The Economist has an online feature this week on Digital Nomads, people for whom mobile connectivity has become a central part of life. The piece features three videos, with the CEO of Sun Microsystems, Jan Chipchase of Nokia in Tokyo, and a podcaster and IT worker in Mumbai. The last of these is the most interesting - Abhishek Ashok Kumar documents a week in his life via voicemail, photos and video, and presents a picture of modern-day India where mobile communication is essential for everyone from mechanics, taxi drivers to IT workers.

It’s somewhat surprising that the reality Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, shows in his slideshow is somewhat more mundane than the world Kumar shows off - sure, Sun’s got a clever system that allows workers to customize a workstation with a smartcard, but “workplace hotelling” is so 1990s. Roadside repair services that advertise by painting cellphone numbers on the Mumbai streets? That’s exciting.

• Seed: Out of the Blue
  BlueBrain is an ambitious project to model interconnected neurons with highly precise digital models. Between the "wet" work done to create accurate simulations and the programming, the scale of the task is beginning to look immense. A digital brain sometime soon? Not without major breakthroughs - "The human brain requires about 25 watts of electricity to operate. Markram estimates that simulating the brain on a supercomputer with existing microchips would generate an annual electrical bill of about $3 billion ."
  (tags: simulation neuroscience brain ibm computing philosophy intelligence AI research science)

• Scamorama: book explains how to get into scambaiting as a hobby - Boing Boing
  Cory Doctorow posts a favorable review of a book about scambaiting. The comment thread is very interesting, evenly split between people who think scambaiting is funny and worthwhile and those who find it cruel and loathesome
  (tags: 419 email nigeria africa scambaiting)
• The Phoenix > Lifestyle Features > White hunters, black hearts
  Excellent piece questioning the ethics of 419 scambaiting and asking some participants tough questions about racism. "Is scambaiting a clever way to combat corrupt actors preying on desperate and foolish people? Or do some of the more derogatory baits say something about our darker selves, laying bare the divide between white and black, rich and poor, First World and Third?"
  (tags: africa 419 fraud xenophobia disconnect scam)

There’s nothing like the term “cyberwar” to capture a reader’s attention. For those who grew up on “Wargames”, “Sneakers” or William Gibson novels, the term conjures up images of heroic hackers in shadowy basements, frantically tapping on keyboards in a life and death struggle against the enemy on the other side of the glowing CRT screen.

It’s a vision that was compelling to senior people in the US Air Force, including former USAF Secretary Michael Wynne, who was fired earlier this year over the scandal of mishandled nuclear weapons. Before his departure, Wynne launched the Air Forces’s “Cyberspace Command” with a television ad that portrayed the Air Force as the defender of the Pentagon against an onslaught of digital attacks. The Pentagon has stopped funding and now may cancel the initiative.

Wynne argues that the current military faceoff between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia is an instance of cyberwar, saying “The Russians just shot down the government command nets so they could cover their incursion. This was really one of the first aspects of a coordinated military action that had cyber as a lead force, instead of sending in air planes.”

That’s the sort of speculation tech reporters live for. It raises the possibility that, instead of reporting on venture capital deals and the kudzu-like spread of Facebook, they might get the chance to be war reporters without the complication of being shot at. In the past week, in-depth articles on cyberwar have graced the pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Salon.

The best of these articles have a common conclusion: it’s very hard to know what’s actually gone on. Call it “the fog of cyberwar”. Better yet, please don’t. As the dust settles, it’s unclear whether “cyberwar” is even an appropriate term for what’s taken place online as an actual war - the kind with guns and dead people - has transpired in Georgia. It’s worth remembering that in this “cyberwar”, the most serious consequence is that a website becomes temporarily inaccessible to viewers - it’s a war being fought with paintballs, not with live rounds.

