The twitter campaign #HelloTaravari started on june 19 around 4 PM. On june 22 at 1:10 PM I downloaded (probably) all 1142 tweets that contained the two hashtags used for communicating with the new minister for health of Macedonia: PërshëndetjeTaravari and #ЗдравоТаравари (Albanian and Macedonian language of the hashtag). Those are tweets from a period of around 72 hours.

If the retweets are removed then what remains is 294 original tweets using the hashtags. The volume of tweets (left) and retweets (right) can be seen below. The high volume of tweets and retweets occur in the morning and evening hours. However, it seems that the excitement from the first 36 hours dwindles in the second 36 hours of the chosen period.

This trend might mean that political marketing among Macedonian twitter users is short lived. It seems that even bad jokes aimed at the minister (example: "#HelloTaravari should I eat meat or cheese pie for breakfast?" - sent by @dRskata1 on June 22 at 10:37 AM) don't last more than 3 days. On June 22, just three days after the campaign started the number of original tweets using the hashtags is less then 5 per hour.

The three leading twitter users that use the hashtag to write original tweets are @evilblonddemon, @LOshGZE and @Carbonoxid with 28, 16 and 13 tweets respectively.

However, when the leading #HelloTaravari twitter users are compared to the leading tweeter users from the rankings done at Time.mk (T-index, Top by Reach и Top by Followers), there is only one tweeter account (@evilblonddemon) that is present among the most active / most popular 20 users both generally in Macedonia and using #HelloTaravari. This might be an indicator that political campaigns are not of special interest among those Macedonian twitter users that create the leading content on twitter.

The analysis of the distribution of occurrence of the hashtag since the beginning of the campaign shows that most of the active accounts show up once or twice, while only 25 twitter accounts have 10 or more tweets and retweets with the hashtag #HelloTaravari. The most active accounts have 40 to 60 tweets and retweets during the 72 hour period, ore one tweet every 1.2 -1.8 hours (72 - 108 minutes).

At the and, almost all of the collected 1142 tweets use the Macedonian hashtag. Beside the original ministry announcement tweet, a tweet with a link to a news outlet PortAlb, and a tweet asking if the hashtag is used, every other (seven) tweets are retweets of the ministry's announcement. This means that a total of nine tweets have used the Albanian hashtag in the first 72 hours of the campaign. This might be an indication of the number of twitter users in Macedonia that speak Albanian, as well as indication that the Ministry of health should choose a different channel to talk to with Albanian-speaking citizens instead of Twitter.

Originally published in Macedonian at Radio Free Europe: https://www.slobodnaevropa.mk/a/28576600.html

News of Internet surveillance finally reached the Macedonian mainstream media.

The news outlet 24Vesti reported twice (Македонија вклучена во американската шпионажа на интернетот, Груевски не знаел за договорот со кој Македонија е вклучена во шпионска афера) about the documents made available in Glen Greenwald's new book that show a list European partner countries (How Secret Partners Expand NSA’s Surveillance Dragnet).

The second report includes a statement form Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski saying that he is not familiar with the case, and he couldn't comment because he doesn't know the details.

Maybe this would be big news somewhere else, but it's difficult to expect a media storm in Macedonia which has seen declining media freedom rankings in the recent years with the latest Freedom of the Press report stating that: "Most private media outlets are tied to political or business interests that influence their content, and state-owned media tend to support government positions. The government of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and its media allies have shown growing hostility toward critical news outlets."

Questions about the use of NSA technology by the Macedonian government for the purpose of surveillance of Macedonian citizens remain to be answered, even though there might be no one to ask them.

Awesomeness transpired today in Izlet café where the photographs of the annual Twitter calendar (NSFW link) were displayed for the first time.

Following last year's breast cancer awareness calendar (NSFW link), this year the topic was moved to sex education and, very loosely and broadly, interior design.

Ivana Batev deserves all the credits for the hard work in making the photographs.

She tweeted: Whoever thinks that to undress in Macedonia is not revolutionary doesn't live in the same society as me and I envy them.

I agree with this and I think that this is the strongest statement we can send with the photographs today. Kudos for all the people who were audacious enough to undress before her.

Also, big thanks to HERA who provided sex education tips in 140 characters twitter format and to everyone who bought photographs. The money will be used to help marginalized communities in Macedonia.

And finally, a little bit of excitement for our 'interior design through the porn lens' blog IdeiZaDomot (NSFW link) as we will have some original content to add to the stream.

With a delay which is not unusual for Macedonia, the Macedonian PEN observed the Day of the Imprisoned Writer on December 3rd at the Faculty of Philology in Skopje.

The event welcomed speakers and poets. I had about 5 minutes to talk on the given topic: "Digital freedom and the writer". I spent my time talking about surveillance and the inability to read and write in privacy and anonymity with the usual computer system people use - making a case for free software and encryption. I hope that that was useful for the audience which I think was mostly with a non-technical background.

The full text [in Macedonian and probably in English] will be published on Diversity's site in the coming days. Update 21.12.2013: here is a link to the text [in Macedonian].

The preparations for the event took a lot of time and I'm glad to say it was time well spend. Working with Valentina Bozinovska on our rhetoric skills was useful. I got to see my text and speech evolving. Looking back on it I now think that 2-3 weeks of writing and practice are needed to be ready for speaking on events with strict time slots.

***

Two days later, on December 5th, I partnered with Damjan for yet another presentation / workshop [and received help from Ana]. The annual event organized by YEF [MOF] is called "Stanica Studentska" and is a forum for meetings and discussions among university and high-school students.

2s.mk had another presentation about 3D printing earlier the same day, and we talked about regulation on the Internet. I think we did a good job. We spent the least possible time to talk in general on the topic and then tried to engage everybody.

We had a group of about 20 people. I was standing at one end of the room representing total regulation, and Damjan was at the other end. We asked everybody to stand up and make a line positioning themselves according to their preferences for regulation. Then we asked them to explain why do they stand in a particular position and to move around if what they hear from the others influences their views in any way. Maybe, at some point it was chaotic, but it looked like fun most of the time.

The views of the people present were interesting. Almost everyone talked about regulation as something conducted by governments. Nobody really discussed the role of big Internet companies. I think that is something we need to work on in the future.

The saying goes that everything is late in the Balkans [and even more so in Macedonia]. It seems that in the 2013 municipal elections the Twitter revolution finally happened in [to] Macedonia.

In the past few years there were couple of politically driven, socially charged issues [protest against police brutality, protest against rising electricity and heating prices] that used Internet, social networks and technology in general. However none of them were significantly successful.

Now finally praise is coming from mainstream pundits, and acknowledgment and gratification are coming from the mayor-elect of Centar municipality in Skopje. Twitter has won!

That is, of course, if we overlook the ongoing and extensive debate regarding the role of social networks in social movements - something that according to researches is hard to measure. For more, there is always Evgeny Morozov's writing criticizing the usual naivety of 'Tweets were sent. Dictators were toppled.'