Enterprise Ireland is the main funnel for government funding of companies – each year it invests millions of euros in hundreds of companies it considers High Potential Startups (HPSUs), and later-stage developing companies. This cash – “EI money” – has become a major part of the startup ecosystem in Ireland, and it’s one expense that isn’t getting the axe in government budgets.

Public investment money flows to Irish startups in other ways, too. Much of the private sector money invested in Ireland is in fact government money managed by Irish VCs and other administrators, and blended into seed capital funds. Seed capital funds are administering the investment of at least €124 million of public money. In addition, there’s the competitive start fund, and the innovative High Potential Start Up fund. If you can impress the right people, there’s a lot of cash about.

The government is doubling down on this strategy of growing companies through investment. It recently gave US-based investment firm Sofinnova €30 million to invest in Irish healthcare and life sciences companies, and invited other investment firms to come to Ireland and help invest public money in Irish startups. Plus there’s generous tax relief available for startup investors – some Dublin accountants boast that between tax relief and government money, they can quadruple the cash value of any investment.

How do all these companies perform afterwards? It’s hard to say – there are fewer press releases about how everyone is doing three years out. The good side is that EI (and Ireland) gets a slice of the cake when there are successful exits – when companies get acquired further down the line. On the other hand, the process feeds the phenomenon of “grantepreneurs”. In Business Plus magazine last year I read an investigative piece about companies that got millions in public investment, and didn’t have much – or anything – to show for it. Some didn’t even seem to have tried.

As new tech companies start to influence more and more of the economy, Ireland wants to support its emerging entrepreneurs. But you know what would be even better than investment? Customers.

Government: Ireland’s biggest customer

Government spending accounted for 47.5% of Irish GDP in 2010. This included everything from social welfare to recreation, defense to education, and thousands of services and products. That money feeds a lot of mouths.

Now imagine if it was possible for startups to compete for a slice of that spending? Traditionally, the public sector has been slow to take on new technology or vendors. Just like no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft, no-one ever got fired for hiring Accenture, Arthur Cox, Microsoft or PriceWaterhouse Coopers. So any upstart who thinks they can do a better job of helping the department of social welfare manage its data, or the Gardai manage their schedules, or Coillte manage its supply chain, or feed children, or help some quango “raise awareness” – well, good luck. You’re facing an uphill battle, and you’ll probably have an easier time selling into the UK or the US.

Many government departments, state companies, and quangos have tried and trusted vendors, relationships. There isn’t the same pressure as the private sector to innovate – the public sector doesn’t have shareholders to account to, or reasons to change. Some public bodies don’t have the expertise to draw up their own procurement terms for major software changes – meaning the big consulting firms draw up the terms of reference, write their bids the next day, and – surprise, surprise – win the contracts.

Of course, sometimes you need the big guns. But sometimes you don’t. Right now, the public purse is open to startups in a narrow way – investment. Here’s some cash, Sonny – now go away and leave Daddy alone. See if you can sell your wares abroad. But investment can burn up pretty quick without customers, and new customers are the hardest step for any startup. So why not start buying our products and services?

The reason is simple: there’s a sea change going on in tech right now, and Ireland needs to build some global companies from it.

Software eating the world

Super-investor Marc Andreessen has predicted that in the coming years, software will eat the world. So what does that mean? In a few years time, web-connected software (apps and websites built into everything from your phone to your fridge) will help you do everything in your life, from locating your friends on Saturday night, ordering the right food, managing your fitness, navigating foreign cities, knowing when to visit the dentist, subletting your spare room, and carpooling. Software will tell farmers when to cut their grass, will tell you where to buy the cheapest gas, and will turn on your heating as you drive home. Software in your phone will help you find the best price for the blender you want to buy, and then you’ll buy it through software in your phone. All these things will come to pass, and some very big natural monopolies will develop – like Facebook, Google, Amazon, AirBnB, and Apple. We live in the era of a great technology land grab.

If Ireland is to produce software companies that will eat the world, and win some turf in this land grab, sure, they will need investment. But investment tends to follow good ideas anyway, and savvy Irish entrepreneurs are getting good at bringing in the bacon from foreign and domestic VC funds. Ireland has a pretty hopping angel investment scene, too. What software companies need even more is initial customers, who’ll take a risk on the new technology or approach to solving a problem. Having some happy customers who’ll sing your praises to prospective clients is worth far more to a company than a chunk of cash.

So: what if we were to invert the public sector attitude – and turn the Irish public sector into a place where new ideas and processes are embraced, tested, and tried out? The public sector – including government departments, the courts service, universities, and state owned companies – solves thousands of problems each day. It employs hundreds of thousands. It spends a billion or two a week. And it’s reputed to have some inefficiencies.

Many of the things governments pay for – from managing a consultant doctor’s schedule to providing public information – will be eaten by software in the coming years.  If Ireland is at the forefront of this historical change, producing stellar companies in the field by giving them a head start now, we can reap some of the benefits of it.

Plus, on the filpside, this approach would save taxpayers a fortune. If startups got their agile, low cost, customer-oriented mentality into some government processes, well, there’s a chance they’d be done better.

