Eye on Innovation, Design and Technology

Internet Community Websites and the Orkut Brazilian Phenomenon

Instapundit recently reported

Last week Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. agreed to pay $580 million for Intermix Media, owner of the popular community website Myspace.com which had 17.7 million visitors in June. The announcement came just days after News Corp. formed its Fox Interactive Media unit.

Which shows that the phenomenon of community websites for social networking is starting to become big business.  This article relates what it calls "Facebook Frenzy" about  Facebook.com, which apparently has become the most popular community website in university campuses.

Facebook is an Internet sensation at campuses across the nation. Constantly updated by its 2.8 million registered users at more than 800 colleges and universities, the Facebook takes the local malt shop social nexus of the 1950s and makes it universal.

Started by three Harvard sophomores in February 2004 as an online directory to connect the higher education world through social networks, the Facebook now registers more than 5,800 new users a day.

Hughes said Facebook turns a profit, mostly from advertising. He refused to disclose the private company's earnings.

Other networking community websites include Friendster.com which claims 19+ million profiles and blogs, meetup.com and hi5.com.  Other differentiated networking sites are linkedin.com and rize.com, which promote professional and business networking as opposed to social networking.  Sites like Flickr.com and Multiply.com emphasize the use of blogs and photologs.

Another community website available is Orkut.com.   However, an interesting phenomenon has ocurred with this site created by Google

As nearly everyone knows, Orkut is Google’s entry in the crowded “social networking” field. Orkut seems to be relying on the combination of the powerful Google brand combined with an invitation-only policy to create interest in a service that otherwise would be regarded as late to the game. Like other social networking services, which are designed to connect people who want to date, make friends, or do business together

However, for reasons that at this point are unclear, Orkut.com has become a site that is for all practical purposes a "Brazilian" site.   As of this date, about 75% of the users state their country of residency as Brazil, and even this understates the number of Brazilian users since Brazilians living all over the world have also joined the site while registering under their country of residency.   The second largest number of users are from the U.S., at about 5%.  Posting in Orkut's forums is now done in Portuguese in most of the communities.

Due to the amount of Brazilian users and communities in the Portuguese language, users from other parts of the world have become upset with the service, which had English as its default language. Some went as far as to start online communities and discussion groups dedicated to complain about this phenomenon.

The reasons for this phenomenon apparently follows the Brazilian Internet Phenomenon. Services such as weblogs and photoblogs are now very popular with Brazilian users as well. For example, it's not hard to see Internet searches within the Brazilian territory returning several results pointing to weblog entries. That is seldom seen in other parts of the world. The popularity of such services in Brazil intrigues many people, making this phenomenon worthy of study.

In order to understand the scale of the Brazilian Internet Phenomenon as it relates to Orkut, I put together the following statistics comparing the numbers of users in Orkut to Brazilian and U.S. internet users

Population of Brazil 181.8 Million
Population of U.S. 296 Million

# of internet users in Brazil 17.9 Million
% of population 9.9%

# of internet users in the U.S. 200.9 Million
% of population 67.8%

# of enrolled college students in Brazil 1.5 Million
% of Population 0.8%

# of enrolled college students in U.S. 15 million
% of Population 5%

% orkut users of college age 18-25 54%

Approximate total of # of orkut users 7.5 Million

% of orkut users from Brazil 73.8%
# of orkut users from Brazil 5.5 Million
# of Brazilian orkut users as % of Brazilian internet users 30%

References
http://www.oncourseworkshop.com/Miscellaneous007.htm
http://www.photius.com/countries/brazil/society/brazil_society_colleges_and_univers~6924.html
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats2.htm
http://www.orkut.com/MembersAll.aspx
http://instapundit.com/archives/024426.php

It is clear that the Brazilian Internet Phenomenon in Orkut is massive as represented by the huge % of Brazilian Internet users that are members of Orkut.  I can understand why Americans have migrated to other forums, but it is still somewhat inexplicable to me why other countries have not claimed stakes in Orkut (i.e. Mexico), or why there is not a similar forum of Brazilian origin, with Brazilian advertising.  I would think that any Brazilian internet company would kill to have anything even close to the success of Orkut and that at the same time had paid advertising.

Questions for Wilson

Rivers of ink have been spilled regarding the supposed “outing” of her name and her relationship to Wilson, starting with this article

"Wilson, while refusing to confirm his wife's employment, said the release to the press of her relationship to him and even her maiden name was an attempt to intimidate others like him from talking about Bush administration intelligence failures"

To this date I continue to hear even on the radio speculations about “who had her name and who mentioned her name first”

Now that it is documented that her name and her relationship to him were available to anybody with internet access, we see that a large part of the scandal has been simply invented out of thin air.

