This poses a problem for people working on polarizing issues — especially if your opposition has a more devoted online following.

This is the situation of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which generally plays David to the National Rifle Association’s Goliath on gun issues.

Compare the NRA’s Twitter feed, with 17,543 followers, to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, with 329. While the Brady Campaign is more active on Facebook, with 10,372 fans, it is dwarfed by the NRA’s Facebook fan base of 662,173.

Gun rights advocates are so active online that their presence has become a problem on the Brady Campaign’s Facebook discussion board. The board’s rules state that it is not for debating the issues, only conversing among Brady Campaign supporters, and only approved members can post to it.

Nevertheless, hostile “trolls” occasionally bombard the site with pro-gun messages.

“We were running some new Facebook ads leading to more trolling than usual, on days when there was nobody to watch it,” an administrator, David Churchill, wrote. “I think we learned our lesson.”

The International Action Network on Small Arms, which advocates for global gun control, shows some of the ways that social media can enable valuable information-sharing, even if it does not necessarily promote debate between opposing sides.

IANSA is an international coalition, and its communications office primarily transmits information of interest to its members, according to Ranveig Svenning, the network’s communications officer.

“Twitter is a good forum for us because we can link up with our members,” Svenning says.

IANSA also collaborates with bloggers to cover big events in the gun control world. In July, for example, IANSA organized bloggers to cover meetings on a proposed Arms Trade Treaty at the United Nations. Few mainstream media outlets covered the event in detail, and the blogs are among the best information available on the event.

Gun control is less controversial internationally than it is in the United States, which may explain how IANSA has managed to maintain a relatively open policy for sharing information. Anyone with a Facebook account can add comments to the network’s Arms Trade Treaty blog without permission.

However, there may be a disadvantage in being less centralized in that it is more difficult to engage with your opponents.

The NRA, for example, produced a slick YouTube video portraying IANSA as a global conspiracy to confiscate American guns. To date, it has been viewed more than 1.1 million times. A relatively popular Amnesty International video in support of the treaty, by contrast, has had about 15,000 views.

However, IANSA’s experience with digital media suggests ways that it could be used more effectively to counter misperceptions and change public attitudes about guns.

South Africa, like the United States, has a relatively high level of gun violence and a cultural tradition associating gun ownership with political freedom.

The title of a popular Zulu-language song from the anti-Apartheid struggle, “Umshini Wami,” means “Bring me my machine gun.”

A YouTube video from an IANSA member organization, Gun Free South Africa, tells how activists rewrote the song to be “Umshini Wakho,” meaning “Bring us your machine gun,” as a call for citizens to support their government’s disarmament efforts.

The video itself has registered only a few hundred views — showing perhaps that radio or TV, rather than YouTube, is still the most effective way to disseminate this kind of message in countries such as South Africa.

Nevertheless, channeling this kind of creativity into the digital media world is a challenge that remains for organizations such as IANSA and the Brady Campaign.

What could make pro-gun-control digital media go viral? Most videos on IASNA and the Brady Campaign’s YouTube channels are simple video recordings of talks by noteworthy spokespersons. Is there a way to leverage cultural symbols, as Gun Free South Africa did with Umshini Wami, to promote safer gun laws?

I am especially enthusiastic of the new possibilities that the Internet brings for people to enhance their real lives and reinforce their small social worlds. This growing trend of using online tools for offline aims is especially attractive to me, as it becomes an amazing tool for citizen empowerment, which is my main area of study at SIPA.

Let’s get a closer look to what is happening and of its potential for citizens empowerment:

The three phases

As the rest of the world connected to the Internet, I have gone through the different phases of this new phenomenon, learning and discovering new things and also new facets of myself.

In the beginnings of the Internet, by the late 1990s, I became crazily excited about the new windows that the Internet opened to me. Google was one of the best gifts for humanity. I recognize I was also a victim of the chat phenomenon. I chatted and chatted with unknown people, and got to make some tight/weird “friend” relationships with some of people I found there. Later, we learnt to better filter the available information in the Web, and also to better filter the people we were virtually meeting! After a first phase in which we were using the Internet as a vehicle to connect with the rest of the world, we went one step further and began using the Internet as a vehicle to connect online with closest communities, our friends, our classmates, colleagues, and co-citizens. With the arrival of the Web 2.0 we began having a more active role in the online world; we started participating in the Internet in a broader sense. We began building together and somehow, getting some ownership of the social phenomenon. Still, we were amateurs. Facebook allowed us to find our friends, meet new people, chat and send instant online messages. In other words, I used to spend useless time in Facebook strengthening online relationships with people I could have seen life, just by making a quick call and taking the subway to get off three stations away.

