Credit: State.gov

This morning, the U.S. State Department rolled a new project that they developed in conjunction with the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for New Media. They're calling it Opinion Space, and I'll admit that I don't yet understand the "why" bit of it (or even the "how" necessarily), but there's no reason for you not to play with it in the meantime.

The gist is that that Opinion Space is a data visualization tool that collects opinions from people, and then bunches them together into hotspots. There's a good chance that you'll find that you're a lot like people living in other places around the globe. At this point, Opinion Space looks very much proof-of-concept. But what's striking is that it seems a lot more like something that you expect coming out of the MIT Media Lab than the United States State Department. It's a redefinition -- or, really, one more tweak in a continuing redefinition -- of the mission and means of U.S. development and diplomacy, and it's been happening under the purview of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a pretty quick pace.

Back to this particular tool thingy. According the FAQs, the goal of Opinion Space's interface and architecture is to combat three things that are bad about modern "participatory culture." The first is that the data produced in online discussions can be unmanageably large. The second is that people tend to cluster with like-minded folks (see, blogospheres), which leads to "cyberpolarization." The third is that moderate opinions tend to be drowned out by more extreme ones. The hope is that by going the visual, statistical route here, the effect will be to "'depolarize' discussions by including all participants on a level playing field." Plus, people like to look at maps, especially ones with glowy dots.

[MORE] Some initial notes upon playing with Opinion Space: In this iteration, there are two means by which to input opinions. The first is by rating five statements on a sliding scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree; the topics: nuclear weapons, proactive diplomacy, climate change, investment in food, and empowering women.

Neat enough. But it's the second that's particularly interesting. That option is an open "Ideas for Secretary of State Clinton" text field. You can see how that way of getting information in the interface could lead to an interesting clustering of opinions about the role and perception of U.S. diplomacy and development in the world.

It might lack the glamor of sending Ashton Kutcher to Moscow, but it's worth noting the degree to which Hillary Clinton's State Department has, as part of their "21st century statecraft" push, embraced the idea that telecommunications can be absolutely critical in life of death situations. In Haiti, we saw people texting from beneath rubble, but the Haitian telecom infrastructure's failings were a sad obstacle to relief there. It's a powerful lesson now being applied to the earthquake zone in Chile, where, at the request of the Chilean government, Clinton arrived this week bearing 20 satellite phones and a technician who knew how to set them up. From the Christian Science Monitor:

While clean water, food, medical support, and rescue workers are the priorities in the hours after a catastrophe, so too are phones – so that governments can properly assess the damage, dispatch officials to hot spots, and distribute aid to those most in need.

So, after opening up to foreign aid assistance, Chile’s first request to the US was communications equipment. And that’s what US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on part of a Latin America tour that was scheduled before the quake, has brought with her today as she visits Chile.

In other State Department news, tonight at 6 pm EST Clinton will participate in a live-streamed townterview (i.e., townhall + interview) in Sao Paulo, Brazil -- which we mostly mention because it's really fun to say "townterview."

Credit: Ustream.tv

Need a break from watching Eric Cantor and Barack Obama debate how heavy a bill should be? Well, you're in luck. Ashton Kutcher is live streaming from Moscow, sharing his thoughts on the State Department's tech delegation to Russia he's been a part of this week.

With all due sensitivity, the tremendous disaster unfolding in Haiti as a result of Tuesday's earthquake just outside Port-au-Prince is putting the new media and tech experts inside the Obama Administration in what is a familiar place for the many campaign veterans among them: raising money online (often from small donors) and using every tool they know to get word out as quickly and efficiently as possible. But much is new and untested about this situation. And like the rest of us scrambling to confront the Haiti disaster, they're also often making it up as they go along.

The Obama White House has, for its part, taken on the job of sharing the presidential perspective on the crisis, posting footage from briefings with President Obama and, for example, shooting YouTube videos with First Lady Michelle Obama. The White House is also acting as an online clearinghouse, attempting to point to work being done both in and out of government. The latter includes the work being done by the William J. Clinton Foundation to provide relief in Haiti.

