community software

Like any businesses, we receive numerous magazines from all sorts of places.  We have a little table full of magazines that don't get much attention.  (Frankly, most of them are too techy for me to read during my spare time...)  Yesterday, Kris was walking by this table and saw something that made him whip his head around and look twice.  "I swear I saw Druplicon..."  he murmured. 

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Look what's on the cover of the November 17, 2008 issue of Information Week! Drupal is mentioned several times throughout their series on open source.

In most every Drupal installation, there are a few (if not more) modules you inevitably end up installing and using.

Two of these are likely CCK and Views*. Then, all the other, shall we say, essential modules you end up hearing about, and installing as well.

So, your next question may be, “What’s the fastest way to get started with Drupal?”. If you know CVS then that may be a good way to go (it’s the method I use). If you don’t, then…

Why not get going quickly by trusting in some of the minds behind Drupal itself? Acquia Drupal is the “commercialized” version of Drupal. Although there is a free version too! It comes with a pre-installed collection of modules which all pretty much fall within the essential category. I just wonder why they didn’t include Global Redirect if they’re including Pathauto.

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Today Qualcomm scored a huge coup for its MediaFLO mobile television service by winning the right to broadcast the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show and to create a 27/7 channel devoted to the event. All MediaFLO subscribers will be able to watch the broadcast when it airs on Dec. 3. The fashion show pulled in a television audience last year of 6.5 million, exactly mirroring the number of people who are watching any form of mobile TV, which includes options other than MediaFLO.

But as the February transition to digital television looms, groups such as the National Association of Broadcasters and the Open Mobile Video Coalition (pushing a jointly developed LG and Samsung standard)  are seeking to develop alternate methods to watch TV on the go to avoid being beholden to wireless providers. The OMVC and it’s backers are branching out beyond cellular networks, hoping to install their technology in cars and laptops. Should those efforts succeed, Qualcomm’s investments in MediaFLO won’t pan out.

With its Ultra Mobile Broadband 4G wireless effort officially shuttered last week, Qualcomm needs to find another way to mint money. It still has a platform effort in Gobi, MediaFLO is still around, and 3G networks aren’t going anywhere for a while, but Qualcomm built its success on controlling the IP for the widely adopted mobile standard CDMA. It can certainly play in other fields, but without a choke hold on some widely needed intellectual property, its negotiating power and royalty rates will be lessened.

Image from CBS

CiviCRM 2.1.2 release with bug fixes, as well as a fix for a critical security vulnerability is now available for download. CiviCRM 2.0.7 a maintainance release fixing critical security vulnerabilities is also available for download. The vulnerability addressed could allow a remote user with insufficient permissions to access CiviCRM functionality via the API and / or command line scripts.

Upgrading your existing CiviCRM 2.0 and 2.1 sites is strongly recommended. Upgrade instructions are available on the wiki for Drupal, Joomla and Standalone

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RIM’s recently released Blackberry Storm is a device that tries to outdo Apple’s iPhone by including a beefed-up OS, polishing up the interface and marrying it to a really fast 3G network (instead of AT&T’s pokey 3G network.) The device even has visual voice mail, and a cut-and-paste feature. And oh by the way, RIM got rid of the the keyboard and got itself a touch screen.

Verizon seems to have orchestrated a nice launch and the early reviews give the Storm a thumbs up. If you believe everything reviewers say, then you gotta wonder: Why has RIM only gotten around to making BlackBerrys like the Storm (and the Bold) now? I think it was due to a lack of imagination — and fear of taking risks. Now that that iPhone has made touch screens cool, RIM is jumping on the bandwagon.

Our own James Kendrick has taken an in-depth look at the Storm and has posted his findings on jkOnTheRun, along with a fantastic video that takes you through the pros and cons of the device. He sent in his thoughts for our readers:

The Storm is unusual for a Blackberry as it lacks a physical keyboard of any kind. The screen is a large display that uses SurePress technology from RIM that makes it feel like using a physical thumb board when you type on the screen. In our brief experience it works very well and we won’t be surprised to see the Storm take off in the consumer space.

He seems to like the device a lot (You can find his complete review at jkOnTheRun). I, however, am not sold on it.