Fortunately, something has recently changed. In the recent times, people have began to use the Internet as I believe it should always have been used: as a tool or a platform that makes our REAL lives better, easier, more informed, more dynamic. We are somehow recovering our good sense, our decision power. Progressively, we spend less and less useless time in the Internet. And the time we spend there is more efficient and more pragmatic for our real lives.

I decided to consult a social media expert to confirm this identified trend. Sharon Mandler is Senior Digital Strategist at Saatchi+Saatchi. Asked about the latest trends in the Internet, she states: “There are two main trends happening right now in the field of social media. On the one hand, online and offline lives are converging. People are not any more shut away in the Web. Today the Internet is being used as a way to make your life offline easier, more informed, more fun. On the other hand, the Internet is back to basics. People want simpler and faster services, spending less time searching and more time getting. The growth of the apps is a good example of these two trends.”

Asked about the new vehicles being used in this new wave, she suggested me to read a very hot and divisive article published by Chris Anderson in Summer of 2010 and titled: “The Web is dead. Long life to the Internet”. The author, editor-in-chief of the magazine Wired, reflects on the increasing role of the applications prompted by the spread of iPhone and other smart phones, as well as other Internet browsers in detriment of the traditional webs. In the controversial article, the author stated: “Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.” The following chart presented in his article shows this trend:

Interviewing Sharon Mandler, I ask her about the driver of this change: is it business, the new technology or the citizens themselves? She answers: “The new trend identified on the Internet is prompted by a combination of new technologies, such as the smart phones that permit the installation of applications, together with a more expert and demanding user. Companies of course have also found a profitable way to provide access to their services through these applications and new platforms”. I wonder then what she means when she states that users are more experts and demanding: “The Internet user is not any more an amateur. We have become experts of the Internet: we are increasingly making a more efficient use of it, we select the people and the time we want to spend online, and we find the ways that the Internet services can enhance our real lives”.

Here ideas are aligned with the opinion of Chris Anderson to this respect: “(…)And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen). The fact that it’s easier for companies to make money on these platforms only cements the trend.”

Fostering citizen empowerment

Since the beginning of its existence, the Internet is empowering people by easing access to information, connections, communications and crowd contribution. The new trend on the Internet will have even a higher impact on empowerment. By connecting the online and the offline world, people are empowered in their real lives.

The Internet can extraordinarily foster citizens’ empowerment. In my previous posts I presented some good examples of it: for instance, the growing web-based NGOs fostering community action projects, such as Do Something, or Pando Projects, or new e-tools like SeeClickFix allowing citizens to to report issues happening in the public streets directly to the City Hall (like potholes or graffiti that should be removed). There are also e-platforms like Agentanything.com that permits everybody to post errands that are offered to students in exchange of some pocket money, and smart new websites to rent or sublet your apartment. We find also a large number of new websites that are offering e-tools to strengthen social groups offline, many of which offer mobiles applications for it. For instance, Group Me allows to send common texts to all the group of friends,  and Four Square offers a mobile application that allows finding where your friends are in the city, which restaurants, cafés, cinemas and places they have visited and how they evaluated it. Another great e-tool to empower people offline is Kickstarter. This platform is perfect to do crowd-sourcing for any personal project. Finally, I also found a website that creates a sort of Facebook at the neighborhood level, allowing people of the same neighborhood to connect online, share comments and suggestions of the places around and look for jobs in the neighborhood. This great idea is developed by a website that, unfortunately, is quite disorganized and not very user-friendly: Local Box.

All these websites work as platforms to attain offline goals, in real life. All of them are empowering citizens, who are getting together to fight for common causes or just becoming closer to better know each other. Mobile applications seem  the perfect vehicle for users to be selective and efficient in the use of the Internet, and make the best out of it offline. People have finally take control and ownership of the Internet, making it a useful tool for their real lives (instead of becoming a tool of the Internet, as I felt when long time ago I realized I had been chatting about nothing for more than four hours).

So why is this a problem?

For starters, there is discrimination. The Internet is as an open medium, where every feature and service is treated equally. For example, search engines provide you with sites that are the closest match to your request, not the highest paying content providers.

Next, there is double payment on a service. Currently, net users are charged for access. Opponents to Net Neutrality also want to have users pay for content, by charging the service providers who will then pass on these costs to users. Currently we pay for the pipes, not the type of content that comes through the pipes.

Most importantly is the oppression of innovation. The net as it stands allows start-ups and entrepreneurs to enter the marketplace competitively. A tiered Internet will be dictated by who can afford to dominate the content supply market through massive financing.