Often the work inside government that the White House is pointing to is the efforts of Hillary Clinton's State Department, which perhaps has the most dense collection of new media innovators working in the federal government today...

The more cynical amongst us might have looked at Hillary Clinton's rush to embrace "21st Century Statecraft" when she landed in the Secretary of State seat as a chance to make up for all that wasn't done online and with technology during her '08 presidential bid. It wouldn't be a first time that a politician took the "just add Internet" approach to reviving his or her political fortunes. But it seems like every other initiative to come out of the Secretary's office these days has some networked component:

The U.S. Department of State announces the launch of the global “Democracy is…” Twitter Contest. Tweet what you think democracy is using the hash symbol: #democracyis. The goal is to provide a worldwide platform in which people can discuss the meaning of democracy and exchange ideas from diverse perspectives.

The global “Democracy is…” Twitter Contest begins today at 5:30 p.m. EST and ends January 21, 2010 at 11:59 p.m. EST. To join the contest, become a Twitter follower of @demvidchallenge and tweet what you think democracy is in 140 characters or less. The contestant whose tweet with the greatest number of unique re-tweets will receive a Flip Video HD Camcorder. The winner will be announced on the Democracy Video Challenge Facebook fan page ^[1] on January 25, 2010. Only one re-tweet per user will count in the official tally. Additional contests will be announced throughout the year.

Whether or not this social-networks-as-foreign-policy approach will bear fruit is still very much an open question, but it is bleeding into the broader foreign policy discussions, it seems. Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican has taken to Foreign Policy to heap praise on the Clinton State Department's focus on digital tools.

For at least an hour yesterday, Twitter was brought low by a group calling itself the "Iranian Cyber Army" in what might be ready as either a strike at how the communications platform was used to organize and publicize Iran's post-election protests this summer, or a more direct hit at how officials at the U.S. State Department called on the San Francisco-based company to bypass a planned downtime to aide Iranian protestors. The website of the Iranian opposition group Green Wave of Freedom was similarly hacked.

The attack, it seems, involved redirecting the DNS records of Twitter.com to point to a homepage that, according to the BBC, read in English translation, "USA think they controlling and managing internet by their access, but they don't, we control and manage internet by our power." (One way to think about how DNS redirects work is to think of tweaking phone company records so that instead of, say, 867-5309, ringing at Jenny's house, it rings at Susie's. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone commented on the episode on the company blog by writing that, "Twitter's DNS records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed.")

For a time during the attack, Google's search result for Twitter, reported TechCrunch, seemed to even more directly tie the DNS action to the contact this June between State Department Policy Planning Staff staffer Jared Cohen and Twitter chairman Jack Dorsey where Cohen, it seems, encouraged Dorsey not to go through with a scheduled maintenance period during the Tehran protests. "In the name of God," read the Google search result squib, "As an Iranian this is a reaction to Twitter’s interference sly which was U.S. authorities ordered in the internal affairs of my country…"

The Hillary Clinton-led State Department's technology-empowered 21st Century Statecraft Initiative has been getting a lot of press attention lately, and the State Department has attempted to frame the new approach to global engagement as coming from an open-ended desire to foster conversations and collaborations. During the June Twitter affair, a State Department spokesperson said, "We are proponents of freedom of expression. Information should be used as a way to promote freedom of expression."

