British writer and analyst Charles Leadbeater, and researcher Annika Wong, have put together a report called Cloud Culture to be published by the British Council next year. Their statistical study, provided to me by Leadbeater, is based on figures from the social media analytics company Sysomos. It shows that such a tiny proportion of Iranians are on Twitter that any stories about a new movement based on the social network are meaningless. The figure they provide, by they way, includes the thousands of foreigners who changed their Twitter location to Tehran when the 'Iranian internet revolution' story struck after the elections in June and Facebook and Twitter were afire with Iran sentiment. So the likely figure is even lower.

The report adds that only one third of Iranians have internet access at all. And because opposition supporters are young, and on the internet, and Ahmadinejad supporters tend to be older and rural, the picture on the ground is likely skewed by any analysis that relies on tweets.

Leadbeater and Wong also compile a series of hyperbolic quotes from a variety of media sources at the time of the protests:

• "Twitter has become a key information conduit as the authorities in Tehran have cracked down on reporting by traditional media." Chris Nuttall and Daniel Dombey, Financial Times.
• "After disputed election results and massive street demonstrations in Tehran, Iran, information is flooding out of the country – on Twitter." Ashley Terry, Global News.
• "This is it. The big one." Clay Shirky of NYU.
• "We've been struck by the amount of video and eyewitness testimony... The days when regimes can control the flow of information are over." Jon Williams, BBC World News editor.

The meme was just too tempting, it seems, for anyone to dig into its veracity. The media — this site included — loves to write about Twitter, and loved doing so even more in summer when it was even newer and shiner. The storyline also fit the fact that Iran is a young country, and chimed with the heartbreaking YouTube video of the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan.

The solidarity that thousands, even millions of Americans showed with the people of Iran during June's elections and the subsequent protests was admirable. It was also potentially dangerous. I was at the UN protests against President Ahmadinejad earlier this fall. Several young men were wearing dust masks they had purchased from hardware stores. I asked one why. "I am wearing it because I have to go back to Iran," said a softly-spoken and shy 28-year-old student who gave his name only as Mohammed. "I return next year and this is for safety, in case they are watching," he added, pointing to his mask. "It could be the best $3 I ever spend."

If Mohammed is picked up despite his dust mask, the fact that the protests in Tehran were partly fomented by Western support based on a false story about Twitter will be of no consolation. It's probably not much comfort to these people either.

As the CEO of a publicly-traded company, tech stalwart Hewlett Packard, Fiorinia had a fiduciary duty to maximize profits for her shareholders. It takes immense hubris to think that can be reconciled with a future in public service. But then Silicon Valley is a famously arrogant place; that's why this election cycle has two political novices, Fiorina and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, trying to leverage corporate experience into elected office.

Fiorina's having a rough time of it. Her latest problem: defending herself against charges that HP made loads of money during her tenure by selling its products in Iran despite a U.S. trade embargo. "To her knowledge, during her tenure, HP never did business in Iran," Fiorina's campaign told the San Jose Mercury News.

Really? Fiorina had no idea? That's odd, since...

• Fiorina in 2003 noted Middle East sales were defying global trends, and, as the Merc notes, HP's partner there issued a press release saying sales topped $100 million and that "the seeds of the Redington-Hewlett-Packard relationship were sowed six years ago for one market - Iran."
  
• Three of the three HP partners in the Middle East contacted by Christopher Stewart for a story in Portfolio magazine's August 2008 issue readily agreed to ship printers to Iran. Portfolio notified HP of the incidents, but the company didn't condemn them, instead refusing comment. Fiorina was gone as CEO at this point, but Portfolio noted that diversion of American products to Iran trough Dubai had been going strong for many years.
• HP had an office in the Dubai free-trade zones notorious for funneling American goods to Iran, Portfolio reported — so it had ample means to be aware of how its products were being shipped.
  
• After the SEC noticed the prevalance of HP products in Iran, it asked the company about the matter, and got back a letter from the company saying its Dutch subsidiary sold $120 million to Iran in 2008.
• Finally, in January 2009, HP severed ties with Redington Gulf, the distributor that had publicly bragged about its Iran trade six years earlier.
  