On December 21, 2010, the FCC will vote on a net neutrality proposal plan. Outlined by Chairman Julius Genachowski, the plan includes five key points: transparency; a ban blocking lawful apps and services; a ban on unreasonable network management; allowance some ISP network management; and rules governing wireless that calls for the above. Another notable feature is that the plan does not reclassify broadband as a telecom service, and holds it to the same rules and regulations.

Net Neutrality is absolutely necessary for the future of the Internet as we know it, and although many in the U.S. have an inherent mistrust for government regulation, it is the only way we will achieve equity for all users:

“In the end, network neutrality rules are not the only way government can try to lower the costs of market entry in the national economy. However, it is one of the simplest, and it has proven very effective over the last decade.”

Tim Wu, Professor of Law, Columbia University.

1. Apple supports open standards for the web and has adopted HTML5 which is open and controlled by a standards committee. Adobe’s Flash is 100% proprietary, with Adobe having sole authority over its development, and thus if is a “closed system”.
2. The majority of web video is now encoded in the H.264 format, which is viewable on all Apple devices.
3. Flash compromises security, performs poorly on mobile devices and “is the number one reason Macs crash”.
4. The older video encoding used by the majority of Flash websites requires software rather than hardware decoding, and halves battery life.
5. Flash was not designed for touch screens, and relies on mice and rollovers, which have no place on the iPad, iPhone or iPod.
6. Flash is a cross platform development tool, with a bad track record in adoption times of enhancements to Apple’s platform. Enhancements will only be adopted when they are available on all supported platforms (PCs, Andriod phones, etc.). This results in developers having access to a low level set of features.

While this letter puts a grim light on Adobe’s app development future, on September 9, 2010 Apple announced they would be “relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps”. This means that developers can now use Adobe’s Flash CS5 to create iPhone apps.

Google was happy about this too, as  developers can now use Google’s advertising solutions in Apple apps.

So, what can we take away from this? When Apple relaxes, many breathe a sigh of relief.

That night, the owner, David G. Bradley, proposed a toast. “For the magazine new bet on the online content”, he said. The company was close to break even for the first time in decades, he assured. Everyone clapped, nobody believed in Bradley’s words.

But this week, The Atlantic has announced that the red numbers are gone: it expects a $1.8 million profitability by the end of this year.

The news is important because it brings to the table another successful business model, different from those followed by other magazines such as The New Yorker, The Economist or Foreign Policy, that hide their content under a paywall and, therefore, are able to charge for subscriptions.

In contrast, The Atlantic business model seems to rely on web traffic and thus, on online advertising. By hiring bloggers, redesigning its website to make an almost independent product from the print issue, and launching The Atlantic Wire, the company has managed to attract almost 5 million unique visitors, boosting the digital advertising up to $6.1 million, a figure that represtents almost 40 percent of the company’s overall advertising take, according to The New York Times.

It’s interesting how the magazine has been able to improve its revenues in investing in original content, by joining the online conversation with other media outlets, and without necessarily adding high-quality video packages to the website. This should be refreshing for every “print” journalist, because that means that advertisers are still willing to put their money in sites where concentrating readership. And what will eventually attract readership, well, eventually good content. Good journalism is still profitable, even in the web!

And there were the start-ups.

Away from the reflectors, a bunch of newly born tech companies presented their applications, web platforms, and social media tools designed to make a greener planet, and make a profit out of it.

“We were rubbing shoulders with all these top executives from green, high-tech companies and policy makers.” said Cristina Palacios, co-founder of Aventones (the word for “rides” in Spanish) “But unlike them, our impact depends on web applications. The web has empowered entrepreneurs at unthinkable levels, and applications can actually contribute to decrease carbon emissions.”

Aventones is a Mexican private social network offering its services to companies and universities to find common driving routes among members willing to share their cars. In other words, it’s an online carpooling tool aiming to reduce traffic in Mexico City.

“It is a software that can be accessed anytime by anyone with a computer and access to the web”, said Palacios, one of the three founders of the 5-month-old start-up.

Mexico City has about 4 million automobiles making 22 million commutes a day, according to the 2010 IBM Commute Pain Survey. The implications of this massive motorized transportation for the quality of life of commuters and for the environment are huge. CO2 emissions add up to 2 million tons per year. The local ministry of transport estimates that drivers spend about 2 hours a day in their cars, which translates in high maintenance and gas costs, representing almost 20 percent of the household income of an average family in the city.