It's clear that at least some of those who don't appreciate America's aims in the world see its involvement in social media as something potentially very political indeed. Twitter -- and the State Department -- might want to take it as a badge of honor that their nascent efforts are able to elicit such a targeted response as yesterday's episode. That said, if outfits like Twitter are going to be major players on the world stage, they might want to think about doing a better job of protecting their DNS. (Photo credit: Dalantech)

For all our talk about celebrating the unifying and empowering potential of technology, we can't ignore the fact that sometimes what is being strengthened is violent, dangerous extremism. We pretend that isn't the case at our own peril. One of the young Virginia men caught up in the Taliban recruitment situation last week, 20 year old Ahmed Abdullah Minni, was turned from lonely suburban extremist to part of an armed global force after he posted comments on YouTube celebrating videos showing attacks on American troops. That caught the eye of a Taliban recruiter based in Pakistan, who then hooked up with Minni, use all the tech tools of the trade:

After Saifullah first made contact with Mr. Minni via comments on YouTube, he exchanged messages with them by leaving draft e-mail messages at a shared Yahoo address. Militants have often used the to reduce the chance that intelligence agencies will intercept messages.

The police report said officers confiscated the men’s laptops and external hard drives, as well as cellphones and an iPod.

The dark side of all this is the suggestion that we haven't paid enough attention to what kind of connections are being made online, instead falling back on a easy assumption that anytime two humans form a stronger bond, that's a good thing...

We might be computer obsessed here in the United States, but in much of the world, mobile is king. The White House and State Department have been doing an impressive job recognizing that if they're to use digital media to reach target audiences outside the United States, than cell phones and other mobile devices can be a direct line into the pockets and lives of the members of those desired audiences.

Case in point: Obama's recent speech laying out his strategy for the war in Afghanistan. There's a benefit in having citizens of the region hear the President's words directly, but only a sliver of the populations of Afghanistan and Pakistan go online via computer. "Looking at data on Whitehouse.gov," reports the White House blog, "we don’t have a lot of traffic coming from Afghanistan and Pakistan because Internet penetration in the region is relatively low at 2% and 11% respectively. However, mobile penetration is much higher. 52% of the 177 million people in Pakistan have at least 1 mobile device and 30% of the 28.4 million in Afghanistan." To get at that audience, they took a minute-long segment from the President's address that was specifically targeted at everyday Afghanis and turned it into mini videos, complete with local language voiceovers, that can be sent around via cell phone.

The tiny size is a perfect fit for a cell phone screen, and voiceovers eliminate the problem of scrunched, unreadable subtitles. The White House's mobile video clip aimed at the citizens of Afghanistan is available in Arabic, Dari, Urdu, and Pashto (the last of which is the clip up above). Curious what exactly Obama is saying to the people of Afghanistan? It's available in English, too.

A staffing update: Katie Stanton, whose hiring by the White House we covered earlier this year, will be departing the White House new media team headed by Macon Phillips to join the State Department. Stanton, who had been serving as the White House Director of Citizen Participation, will be aiding in the execution of the State Department's burgeoning and ambitious "21st century statecraft" initiative that aims to use technology to advance the department's aims around the globe. Secretary Clinton's Senior Advisor on innovation, Alec Ross, whose team in the Secretary's office Stanton will be joining, had this to say: "Katie has an uncommon blend of foreign policy and technology expertise that will be put to work on projects around the globe from Rwanda to Mexico. I couldn’t be more excited to have her on the team."

We've been covering in some detail the U.S. State Department's efforts to foster new conversations and smooth some of life's more difficult transactions using technology, from promoting digital violence tracking in Mexico to encouraging social networking in Pakistan to setting up mobile banking in Afghanistan. Some of these efforts seem simple, but eliminating some of life's fear and confusion -- whether that's engaging with a wider circle of humans or making it physically safe for women to play a role in a country's burgeoning economy -- holds the promise of being transformative. Earlier this year, the State Department took a delegation of U.S. tech company representatives to Baghdad. They met with students, they met with elected officials. And one of the things they heard is that the gap that exists between your average Iraqi trying to make a life for himself or herself and Iraqis in government is frustrating, alienating, and only serves to worsen the assumption of many everyday Iraqi nationals that they don't have a role to play in their country's uncertain future.

This morning, as a direct outgrowth of that trip, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced that the Iraqi national government has just launched its own YouTube channel, online at YouTube.com/IraqiGov. YouTube's Steve Grove has more.