Here’s what’s known: many Georgian websites have been difficult or impossible to access for several days. In response, the Georgian government has moved some vital email addresses and websites to Google, and other Georgian websites have sought help from Estonia. Here’s what’s not known: whether these attacks were directed by the Russian military, as Georgia’s Foreign Minister has speculated, by shadowy criminal gangs, or just by kids with a grudge against Georgia and too much free time. The last of these scenarios is looking increasingly likely.

Some of the most dramatic reports of cyberwar have come from an anonymous blog (RBNexploit) that tracks the Russian Business Network. RBN is a source of great concern to many in the computer security community - it’s a very successful producer of tools used for spam, identity theft and malware. The RBNexploit bloggers asserted that RBN hackers - on behalf of the Russian government - had taken control of backbone routers that delivered traffic to Georgia via Turkey, effectively cutting Georgia off from the Internet.

While this would have been dramatic and exciting, it doesn’t appear to be true. Earl Zmijewski, a vice president at internet monitoring company Renesys, has been watching connections into Georgia very closely and reports, “During the hostilities, we’ve seen no significant changes in routing. In particular, we saw no apparent attempts to limit traffic via Russia, but then again, most traffic from Georgia seems to currently transit Turkey. ”

What’s knocked some Georgian websites offline are denial of service attacks. These attacks are the equivalent of harassing a person by calling her on the phone as often as possible and hanging up when she answers. On the web, this involves sending a request to a web server over and over, hoping to overwhelm it and make it incapable of serving pages to legitimate users. In a more sophisticated version of the attack, dozens or hundreds of people call the same number - load the same webpage - which might make even a modest-sized corporation impossible to reach for the duration of the attack. These more complex attacks are called distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), and they have become frustratingly common since CERT (Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Emergency Response Team) first warned of them in 1999.

It requires very little technical expertise to carry out a simple DoS attack - hit reload on your web browser every few seconds and you’ll be carrying out an (ineffective, primitive) attack. Belarussian tech journalist Evgeny Morozov was curious how much technical skill it would require to participate in a more organized attack. In a brilliant article for Slate, he describes visiting sites like StopGeorgia.ru, where he discovered a webpage that, saved to his desktop and opened in a browser, made thousands of requests an hour to 18 Georgian websites. Presto - “cyberwar” for dummies. A bit more poking led him to a set of instructions for DoSHTTP, a utility that can easily be misused to perform efficient denial of service attacks.

The technical solutions Morozov found weren’t especially sophisticated - one relied on a dozen lines of Javascript code, the other on a widely available off-the-shelf tool. These attacks can be effective not because they’re using especially sophisticated technology, but because they leverage a “social hack” - they rely on the actions of individual, patriotic Russians organized via sites like StopGeorgia, which hosts a “scoreboard” displaying which Georgian sites are reachable and unreachable. Look too hard for shadowy political forces and esoteric technology and “we risk underestimating the great patriotic rage of many ordinary Russians, who, having been fed too much government propaganda in the last few days, are convinced that they need to crash Georgian Web sites. Many Russians undoubtedly went online to learn how to make mischief, as I did.” (Morozov is very clear that his sympathies don’t lie with the Russians in this conflict, and that his attacks were conducted very briefly, for research purposes.)

The attacks on Georgian websites are probably not just coming from angry Russians hitting reload. Some are likely coming from “botnets”, large sets of computers that have been infected with malware, software that allows a computer to be controlled remotely by a third party. Russian hacker network RBN controls one network, the Storm botnet, but many others exist. It’s now possible to “rent” a botnet - Bill Woodcock of internet research consultancy Packet Clearing House estimates that botnets can be rented to perform DDoS attacks for as little as four cents per machine. It’s possible that some hackers have rented botnets and turned them against Georgian websites, or that some operators have decided to “donate” attacks to the anti-Georgian cause.

