Monique Adams's List: DigitalCitzenship

• A recent WikiLeak suggests that the seeds of the February 2011 revolution were already sown by late 2008, by activists called the April 6 Youth Movement who wanted to unseat Mubarak prior to the scheduled September 2011 elections. Yet few doubt that much of the momentum built in June 2010, when a Google employee named Wael Ghonim anonymously started a Facebook page to commemorate the death of Khaled Said, beaten to death by police for flaunting drug possession online.
• The wildfire flame of social networking burned quickly. In just a few weeks, Ghonim's page — We are all Khaled Said — had accumulated 130,000 fans, according to the New York Times. Ghonim this week said that the page has 375,000 followers. (The English-language site visible to U.S. Facebookers has just over 71,000 followers.) In a country with around 5 million Facebook users, that is a large percentile, and doesn't count Facebook users who may visit the page without "liking" it.

• "The real threat to the regime is people will take pictures of the police beating their brothers and sisters, and the regime can't respond well to Facebook images of the police shooting rubber bullets into a crowd," Howard told msnbc.com on Jan. 28. "There is no regime response for those images that go out over trusted networks."

  This made the Egyptian government nervous, to put it mildly. And they pulled the plug.
• You can't stop the Internet

• On Monday, Feb. 1, a service called SpeakToTweet, launched by Google and Twitter, brought voices of Net-deprived Egyptians to the global forum of Twitter by way of a phone number. Just like regular voicemail, people could call and leave a message.

• "Taking away the Internet brings attention to people's protests in a way that the protests by themselves can't muster," Cowie said. The images and videos that escaped during the outage were rendered more uplifting and powerful by their illicit nature. "How do you make everybody care?" asks Cowie. "Turn off the Internet."

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• The campaign to get Mubarak to step down, and for Egypt to adopt a more democratic government, began as a Facebook campaign started by Google marketing executive Wael Ghonim, who has been labeled a hero of the Egyptian revolution for his role
• Social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter played a vital role in the Egyptian revolution, helping to get word out to the rest of the world about what was happening on the ground. This, in spite of the government’s near-complete five-day shutdown of Internet, Blackberry and mobile phone access in Egypt.
• Google also helped, having created a Speak2Tweet application, with the help of Twitter, that enabled protesters to phone-in their tweets
• As the protesters on the ground are reportedly now shouting, because of services like Twitter and Facebook, “Egypt is free

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