While I can live without a keyboard on iPhone, I cannot do the same on a BlackBerry. One of the reasons I like BlackBerry is the physical QWERTY keyboard. The Bold’s keyboard was one of the reasons I gave that device a big thumbs up. The keyboard and push email make BlackBerry a device to love because it allows you to plow through copious amount of email when on the go. The reason I carry both an iPhone and a BlackBerry 8800 is because I use the first one for browsing and talking, while the other is for everything that involves text: Google Talk, Twitter, Facebook messages and of course, staying on top of a steady torrent of daily email.

As Walt Mossberg says, “[U]sing the Storm’s keyboard is much more like using the iPhone’s keyboard than a traditional BlackBerry’s. I found that I could type quite well on the Storm after awhile, but that a greater adjustment, and more practice, were required than with a physical keyboard.” He is also miffed that you get a Suretype keyboard when the device is held in vertical and goes into a QWERTY mode only when the device is held horizontally. I agree — it’s a boneheaded UI feature.

I am of the opinion that devices that stick to their true strengths are the ones that succeed the most. Apple is winning with the iPhone because touch is an integral part of the entire experience. All the applications are being built on top of that experience. In losing its keyboard with the Storm, this BlackBerry device has lost some of its uniqueness.

The Storm reminds me of the St. Louis Cardinals phenom Rich Ankiel, who was an awesome pitcher till he flamed out, got hurt and came back as an outfielder and a hitter. He scored a lot of runs last seasons, but he isn’t a center fielder like Mickey Mantle. He is just another player. Storm will be that — just another touch-screen smartphone.

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Photo Courtesy of RIM

Today, Ultra-wideband chip makers Artimi and Staccato Communications announced $20 million in funding and a merger agreement, which seems like tying two leaky boats together, giving them some more gas and hoping they make it to shore. The combination of Artimi and Staccato brings together the two UWB companies that were rumored to be running out of cash (as most of the other players had received cash earlier this year).

I have my doubts about the future of UWB, the high-speed personal area networking technology, after the closure of UWB chipmaker WiQuest, the bankruptcy of UWB chip firm Focus Enhancements and the halt of Intel’s UWB research program, but belief in UWB apparently remains high. Alereon CEO Eric Broockman, earlier this month, told me he believed that cell phones might be the eventual killer application for UWB, as people could use it for high-speed data transfers without sucking up a lot of power. He pointed out that SK Telecom, which had invested in Alereon this year showed a prototype handset with UWB chips inside. Maybe there is hope, but I’m not betting on those boats reaching the shore.

I’ve spent the past few days pretty immersed in the SC 08 conference here in Austin, Texas, but I’m still embarrassed that I missed the formation of a new lobbying organization think tank called The Future of Privacy that’s being funded by AT&T. The group hopes to help policy makers and business leaders figure out how to manage online privacy.

A big source of irony from the group, other than its purported focus on online privacy to benefit consumers and the industry alike, is that Co-chair Christopher Wolf also headed up one of my favorite astroturfing efforts, Hands Off The Internet, the phone company think tank dedicated to Net Neutrality. Somehow, that connection isn’t mentioned in his FOP bio. Wolf is a litigation partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Proskauer Rose LLP, a firm that does work for AT&T. The other co-founder of FOP, Jules Polonetsky (here’s a great interview on his views on Internet privacy), was the former chief privacy officer at AOL. Prior to that he worked at DoubleClick, which was bought by Google.

The creation of the FOP is both a good thing and bad thing. It’s a sign that consumers worried about how their private information is collected and used on the Internet have been taken seriously. On the other hand, the backer and members of this particular organization are highly likely to influence legislators in a direction that will keep consumers’ data in their hands.

I hope that some of the more privacy focused representatives can cut through the corporate double-speak that I have seen firsthand from the telecommunications companies on other issues. Perhaps Google, which is not represented on the board, can start its own privacy think tank and we can watch the fight unfurl between caching private data for later use, and profiting from data as it travels through the ISPs’ pipes.

This issue of Internet privacy has gained more momentum in the last few months after ISPs contracted with a startup called NebuAd to monitor where a consumer surfs the web and serve ads against those visits. Other companies are trying this as well. Since then, Congress has held two hearings on online privacy, with one related to data collection and the other related to deep-packet inspection as employed by NebuAD and its ISP customers.