Of course, if functions of government are to be trusted to young companies, all existing (logical) safeguards and standards should stay in place. (Personally, I’d like to see the destroyer of critical thinking called “best practices” banished, though.) The best companies should still win. And needless to say, we’d have to prevent any corruption or gombeenism in public contracts. But given how much our government spends on technology, legal, accounting, healthcare, food, security and everything else every year, and given what a deplorable job some existing firms have done, isn’t it worthwhile imagining something new?

So here’s my question to Ireland, Inc.: if you really believe in all these startups you’re funding, why don’t you start buying their stuff?

One of the Irish startup scene’s best known successes, the Dublin Web Summit, is now an export itself, bringing snappy talks, fast paced panels, and big names to the heart of the heart of the City of London.

By now, I’m a hardened old veteran of StartupLand, that wonderful place filled with lean startups pivoting their product market fit to win early adopters, angel funding, and cross the valley of death. It’s a place where ideas and memes pop up and spread (and are adopted and get old) as fast as any of the products. Where an inspirational Steve Jobs quote is only a few slides away.

For the impatient, frugal and fast moving founders of StartupLand, a conference has to be quality to hold our attention. For the past few years, the Dublin Web Summit has been exactly that. Paddy Cosgrave and his team have brought A-list founders (Skype, Youtube) and influencers (NY Times, 500 Startups) to Dublin for an orgy of pep-talks, lessons learned, panels and idea exchange.

Now, Paddy has got together with Mike Butcher (of TechCrunch and Geek ‘n’ Rolla, a London startup conference) to create the inaugural London Web Summit. At the Brewery venue in the City of London, 1,000 entrepreneurs, investors and other StartupLand veterans have gathered to swap ideas, pitch each other, and try and imagine the future (for their products). It’s happening literally right now.

And I’m enjoying it thoroughly. Even a jaded auld startup hack like me still loves the web summit series. It’s fun, imaginative, and attracts quality people. While the London Web Summit doesn’t quite have the caliber of A-Listers that Dublin does (coz it doesn’t have a f.ounders conference going on next door) it’s still a great day out for networking, pitching and opening up to new ideas.

Jade of Redeem&Get demoing at London Web Summit

And it’s a great day for the Irish startup mafia to show their stuff. Our launchpad colleagues Redeem&Get are selling downstairs, DogPatch Labs neighbour James Whelton has a Coder Dojo in the basement, and SOS Ventures investor Bill Liao is strolling about eying prospects. Mark Little of Storyful gave a talk about the future of journalism. Other Irish companies here exhibiting include Scurri and the awesome Von Bismarck, who will be helping you shop clothes in the very near future. There’s even an Irish dragon in attendance, former Presidential candidate Sean Gallagher.

Enterprise Ireland sponsored the press room, so I’ve been happily munching on O’Donnell’s “authentic hand cooked Tipperary Crisps” (try saying that with a mouthful of ‘em) and Lily O’Brien’s milk chocolate truffels and crispy hearts (highly recommended). There’s some Flahavan’s porridge on display, and a pyramid of Ballymaloe country relish. It’s like a homesick migrant’s dream display. “Well it’s breakfast time back home.”

The author with "Dragon" investor and former Presidential candidate Sean Gallagher at London Web Summit

We might have lost the rugby. But Ireland Inc. is still a contender. The Dublin tech startup scene matches that of any other European city, though we have to watch our flank against super-chic Berlin. And O’Donnell’s robust “mature cheddar” flavor will leave Walker’s crisps quaking in their greaseproof foil.

Keep up with NewsWhip on Twitter, and make sure to check out what’s trending now in tech on our homepage: NewsWhip/Tech

We’re proud to announce we’ve added China to our roster of country sources at NewsWhip. Head to NewsWhip.com/China to take a look for yourself.

NewsWhip China shows the fastest spreading, most social news from and about China – though limited to English language sources.

Based on what’s bubbling up there to date, we think it might be one of the most eclectic and open ways of keeping track of Chinese society, politics and culture. We’re monitoring social activity on hundreds of China-focused outlets in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and foreign press. The sources cover topics ranging from political gossip, expat perspectives, Chinese society, criminal law, business, the economy, and technology.

As I write this, the top stories include a peek inside a Shanghai detention center on Shanghai List, and a report of a Tibetan self-immolation. I check back again, and here’s a mini-skirted model appearing to show off her Communist Party sugar daddy. Zinging stuff.

Like any NewsWhip page, the stories on NewsWhip China are ranked strictly based on the amount of real time social activity around each. We can’t claim to give the real skinny on the street in Chinese society as we don’t monitor China’s home grown social networks or Chinese-language sources. But monitoring English language Chinese news spreading on Facebook and Twitter still produces very interesting results.

If you have any friends with an interest in China, please pass on this resource. Let us know if you have any ideas on it below. And of course, you can now select “China” as a country source if you’re signing up for the NewsWhip Daily.

[pic via keithmarshall]

The infographic ranks news sites based on how many viral stories they produced during the month of January 2012. We define a viral story as one getting at least 100 likes or shares (on Facebook) or 100 Tweets (on Twitter). We’ve ranked the top 25 news sources in each category.

