Twitter

Earlier this month an American student was arrested in Egypt while trying to photograph a demonstration. The student used his mobile phone to send a message to Twitter simply stating "Arrested". His Twitter readers were then able to contact the US Embassy and the media to draw attention to his case.

The TechCrunch article about this has some interesting comments. Everyone seems to agree that this is fantastic PR for Twitter, especially with the outages and personnel turnover going on at the company right now. There also seem to be a lot of Twitter haters.

Empowering community activism

I read an interesting article today in Wired about a community of sex industry workers, that has been empowered by standard Web 2.0 and mobile networking technologies.

"Using mobile gadgets and Web 2.0 apps, sex workers mounted an internet-enabled campaign to spin the story. Smartphones, RSS feeds and mobile social networks enabled them to pounce on stories as soon as they appeared in the mainstream media, posting comments on news websites and blogging the good, the bad and the even worse coverage as it appeared."

I am curious whether this community uses anonymity features available with certain technologies, or whether they use traditional personal networking to keep employees identities private. The article did not make that clear, but I believe they used a little of both approaches.