As the online experience becomes more interactive, the rules around of who’s watching us as we’re watching the web need to be defined. But in addition to worries about corporate spying, legislators and lobbying organizations should also take a close look at what governments can now access and use. For those of you following this space, the advisory board includes:

• Dorothy Attwood, Senior Vice President, Public Policy and Chief Privacy Officer, AT&T, who went before Congress to decry NebuAd’s tactics but noted that perhaps in exchange for lower rates a consumer might be willing to share more data with the ISP
• Chris Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer and Head of Global Public Policy, Facebook, the company that brought you the privacy nightmare known as Beacon
• Simon Davies, Director, Privacy International
• Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University and Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress, who is advising President-elect Barack Obama on technology

I wanted to take this moment to celebrate the launch of my sixth book, Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media (subtilted Cellphone, Cameraphone, iPhone, Smartphone). The book appeared on Amazon UK and Amazon USA this week and had its first ranking at the UK site already (debuting at 59,000 ranking and number 36 in telecoms books and 78 in advertising books). Remember that you can always buy it direct from the publisher (probably also the fastest way to get the book still now in November 2008) who ship worldwide at http://mobile7th.futuretext.com/

The book has incredibly warm first reviews, ranging from Chip Hawkins (we all know him as the founder of Electronic Arts and he now is chairman of Digital Chocolate) to Vodafone's Strategy Director Daniel Appelquist calling it my best book yet. Digital tech guru and fellow author Paul Golding has written the first book review (I can't believe how fast these are coming in these days, when my first book came out, it took literally six months for the first review to be published) and I can only say, thank you Paul, you are incredible.

But the big news is that I have launched a blog about the book at   www.7thMassMedia.com   and welcome all of our readers to sample the blog and those who have an active interest in how mobile is used as a mass media channel (including of course mobile advertising, mobile marketing and engagement marketing on mobile). The blog will also track the feedback for the book.

As to our loyal readers here at CDB - do not worry. I am not going to desert you ha-ha.. I love the CDB community and especially waking up and starting my online day visiting the CDB blog and discovering a new blog by Alan. He is my inspiration and hero, and I only wish he had time to post every day...

And then there are our regular readership, who give us such a rich sounding board here in digital feedback, and a continuing dialogue on the comments sections. I will of course continue blogging here. But some readers must have felt over the past three years that at times Tomi's postings are "almost too much" about mobile. That is why the 7th Mass Media blog (and book). I will focus mobile-specifc blogs to only 7th MM, and advertising/marketing blogs only to CDB, but any convergence areas to both of course.

But check out the 7th MM blog and consider it for yourself. And yes, anyone reading this, if you would like to sample either my brand new book on Mobile being the 7th Mass Media, or if you have not yet read Communities Dominate Brands - then send me an email to tomi at tomiahonen dot com and request an excerpt of either (or both) books. The CDB excerpt is one chapter in length (plus book foreword from Coca Cola and one case study) while the 7th MM book excerpt runs 2 full chapters and the foreword and one case study. I'll be delighted to send you the samples from the books so you can safely test the books for free, before thinking of buying them. We believe in this method, that is why we practise what we preach at CDB (and 7thMM).

I now had 3 days at 2 conferences in London where both Jonathan MacDonald and I spoke (or chaired) here in London and we both observed a palpable energy about this intention to pursue that "army of fanatics" and how comprehensively that will change not only advertising and marketing, but also telecoms and IT, and media, and indeed all of business, and beyond business, into government, education etc.

Jonathan "J Mac" wrote about how this changes his mind-set, and he is shifting gears. For those who know him, he does not mean he is "shifting down" ha-ha (J Mac is incredibly energetic and dynamic, far more so than I am for example, and many say I am quite energetic ha-ha) - no, Jonathan is shifting gears now - upwards. He goes from talking about the "Communication Ideal" in the "Every Single One of Us" thinking. I just blogged about it that it is the natural progression of where our book ended in 2005 and should be read by anyone who liked our book.

But now, he moves beyond. J Mac is working on "volume 2" of the Every Single One of Us thinking. He goes from how to communicate it, to how to do it. He calls it "No Way Back from Here." He blogged about it yesterday (I cannot imagine how he found the time for that), a very revealing posting showing where he feels the "vibe" is in this space.