“We saw an opportunity. Most of the people in the city do not use public transportation to go from home to work and vice versa, and most of the commutes by car are made only by one or two persons in the automobile”, said Palacios “Our guess is that people don’t share their car because they are not aware of other people that share the same routes, and because they don’t necessarily trust the traditional media to publicize their willingness to share a ride in exchange for money”.

In Mexico City the trust among citizens have been deteriorating due to the high crime rates that persist in the metropolitan area. In 2010, the Citizen’s Institute for Studies in Insecurity (ICESI) reported that 20 percent of the adult population is likely to be a victim of a crime in Mexico’s capital city. It’s crime rate, 14,100 per 100,000 inhabitants, is one of the highest in the world. No wonder why people in the city think twice before trusting other citizens.

“People are not willing to post on a paper their routes or their interest in sharing their car, but we’ve found out that they somehow trust people more when they have friends in common or they attend the same university, or work in the same company. That’s the reason Aventones is a private social network”, said Palacios.

Aventones is using Facebook Connect to indicate if the people willing to share a ride have friends in common. The social network is helping citizens close the trust deficit that discourages people from sharing their car with unknown persons.

“I would never share my car with someone I don’t know, but I guess that if we have friends in common, that would make him or her a ‘legit’ person, someone I can trust. I can ask our mutual friends for references I guess.” said Monica Lavin, a 32-year-old executive at Walmart Mexico.

Aventones, who is about to close its first deal with Costco and two major universities in Mexico City and expects to break even after its first year of operations, will also offer incentives to the members using the social network based on their activity as carpoolers. Gas and food coupons will be given to those drivers taking more people on a regular basis. To improve engagement and trust within the network, the site will also award badges for those who are more active.

“We are targeting companies with more than 300 employees, the idea is for them to pay us for managing the platform and to provide them technical service.” said Palacios, “In exchange, they will provide the service to its employees, and they will decrease their carbon footprint, decrease their parking-related costs, and maybe improve the social integration among the people working for them. The company will also receive media exposure, because it will reinforce its commitment to help stop global warming”.

Aventones is not the first nor the only online tool focusing on matching commutes in order to foster carpooling. eRideShare,CarpoolConnect and CarpoolWorld are some of the dozen of US based companies currently offering similar connecting services. However, Aventones special interest in closing the trust gap that exist in Mexico City through social networking makes it a special case. Unlike other carpooling online-tools, Aventones is a closed, private, network, taking advantage of close the close links to reduce uncertainty. It is also the only online tool with operations in Mexico.

“The lessons we’ve learned from the CO-16 in Cancun are that there is room for opportunity for green start-ups.” said Palacios “Our big advantage is that we can keep our costs low by taking advantage of the web. On the other hand, people are becoming increasingly aware of the climate change and also feel very comfortable using the web”.

To underscore the importance of student crisis mapping, Craig Fugate, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator publicly stated that the student led crisis map during the earthquakes in Haiti “was the most comprehensive and up-to-date map available to the humanitarian community.”

SIPA has been ahead of the curve when it comes to crisis mapping and was very involved with Ushahidi during disasters in Chile and Pakistan over the last year.  After their Chile initiative ended, the core members of the Ushahidi-Chile @ SIPA team met with Patrick Meier, Director of Crisis Mapping and Strategic Partnerships at Ushahidi, to discuss lessons learned.  It was at this meeting that Meier first began to discuss the initial U4U idea with the SIPA team to gain their input and support.

In the early stages of planning, the model for U4U was a team of students from universities around the world who are trained and ready to become crisis mappers the moment a disaster strikes.  Teams from different universities would rotate as first responders and take on all mapping activities during the first 48 hours of a crisis.  After the initial response, the university team would pass responsibility to either local or UN organizations.

“How it was originally presented to the SIPA team is much different that it is now,” says Jaclyn Carlsen, SIPA Student and Co-Director of the SIPA New Media Task Force, which leads crisis mapping at SIPA.

For starters, U4U’s focus will primarily be universities in developing countries instead of the original model with schools from around the world as first responders.  U4U will bring students from developing countries to the U.S. to be trained on Ushahidi and related platforms.  These students will also work with peacebuilding experts from USIP to identify specific ways to use information collection and crowd sourcing technologies in their home countries.

Further, the scope of U4U will be broader than disaster response alone.  While the original model was centered on disasters, U4U as it exists now will encompass a range of issues.  Its management has been consulting widely with international and community based organizations about how the tools can be used and the issues surrounding them.

“It goes to show how Ushahidi was first used primarily in disasters but they are realizing that this tool is so versatile. It can be for conflict resolution; it can be used for peacemaking.  I think that’s why it became more holistic,” reflects Sawako Sonoyama, the other Co-Director of the SIPA New Media Task Force.