We collected all this data using NewsWhip’s discovery and data collection engines. They discover almost all the free news and major blog posts produced in the English-speaking world each day, and track how they spread on social networks. While we only use the data temporarily – to build a picture of what’s taking off in real time – we collect it, to make a really neat data set. From that, we extracted the following:

We had to do some work on our data set to produce this infographic. For example, some sites (like MSNBC or CNN) publish into many subdomains (like today.msn.msnbc.com or money.cnn.com). For these sources, we united their subdomains into one single domain so they would be fairly counted.

One thing we’re missing: sites with paywalls and partial paywalls. We have only partial data sets for these, so it seemed better to exclude them than have them half-counted. Hence NYTimes.com, WSJ.com and FT.com are not included.

We hope you enjoy the data. There are some big lessons there on the future of news – a place where we’re sure social distribution will play a huge role.

Follow us on Twitter for more. And check out the awesome NewsWhip.com.

How do you deal with information overload? Avoid news sites? Only read every second tweet? Stay offline and cower under the bedclothes?

Well cower no more. Today, we present our solution to information overload: the NewsWhip Daily. It’s a personalized, daily summary of the most socially important stories in any topic you like.

With a handy summary in your inbox, there’s no need to monitor the airwaves for that one story you might otherwise miss. All the most important stuff will be here.

How does it work?

Pick your areas of interest – choose from 8 countries and about 40 different topics, including tech, design, fashion, rugby, and whatever else takes your fancy.

NewsWhip then tracks all the topics you picked to see which stories in each make the biggest splash on Facebook and Twitter each day.  And just before lunchtime, it gathers the top 3 stories in each one and puts them together in a single gorgeous email summary. Plus, if you use Facebook to connect with it, we’ll add a sidebar with the news stories your friends have been sharing.

How do you get it?

Signing up takes under a minute – if you’re a speedy clicker, probably 30 seconds. Here’s the steps: (i) Connect with us through Facebook (or fill in your details), (ii) pick your topics and countries, and (iii) you’re done. You get your first email in minutes. You can kick it off here.

And hey presto, you’re now on top of the most socially important news in all your areas of interest. No need to drown in the data when the NewsWhip Daily makes it all so digestible (and tasty – it’s a pretty email).

We’ve added an advanced feature for real news hounds – you can get the “Daily” as often as every 3 hours if you like, and really stay on top of your field. If you check this option, it will pick the top 3 stories from the past 3 hours for your more frequent emails.

What’s special about the NewsWhip Daily?

There are a few social news products out there these days, mining your contacts for stories. NewsWhip Daily is quite different. We’re more interested in the entire social ecosystem, so we’re not so focused on your friends. It’s like putting one big social filter on all the news in a topic, and seeing what people judge as worthy of coming out on top.

We hope you enjoy.

Stay on top of the world of social news by following NewsWhip on Twitter or Facebook.

As you may have read today on Silicon Republic, we have a new feature on the sidebar of every NewsWhip page, a fantastic Infomous cloud showing the fastest spreading news topics right now.

The clouds work from our data to show the fastest spreading topics on Facebook and Twitter, and are built by Infomous, a company that has built the slick cloud-based information navigation platform you see above.

These clouds are not just pretty to look at, they also work as navigation tools for browsing the most socially important news. Click on a word and all the fastest spreading news stories associated with that word will appear in a dropdown menu. Click around to learn other ways to interact with the each cloud.

Plus there’s more than one cloud on NewsWhip.com: as you click into any of our topic categories – like entertainment, tech, or sports – you’ll get a special cloud for what’s trending in that topic. Here’s a cloud showing what’s trending right now in tech.

The clouds are made by American information navigation company Infomous, using NewsWhip data. We first got in touch with Infomous in December 2011, and we both quickly figured out we could do a lot together. NewsWhip data is a real time picture of the world’s news conversation, while Infomous have a fantastic interface for displaying and navigating that data. You can see the full size cloud on their site, here: infomous.com/newswhip. We’re looking forward to doing more work with them in the future.

To see the fastest spreading news, head over to newswhip.com.

Follow us on Twitter @newswhip

Sometime soon, we’ll be saying farewell to TV towers and printing presses. We live at the start of the era of digital distribution – all or nearly all of our media coming to us online. And more specifically, we’ve just entered the era of social distribution – where online social networks like Facebook and Twitter become a primary means of discovering news. Today, Facebook and Twitter will directly distribute more news to more people than any news company ever has in history.

News sharing and distribution is being re-engineered every day in Silicon Valley. Take for example the now-ubiquitous “like” or “tweet” buttons on news sites and blogs. Those buttons empower millions of editorial sharing decisions each day, and smooth the path for people to spread news to their friends. Those subtle little buttons have profoundly changed how we interact with news – every story is now a potential “share”. And we’re probably still in the social distribution stone age. Inevitably, many more innovations are ahead in sharing and commenting news to our social networks.

Social distribution gives “old media” companies yet another technology problem to contend with. Already these companies are dealing with the unbundling of their product and loss of ad revenue (property, classifieds, personals, etc.) by “new media” online companies. Now their own distribution is moving outside of their control, as links to each new story on CNN or the New York Times spread through Facebook and Twitter. The media companies can’t package up their own product any longer – they don’t define how their stories looks on Facebook, Facebook does. And to a large degree, they don’t decide which of their stories will be the “big” one each day – now, the crowd does. At the same time, news is becoming interactive, gamified, and some say it could become totally ubiquitous and without dominant platforms – “social, unregulated and all around you.”