Now, the part that about compromising her job.

In a previous posting it was also documented that 36 news agencies and reporter’s groups stated in an affidavit that even the original op-ed by Wilson had the potential to compromise her cover:

"Wilson Op-Ed. Did no one at Langley think that Plame's Identity might be compromised if her spouse writes a nationally distributed Op-Ed piece discussing a foreign mission about a volatile political issue that focused on her subject matter expertise?"

Thus we are now talking about a matter of degree of exposure.  The original op-ed increased the risk of her cover being blown because as documented before, her maiden name and her relationship to him were available on the internet and because, as D. Corn states, the nature of her job was

“ the dicey and difficult mission of tracking parties trying to buy or sell weapons of mass destruction or WMD material”

thus being identified on the internet as wife of an individual who bragged openly and widely of being CIA contractor carrying WMD missions is not quite consistent with being on DEEP COVER.   Thus the op-ed had already partially compromised her identity, even without Novak’s article, unless WMD dealers do not have internet access, do  not know how to use google and do not read the NYT.

  Novak’s article further increased the potential of exposure by publishing that she was a CIA employee, one of many thousands in DC, although several individuals have stated that this information was relatively common knowledge among the press and even her neighbors.

Thus what was the final nail in the coffin?  What completely ensured that Ms. Plame’s ability to carry out further operations would not be possible?  Perhaps when as C. May states, an indignant article , that received significant play in the MSM, published the following statements, none of which were mentioned in Novak’s article

“and his wife was outed as an undercover CIA officer.”

“A pair of top Bush officials told a reporter the name of a CIA operative who apparently has worked under what's known as "nonofficial cover"

“The White House has wrongly branded a woman known to friends as an energy analyst for a private firm as a CIA officer”

Perhaps the author of such  article would like to comment on the source of the information that Ms. Plame/Wilson was an undercover officer, had “non official cover” or that she worked as energy analyst, since none of this information was available prior to the publication of the article.

The real issues about outing a cover agent are 1) knowledge of the covert status and most importantly, 2) intent of blowing the cover. The questions then are:

1)  If Ms. Plame's cover was so deep, and outing her identity so dangerous, why did Wilson allow her maiden name to be posted on his internet bio at the Middle East Institute in 2002 where it was available in July 2003 at the time of his Op-Ed in the NYT? 

2) Given the established public nature of her maiden name documented above, why didn't Wilson think that writing an Op-ed about the CIA and her subject matter expertise in the NYT and then giving public interviews about it could plausibly increase the risk (even if it was only marginally) to her job, her cover and potentially her life?

3)  Given that he was so casual about making very public statements related to his wife's field of expertise and place of employment, it would be logical for any rational observer to conclude that Wilson had a lackadaisical attitude to protecting any subjects related to her wife's job.  Thus the questions are, would any rational husband in the world do anything public that would create ANY risk, even minimal risk, to his wife's job and potentially her life?  Would anyone even think that a husband would be so reckless?

4)  Thus, knowing this information, why would any other rational person, regardless of position, when learning about her place of employment would even think or speculate that her CIA employment was of a covert nature or that there would be any sort of risk associated with mentioning it?

The Conflict between Cultures in the Netherlands

While the conflict between the U.S. and Iraq has crowded the headlines for the past few years, another event that is creating conflict between western society and Muslims has been ignored: The lack of assimilation of Muslim immigrants in Europe.  C. Caldwell documents the problems currently ocurring in the Netherlands due to years of a policy that encouraged segregated societies and a lack of emphasis in shared values such as history, law and language.

This is why the murder of one Dutch filmmaker 911 days after the assassination of Fortuyn is described by people in Holland as having had the same effect on their country as the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 in the World Trade Center towers. Dutch people have the sense that, for the first time in centuries, the thread that connects them to the world of Geert Mak's father, and that world to the world of Erasmus and Spinoza and Rembrandt and William the Silent, is in danger of being snipped. Part of it is the size and the speed of the recent non-European immigration. The Netherlands, with a population of 16 million, has about 2 million foreign-born. By some estimates, a quarter of them do not speak Dutch.

Already in the 1990s, there were reports of American-style shootouts in schools, one involving two Turkish students in the town of Veghel. This past October, newspaper readers were riveted by the running saga of a quiet married couple who had been hounded out of the previously livable Amsterdam neighborhood of Diamantbuurt by gangs of Muslim youths. There were incidents of wild rejoicing across Holland in the wake of the September 11 attacks, notably in the eastern city of Ede. The weekly magazine Contrast took a poll showing that just under half the Muslims in the Netherlands were in "complete sympathy" with the September 11 attacks.

