Super Bowl 2012 ads http://on.mash.to/vZ4i0A
Apparently there was some sort of sporting event for not very fit people yesterday. You know the one I mean – where they stop for several minutes to catch their breath every 90 seconds or so and the time has to be filled in with TV adverts.

How France’s Free will reinvent mobile http://bit.ly/xMHvKW
Read how a French mobile phone network is providing phone calls, SMS and data – all for free.

How to get people to pay to read your tweets http://rww.to/v0zWW2
A clever innovation from a Swedish charity, getting people to pay up in order to get access to tweets from celebrities.

Will the internet cope with the Olympics? http://bit.ly/yKHSa6
The government and London 2012 team are warning London businesses their internet connections may go slow this summer.

What will it look like from the top of London’s Shard? http://bit.ly/xdGc3a
You don’t have to wait for the skyscraper to be finished and the public viewing gallery to open. A photographer has climbed up on top of a crane and taken some amazing shots.

Technology played a key inspirational and mobilising role in both. In 2011 it was rolling TV, especially Al Jazeera, and the internet. In 1919 it was the telegram, distributing widely around the world US President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech which inspired claims to national self-determination. The pace of technology may have been slower but the spreading of hope from events outside Egypt was the same.

Being newer, Facebook got more of the limelight than Al Jazeera, perhaps thankfully so given the politics of Al Jazeera’s enthusiasm for reporting the Arab Spring’s Tunisian origins, a country whose government had a hostile approach to the station. How much was its coverage motivated by impartial journalism or commercial grudges? The answer in this case matters little, save as a reminder that questions of media power and agenda setting apply just as much when being exercised on behalf of the unquestionably virtuous as when in more questionable circumstances.

Aside from inspiration, would-be protests also need a reassuring answer to the question “if I turn out to protest tomorrow, will I be picked on for repression?” As Clay Shirky has pointed out this can become a chicken and egg trap – if only you turn up, then the changes of being the victim of a crackdown are much higher than if a million turn up, but the one million will only turn up if they know that they won’t be the only one.

Successful protests often beat this trap by using a cover which makes initial crackdowns hard or unlikely, gaining breathing space to grow.  In Here Comes Everybody, Shirky gave the example of the East German protestors who ended Communist rule. They initially used the cover of events such as music festivals, forcing on the dictatorship a choice between the high political cost of cracking down on popular, highly attended events or letting a small number of protestors protest. It was a lose-lose choice: either you increase unrest or you give space for it to grow. (The Communists chose the latter, and lost.)

Social media is particularly good at providing the virtual equivalent of space for protest that the music festivals gave. Ethan Zuckerman calls it the ‘cute cat theory of censorship’.  It is relatively low cost for a dictatorship to crack down on a small number of dissidents. But there is a much higher cost to restricting popular social networks. So if political dissent and cute cat photos are both featuring on the same technology platforms, it pushes dictators towards that same lose-lose choice.

Of course, protests predate not only social media but the internet itself, so the technology is not itself the full story. There are some cases where social media almost certainly was the determining factor, as in the fall of Philippines President Joseph Estrada in 2001 in the face of mass protests organised via text messaging.

But predictions and counter-factuals are an uncertain business. Tunisia was not an obvious pick ahead of neighbouring countries before its revolution happened. It is therefore both wiser to stick to broad tendencies, saying that social media makes the successful toppling of dictatorships more likely, even if only rarely on its own.

Nor is it a certain process, as the cases of Iran, Belarus and (so far at least) Syria tragically demonstrate. Moreover, as Evgeny Mozorov has pointed out, technology can be used not only by dissidents but also by governments. Mozorov has particularly highlighted the case of Russia, a flawed democracy where the state deals with the cute cat problem in the main not by trying to block but instead by trying to flood the online world with astroturfed loyalist content.

What matters too is not only how the government uses social media, but how united it is. One crucial difference between Egypt and Syria, for example, has been the respective roles of the military – in the former deciding its future lay in backing change (as they did with Estrada’s ousting too), in the latter in deciding its future lies with the status quo. The views of the generals matter more than Twitter.

So too with foreign governments, where the difference between examples such as Libya and the Ivory Coast compared to Darfur and Rwanda lies in the willingness of foreign governments to support meaningful military intervention. The views of China and its ability to veto UN Security Council resolutions matters more than Flickr.

Yet social media can play an important role in helping pose those questions to generals and foreign governments to which they then have to choose their answers.

And of course context matters too: what mattered most in the year running up to the Arab Spring was not the growth of social media usage but the one third increase in food prices across the Middle East.