With these big technology changes at play, will the big news and media companies – the New York and London of media – keep their grip on serving us our news? Or will news be unbundled and come in ways we can’t yet imagine?

Our bet is that New York’s big media companies – or their successors – will ride this one out just fine. Most quality newsrooms and big news brands will survive the new media disruption. Here’s why.

1. Content is still King

The internet, Facebook, Twitter – they’re just the new plumbing. Instead of picking up a newspaper or sitting down in front of your TV, now you get news digitally, often via your social network. And once you get to the content, you see ads, and the content creators get paid.

And no-one does content like big media companies with experienced reporters and editors. In the US, the news sites (excluding tech) that are winning at viral social distribution are ABC News, MSNBC, the New York Times, Fox News, ESPN, CBS, the Huffington Post, and the Washington Post. Similarly, in the UK, the establishment companies are performing excellently, with the Guardian, the BBC, and the Daily Mail all among the world’s top 10 most viral news sources. These guys just have the chops to produce the stories that people want to share. While every blog has its day (and some have become huge in the past 15 years), the expertise in the New York and London newsrooms is second to none.

The expression “content is king” was coined by media mogul Sumner Redstone, a former tax lawyer who took over his family business – a theater chain – but reckoned that content (movies) was becoming more important than distribution chains (theaters). He decided to get the family business out of movie distribution and into movie production, and eventually mastered the takeovers of Viacom (including MTV), CBS, and Paramount Pictures. Today, you can get content from those companies in dozens of ways, offline and offline. Redstone doesn’t care, as long as you get the content, and he somehow gets paid.

Today, news companies are producers of great content, and are – or should be – also becoming agnostic about channels. If news companies see themselves as independent of channels – as long as they somehow get paid – they can change quickly and embrace the new.

Of course, many Newspapers and TV and radio stations are still married to a form of distribution – be it print or a stream of broadcast. The newspapers and radio stations that have put an early emphasis on digital are now boasting above-standard digital footprints – and revenues.

2. We need trusted storytellers

While Twitter can “break” a news event – one person with 14 followers can be the first to publicly publish news of a death – we need storytellers to turn the scraps of information into a news story. Verify what happened, gather facts that aren’t already online, make sense of the event, and add context, meaning and narrative.

We already trust these storytellers, we know they have professional reputations that mean that they won’t publish unresearched facts or falsehoods. So we tune into them, instead of the random noise that many others generate on social networks.

New technologies can speed and improve this process of news gathering, but professionals with reputations still need to do it. And the best of those professionals continue to head to the creative clusters (and news companies) of cities like New York and London.

The best storytellers will be rewarded hugely in the “social” era because people are better judges of quality than computers. Each day on NewsWhip’s front page we see the results of the world’s collective editorial judgment. And the results are far more engaging than the educated guesses of computers. Already, Salon and Slate.com have found that deep, engaging news reporting (and investigation) can reap tremendous rewards as the resulting stories spread through online social networks and reach far greater audiences than they might otherwise.

3. The Old Media / New Media gap is closing anyway

Today, Reuters and the New York Times have social media editors. The New York Times, the Guardian, and the Washington Post all use in-house technologies to track Twitter and Facebook spread. The startup ecosystem in New York has produced some media-focused products, most notably Betaworks. And aggregators like Tumblr and Buzzfeed are now hiring journalists to produce content as well as curate.

As media companies adjust themselves to the new “plumbing” they’ll need developers and engineers to replace the guys who today run the ink and paper print plants. Engineers who help optimize stories for new platforms as these emerge. The fact that the pipes are now coming live from Palo Alto and San Francisco is important – we’ll see more engagement and cooperation between the tech and journalist communities in the future. But the pipes only give a route to consumers, they don’t define or control what’s moving through them. That’s up to users, and users are picking the quality output of top notch sources – and New York and London still do that better than anywhere else.

NewsWhip tracks how fast the world’s news is spreading through online social networks. See the fastest spreading news at NewsWhip.com.

For the latest on social distribution and news, follow us on Twitter @newswhip.

Dogpatch Dublin

Since January, NewsWhip – meaning me, Andrew, and our overworked computers – has been located at DogPatch Labs, on Barrow Street in Dublin. Before Dogpatch, we were in the NDRC Launchpad program, up near Guinness in the former building of MIT Medialab Europe.

Co-working spaces like Dogpatch just provide the desks, space, light and heat, and a few other perks – like connections, similar companies to work with, and if you’re lucky, food and beer.

Accelerators like Launchpad – or its well known American cousins Techstars and Y-Combinator – give you a work space for a few months, a chunk of money (in the region of €30k) toward your costs, and access to a load of mentors for fundraising, marketing, PR, and business planning. In return they take a small equity stake in your company.

Accelerators and co-working spaces have one major common feature, that I think is their most important: they’re big, open rooms filled with the right people: other startup teams, coders, designers, developers and business heads. If you’re a new startup company, you should be in a room like this. Why?

1. Sharing secrets, frustrations, ideas and leads

Other startups have the same problems as you: getting press attention, hosting, working with the Facebook API, dealing with investors, and interacting with all the agencies and helpers that populate startupland. You can and will help each other when you share information, pass on leads, talk about your good and bad experiences. For example, we’d never have found our fantastic new designer without our friend @claireburge. In our experience there’s a lot of trust and hardly any competition in an accelerator, even one with a pitching competition at its end.