The rhetoric of “cyberwarfare” has a reassuring implication: we understand how to fight wars, so surely we can win a cyberwar. Unfortunately, the truth is more complicated. There’s no magic “cyberspace command” solution the USAF can unleash to defeat a botnet. The administrators trying to bring Georgian webservers back online are doing precisely what any sysadmin does confronted with a DDoS - they are blocking traffic from the IP addresses that are launching the attacks, and sharing these blocklists with administrators confronting the same problems. If they can block addresses more quickly than the attackers can recruit more participants, they’ll win. This strategy is known by the complex technical term “Whack-a-Mole”, and it’s roughly as frustrating as the fairground game of the same name.

What’s frightening about the online attacks against Georgia is not that they’re organized by shadowy Krelmin forces, but that they’re coming from a loosely organized group of individuals. In his new book “Here Comes Everybody“, Clay Shirky notes that one of the characteristics of the contemporary internet is that it enables “ridiculously easy group formation.” Once formed, these groups can organize potluck dinners or spread propoganda. Chinese netizens, angered by what they perceived as anti-China bias in western media, organized a campaign to challenge media narratives on sites like Anti-CNN.com. Individuals have flooded YouTube with videos exposing errors in CNN and BBC’s China coverage and arguing that Tibet is a part of a multi-ethnic, federated China. Most western media reports assume this effort is organized by the Chinese government, a charge participants angrily deny.

The shift from a world where power comes solely from governments and militaries to one where power can come from loosely organized, adhoc groups is a hard one to grasp. It’s easy to understand why the press and the military would misunderstand the situation in Georgia as a new type of military attack. The truth may be more intriguing and frightening - we’ve entered an era where individuals can organize their own “cyberwar” campaigns online, in concert with or in opposition to their governments.

Reuters was kind enough to ask me for my thoughts on this matter - a version of the piece is available on their website.

It’s pretty rare that I finish reading a dense, academic book four hundred pages long and find myself wishing it were just a bit longer. Paul Starr’s “Creation of the Media” ends with a sort of cliffhanger - he offers an in-depth history of the emergence of newspapers, the telegraph, the telephone, movies and radio in America, then stops abruptly with World War II, the emergence of FM radio and television. His analysis of three centures gives the reader a pretty good sense for how he’d analyze these new technologies - he doesn’t believe in technological inevitability, but believes that policy decisions made around technologies soon after their introduction determines how they’ll be used in different contexts. So I can guess at what Starr might think about current debates over network neutrality, but I found myself re-reading the last few pages of his tome, hoping he’d hint at a sequel that analyzes the recent history of American media and the emergence of broadcast and cable television and citizen media on the internet.

Reading the book, I found myself periodically stepping away from the text to investigate an example Starr covers in just a single phrase. The book is filled with there, casual allusions to intriguing historical events that make it clear that Starr could write roughly three times as long a volume if he explored these examples in detail.

Reading one of these examples, I found myself thinking, “I hope someone’s researching this and making a documentary or something.” Here was the sentence that prompted that line of thought:

In 1909, Congress authorized the Treasury Department to censor imported films, and a few years later it banned prize-fight films from interstate commerce after a widely distributed fight film showed an African American boxer defeating a white man.

A very quick bit of Googling reveals that the prize fight in question was the “The Fight of the Century”, where world heavyweight champion boxer Jack Johnson was challenged by a series of “great white hopes”, seeking to defeat a proud, outspoken and extremely talented African American athlete. Johnson was challenged by James Jeffries, a former heavyweight champion who had retired undefeated six years previously. Jeffries announced that he would undertake the fight for reasons of racial pride: “I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.”

Jeffries lost. Badly. The fight had been scheduled for 45 rounds, but ended in the 15th when Johnson knocked Jeffries down twice in rapid succession. His promoters ended the fight, rather than seeing the former champion knocked out by a black man. Johnsons’s victory was widely celebrated in the African American community - poet William Waring Cuney captured some of the excitement in his poem, “O Lord, What a Morning”:

O my Lord
What a morning,
O my Lord,
What a feeling,
When Jack Johnson
Turned Jim Jeffries’
Snow-white face
to the ceiling.

