Experts laud role of new media in Iranian protests: Via The Jerusalem Post – JPost.com .

Twitter's role in the recent Iranian protests has been exaggerated, but new media were crucial in enabling an online community within and beyond Iran to convey information to protesters otherwise shut off from independent news sources, according to new media experts.

After Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner in Iran's controversial presidential election, supporters of rival Mir Hossein Mousavi organized their opposition using many online tools that helped coordinate rallies and provide coverage about the events in their country and the response around the world, noted members of a panel on Tuesday. The panel was hosted by the National Endowment for Democracy and the Center for International Media Assistance.

As the government cracked down on this online activity, the international press focused on the use of Twitter, which was harder to block due to its decentralized framework.

"I think the Twitter story has been greatly exaggerated," said Robert Faris, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
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S.F. techie helps stir Iranian protests: Via San Francisco Chronicle.

But for the past few days, Heap, an IT director in San Francisco, has been on the virtual front lines of the crisis in Iran, helping people there protest the presidential election, which opponents of the incumbent regime maintain was fraudulent.

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets since Saturday, organizing and sharing news on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The Iranian government, in response, has blocked those sites, along with mobile phone service and other communications tools.

But Iran has the highest number of bloggers per capita in the world, said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University, and they were undeterred. "People used Twitter, and people used their cell phones and used all kinds of mechanisms."
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Silicon Valley should step up, help Iranians: Via San Francisco Chronicle.

Until Iran's election and ensuing political crisis, many Silicon Valley companies had ignored Persian-language services almost entirely. It's easy to understand why.

First, there's an American embargo against Iran, which forbids American companies from doing business with that country.

Second, there is a perception that the Iranian community (particularly outside of Los Angeles) is not that large or significant. Third, most Iranians in the United States are well-educated, upper-class people who speak English very well.

So ignoring Iran has been convenient - there has seemingly been no real business motivation for tech companies to make their products useful for Iranians both inside and outside Iran.

[...]

Twitter famously received a call from the U.S. Department of State nearly two weeks ago asking the company to postpone its scheduled maintenance to suit those in Tehran's time zone, rather than those on Pacific time.
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Twitter on the Barricades in Iran - Six Lessons Learned: Via NYTimes.com .

Political revolutions are often closely linked to communication tools. The American Revolution wasn’t caused by the proliferation of pamphlets, written to whip colonists into a frenzy against the British. But it sure helped.

Social networking, a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, has already been credited with aiding protests from the Republic of Georgia to Egypt to Iceland. And Twitter, the newest social-networking tool, has been identified with two mass protests in a matter of months — in Moldova in April and in Iran last week, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to oppose the official results of the presidential election.

But does the label Twitter Revolution, which has been slapped on the two most recent events, oversell the technology?
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