2. Peer pressure (of the good kind)

Launchpad IV teams wishing Gene of Redeem&Get a happy birthday. Pic: Claire Burge

Having a peer group and seeing them work, pitch, build, and pivot is a great source of motivation. In a room alone, there’s more room for self doubt, and wondering what the hell you’re doing. In a room of startups, you bouy each other up – and keep each other grounded sometimes too.

3. Pulling your perfect little idea out of its secret box

In an accelerator environment, you’ll have to get used to explaining your idea and having it challenged. Which is a great thing. No-one’s going to steal your idea (or at least I’ve never heard of that), and if it’s based on some dumb assumptions, it’s better finding out sooner than later and pivoting into something that works. Or just getting onto something else. Failing early is so much better than failing later.

4. Friends & Mentors

We had a great time with our friends back at Launchpad (here’s a post we did on all the teams who were there the same time as us). Some others made the same migration as us from Launchpad to DogPatch – we still see @daxon‘s handsome mug every day, as well as the great Boxever team.

Accelerators give you mentoring for sharpening your business model (no-one gets it right first time), and draft in great speakers to either motivate you or tear up your business plan. Launchpad had Bill Liao of SOS Ventures, entrepreneur Barry O’Neill, Martin Curley of Intel, John McColgan of WorldIrish, and several other notables. The best of these will really stay with you.

5. They take a lot off your mind

Any accelerator or co-working space will give you space, an internet connection, and light and heat. When you’re a startup building a new product, you don’t want to have to worry about lease, big damage deposits, electricity bils, your internet service provider and other crap. I’ve been on the wrong side of this before, and having it taken care of for us by DogPatch is such a relief.

Dogpatch has free coffee, food, beer, and sometimes lunches. There’s pool and darts, and even a supply of Cadbury Freddos, everyone’s favorite camel filled chocolate frog. Launchpad has free talks, frequent free lunches, and tasty coffee. The savings from a free supply of coffee add up pretty quick (at least for an addict like me).

So: get a (shared) room.

Dublin has a few great accelerators right now, like Launchpad, Propeller, and Startup Boot Camp (which is next door to us on Barrow Street). Apply. If you don’t get in, ask why – at least then you’ll learn a bit about how you’re perceived. And preparing your application will help bring that perfect little idea of yours out into the big bad world.

If you know of any other co-working spaces you’d recommend round Dublin, please add it in the comments.

Follow @NewsWhip on Twitter

Startup people! See what’s trending right now in tech on our main site… NewsWhip.com/Tech

The US is monitoring what you post on Twitter and Facebook. So if you ever want to visit the States, be careful what you write.

Today, many companies are in the business of monitoring social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Marketers and brand managers gather data and run “sentiment analysis” to see how people are, say, feeling about Coca Cola today. At NewsWhip, we monitor Twitter and Facebook to spot the fastest spreading news stories.

Now the US Federal Government has launched its own social media monitoring strategy. And on Monday we saw some of the results of this strategy, as a pair of tourists were arrested in the US on terror charges over jokes they made on Twitter.

A quick recap: the Daily Mail reports that two tourists, Leigh Van Bryan (from Ireland), and Emily Banting (a Brit) were detained by armed guards last week in LA Airport just after clearing immigration. The duo were separated and interrogated for five hours, and Leigh was transported, in a cage (where he had a panic attack), to a cell, where he held overnight in a cell in the company of Mexican drug dealers. The duo were refused entry to the US and forced to buy new flights back to Europe.

Their offense? In the weeks before his trip, Leigh had joked about his upcoming trip to LA on Twitter, saying he would be “diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up!” (a reference to a Family Guy joke). He also asked a friend on Twitter if they were “free for a quick gossip/prep before I go to destroy America? x”

After his arrest Leigh and Emily tried to explain how both of the tweets were jokes. Going to “destroy” a place means you get drunk and careless there in British slang. Digging up Marilyn Monroe was a reference to a gag from Family Guy, an American TV show. The explanations were ignored as the duo were arrested, processed, and packed off to Europe.

So how did this happen? Here’s where it really gets interesting. And, well, scary.

Twitter as Big Brother?

First, how did the Department of Homeland Security (the DHS, the guys responsible for the border) find Leigh and Emily? It’s unlikely that either of these guys were on “watch lists” in advance of Leigh’s tweets. I mean, look at them. And the “documents” provided to Leigh after his arrest by the DHS officers mentions only his posts on “tweeter” as the cause for refusal of admission. Though it’s possible they had other reasons, none were mentioned by the DHS officers.

So assuming Leigh was not pre-identified before his fatal tweets, the DHS must have picked him out of the 250 million tweets published each day on Twitter, known in the industry as the “firehose”.

How is this accomplished? Well, automated processes – like search terms – will be at work, spotting phrases like “kill” “shoot” “destroy”, etc., when those words appear in tweets with words like America or the US.

This is the same process that brands monitor for things like “I hate Coca Cola” or “I love Coca Cola”. In Boolean search terms, the query will look like: (“hate” or “despise” or “disappoint!” or “love” or “like” or “yummy”) w/3 (“Coke” or “Cola” or “Coca”). This will spot various emotive words appearing close to Coca Cola keywords and give a fuzzy picture of how people feel about Coke today.