Meanwhile at the Mobile Content conference yesterday, that I chaired and where J Mac was deliberately set to be the last speaker to close it out (he chaired it on Day 1, when I was the keynote ha-ha, see the parallel), I was asked by several, why no, why here, why us. Why not Silicon Valley, or Finland, or based on my book Digital Korea, why is this sudden leadership into the "army of fanatics" philosophy not emerging out of South Korea. I had some quick responses to that, but am thinking about it, and have a far more complete picture in my mind emerging now. I will blog about it shortly.

If you look at young people - under employment age but already fully literate - and how they interact with technology, and in particular computers and mobile phones, and the internet on both (a revealing statistic of Flirtomatic UK users from the conference yesterday - Flirtomatic has over 1 million users mostly in the UK, with a little over half using mobile and the rest using the internet version, with a youth and young adult -skewing user base. But an "online" survey conducted via mobile only (so obviously these are heavily mobile Flirtomatic users) of 6,000 Flirtomatic registered users, which asked do you use the internet - not if they used Flirtomatic - on their mobile phones - then a totally stunning 85% said yes. If this is out of half a million british users, and a massive sample size of 6,000 (normal Gallup style marketing research surveys have sample sizes typically of 1,000 or so) - they find over 8 in 10 (young) mobile phone users in the UK who access the internet on their mobile.

I do not mean to suggest that 8 in 10 Brits do so. Absolutely not. But I do mean this indicates that of the Flirtomatic (mobile version) user base, which is half a million strong, the vast majority already do.

Sorry about the distraction (oh, and another side note, Flirtomatic CEO, Mark Curtis's book is Distraction, and a brilliant read. Its subtitle is Being Human in a Digital Age, it is very very thought-provoking).

Sorry, yes. But I meant, if you look at young people today - younger than working age, and how they use the internet, mobile, etc - then you see they work and collaborate totally in different ways to their elders.

Totally differently. They know instinctively how to Google and search. They know instinctively how to collaborate in Wikipedia and post their reviews on Amazon and give their mood on Facebook. They do real time commentary on Twitter (I just had a series of 20 or so comments of my Future of Mobile conference presentation Twittered in real time. I read them afterwards and it made for a strange reading of what was on the minds of the audience. Very humbling..)

Now how will this Generation C (Community Generation) behave in the future? How will they work when they graduate and get their first jobs? How will they run companies when they move up the ladder and start to assume control.

They KNOW instinctively, that collaboration - especially in the digital information age - is the natural competitive advantage. They will insist on collaboration. Remember the "bizarre" CEO fifteen years ago who insisted that all executives have to use email, or the CEO ten years ago who insisted all management have to actively use SMS text messaging in internal communications. Their companies achieved competitive advantages over their rivals that in hindsight gave them "insurmountable" leads in productivity, and ceteris paribus (all other things being equal) would propel their company into far better competitive performance than their peers from that time.

Now, lets get back, to our J Mac.

He read our book. He says so everywhere. He then went out and thought about it. He came back, worked in this space - helping launch Blyk - and now is teaching the digital advertising world how this really works - through his current employer Ogilvy One. Fine. But he already wrote one book, and no doubt is collecting his thoughts onto his follow-up volume.

Imagine from an investor's or owner's point of view. If you could have someone like J Mac (or our Alan Moore or say David Cushman or someone else like those, who has actually done it, built successful "Communities Dominate Brands" based businesses and processes) and who then have taken those lessons and pushed this thinking beyond our 2005 book - all while sharing and collaborating with us. Imagine if you could have this talent in your organization, to tap into that ocean of marketing power, that is "an army of fanatics." Your company would shortly become unstoppable.

And army of fanatics. Imagine if you had that? You could not lose. Apple has an army of fanatics with the Macintosh computers. Apple has another army of fanatics with the iPod (with some overlap obviously). Now they launched the iPhone - through their army of fanatics. Of course it became the best-selling smartphone in the USA (where the bulk of that army of fanatics is, obviously). Barack Obama used his army of fanatics to get elected.

This is not just Blyk in the UK. This is an universal trend. But it is a radical innovation in all of business (and government and non-profits - imagine Greenpeace - that is certainly an army of fanatics - and beyond). An army of fanatics is not "only" in the digital space. It is a universal trend in humanity, and only online digital networks will enhance that ability, boost it. Remember that the mobile phone is the ultimate lubricant to this interactivity and collaboration, as Howard Rheingold said, mobile phones amplify the human talents for cooperation. Because we all carry them (not all have laptops) and because we always carry them (even sleep with them) and they are always connected (not like spotty coverage of laptops at some WiFi hotspots).

