Bersih 2.0 is a movement for the people, by the people to fight for reform of the Malaysian electoral process. It is independent of political parties and it strives for fairness.

On the media front, it was amazing to see hundreds of thousands, if not millions of tweets, Facebook posts and forum engagements generated around the event to rally for a cause – a cause that transcends race, religion and status in life. It just goes to prove that a notable cause will rally together people, and they will use whatever medium necessary to support it.

Though I was not able to be at the protest in person, I was able to follow along via my mobile phone and notebook. It was true to life and I loved every moment, being able to be in the centre of action, though I unfortunately wasn’t. It was much better than the World Cup, Olympics or Royal Wedding. Combined.

It’s amazing to see the power of social media added to the on-ground activities and how it was able to mobilize the thousands of people. The mobile Internet has empowered the masses. It’s proof how much we need our mobile telcos. We could see reports live, or slightly delayed, appearing on the Internet in the form of text updates, photos, videos and even streaming! Totally amazing.

As a tribute to the Bersih 2.0 efforts, here are some photos collected over the course of the day. None are mine, and I’ve tried to give credit as best as I can, but I may have missed a few credit. I offer my apologies in advance. Fact is, the photos were flying everywhere, embedded on various sites.

PHOTOS BY

ahmadhusni, Bandar Kuala Lumpur, BBC, beritaharian, cyberred, danielkong, dansemacabre
evilickle, fahmi_fadzil, freemalaysiatoday, j_rubis, jasurin, johnhansoei, KeadilanDaily
kenhong, khalids, kyspeaks, limbenji, bilviva, curicuriwangmsia, pratamad, kkling, liingpeh
ngkaychin, ryudiculous, plgan, premesh, RAKYAT MARHAEN, randyhew, theonlinecitizen
zhenyanglee, skidolma, ygren, terence7, wordsmanifest, alfredhean, behlihyi

MUSIC

The Weather Is Changing by Fred Winterbottom

Oh well… the battle was fun while it lasted, though it didn’t carry on for too long. Upon arriving in Beijing, China, I was presented with an Internet connection in my hotel that totally blocked YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot and many other sites (I wrote about it here). Sure I had heard about the issues before arriving in China, and I was determined to get around them.

The solution that several sites stated was to sign up for a VPN service BEFORE entering China. I realised that many of the VPN sites were already securely blocked by their awesomely-amazing-annoying-firewall. Anyhow, while doing my R&D on circumventing the firewall, I stumbled across 2 sites that were decent and reasonably priced too.

Enter Astrill and Vpntraffic.

Armed with a snazzy, professional website, they promise to deliver, and deliver they do. I signed up for a 7-day trial account (you need to register for an account, then activate via SMS and request for the trial) to test it out, and it surely worked well. They offer a choice of IP addresses from USA, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Netherlands, Australia, Portugal and Ireland.

Importantly, they support many platforms – I was surfing Facebook on my iPhone and MacBook Pro with ease. Of course, they support PCs and Android devices too. Using a Mac, I had to install their software which would then initiate the VPN connection with their servers. Simple and easy setup, even for non-techies.

Sorry, I didn’t test the PC connection, but I did test the iPhone. When connected, it would show me a VPN icon in the top bar.

Everything seemed to work well, and I’m impressed. I highly recommend you test it out for yourself with their 7-day trial (no credit card required), then sign up.

Cost: USD23.36 for 3 months

While I admit I did not sign up for this service, nor trial it out, their promise is impressive and so is the price! Reviews scattered all over the Internet rave about the ability to get online and access Hulu, Facebook, YouTube from China, and it must be good.

You get to choose an IP address from 11 countries, namely USA, Australia, UK, Canada, Spain, Russia, Italy, India, Japan, Korea and Hong Kong.

As for operating systems, they support Windows, Mac OS, iOS, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian!

Overall, I’d say their website is horrible, but their brand promise and price are good. Who can ask for more, when they merely charge USD5 PER MONTH! If you’re only in China for a short period, sign up for their 3 day package at a mere USD0.99. The packages get even cheaper if you sign up long term.

And with that, I conclude the battle has been won. Internet freedom is restored, but only if you know how to, and only if you’re willing to pay a little. It’s a small cost for freedom.

The day will come when The Great China Firewall will crumble. I’m sure of it. Till then, viva VPNs.

And so… I have arrived in China, and have already been warmly welcomed by The Great China Firewall.

Facebook, nope. Twitter, nope. Gmail, nope. Blogspot, nope. And many other websites – all NOPE!