The DHS probably has something similar, with a huge range of word searches that someone decided should trigger security alerts, like attack, kill, destroy, etc. (You can probably think of more, but I don’t want to trigger alarm bells by stuffing them all into this post.) When those searches are triggered, then the process begins. Last week, that process culminated quite smoothly in Leigh and Emily’s arrest.

So it seems likely that all of Twitter (and probably Facebook) is being monitored for potential threats, and goodness knows what else. So if you’ve tweeted the word “ridiculous” or “Osama” or “destroy” within a few words of “America”, you might be on a watch list too.

Think you’re safe? If you’re a photographer, what if you’ve tweet that you’re planning to “shoot the Empire State Building”? Or if you’re hoping your product really takes off at a conference, what if you hope it “explodes”? What happens if you tweet that you hope the “US gets wiped out” in the Hockey finals? Or if Mastercard want to “attack” American’s Express’s dominance of the corporate cards market in New York?

Well tough luck. With any of those phrases you may have triggered the “deportation algorithm” – the unfortunate combination of words that makes you look vaguely like a threat to a computer in Arlington, Virgina, and may result in your eventual forced removal from the USA.

Unfortunately, the number of false positives a system like that could throw up is huge. Imagine how many potential terrorist suspects the DHS will discover if “Romney destroys Obama” in a debate? Will the resulting chatter be interpreted as millions of death threats?

You watch your mouth on a border, especially post 9/11. We know by now that border officers don’t do irony, sarcasm, etc. – which is fine, that’s their job and no one expects a mirthful time. But when everything you’ve ever said publicly on Twitter or Facebook can suddenly be raised, the border interview could become a lot more unpredictable. How do you feel about answering questions about everything you’ve ever said on Twitter, when the officer will fixate on the most inflammatory or dangerous interpretation of it? (Needless to say, there won’t be a judge present to hear your side.)

What’s the upshot of all this? If you are an “alien” (the US government term for non-US nationals) and if you ever intend on visiting America, it looks like you need to be very careful what you tweet in advance of the visit. Or share on Facebook. Or even write online. A joke, political comment, expression of disagreement with US foreign policy, or anything else might one day be interpreted as a threat and get you interrogated, caged, put in a cell, and effectively “deported” at your own expense.

But doesn’t the US have robust protection for freedom of expression? It does. But “aliens” don’t have constitutional rights against federal agencies like the DSH, so you can forget about those freedom of expression arguments bubbling up in your mind. The only way to stay out of trouble is to regard every public utterance on Twitter and Facebook as one that could be interpreted by DHS officers as a threat. For civil society and discourse, that really is a remarkable development, especially coming from the US, which regards itself as the world’s most powerful advocate for civil and political rights.

What happened to the Humans?

The DHS has a very sensitive detection social media detection algorithm. In a sense, that’s fine. The fact that the DHS has a system that triggers some sort of reaction when someone tweets the words “destroy America” is perfectly sensible. (Even if it is a bit much to assume anyone will tweet about that if they intend doing it.)

But how can that phrase trigger a bureaucratic process that results in people being caged and deported, without any possibility of common sense intervention once that algorithm is triggered? It seems that no decision-making human entered the process, other than to verify that Leigh had in fact written the tweet, and as a matter of pure syntax, it could be interpreted as a statement of intent. I once read a science fiction story set in a world like that, where computers decided who was guilty and innocent based on algorithmic probabilities and (mis)interpretations of statements. I never imagined such a system could actually be introduced in a modern democracy.

As a matter of national security, this doesn’t look good. Making people from other countries afraid of talking about (or even mentioning the word) America will not serve long term security objectives, or the US national interest. Hearts and minds won’t be won when you can’t even discuss your feelings about a place.

Plus, I wonder if DHS policy-makers have considered what happens if other countries start following the US lead. What would be the US reaction if its citizens are detained and deported all over the world for bad jokes, expressions, and political opinions they once expressed on Facebook?

The weird thing is that the story of Leigh and Emily is probably considered a success story for the social media monitors in the DHS. Threat detected. Threat neutralized. High fives.

Anyway, I’ve been careful as I typed this, hopefully careful enough to not get a detour to secondary screening next time I visit my friends in the States. In US First Amendment-speak, I’ve been feeling a “chiling effect.” I hope common sense prevails and the incident with Leigh and Emily is not a picture of our future. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to destroy a bag of Taytos.

To keep up with the world’s fastest spreading news (like the story discussed here), add NewsWhip.com to your daily reads.

Follow us on Twitter: @newswhip

Prison pic via.

Want to know the most buzzing, fastest spreading news stories about the US 2012 elections, literally right now?

Well, we’ve gone and built something that can tell you. NewsWhip Election 2012 works like the rest of NewsWhip – it tracks and ranks the news spreading fastest on social networks – but we’ve focused it on news stories about the US national elections: all the latest about your old pals Newt, Romney, Obama, and anyone else who gets involved.

Since we started testing this a few hours ago, we’ve learned about the lunar ambitions of Newt Gingrich, that the Mormon church baptism of dead Jews that could cause problems for Mitt Romney in Florida, and a testy exchange between President Obama and Jan Brewer in Arizona. It’s all such fun.