But yes, a rambling posting. There is a fierce urgency of now. Some companies will "get it" and increasingly they will seek out the best thoughts of the thought-leaders in this space. And then when David and Alan and J Mac (and Tomi) say that wait - there is an even more profound change happening now, beyond just blogging and Twittering and SMS...  That there is a fundamental shift in how some organizations work - they will pay attention. And they will experiment in this space. And their experiments will bear incredible fruits - remember Tohato potato chips campaign from Japan, remember the BMW winter tyres campaign from Germany, remember Obama's campaign from the USA. Its not just here in the UK, it is global.

There is no going back. We have come upon the cliff. We know there is a future and now we are told to take a leap of faith. And the latest to push us to jump is J Mac. He says there is no way back from here. Read it.

Just as I completed my MsC last year at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), I've been asked to go give context and advice on the possibility of using Drupal with people at the Central European University in Budapest. They were looking at content management systems such as Plone and Drupal and were trying to scope their work and the possibilities they have for converting to an Open Source system. I gave them details on Drupal: some of the key components available, high profile sites using the system, support options they have, the rate of progress within the community, and they were impressed.

I almost forgot about this before they got back to me recently saying that they choose Drupal and would like to publicize their job offer for an in-house Drupal consultant, who could help migrate their data, bootstrap their work and educate other team members on Drupal. Now that Drupal 6 is shining brighter with CCK and Views out in full force, there is no question they are planning to use Drupal 6.

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Last but not least, we're going to look at:

• Spam Control
• XML Sitemap to help with search engine optimization
• Setup Metatagging
• Human Readable (and search engine readable) URLs
• Fivestar rating on content
• ServiceLinks to allow for social bookmarking

Spam Control

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I’m a geek groupie when it comes to technology. I can’t actually produce any of these life-changing products, but I can recognize something cool when I see it. And the 100-Gigabit data transfer demo that Ciena was showing off at SC 08 in Austin, Texas, today was very cool. Unlike previous demonstrations, Ciena’s was a 100-Gigabit data transfer over a single channel, rather than one aggregated over multiple channels.

The product isn’t available for commercial use yet (and there’s no date set for when it will be), but when it is, customers will be able to upgrade their existing fiber equipment with the Ciena kit to 100G. Other players, from Infinera to Alcatel-Lucent, are also trying to deliver 100G networks. Those speeds will help the core network handle the anticipated growth of Internet traffic, and lower the per-bit cost of delivering that traffic. In the video below, Dimple Amin, vice president of R&D and special projects at Ciena, talks about the demonstration, what it does and how far such traffic can travel. He also says there’s no technical reason why these speeds couldn’t be delivered at the edge of  the network to consumers’ homes. That would be the day.

Earlier today I took the one and half hour train ride up to Philly to attend the first DrupalCamp for that fine city. I hope they have more! Big thanks to the organizers, Nathan and Alex. It was very well put together and the venue was great. There were about 100 people there and I got to catch up with some friends and meet lots of new faces. I was slated to do two sessions, Contributing to Drupal and then a doc sprint. I got into town a little bit late and was not on top of my game, fighting off the remnants of my flu bug. Jeff Miccolis of Development Seed kicked off the session until I got in the door and set up (thanks Jeff!) and then we ended up doing one good long session on contributing. There were lots of good questions and conversation. My slides are pretty spare, to be used more as points to talk about, but I did have handy URLs to get more information on topics, so I've uploaded a PDF of them here. Everyone should feel free to use these in their own presentations and modify them up. Anything that spreads the good word of Drupal is alright by me. ;-)

UPDATE: sorry to folks that couldn't download the slides. It should all be working now.

After a very successful debut last year, The Crunchies are returning to once again celebrate the best of entrepreneurship and new startups. With the economy being what it is, 2009 is going to be a tough year for everyone and I see events like The Crunchies as a big morale booster for those of us working in the trenches. The Crunchies are a joint effort by us, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider and TechCrunch. More details will emerge in the coming days but for now, here are the rules and some facts.