Johnson’s life reads as a primer on racial tensions through the first half of the twentieth century. Marrying a succession of white women, he experienced sustained harrassment in the US and finally fled to France to avoid prosecution under the Mann Act. His death in 1946 was from a car crash - Johnson was speeding away angrily from a diner in Raleigh, NC which had refused to serve him.

Johnson served as an inspiration to Muhammed Ali, and continues to inspire hiphop pioneers like Mos Def, who named his rock side project “Black Jack Johnson”, featured on the album “The New Danger”. (Geffen wasn’t interested in releasing a Black Jack Johnson album, despite a band that featured members of Living Color and Bad Brains. Mos Def released the tracks on an album hiphop fans hoped would follow in the vein of his brilliant “Black on Both Sides” - the rock tracks were badly received, raising the question of whether naing a project after a man who had such a rough life is really such a great idea.)

As for that documentary - well, Ken Burns already did that, in an ambitious project called Unforgiveable Blackness.

Makes you want to explore a few more of those throwaway sentences, huh?

(The title of this post is a bit deceptive. Starr didn’t even footnote the sentence on Johnson. But I expect to lose a good chunk of the next month following the footnotes he did offer.)

I’ve become a big fan of chef Anthony Bourdain, first through his snarky, obnoxious and profane books about the restaurant industry and food around the world, and more recently through his excellent television show, “No Reservations“. The show portrays Bourdain travelling around the world - or sometimes around the corner - in search of unique culinary experiences. Much of the time, the show makes the case that you should visit a place you know little about simply to eat the food - his show on Ghana was so joyful and positive that the Ghanaian tourist board should simply send DVDs of it to any potential tourists. The very best shows, in my opinion, aren’t just travelogue, but provocative political statements - his show on the US/Mexican border made a passionate case that the border needs to be looser, not tighter, and that anti-immigration activists didn’t understand the unique cross-border culture.

Last night Rachel and I caught up with Bourdain’s recent travels to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and encountered one of his best political episodes. Bourdain freely admits that Saudi Arabia hasn’t been high on the list of countries he’s dying to visit - a former heroin addict and current, unabashed heavy drinker, the Kingdom’s attitudes to alcohol alone seem like they’d be sufficient to keep him away. But No Reservations ran a contest encouraging fans to submit videos encouraging Bourdain to film a show in their hometowns. The clear winner of the contest and interview process was Danya Alhamrani, a remarkable Saudi woman born in Bismark, North Dakota, and raised between Bismark and Jeddah. With business partner Dania Nassief, she’s the founder of Eggdancer Productions, a media production company in Jeddah unique in that it’s run by two women.

Alhamrani is very clear in her videotape that she wants to bring Bourdain to Saudi Arabia to challenge his preconceptions - and America’s perceptions - of what her nation is and isn’t. She succeeds with Tony, at least - he’s surprised by the warmth with which he’s received, and observes on his blog:

Fact is we met a lot of funny, good natured, very, very generous people over there. They actually had the capacity to laugh at themselves. They were all too aware of how they look to outsiders. They watch “Friends” and “Oprah” and “American Idol”.

Many, many of them were educated abroad. They were scrupulously devout in their faith without being humorless.

It’s clear from the show that the humor and warmth which which Bourdain is received has a great deal to do with Alhamrani, who is clearly a remarkable figure, and one of the most natural bridge figures I’ve ever seen on a television screen. Her North Dakota background means she understand more or less precisely what Bourdain is inclined to believe about Saudi Arabia, allowing her to line up and then mow down stereotypes. Because she lives in Jeddah as a Saudi, not as an expat, she knows where to go, who to see and how to show Bourdain the markets and greasy spoons that always serve as his happiest locales. And because she’s apparently a force of nature, her agenda of challenging preconceptions comes through every shot of the episode.