We love the theater of the Election 2012 bandwagon, and we’re looking forward to a nice, entertaining election season. The best stuff will get shared quickly, and so should appear quick on NewsWhip.com/Election 2012.

Here’s the link! Hope you enjoy it.

Follow NewsWhip on Twitter to keep tabs on developments: @newswhip

The “innovation island” plans to change its law to allow copyright litigators block access to sites they don’t like.

In December, the Irish Times reported that the Irish government was planning to stop “illegal downloading” through a new government order. With half the internet blacked out in protest against SOPA on Wednesday, it’s worth knowing that the self professed “Innovation Island” is about to publish its own law allowing music labels and other copyright holders to ban internet service providers from allowing their customers access to sites that (the copyright holders think) infringe their copyright. We’re about to get our own, local, Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA).

“Minister of State for Enterprise Seán Sherlock is to publish an order early in the new year that is expected to allow music publishers, film producers and other parties to go to court to prevent internet service providers from allowing their customers access to pirate websites.”

What does that mean?

First up, pirate websites doesn’t just mean Pirate Bay. Depending on how the Order is drafted, it will likely mean any site that, in the opinion of any company or copyright holder, has infringed its copyright. So it could potentially include Google Image Search, Facebook (image & text copying), LinkedIn (image and text copying) Youtube, Google News, Flipboard, and any site that aggregates, quotes, mixes up, or creates directories of content. Goodbye Tumblr, Delicio.us, and good luck to any startup that wants to point to, arrange, quote from, or otherwise interact with the content of the internet.

You can be closed down. Just like that. Poof.

Sound dramatic? It is. That’s why the anti-SOPA movement, including Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, Google and others, are so worked up about its US equivalent.

The copyright lobby is looking for this new legal weapon, and there’s no reason to expect that it will be used proportionately. Music labels already have a history of aggressive litigation in wringing everything they can from existing laws. Remember for a moment the last glorious 15 years of RIAA Granny-suing, the 12-year-olds in court, the million dollar judgments against people who didn’t know their kids were downloading. There’s no-one more aggressive than someone backed into a corner, and the essential “value add” (or reason for existence) of music labels – marketing and distribution of “records” – has been overtaken by technology. Musicians can record songs, release them online, achieve fame, and make money without any need to impress a record company. Today EMI & co. cling to copyright laws, and need new weapons in their legal arsenal to keep their revenues up.

The proposed changes in Irish laws would give these desperadoes, and other litigants, a nuclear threat to force the internet to rearrange itself in a way that suits them.

Imagine, for a moment, what the World Wide Web would look like if it was shaped to the will of the music companies and movie studios and old media giants. There’d probably be about 12 (very expensive) websites on the whole thing, streaming live Disney movies, X-Factor songs, and €16.99 uncopyable, single listen digital albums.

Of course, the big boys (like Youtube) will probably work out deals with the labels and copyright litigants. Those deals most likely will not suit you and I. Startups that can’t afford lawyers and are perceived as threats could be easily sued out of existence (quite literally, they would go dark), and we could all move back to the mid 90s.

On Wednesday, a substantial portion of the internet blacked itself out in protest at SOPA, and its passage looks increasingly doubtful. But Ireland is careening in the other direction.

Why has there been so little outcry about this potentially drastic change to the law in Ireland? Broadsheet.ie went dark as part of the international anti-SOPA protests, but the papers and RTE are quiet.

Part of this might be down to the one-sided reporting on the matter. In the Irish Times piece referred to above, the fact that music companies can’t force ISPs to block access to particular sites is referred to by the reporter as “a loophole in Irish law“. By that logic, the fact that the Irish Times can’t get an injunction to stop you sharing a newspaper is a “loophole.” So is your right to share your choc ice. Free internet access is not a “loophole.”

More recently, the Irish Music Rights Association (IMRA, our local RIAA) launched litigation to force the government to pass other laws it wants – basically a “3 Strikes” rule to take away the internet from copyright infringers. Needless to say, the only quotes in the piece were from IMRA chief Willie Kavanagh. He said the “3 Strikes” rule was “working incredibly well.” What does that mean? A lot of people are being booted off the internet and buying CDs?

As law lecturer TJ McIntyre said on his blog, it’s “disappointing to see a story uncritically repeat the claims of one side to litigation without offering either a response from the other side or an independent perspective.”

In its earlier piece, the Times adds that “Official figures show that CD sales in the Republic fell from €146 million in 2006 to €56 million last year.”

CD sales. That’s what it’s all about people! If EMI and IMRA have their way, our booming CD-based economy will rebound by Q3 2012.

We’ve been tracking the social spread of the world’s news sites since September here at NewsWhip. And we’re building a map of who’s winning at social distribution.

NewsWhip tracks about 60,000 newly published English language news stories each day, from about 5,000 sources. Depending on how many shares or tweets each one gets each hour, it moves “faster” or “slower” through the social web. We publish the results live as they happen at newswhip.com.

We looked at our aggregate data to see which sites we publishing the biggest quantity of viral stories. We reckoned we could define a story as “viral” if it gets at least 150 shares or tweets per hour, which would give it a NewsWhip score of 100 (more or less). We then picked a month (November 2011) to run our query for.