• Nominations will be accepted from now through Dec. 10 at midnight PT.
• There are 15 award categories to recognize various types of technology innovation.
• Companies will be nominated based on their accomplishments in 2008.
• For each award category, each person is invited to nominate one company.
• The voting will start on Dec. 15-Jan. 5 midnight PT.
• The Crunchies committee will select five finalists per award category based on popular nominations and company accomplishments made in 2008.
• One ballot per IP address per day will be counted in the final vote for the winners.
• The Awards Ceremony will be held on Jan. 9, 2009, 7:30 pm at the Herbst Theater across the street from City Hall in San Francisco. The reception will follow and tickets will be released in December.

The folks in charge of the SC 08 conference being held in Austin, Texas, this week have trumpeted the phenomenal growth of the supercomputing show, with attendance up by almost 10 percent from the previous year, but I’m beginning to doubt that high-performance computing is driving this growth as much as the broad changes in the data center world. As Ori Aruj, CEO a GM of switch chipmaker Dune Networks, told me when I asked why he was at the show, “This is no longer about high-performance computing and research. This is now a data center conference.”

I’m inclined to agree with him, as there are a lot of networking and storage vendors here with really large and visible booths that seem outsized compared with the HPC market opportunity. There are also attendees here from companies that have little or no business in supercomputing, such as Dune Networks, Isilon or Rackable Systems. Some of the 219 industry exhibitors (as opposed to the 118 research exhibitors) can’t possibly make enough in the HPC market to justify such a large presence at the show, although a product manager at Ciena, which makes networking gear,  pointed out that HPC installations can act as an effective advertisement for other business.

So here among the 10,764 attendees at the show one might be forgiven for occasionally forgetting that Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia and a host of other consumer brands aren’t here to talk about basic computing — but supercomputing.

Doing a good wiki in Drupal 6 is surprisingly hard. My project to create a site with MediaWiki-like functionality for climate research at UC Berkeley took much longer than I thought it would, and the result was mediocre. Here are my notes evaluating different modules:

Modules I ended up using

• Talk (6.x-1.5)
  • Function: Move the comments into separate tab.
  • Configure: Enable in Content Type -> edit -> Workflow settings (which is odd, should be Comment settings).
• Diff (6.x-2.0)
  • Function: Show what changed between one revisions.

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When themeing your view in Drupal 6, you have the ability to override the default templates. Depending on the “Style” and the “Row Style” attributes that you assign your view, different options are available to you. If you choose a “Node” row style, you can take advantage of a special template suggestion.

You can create a .tpl file in your theme directory with the following naming scheme:
node-view-VIEWNAME.tpl.php

This template will be used to render each node in the view.
It works almost the same as node-NODE TYPE.tpl.php but only for the view that you have specified.

The Drupal markup filtering system is confusing for a couple of reasons:

• The terms “format” and “filter” are used inconsistently. For example, the main admin page is title “Input formats”, but the url is “admin/settings/filters”. The best I can do is: The markup filter system consists of multiple input formats which are ordered stacks of individual filters.
• The term “Input format” itself is misleading, because the filters work on output, not input.
• The “Input format” admin page is unhelpful and hard to navigate.

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An Iranian blogger has been arrested in Iran and charged with spying for Israel. He could face the death penalty if found guilty. Hossein Derakhshan, known around the world as the father of the Iranian blogosphere, was recently arrested upon returning to Iran from Canada.   Jahan News, an Iranian website affiliated with Iran’s intelligence community, reported on Monday that he admitted to spying for Israel. Derakhshan, a 33-year-old secular Iranian, has been living in Toronto for the past seven years and holds Canadian citizenship. It was in Toronto that he started writing his blog, Hoder, in both English and Persian. Derakhshan has participated in many international forums as a representative of the younger Iranian generation.  

Observers have noted a tougher tone in his writing over the past couple of years, in that he has been more supportive of the regime in Tehran. Derakhshan has appeared in numerous news reports providing an Iranian point of view and expressing support for Iran’s controversial nuclear program.

Source The Media Line that I picked up off twitter

We blogged about it here The fight for weblogistan and beyond and here

Flows of information and communication cannot not be ultimately suppressed. If I wanted to create create a movement in Iran to fight extremist views of all persuasions I would enlist the bloggers, hence Iran's obvious distaste for Hossein.