I’ve never been to Saudi, and am not likely to make the trip as a tourist any time soon. But I found myself reacting to certain moments in the show based on my limited knowledge gained through Saudi bridgeblogs. Alhamrani and Bourdain visit a local fast food restaurant, and he’s briefly confused as to whether they should sit in the “family” or “single” sections. Alhamrani explains that the single section is only for single men - the two of them together were a family, and their meal took place in a booth surrounded by translucent glass. Bourdain asked the predictable question - whether this form of isolation was insulting to Alhamrani as a woman - she explained that it wasn’t something she found frustrating, but something that single men often resented… something that had been clear to me from reading Ahmed Al-Omran’s brilliant Saudi Jeans blog. As a young, single Saudi man, Ahmed is a feminist at least in part because he’s frustrated about the ways in which the Kingdom’s attitudes towards women end up marginalizing men as well.

There’s nothing better than visiting another country - preferably in the company of someone who can bridge cultural gaps and help you experience the actual country rather than the tourist simulacrum - for changing opinions and attitudes. Amy Teuteberg, Bourdain’s producer, finds herself - to her great surprise - writing about her fondness for her abbaya, which allowed her to blend in on the shoot to a much greater extent than in other shows.

But if you can’t go, you can always read. Reading the Global Voices Digest this morning, I came across Ayesha Saldanha’s translations from Saudi blogs about slavery and worker’s rights in Gulf nations. The frustration and anger in these posts at the treatment of “guest workers” makes it very clear that some Saudis are very upset about the situation workers face and looking for ways the situation could be addressed:

When I listen to the real complaints of workers, I can’t help but think that they are largely being treated like slaves… Not only do some companies request a month’s salary from workers in order to renew their residence permit, but other companies prevent workers from having a day off in the week, and others won’t allow any excuse or leave, even in the case of illness. One worker told me that he had been working in Saudi Arabia for three years and hadn’t been able to perform Umrah [pilgrimage to Mecca] because the company refused to give him two days’ holiday.

…

The greatest problem with us is not Islam, of course; we take pride in our customs and culture and our Islamic spirit – but we don’t apply it on the ground. One day try stopping at a busy traffic light near a work site or industrial area, and see how, in 45 degree [113 Fahrenheit] heat, the workers are crammed into a lorry meant for equipment, or for sheep at most… But the greed of the factory or company owner prevents him from buying buses, which might cost no more than 40,000 Riyals to transport the workers from their accommodation to their workplace. If the matter was in my hands, a case would be brought against any company transporting its workers in lorries, and it would be ruled that the owner should experience this transport for a week. (In my dreams!)

Ask yourself now, when was the last time you brought a meal from a restaurant for your driver or housemaid? And how often have you let the driver use your mobile phone to talk to his family, and what about the maid? Does she still write letters and send them by post?

Do you have any doubt that this is slavery?

Oh man. Google Insights for Search is good fun. I’m supposed to spend this week finishing a number of writing projects. But I spent almost all today running different searches and being basically stunned at how much data’s available through the interface.

I mentioned earlier today that Google makes “related” search information available - there’s much deeper information available through the CSV interface, giving fifty associated terms for most searches. I have high hopes of playing with this data to revive my clustering tools, trying to explore the “freudian web” of associations between search terms.

My friend and research partner Hal Roberts has been playing with the trending functions of Insights - similar to those offered by Blogpulse, but covering a much broader search population. He’s got an interesting comparison of searches for “digital cameras” - cyclical, with spikes around Christmastime, but decreasing in intensity over the years - and “nigeria” - a steady, low-level of interest.

I think what’s most exciting to me (at least right now) is the geographic information available within the system. Andrew Chen has an excellent post, looking at searches for different social media sites and their distribution throughout the US. He observes that well-established sites like Digg are searched for by pretty much the entire US (the northern plains states seem immune from Digg-interest… and, oddly enough, there are lots of folks searching for Reddit in South Dakota.) Other sites, like TechCruch, are primarily searched for by Californians… (The folks at TechCrunch point out that this shows the disparity between searches for “techcrunch” and “techcrunch.com”.)

