to the April 16
> protest reminding people that, “demonstrations must be approved ahead
> of time through proper application procedures.” Numerous personal
> accounts of the April 16 march mentioned having received such messages
> or seeing them online.
Just in these two days, China gov tighten the control of internet to prevent from any callings on new protest. Yesterday, the spokesman of Minisry of Public Security warned that any online organizing or gossip on gathering are illegal. The official voices in these two days are mainly one point: all the people should keep stable as the first priority thing. It means that gov is worrying about the protest could evolve into anti-gov movement.
That’s the myth in today’s China. Gov wants to use civilian’s protest to presssure on JP gov. They will also control the information to expose those only supportive to their policy and censor other opinions. Definitely, all the official media has been tamed to one tune already. They are trying a lot to do the same thing in cyberspace even with many so shortsight tricks. Anyway, it’s obvious a mission impossible today, there rasied more reactions already in blogosphere(BBSs are totally controlled in these days), can be summaried into four types:
1. We common people can do nothing now, but only rely on gov
2. The gov is usefulless in solving the problem, they will eventually comprise and sacrifice people’s benefit to keep their regime
3. The gov can do only limited things to reach real mutual understanding, the gap between people in the two countried will widen unavoidably
4. We won’t trust the gov anymore, not just for this issue, many issues in this country are connected
车东Skype上说不能访问中国科学院数字图书馆的网站，因为他正好从毛军最近的一些关于Tag和Folksonomy的文章中受到启发，而毛军的Blog不能访问，他来问问看我是否知道原因。于是沿着这个话题，自然谈到了正统和通俗的冲突。这正好又是最近冲击思维很多次的一个线索，所以各路媒母(Meme)都来开会，自然也就挡不住了。（学习思维导图Mind Map的人，不妨研究一下Meme的链接关系）
先说说Google和语义网，和ooof在一次交谈中谈过自己对语义网的认识过程和未来的知识空间的形态:
不一定是只靠语义网一个策略，所有我讲Google的策略也有可取之处，这就是矛盾了，所以并不是说语义网不好，实际上语义网设想的情景非常好，但实际上我觉得今天的情况是理想和差距在放大….
我们可以在小的范围实现，比如我举个例子啊，比如自然科学的一些知识、图书馆、学术类的一些东西，或者是比较专业分类的一些知识，语义网对它的效果是非常非常好的，但是通俗的知识、非结构化的知识，还有人们非常平凡的一些知识，语义网我觉得它越来越无能为力了，因为它很难控制一个大范围的活动，但语义网在专业领域是非常有用的。
结构化的知识和非结构化的知识将共同存在，而非结构化的知识将有更大的生存基础，这和人们思维的随意性有很大的关系。元数据，虽然可以使用工具高效创建，最终无法让普通人参与到知识的生产中。Google 以及更多的社会性搜索引擎，让人们开始越来越关注知识的松散联系和隐性联系，这些联系更适合描述人脑的思维过程。我在和国内一家BSP沟通的时候，谈到了为什么要为Blogger提供Tag这种通俗分类的原因：
当我们书写一段内容之前，一定是受到一个想法的启示（无论是来自看到的、听到的还是脑子想到的），并没有严格的分类概念。所以往往出现写完后无法匹配固定分类的问题。而通俗分类则可以进行“后标注”，让内容得以被归类和找到同属。
这样地语义表达，显然和正统的分类工作完全不同，也自然会引发人们对正统分类和通俗分类的矛盾心情。这个矛盾放到更大的尺度中去考虑，甚至可以说是整个社会发展趋势中两个非常非常有趣的矛盾：专业和业余。草根和权威，民主和强权，业余和专业…..都存在于这样的关系中，所以当Pro-Am（专业余）这个词出现的时候，我一点都没有感到惊讶，Blog所带来的革命性变化当然印证了这个趋势，而通俗分类也自然而然地融入到“专业余”的范畴中，加强了其复杂度和知识熵。其美妙之处，绝非眼下一些小的工具障碍或使用障碍所能够探查，一个通向“专业余”的时代大门，正在悄悄为我们展开…
（思维中断，待续）