  
  

If Fiorina appears to have turned a blind eye to shipments of her products into Iran, that's what she was supposed to do, as CEO; as both the Merc and Portfolio note, the company most likely stayed on the legal — and profitable — side of a gray zone, a loophole in U.S. trade sanctions. But it will be tough to look patriotic while explaining that to voters. Fiorina had better hope her fellow Republicans continue to be more interested by the supposed dangers of universal health care and illegal immigration than by the War on Terror launched by their party's last president.

The internet calling startup has enjoyed back-to-back coverage on Sky TV News and on Al Jazeera English, and that's probably not luck: The company's flacks distributed a press release about heavier Fring usage in Iran; they've also been working the press on Twitter.

The Fring story is an especially easy sell because the company is based in Israel, so Iranians are using software and services from a country their government officially wants to destroy. Reporters love that sort of conflict and irony.

Of course, there's always the chance the strategy will backfire if viewers decide you're harnessing bloodshed for marketing purposes. Which is why you might want to confine your flackery to spoken conversations, rather than committing it to easily-repubilshed words. Using a technology like, say, Fring.

Here's Hoekstra's spokesman, ostensibly trying to put out the fire his boss started but really just pouring fuel on it:

"Congressman Hoekstra did not compare the ongoing violence in Iran to when Democrats shut down the House chamber during the energy debate last summer," said spokesman Dave Yonkman. "The two situations do share the similarity of government leadership attempting to limit debate and deliberation, and the ability of new technologies to bypass their efforts and allow for direct communication. That's the only point that he was trying to make."

Yonkman then went into hiding with fellow freedom fighters Sarah Palin and Michael Steele, who like Hoekstra have been forced to smuggle out their message of resistance through the country's largest television network and the world's most popular news station.

Here's Hoekstra's original tweet:

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Twitter has been credited with lubricating social change in the religious dictatorship by no less an authority than the U.S. State Department. Maybe the hype has gone too far:

"Social media is not at all a prime mover of what is happening on the ground," says Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society...



"The people I know mainly tell me they hear about these protests from friends or by SMS," [Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council] says.

Whille Twitter might not be drawing large crowds to marches, it is unquestionably useful for publishing news in an atmosphere of suppression. This disproportionately benefits foreign news organizations and the American digerati, so it's no wonder these elites are the ones most loudly trumpeting Twitter as a crucial instrument of communication on the Iran situation.

Still, these benefactors would do well to remind their readers that, with regard to Twitter and actual Iranians in Iran, the medium has not yet become the message.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Yes, according to Representative Hoekstra, this thing looks like that thing. Oh, and according to John Culberson, some jerkoff Rep from Texas, the attempts by Iranians to publicize news the government doesn't want released—acts that put their very lives at risk—are just like how congressmen Tweeted about how the Democrats were mean to them, yesterday.

How incredibly self-deluded do you have to be to say these things, in public?

The social-media obsessive defended his network's coverage in no uncertain terms when in front of the camears. "The story was reported every hour on CNN in some form or fashion," he said during a forceful on-air monologue (see attached clip).

But Sanchez was reportedly more revealing yesterday when speaking to fellow Twitter fans at a conference on the microblogging service, disclosing he'd written an email memo to superiors, prodding them to significantly expand their Iran coverage. Wrote one conference participant:

After his comments on the panel, Sanchez described to me and others how his email about #CNNFail on Twitter went up to the highest levels of the network. And, after the network's business, PR and marketing staff was pulled in, coverage the next day shifted...During the panel, Sanchez that "at no time did CNN drop the ball" - based upon his remarks following, however, I have to wonder whether there was an appreciation in the C-suite at CNN that the online backlash on Twitter was a hint that Amanpour reporting live from Tehran wasn't capturing the whole scene, and that US citizens were hungry for more information about what was happening on the streets and rooftaps of Iran.

The double-talk has already been noted on — where else — Twitter. Wrote NYU professor Jay Rosen, "Rick Sanchez told a different story to CNN viewers than he shared with participants" at the Twitter-fest. Sanchez's bragging about his clout at CNN would seem less duplicitous if only he'd posted it to Twitter himself; he'd hardly be the first journalist to use the service for naked self-promotion.