Carlsen agrees that U4U has taken on “much more of a peace tone than a disaster tone.”  This is very likely due to U4U’s partnership with USIP who is providing funding for the initiative.

Despite its evolution, U4U’s focus remains on the students.  Carlsen believes it is logical for Ushahidi to want students to adopt its platform.

“These issues are very relevant to developing countries right now.  I think they recognize that and that’s why they are trying to draw students to learn these different skills and the different systems around it,” she says.

Sonoyama also pointed out the unique position that students are in. “Even during midterms, graduate students are able to briefly put school on the backburner in order to prioritize their time for crisis mapping.  However, people working full-time are less able to put their professional obligations on hold.  Graduate school is a huge new space to mobilize for humanitarian response.”

However, on U4U’s shift from U.S. universities to their developing country counterparts, Carlsen strongly believes, “SIPA students have skills and experience to contribute to this program.”

“We have an institutionalized crisis mapping initiative at SIPA and participated in two deployments.  We have some lessons learned to share with U4U,” Sonoyama continued.

And they are right.  During the Chile initiative, the Ushahidi-Chile @ SIPA team trained almost 200 volunteers and mapped 1215 incidents.  Several members of the team, including Sonoyama, also traveled to Chile to implement the platform on the ground.

Rather, these SIPA crisis mapping leaders would like to see U4U work more with both developed and developing country students.  Carlsen advocates for all students to be empowered to use crisis mapping tools.

“What I’d like to see from the U4U side is students going back to whatever institutions they’re from and setting up systems before disasters happen, before elections happen, instead of outside organizations coming in and calling the shots,” she says.

At the end of the day, the U4U initiative is wise to capitalize on students for their passion, dedication and willingness to learn new tools.  However, it seems that by turning its focus toward developing country universities, it might lose out on the knowledge and experience of students at schools like SIPA and Tufts whose initial work inspired the initiative’s creation.

The latest ad representing the nation’s biggest magazine publishers begins: “This is not the Internet. Feel free to curl up and settle in.”

Featuring a woman swinging in a hammock between two sun-drenched palm trees, the ad continues: “Magazines don’t blink on and off. They don’t show video or deliver ads that pop up out of nowhere. You can’t DVR magazines and you can’t play games on them. But you can take one to the beach.”

Curiously, the woman in the hammock does not actually appear to be reading a magazine, jokes the New York Times.

But that’s not the only piece of irony in this story.

The ad campaign, which launched in May 2010, is the brainchild of publishing powerhouses Hearst, Condé Nast, Time Inc., Meredith, and Wenner Media.

That’s right. The same leaders who spent the past few years poured tens of millions of dollars into creating iPad versions and other digital formats of their publications are now trying to counter perceptions that print is a dying medium.

Funny, there’s a digital component to the campaign, too.

Since spring, the ads have appeared as two-page color spreads in nearly 100 publications, reaching a combined 112 million readers per month. The campaign is the first-ever of its kind, and publishers are convinced it’s a worthwhile investment.

In fact, they say magazine readership has actually grown over the past five years. Even since Facebook was founded, magazines have gained more than one million readers.

So why the need for the ads?

Michael A. Clinton, president of marketing and publishing director for Hearst Magazines, explains, “We have to be delivering our content in different ways, but in a continually digitized world, the interesting thing is the passion people still have for the print product.”

Want to see more? Check out another ad that’s part of “The Power of Print” campaign.

SeeClickFix, launched in beta in March 2008, is an application for iPhone, Blackberry and Android that allows citizens to report issues happening in the public streets to the City Hall, working like a collaborative 311.

The user takes a picture and gives a brief description of what needs to be fixed or tackled. It could be a pothole, a graffiti, a broken streetlamp… The application recognizes the geographic point where the picture has been taken and sends the Authorities the specific address, together with the picture and user description.

In the website, there is a map where the new reports pop-up as they are sent by citizens. This is useful to see the nearby reports to one´s neighborhood, and then to send the own report tackling those same problems, applying pressure by coming all together, to get the problem fixed.

This application is transforming the relationship between urban authorities and citizens. There is a new dialogue that starts, a constructive channel of public feedback. SeeClickFix fosters social commitment, empowering citizens in front of the Government. The application operates in thousand of American communities, including some big cities such as Washington D.C., New York and San Francisco. Local Governments fostering “Gov 2.0″ (also called “e-government”) are employing social media and mobile technologies, such as SeeClickFix, to build a more responsive, collaborative, and effective government to respond to a more engaged society with a richer civic commitment.