Liability Lawsuits and the Influenza Vaccine

The ongoing story regarding the shortage of influenza vaccine has the pundits looking for the causes. Instapundit refers to a post from Kevin Drum that discounts liability lawsuits as the main reason. Professor Bainbridge covers the subject here
Polipundit then referred to a story from Frontpage magazine that stated

In the late 80’s a man from North Carolina who had received the vaccine got the flu. The strain he caught was one of the strains in that years vaccine made by a US company.

What did he do? He sued and he won. He was awarded almost $5 million!

On the other hand, Snopes claims that this story is an urban legend.

the passage of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 eliminated most of those lawsuits through the creation of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a no-fault compensation alternative to suing vaccine manufacturers and providers for people injured or killed by vaccines. According to a 2003 report by the National Vaccine Advisory Committee (part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), "vaccine shortages do not appear to be liability related":

Unfortunately, Snopes does not have the whole story, since the Vaccine Injury Compensation program does not cover the influenza vaccine.

Vaccines covered under the program include those that protect against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), measles, mumps, rubella (German measles), and polio. The program continues to evolve consistent with medical science, and recently, HHS expanded coverage to four new vaccines: hepatitis B, varicella (chicken pox), Hemophilus influenzae type b, and rotavirus; pneumococcal vaccine will soon be covered, too.

Note that Hemophilus Influenzae type b is NOT the same as the most commonly known influenza or flu that afflicts the general population

The injury table for the program can be found in this link and it does not provide for compensation for injuries derived from the influenza vaccine. Thus, the Snopes article does not prove that that liability lawsuits have not driven the vaccine manufacturers away from manufacturing the influenza vaccine while other sources point to them as a significant factor affecting the cost of vaccine supply.

Rwanda's President Blames France for Genocide

France's foreign minister walked away from a rally marking the 10th anniversary of Rwada's genocide after President Kagame named France as responsible for setting the conditions for the genocide

President Kagame told a rally marking the 10th anniversary of the killing of 800,000 people that France had trained and armed the perpetrators in the full knowledge that they were intent on committing genocide. France dismissed the charges as outrageous. Its envoy to the commemorations, Mr Renaud Muselier, the junior foreign minister, cut short his visit to the country and flew home. “As for the French,” Mr Kagame said in his keynote address to a packed national stadium, “their role in what happened in Rwanda was so evident. They knowingly trained and armed the government soldiers and militias who were going to commit genocide and they knew they were going to commit genocide. They have the audacity to stand there and not apologize.”

Update: The link for this article is no longer accessible without subscription. This is the reference
French walkout over blame for Rwanda genocide
From Charles Bremner in Paris
April 8, 2004
The Times
London

Loving Europe by Leaving

V. Hanson analyzes the prospects for the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Europe

And yet in a period of its greatest crisis since the creation of the Warsaw Pact, "Europe" — whatever that imprecise term really means — has almost no meaningful military capability. If it spends about a fourth as much on defense as the United States, such relative budgetary comparisons are still a misleading barometer of European military weakness.

At a time of enormous budget deficits and trade imbalances with the Europeans, it makes no sense to spend billions to patrol the German countryside, keep Spanish airspace safe, or guard the Cretan Sea. All these are legitimate, practical economic concerns; but again, they are not the chief grounds to begin leaving Europe.
No, the real reason is not to end the European relationship, but to save it. And thus we must not see the current problem merely in a context of money or troops or even ingratitude, hypocrisy, and perfidy — but rather in psychological terms of dependency and its associate pathologies of enablement and passive-aggressive angst.
Precisely because we protect Europe, Europe will need ever more protecting, and will grow ever more weak. And because it will need the United States to defend it, it will ever more resent the United States. Without a real menace like the Soviet Union on its borders, Europe will find ever more outlets to vent cheaply and without consequences — at precisely the time it is most threatened by terrorists and rogue states.

Update: M. Steyn describes the upcoming dislocations that the future withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe will cause in Germany.

And it's the Germans having the palpitations, after press reports that the Pentagon plans to pull out half its troops. Right now, Germany plays host to 175,000 Americans - military personnel plus their families - and reducing that number to 80-90,000 would leave a big hole in an economy that's already looking like a Swiss cheese.

But America has already quit Saudi Arabia, and plans for South Korea and Germany are well advanced. When scholars come to write the final chapter in the history of the European continent, the six-decade US security guarantee will be seen as, on the whole, a mistake. Not for America, but the Continentals.
The so-called "free world" was, for most of its members, a free ride. Absolving wealthy nations of the need to maintain credible armies softens them: they decay, almost inevitably, into a semi-non-aligned status.