Boing Boing, the tech culture blog, went down today, and briefly thought it was under attack. BB blogger (and old Gawker Media hand) Joel Johnson tweeted that the site had been the victim of "cyberwar." The site had only hours earlier posted a "Cyberwar guide for Iran elections;" we asked Johnson via IM if he thought Iran was attacking Boing Boing:

Later, the real culprit emerged: It was Boing Boing's fault; the site had somehow posted every post ever to the front page, resulting in a 171MB index.html.

A similar drama unfurled yesterday on Andrew Sullivan's blog for The Atlantic. Sullivan, who has been blogging heavily about the situation in Iran, proclaimed he was under "digital attack," later clarified to be a denial of service attack. Then later, "it turns out our servers have just been overwhelmed... the tech staff has now ruled out a... attack."

(While Sullivan was under-credited for his tech problems, he was over-credited when Twitter reversed a decision to delay a planned outage, as Sullivan had urged. Though some observers said Sullivan was key to Twitter's reversal, it later emerged that the State Department liked played the crucial role in lobbying the microblogging service.)

If the Iranian regime does have the capacity to launch some sort of cyberattack, now may be the ideal time: There have been so many false alarms, it will take significantly longer to respond to the real thing.

The State Department directly intervened, it confirmed today, contacting Twitter over the planned outage:

"We highlighted to them that this was an important form of communication," said the official of the conversation the department had with Twitter at the time of the disputed Iranian election.

Finally, someone made Twitter stop breaking, showing how a bureaucrat can be more powerful than millions of people, at least until those people take to the streets. (Now's not the time to go getting any crazy ideas\, bitter Tweeters.)

(Image by Alex Carmichal)

His page at the Atlantic loads exceedingly slowly; a post alerting readers to the attack shows up on the Daily Dish RSS feed:

It looks like Sullivan's measurable traffic hasn't dropped off in the last hour, which one would expect in a denial-of-service attack.

TehranBureau, a site that has been aggregating reports from inside Iran, was shut down yesterday—allegedly by some sort of hacking:

The Shahab-3 is just over 50 feet long and 4 feet thick. It weighs over 17 tons at launch. Don't let its stubby profile mislead you — it can be programmed to change course several times in midflight, making it hard to shoot down.

The weapon debuted 10 years ago, in a parade during Iran's Sacred Defense Week. The parade missile was reportedly decorated with signs reading, "Israel would be wiped from the map" and "The U.S. can do nothing." Since then, refinements to the design have increased its estimated range from 800 miles to as much as 1,250 miles, carrying a warhead up to 1,500 pounds — plenty of room for a nuke. Tel Aviv is only 650 miles from the Iranian border.

If you really want to go deep on the Sahab-3, there's lots more in a Federation of American Scientists report, and this encyclopedic Global Security entry includes several detailed diagrams. But take note: Even the FAS doesn't have new data from the past two years. (Photos by AP/Ruhollah Vahdati, AP/Sajjad Safari, AFP/Getty Images)

On Wednesday, Iranian members of parliament voted to discuss a draft bill that seeks to “toughen punishment for disturbing mental security in society.” The text of the bill would add, “establishing websites and weblogs promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy,” to the list of crimes punishable by death.

Hoo boy, I can hardly wait for Michael Moore's take on this one. More coverage by Iranian-American radio reporter Cyrus Farivar. (Photo by AP/Saman Aghvami)

• Yet another Apple blog prints an "exclusive" tip that Apple will release an iPhone next year, combining the iPod with a phone, confirming other blogs' reports. But TrustedReviews also says a full-screen, touchscreen iPod will come out in December, sparking a Christmas rush and the soaking of many nerds' pants. No real product photos here, though. [TrustedReviews]
• An official version of Internet Explorer 7 is out — Yahoo's version. [ZDNet]
• Is your video blog the best? Nominate it for a Vloggie by the end of the day. (Disclosure: I'm a judge for the Vloggies. Full disclosure: My ratings will be arbitrary numbers, as I'll be coming off an LSD bender.) [Vloggies]
• YouTube's most famous founder Chad Hurley has a new reason for his smug grin (pictured) — corporate partner Universal Music left his company out of its new round of lawsuits against online video sites Grouper and Bolt. [Financial Times]
• Iran, trying to stem Western influence, bans fast Internet connections across the country. I'd make a "cut off your nose to spite your face" joke, but that seems risky with the Iranians, no? [UK Guardian]