What’s really fun, IMHO, is using the location features of Google Insight to find out what topics are popular in what countries. Google won’t give you a list of most popular searches worldwide… but they will give you that list for an arbitrary nation, like Australia or Zimbabwe. We’ve had similar information available via Alexa in the past, measuring what sites are popular in what countries. But the search data has the potential, I think, to be extremely revealing.

Hal points out that one of the most popular searches in Nigeria is for “Email Extractor Lite 1.4″, a web-based tool designed to extract email addresses from a large piece of text, probably copied and pasted from the source of a forum page. Actually, variants of this search are the 2nd through 6th most popular searches in Nigeria.

As Hal notes, there’s pretty much no way to explain the result other than concluding that there’s a disproportionate interest in that particular spamming technique in West Africa. Here’s a map of interest in the search “Extractor Lite 1.4″, a spam cluster with a strong concentration in West Africa, but some interest in North America, the Middle East, Western Europe and Southeast Asia.

I’m wondering what other pockets of “undesirable” behavior are mappable via this technique. For instance, searches for “keygen”, a popular site that offers serial numbers and software keys to enable pirated software shows a heavy concentration the former Warsaw Pact nations, with some strength in Southeast Asia as well.

Searches for “torrent” also have an interesting concentration: a heavy concentration in central Europe and Scandinavia. Suspecting a connection to the Pirate Bay, I searched for that term as well, but discovered interest in Pirate Bay is tightly clustered in Scandinavia. Is it possible that interest in torrents in Central Europe, as compared to Africa or the former Soviet Union, is connected to significantly higher bandwith capacities?

There’s no end to the fun you can have with these sorts of maps. Google doesn’t include sexually suggestive terms in the lists that come up when you poll a country, but you can search for those terms specifically and come up with some fascinating maps. A search for “youporn” - an amateur pornography site that now ranks #35 on Alexa’s list of most popular websites, outpacing Flickr, Friendster and Craigslist - gives this map, with an interesting Mediterranean cluster:

Legendary French epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are.” What do we know about a country based on what they’re searching for? Is there something you’d like to tell us, Italy?

• LOL Bush: The president at the Olympics | World news | guardian.co.uk
  The Guardian embraces the Lolcat, captioning a set of photos of George W Bush at the Beijing Olympics in Lolcat fashion. A great moment in journalism history
  (tags: journalism politics funny humor memes olympics lolcats photos guardian)
• Foreign Policy: The Kremlin%u2019s Virtual Army
  Evgeny analyzes Russian bloggers reactions to the Georgian war in South Ossetia and identifies a nascent movement trying to challenge perceived media bias in coverage of the war. Interesting to see some Russian bloggers paralleling the anti-cnn.com strategy.
  (tags: evgeny_morozov russia georgia ossetia conflict media bias anticnn china)

The folks at Pingdom, a company focused on server performance monitoring, posted a fascinating little piece of research based on Google’s Insights for Search tool. I’m interested both in their specific research question - what social network tools are popular in what parts of the world? - and the richness of the data available via this tool from Google. (Basically, I’m feeling boneheaded that I hadn’t realized this data set was available.)

The Pingdom folks tried a simple experiment, using Search Insight to search for information on a dozen social networking sites. The Insight tool reveals how popular searches for particular terms are, and where in the world those searches are coming from. This lets the Pingdom folks conclude:

# Facebook is most popular in Turkey and Canada.
# Friendster and Imeem are most popular in the Philippines.
# LinkedIn is most popular in India.
# Twitter is most popular in Japan.
# LiveJournal is more popular in Russia than it is in the United States.