That mixed picture is epitomised by the brave, inventive and smart Tunisian activist Astrubal. He made wonderful use of social media to crowdsource, document and map the extravagant use of an official government jet to take Tunisia’s First Lady on expensive shopping trips around Europe. Shared photos from plane spotters in many different companies were added to Google Earth to produce an effective and plausible video that turned abstract complaints about indulgent waste at the top into specific evidence.

And yet … this was done in 2007. Ben Ali did not fall until 2011. Did the work of Astrubal and others make Ben Ali more vulnerable? Almost certainly. Was it enough on its own? Certainly not.

This piece first appeared in the February edition of Total Politics magazine.

Why do I share this with you? Well, because it contains such gems as:

That is the dumbest question I’ve ever heard. It was also the exact same question I was going to ask.

Is it necessary to state that George H.W. Bush was in the first generation of american children to have broccoli? that seems fairly meaningless and random.

Shouldn’t there be more on the consumption of broccoli in other cultures, particularly China?

It would be nice if anyone put in this article that George H. W. Bush spoke against broccoli.

And finally…

Seriously now, is it important for someone researching broccoli to know that it was once referenced in an episode of The Simpsons?

… which elicited this response:

If not in Wikipedia, where?

A few wider themes come out from the collection, including the move during the twentieth century from concern over there not being enough food to concern over people eating too much, and the way in which predictions about improvements in flying technology have consistently oversold its potential. Issues of safety, practicality, noise and cost mean we still do not have the sort of personal flying machines that often come up in a myriad of forms from personal helicopters in each garage through to jet packs and anti-gravitational devices.

As the book briefly discusses, a common trend is that even when predictions have been correct at a technical level, they have tended to under-estimate their knock-on social effects. (A good, different example is from the technical predictions over the future of newspapers where examples such as The Guardian’s newspaper of the future have in many respects turned out right, such as over personalisation and direct delivery to the reader, but they missed the way in which the business would be massively reshaped.)

A few of the predictions have thankfully not come to pass, including the idea of turning discarded underwear into candy, and others show how much the world has changed, as with the prediction of the future of nuclear power which handily included instructions on how to build a lightweight portable radiation detector so readers could head out to the countryside and go prospecting for uranium.

The book shows glimpses of a serious side – we can, after all, learn much from how previous predictions have gone wrong – and only occasionally pokes light-hearted fun at some past predictions. However, this is really neither a book for laughs nor for serious thought. Rather it is for gentle entertainment reminding us what the future used to look like.

You can buy The Wonderful Future That Never Was by Gregory Benford from Amazon here.

What would happen if you let a website designer loose in a supermarket? http://bit.ly/v1HbPr

A very funny film from Google on what buying a loaf of bread would be like if supermarkets were designed in the same way as some online stores.

Make your fridge text, your door tweet and your cat send emails http://bit.ly/v6kmT4

Twine is a very simple way of getting objects in your life interacting with you, each other and the world via the internet. All rather clever.

Unilever’s corporate app for investors http://bit.ly/th43Lp

Does what it says on the tin, with a veneer of pathbreaking, novel, innovative and better than sliced bread, of course. A sign of where corporate financial comms is heading.

How StumbleUpon found a new lease of life http://rww.to/tafsMv

Not many social networks go from being hip to passe and then make a successful comeback. StumbleUpon is one of the rare exceptions. Here is how it is doing it.

Social media compliance made easy http://bit.ly/vDQux4

Sticking to compliance and transparency rules in the limited wordcount world of social media can be tough. Here’s a new and clever solution – if it takes off.

It’s only disappointing to see to that in the three and a half years now no-one has demanded a ban on chocolate as the only way to secure our internet against paedophiles, the Mafia, internet pirate, the Chinese and the WI.

Wolmar’s expertise lies in the railways rather than military history and he is refreshingly frank about the limitations of his knowledge of the latter. He has acquired sufficient such knowledge to make the book work well in most parts, though he places too much reliance on AJP Taylor and Winston Churchill at times. Both are very readable, extremely persuasive but also highly controversial historians and to have either as your basic source of information on events is a risky approach. That is the approach that Wolmar takes and as a result, his narrative sometimes suffers. His partial debunking of Taylor’s views on the origins of the First World War, for example, make for a slightly quaint distraction given how much the debate over its origins has moved on anyway since his time.

The other blemish in the book is the paucity and limited detail of the maps, a real shame in a book that relies so much on accounts in which the relative location of places and the geography of the intervening landscape is crucial.

