I know we have hardly begun this campaign, but it's never too early to sit back an take stock. G-B4A is pioneering ways to use new media/Web 2.o for the purposes of political activism. Let's take a look at the tools we've used and how we've used them.

1. e-mail/online collaboration - this is pretty basic (hardly Web 2.0) but it nevertheless allowed three people in different countries (Morocco, Bahrain, Lebanon) to collaborate and launch a project. Total time from proposition of idea to completion of Free Alaa website - 24 hours. Online collaboration allowed a global division of labor. A man in Holland made a Flash animation. A group in Cambridge made a petition page. A man in Florida started a Wikipedia entry.

2. Blogger (the site) - By using a templated webpage service we able to create a professional-looking website in a few hours

3. bloggers (the people) - Google-bombing for Alaa rests on the fact that now millions of people have personal websites (their blogs). A few years ago, a google-bombing might not have worked very well because people did not have access to websites in order to insert links. Now every person with a blog is also a webmaster, capable of changing the face of the internet.

Blogger culture will also be key in the success of G-B4A (Google-bombing for Alaa) because blogger culture has a built-in method of idea dissemination. Bloggers read each other. It is not necessary to send an e-mail to every blogger asking him or her to post a google bomb. It is only necessary that a few high-traffic blogs post google bombs. Then these blogs will not only serve the cause by google-bombing, but will also publicize the campaign when other bloggers read the google bomb post.

3. Technorati - By asking bloggers to tag their Google bombs googlebombingforalaa Technorati acts as an ad-hoc aggregator for G-B4A posts.

4. wiki - a wiki was created to catalogue all the blog posts that include G-B4A's. Because it is a wiki, anyone can edit the page and add the URLs of new posts.

5. Google - I'm saving the most important for last. This campaign rests most critically on our ability to use the Google algorithm to manipulate the search engine's page ranking for our own purposes. Let's be honest with ourselves here. Even though we believe our action is for a good cause, it is an act of mischief or even vandalism (of Google's beautiful architecture, that is). It is quite possible that Google will find a way to block us. If so, we will have to find other methods. We are trailblazers here, finding new uses for new tools. As I said to Mustapha, this isn't only about the action , it is about the process.

Incidentally:
the total cost of launching a global human rights campaign using digital tools: $0
the total time need to launch a global human rights campaign using digital tools: 24 hours

This Egypt is Egypt only Egypt the Egypt beginning.

categories: internet activism_, cool tools_

technorati tags: googlebombingforalaa, egypt, alaa, web2.0