Only Foursquare and LinkedIn work, among a few other international social media websites. It’s no wonder the local Facebook / Twitter clones known as Weibo and RenRen are thriving.

I’ve declared war on it and will endeavour to get around it. When I do, I’ll share more on the methods you can employ to restore PROPER Internet access when visiting China. As it is, many VPN sites that offer services around the firewall have been blocked. Let’s see how I go after a day here.

THIS IS WAR!

Here’s what I’m greeted with for many, many websites I try to access.

You may be surprised, but you’re probably using some form of cloud computing and storage already!

Do you have a Yahoo! or Gmail account? Surely you use Facebook? Dropbox? Google Docs? Or Flickr?

All of these services represent usage of the cloud, which in my layperson’s explanation is basically making use of other people’s servers that are on the Internet somewhere to store your data. It should allow you to access your data from as many devices as possible, so that you can always update and retrieve that information.

Here’s a practical example of how I used the cloud when migrating phones. I was given the opportunity to review the HTC HD7 mobile phone recently, as part of a Maxis initiative and it came with not a shred of my data.

After syncing my phone to get my contacts from my notebook, I proceeded to configure the most important services in my business life – email and my calendar. Configuring the settings on the HTC HD7 is very straightforward, and within minutes, I was already able to reply emails and see my schedule.

Aside from work, the phone is definitely slated for play. I do admit I’m a bit of a Facebook and Twitter junkie. Facebook works natively from the phone, but Twitter required a download of the free app from the Marketplace. It wasn’t too much of a hassle and within the half hour, I was up and running, stalking the news feeds of my friends.

The interface for both Facebook and Twitter is pretty glorious – especially with the HUGE screen that is really, really clear.

Cloud computing and storage isn’t so foreign now, is it? In simplistic terms, it is something many of us folks enjoy transparently, and it’s the way it really should be. I look forward to the day when my entire notebook can be on the cloud. All I need to do is log on from anywhere at anytime and have full access to all my applications and data, at high speed too. I’m sure it’s not too far off.

Using the cloud definitely has benefits, especially when the need arises to access data from a new device or if you’re traveling. It also serves as an avenue to backup your data to, in case your primary machine fails.

Some of us who started Tweetdeck groups previously, don’t want to recreate them all over again in a tedious fashion. Thankfully, Tweetdeck has an easier way of exporting these contacts, though it may seem a tad daunting. Here’s a graphical step-by-step on how to do it.

1. Click on the Group name. You will be shown two buttons. Click on “Export Group As List”

2. Name the list (Oh, I found out you cannot start the name with a non-letter). Describe it, if you want, then select whether it’s going to be Private or Public. Then, hit the “Add list members” button

3. By default, all the members in the Tweetdeck group are listed on the right already, but Tweetdeck allows you to add even more from your general list. When done, click “Save List” and wait…

4. Wait… wait… waittttt… When it’s done, your new Twitter list will have been created. You can delete the Tweetdeck group now, if you wish.

Today, the Daily Mail, UK’s 2nd biggest-selling newspaper made a boo boo by quoting a parody Twitter account, thinking it was the REAL Steve Jobs. Many of us who spend copious amounts of time on Twitter are familiar with the popular @ceoSteveJobs account that spews lots of funny one-liners aimed to poke fun at all-things-Apple.

So, what did the parody account say? Just 13 simple words.

We may have to recall the new iPhone. This, I did not expect. – @ceoSteveJobs

Then, the Daily Mail went on to publish the following news piece online.

I can only imagine how embarrassing it must be for the newspaper, when the entire twittersphere picked up on their mistake and started *rolling their eyes* at the gross misreporting.

Soon after, the article was pulled from the Daily Mail, but a copy still remains here at TheBackpackr.com – read it, if you wish. At the same time, a seemingly similar post (view here) with the same imagery was found on the Daily Mail, though dated earlier. Bizarre.

We’ve just found out via Twitter engineer (@jeanpaul) that the cause of these outages is primarily due to internal sub-networks being over-capacity. He outlines 3 problems and 3 solutions for them. (Read the source article here)

3 PROBLEMS

1. Two critical, fast-growing, high-bandwith components were put on the same segment of the internal
2. The Twitter internal network wasn’t monitored appropriately.
3. Their internal network was temporarily misconfigured.

3 SOLUTIONS

1. Twitter has doubled the capacity of the internal network.
2. They’re improving the monitoring of the internal network.
3. Twitter is rebalancing the traffic on the internal network to redistribute the load.