Neither blemish however seriously damages the book’s attempts to entertain or educate, both of which it does admirably. His main thesis is that it was only the development of the railways which made the increasingly large, and so logistically cumbersome, armies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries possible. In the end, however, the railways were also their undoing because defenders could always call up reinforcements far more quickly than attackers who, as they advanced, went beyond the reach of their own rail networks. The result was that stalemate was the norm until the development of reliable motorisation increasingly freed armies from railways.

One side-story which comes up frequently is just how hard railways were to destroy. A bit of damage here and there was easy, but could also be quickly repaired. It was only well into the twentieth century that explosives made large-scale destruction of railways, at least in rugged terrain that required bridges, viaducts and the like, quick and reliable. Until then, the possibilities of speedy repair had made railways a rather robust form of transport.

Another aspect briefly touched on is how railways offer another example of technological development which could both undermine dictatorships yet also strengthen them (cf the debate over Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion). In the case of railways, they both allowed dissidents and dissident ideas to move around but also permitted troops to be despatched quickly to quell unrest.

As these two examples illustrate, there is much to enjoy in this book even if you are neither a serious fan of military history nor of railways.

You can buy Engines of War: how wars were won and lost on the railways by Christian Wolmar from Amazon here.

First, the list is backloaded towards the end of the year, reflecting the growing readership (for which, thank you). In fact December 2011 was my best month ever, beating even the 2010 general election peak.

Second, as you would expect posts which tap into interests that journalists and other bloggers have do better – hence #2 being my post about fixed-term Parliaments and snap elections which has got (and continues to get) regular traffic from elsewhere thanks to other people using it as a reference source.

Third, search not only brings in a lot of long-tail traffic to this site, it can also make otherwise unexceptionable posts into traffic stars. That is the case with #5 and #9. Both are decent posts, but what puts them in the top ten compared to my other posts is that both have hit the search engine jackpot, doing very well in particular common searches. In both cases, having spotted an initial promising trickle of search engine traffic, I have expanded the original posts and done follow-up work which also links back to them. That has given their long-term search traffic a real boost.

Finally, timing is often what matters, as with #10. It was on a topic that was extensively written about elsewhere, but I got in first with this particular story and ahead of most of the other Liberal Democrat coverage of the by-election in general. Similarly with #6, it appeared at a time when lots of people wanted to know more about what was going on and the party’s official online channels had not (yet) supplied very much in the way of information.

1. How much do the richest 1% in the UK receive?
2. How can a general election happen?
3. I really don’t think Chris Huhne should be doing that to Nick Clegg with the tinsel
4. Nick Clegg’s verdict on events in Europe
5. The new London tube map (December 2011 version)
6. Lib Dem MEP: British demands were “reasonable”
7. 14 Liberal Democrat rebels help defeat housing benefit cuts in the House of Lords
8. Dear Polly Toynbee…
9. Warmer, cheaper homes: Radflek reflector sheets
10. Roger Crouch: first Feltham & Heston campaign advert

If you have been a reader in 2011, thank you and I hope you continue to find interesting copy during this year. As ever, do let me know what you think – the comments box awaits.

Odd though that Amazon doesn’t do Twitter for customer service (and the reason I went for Twitter is that I couldn’t navigate my way round all the options about returning faulty or damaged goods to find something to fit this scenario on their website – again a digital medium you’d have thought they know a thing or two about getting spot on).

RT @markpack: “BBC News – Tory MP sorry after novelty tie breaks into speech – http://bbc.in/fHr6Be” A case of So, La Tie D’oh!

— Andrew Lucas (@bythewatersedge) January 19, 2011

Simon Hughes was actually elected in 1978 – but didn’t take office until the 80′s #slfconf #terminallylate

— Martin Shapland (@MShapland) June 18, 2011

On my way home I walked past a vehicle activated sign on an empty road. It told me I was walking at 7mph and thanked me.Srsly!

— Alex Foster (@alexfoster) July 30, 2011

@markpackBREAKING: Ed Miliband says neutrinos going “too far too fast”

— Jason Hunter (@JasonJHunter) September 23, 2011

@markpack Because stopping criminals by having a police dog abseil onto their heads is the coolest thing in the world.

— Chris Terry (@CTerry1985) December 8, 2011

@TimMontgomerie: “Senior LDs slammed Cameron’s diplomatic skills + said he’s weaker than Major.”> How dare they! Such attacks your job

— Daniel Finkelstein (@Dannythefink) December 11, 2011

No idea why it’s taking CERN so long to find a Higgs Boson – I’ve got billions of them all around me.

— Iain Roberts (@CllrIainRoberts) December 13, 2011