Front Page Horror - Should newspapers show us violent images from Iraq?

J. Lewis debates the appropriateness of showing graphic pictures of shocking events when reporting the news

The subject of photography in wartime bears revisiting because last week, for the first time, truly terrible pictures from the Iraq war were published in the American press. To be sure, we've seen many images of bloodshed and grief, but the pictures of the burned and mutilated bodies of American military contractors hanging from the bridge in Fallujah crossed a boundary. I don't remember seeing anything quite so shocking in a newspaper in my lifetime, with the exception of one or two 9/11 photographs, printed almost by accident in the days immediately following the attacks.

There's a certain kind of vaguely puritanical humanism that suspects pictures of being inherently sensationalistic and manipulative—the idiom of the rabble, which must be kept subordinate to the natural calm reason of words. I don't believe that. But shocking photographs become horror-porn very quickly and very easily, more quickly and easily than language does. A picture can do many things that a paragraph can't, but enlightening us about the horrors of war isn't one of them.

Rwandans Blame World for Not Stopping Genocide

Rwandans criticized the outside world's failure to prevent 1994's genocide in their country

Rwandans criticized the outside world's failure to prevent the genocide of an estimated 800,000 people Sunday at the start of a week devoted to commemorating the tenth anniversary of the massacres.

Speakers opening a three-day genocide conference in the Rwandan capital Kigali said the world had compounded its lack of intervention to stop the slaughter by failing to help the survivors who escaped 100 days of bloodshed.

"With the information that the international community had on the preparations for the genocide and the means it had at its disposal, the international community could have prevented the genocide," Francois Garambe, chairman of the Ibuka genocide survivors group, told the opening of the conference.

The question now: Is the world letting it happen again?

Fear of New Bomb Attacks Grows in Spain

Now that the terrorists know that their tactics work, they are continuing their threats and increasing their demands

High-speed trains to southern Spain began running again on Saturday after a bomb found on the line was defused but fears grew that Islamic extremists could strike again after the Madrid rail bombings. The 12-kg (26-lb) bomb found on Friday on the high-speed line from Madrid to the southern city of Seville revived tension that was just beginning to subside after suspected al Qaeda-linked commuter train bombs killed 191 people on March 11.

Several newspapers reported that the Spanish embassy in Egypt had recently received a letter signed by the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades and al Qaeda threatening to attack embassies, consulates and other Spanish interests in north Africa and the southern and eastern Mediterranean region.
The letter said the attacks could be avoided if Spain withdrew its soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan in the next four weeks, El Mundo newspaper reported.

The key to observe here is that withdrawal from Iraq is no longer the only demand. Withdrawal from Afghanistan is now demanded. And once they obtain that, they will ask for more.

Update: The apparent ringleader of the Madrid attacks has blown himself up.

The Tunisian suspected ringleader of last month's Madrid train bombings blew himself up with three accomplices after police cornered them in a suburban Madrid apartment, officials said Sunday.

Investigators have clearly tied together three events that have rocked Spain in recent weeks: the March 11 train bombings, the discovery of a bomb wedged beneath a high-speed rail south of Madrid Friday, and Saturday's suicide blast.

A further two or three people may have escaped before the explosion, Acebes said, adding that the group appeared to have been planning more attacks.

The West must unite against the common threat

The British newspaper The Guardian, usually a source for anti-U.S. commentary, has published a sober analysis on the need for a joint response by the West to confront the common threat of terrorism.

So far as the Spanish voters' intentions are concerned, the election result was not subjectively a victory for al-Qaida. But it is, as Marxists used to say, an objective victory for al-Qaida. The Madrid bombings look likely to do exactly what a message posted on a radical Islamist website months ago said they should do: exploit the election moment to knock Spain out of the "Crusader-Zionist" coalition in Iraq. Conclusion: terror works. The problem has been compounded by a disastrous first press conference by Spain's new socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who is long on names but short on experience. ..the vehement tone in which he repeated his criticism of Anglo-American policy in Iraq, talking of a war based on "lies" and calling for "self-criticism" by Blair and Bush, was suited to a pre-bombing election rally but not to a statesman assuming the leadership of a nation now in the frontline of an international defence of freedom against Islamist terror.

As a result, Americans are again denouncing lily-livered Europeans, France is quietly celebrating the return of Spain to "old Europe", and everybody is squabbling about Bush and Iraq instead of confronting, together, today's threats to our freedoms