In case you didn’t know, Twitter has also launched a pretty funky feature to commemorate the World Cup season. It has special pages that filter World Cup related tweets from both teams in play and display them to the audience, LIVE. You can take a look at it here. This surely increases the traffic to Twitter exponentially!

RANDOM FAIL WHALE INFO…

Some enterprising individuals have redrawn variants of the fail whale as shown below. Pretty nifty, huh?

Related articles: High Error Rate on Twitter.com, A Perfect Storm of Whales

News about earthquakes break via Twitter and scientists have actually come up with some correlation between the crowd, the cloud and their (multi-million dollar) scientific equipment. The article is reported in Wired Science.

On the street I saw a small girl cold and shivering in a thin dress, with little hope of a decent meal. I became angry and said to God; “Why did you permit this? Why don’t you do something about it?” For a while God said nothing. That night he replied, quite suddenly:

“I certainly did something about it. I made you.”

For many months, I have been silently following a website that is interestingly called InvisiblePeople.tv. It is an interesting play on how humans shun away from looking at something they wish to eradicate from their minds. All too often, we walk quickly past the people begging on the streets, stealing a glance or two from the side of our eyes.

We’re afraid – that’s the truth. Afraid of being asked for donations, afraid to be caught staring, and worst of all, afraid to care.

This project heavily invests in social media and uses it to make the invisible people, visible. Mark Horvath, the man behind this project was once known as the Lizard Man of Hollywood Boulevard, when he himself was once homeless. Mark had strong media beginnings as a Hollywood distribution executive, but lost it all to drugs and alcohol. In a nutshell, thanks to the LA Dream Center, he was set right again and freed from the bondages he once had.

Today, he goes out to the streets armed with a small camcorder, mic, laptop and iPhone. Mark posts raw unedited footage (sometimes deemed too raw) of the people he interacts with as they share their homeless stories with him.

So, how exactly does Mark use social media? Sites that are frequently updated include: his blog, Twitter, Facebook, Whrrl, MySpace, YouTube, uStream, Vimeo and Flickr. They serve as his own broadcasting channels to reach out to the public and update them on-the-go. Through the true-to-life updates, he has caught the attention of many and this has served to further propagate the message and his mission.

Is there any magic to it? From what I see, there isn’t: it’s about being true to your project and being as transparent as possible. Picking the right social platforms is probably very important too, as you would want to target the relevant audience through it. Frequent updates help too, and we can see videos are uploaded very often on the InvisiblePeople.tv site.

With so many platforms to manage, I was very curious as to how Mark manages them and sent him a couple of tweets. Here’s his down-to-earth reply.

Stats to date: CNN reports more than 1,000 videos are watched per week on the Vimeo channels and the project has more than 10,000 followers on both his Twitter accounts (@hardlynormal and @invisiblepeople). Mark has been featured on Huffington Post, CNN and loads more media as a result of him being extremely social with a fantastic mission.

He’s raised sponsorship and donations from many companies amongst which are Ford, Hanes (they give out socks to the homeless) and Virgin Mobile. Truly, it’s a powerful testimony of how one man has shared the stories of hundreds of homeless people with the world and brought smiles to those who are in need.

More importantly, via social media, an entire movement has been formed, out of people who are more aware that these problems exist. To all those who are interested in making a difference, Mark in a very practical way asks them to start helping in their own neighbourhood. There’s little point in helping out halfway across the country when the problems are prevalent in your own backyard.

May the invisible become visible, via the power of social media.

Find out what’s trending in a locality near you… but only if you are from one of these countries or cities. Twitter currently supports:

• Brazil
• Canada
• Ireland
• Mexico
• United Kingdom
• United States (filter down to: Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, London, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Francisco, Seattle, São Paulo, Washington D.C.

Here’s a comparison of what is trending worldwide vs what’s trending in different countries.

And if we look at different cities in the United States, some have similarities.

Note: The Apple Tablet / Slate launches in a few hours and no one in the UK is talking about it? :p

This could well be a move to allow for hot citizen journalism that is geographically specific. Just imagine homing in on a location where a sensation is occurring and keeping abreast of happenings there live.Will they eventually allow me to stalk the tweets from my neighbors?

To be honest, I’m more intrigued by the augmented reality applications out there for the iPhone. Have you seen Twitter 360? It’s SOOOO HOT! Here’s 2 screenshots of what it looks like.

I guess you could term it rather like channel surfing, or rather Twitter trend surfing.

I’m bored… let’s change the channel. Bzzzzt…