So here are the winners – the 25 sites that published the greatest number of viral stories (scores of 100 or more) in that month. These sites are the most viral news sources in the English language.

*Edit, Tuesday Jan 10: In the above table, we check news sources based on individual domains, and a commenter below pointed out that we could aggregate all scores for the MSN / MSNBC network to give it an overall score. We just did that, and found the msnbc network (encompassing about 40 sections including usnews.msnbc.msn.com and firstread.msnbc.msn.com) had 241 viral stories in November 2011, which would have put it in 8th place, ahead of Fox News.*

The Huffington Post produces a huge volume of socially-primed content, tailor made for tweets and sharing. Still, the fact that they’re so far ahead shows how much a new site with careful focus on its social spread can achieve these days. (Buzzfeed raised a pile of cash today, and has similar ambitions). Fascinating to see HuffPo followed up by three UK-based publications. The BBC is massive globally, and drives tremendous sharing activity not just in the UK, but also in all the English-language markets east of the UK – India, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, etc.

The Guardian and the Mail are also right up there. The UK’s national broadsheets are all competing vigorously for online eyeballs, and the competition seems to be bouying them all up. The Telegraph is also in the top 20.

Mashable comes in at number 5, not surprising given the social buzz that seems to surround every story published there. TechCrunch isn’t far behind, and tech blogs Engaget and Gizmodo are also in the top 15. Remarkable how many of this top 25 literally did not exist 10 years ago.

Two cautions about this information:

1. We don’t go behind paywalls to monitor paid sites, so you won’t see the New York Times, Financial Times, or Wall Street Journal on the list. We might change that policy in the future to make our data set more complete.

2. We are looking at aggregate information here – this is who’s most successful in quantity, not quality. If you’re a publication that posts only one or two stories a day, you won’t get enough aggregate sharing to get on this table, even if each of your stories gets major traction.

As news moves away from bundled, one-to-many distribution (newspapers, radio, TV) and into a distribution network that relies on sharing (Facebook, Twitter), social distribution will be critical for any new (or old) news site. We’ve started gathering even more granular information since January 1, 2012, so we’ll have some really good stuff to share soon.

Anyone surprised at the ranking? Or unsurprised, even?

To see which story is spreading fastest literally right now, head over to our homepage at newswhip.com.

Image via.

For more on what’s happening in social news, follow us on the Twitter – @newswhip

NewsWhip has some projects over the coming weeks, and we’re looking for a good web designer to help us out. It’s a couple of smaller things for now, but if we can find someone great we’d look forward to a rosy future working together.

If you’ve designed any great sites before and this sounds like something you could be excited about, please drop me a line with links to some past work: paul@newswhip.com. We’re based in Dublin so we have a bias towards finding someone here.

Work product will be PSD files – we do the cutting and building ourselves.

NewsWhip’s Paul Quigley gathered insights from some of the notable guests at the October 2011 Dublin Web Summit. Here’s entrepreneur and investor Bill Liao, who has a surprisingly philosophical approach to business. Our favorite quote: “Innovation is inversely proportional to formality”. Enjoy.

How did the conversation go at Guardian HQ, some 6 or 7 months ago?

The editor in chief clears his throat: “Let’s go over it again. Facebook want us to agree to this brave new world of auto-sharing. Readers who have connected will automatically reveal what they’re reading to their friends. Some of you guys are worried. What’s the problem?”

“There isn’t any,” pipes up Priscilla, head of digital wotzits. “We know that today, for every share or recommendation on Facebook brings us 2 more visitors. So when our readers start sharing stories automatically – auto magically – people will cram onto our site from Facebook in a virtuous circle.”

“Frictionless they call it,” says Johnny Hack, shaking his head. “And I’m not so sure about it. We’ll get traffic, but we’ll annoy our readers. They might uninstall the app so they can read in private, without their friends virtually staring over their shoulders. Being forced to read over their shoulders, almost.”

“Not at all. People don’t even know how to uninstall half the stuff in Facebook” says Priscilla. “Ever try and un-like something? Millennials will love the serendipity, and don’t care about privacy. Plus definitions of privacy are changing, yada yada.”

Just then a third voice cuts the room, that of old print curmudgeon, Bertha Ink. “I see a bigger danger here.”

“What now?” asks Priscilla, eyes rolling.

“Well, by putting ourselves inside Facebook, we’re making Facebook crucial to how people discover and read our stories. Sure we get an advantage now, coz it’s only us and maybe the Washington Post doing it. Loads of impressions and “likes” and whatnots. But what about when Facebook invite on every other publication on earth in? Then we all find ourselves stuck in Facebook, with far less control of our own … marketing … distribution, even our message. So sure, we win a few million impressions with a land grab when we’re first in, but what about when everyone else rushes into the party?”

“That’s just how the future will be,” says Priscilla. “Everything you do online will be broadcast to your friends.” A few editors exchanged worried glances.

At that moment, a flush faced Peter the Paper Boy ran into the room. “This just in!” he gushed. “The Washington Post have committed. They’re doing a Facebook app.”

The Editor in Chief smiled his trademark rueful smile. “Well that’s it. We’re not waiting this out. Our “Digital First” policy means we can’t sit back and miss out on all the potential Facebook engagement.” He shook his head to Bertha, who was making faces. “They’re a trustworthy bunch at Facebook, don’t worry.”