Of course, that’s not quite what these searches measure. Companies generally keep their traffic data extremely private. (We try to be a bit more transparent, publishing an analysis of Global Voices logs online, but those numbers probably aren’t entirely accurate and we increasingly rely on Google Analytics to track what’s happening on our own servers… and we don’t pubish those numbers.) The Insight data isn’t measuring traffic to those sites, or their number of active members, just the number of folks searching for those sites via Google. That may or may not be an effective proxy for interest in those networks. I’m a Facebook user, and I have the site bookmarked, so I rarely would find myself searching for the site - it’s possible that the search data is a more effective proxy for the strength of a brand in a particular market, or the level of interest from non-participants in a specific site.

On the other hand, the information Pingdom turns up through this proxy looks pretty similar to the results Le Monde published a few months ago, using information from Valleymag Datamonitor, which evidently had access to numbers that measured the users of social networking sites broken down by their national origin.

Google appears willing to share a suprising amount of data with this tool - a search for “red sox” (rapidly becoming my “foobar“) gives a graph of searches for red sox since 2004, marking peaks in the graph with news stories. (The highest peak in the Red Sox graph is assocaited with the 2004 World Series victory… the peak for the 2007 series victory is puny in comparison.) Regional interest shows that while interest in the Sox is highest in the US, there’s substantial interest in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico (baseball-crazy nations with citizens who play for the Sox), and a surprising amount of interest in the team from Ireland. (Okay, given the massive Irish-American population in Boston, perhaps not that surprising.) It’s also possible to graph interest in a topic by nation over time, comparing the rise and fall of Dominican and Pueroriqueño interest in the Sox over time.

Finally, the tool shows ten terms most commonly associated with a search term, and “emerging” terms that have recently been associated with your term. Predictably, the Red Sox are associated with Boston, tickets and the Yankees… less predictably, center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury appears as a “breakout”, a term that’s recently become popular.

I had some fun with another tool designed to reveal this “associated search” data, Overture’s (now unavailable) keyword selector tool. Back in 2004, you could feed the KST a term like “red sox” and discover that there had been 10,068 searches in the previous month for “red sox suck”… in contrast to 30,527 searches for “yankees suck”. I fed my favorite search terms - a list of the world’s nations - into the tool and cranked out an interesting data set that I blogged about as “the Freudian web”, our associations between particular nations and our interest in them. The data that came out of that research suggested that there were some nations where our interests were basically in seeing naked ladies, others where we mostly wanted to buy cheap prescription drugs.

What’s especially nice about the Google tool is that we can look at the interest in a search time from different nations. Search Google Insight for “Sweden” - you’ll discover that “Sweden” is a more popular search in Gambia than in Sweden itself. Why? Click through on Gambia and you’ll get a page tracking searches from the Gambia for Sweden, which reveals that Gambians are searching for universities in Sweden. (So are Nigerians, Ghanaians, Cameroonians and Bengalis.)

I suspect there’s something wonderful that can be done with this data, though I don’t quite know what experiment to run yet. I’m interested in the ways that searches can proxy interest in specific topics, especially in international news. Searching for “Ossetia” reveals a predictable uptick in interest in the past month. And it wasn’t surprising to see the most interest in the term coming from Russia. But why are Finns searching for information about Ossetia? Again, clicking through is interesting - Google tells us that the searches for information about Ossetia aren’t just from Finland, but from the province of Southern Finland, a part of the nation that borders on Russia. Perhaps Finns in that corner of the country are looking anxiously at to the west and wondering whether Russian incursions could come across their own border. Or just that there are a lot of Russians in southwestern Finland. A search for Ghana, classified by US states, reveals the strongest interest in Maryland and DC, an area that’s got a huge Ghanaian expatriate population.

Fun data sets like this have the tendency to ruin my productivity until I can find some interesting way to manipulate them. Thanks, Google, for spoiling my month of August.

• Firm Offers Laptop at $28 to School Kids | OffBeat Buzz
  Another low-cost laptop aimed at educational markets - $28, 2GB flash memory, black and white LCD display, designed for the indian market
  (tags: olpc ict4d india laptop)