Why I think Iran's goings-on is changing everything.

Note: If you're looking for information on the woman, it's simple: she responded and she's in a relationship, and I'm going to refrain from any more of these types of postings. As my friend said, one of us blogging about this subject is enough, yes?

So, Iran has been a hotbed of turmoil over the last 24 hours. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameni, decided it was a good idea to declare that if anyone protested today, they would be forcibly stopped and arrested. There have been reports of just about everything going on- water cannons, tear gas, beatings, fires, bullets, and even reports of acid dropped from helicopters used on the crowds in an effort to shut them down. All of this has been going on, and we'd never know if it wasn't for web 2.0. Did anyone ever expect that it would completely undermine a regime like it has?

The main two vehicles for the spread of news has been twitter and youtube. The protesters post videos showing the violence against them on youtube. They then use twitter to point people to the protests. Western journalists have been banned from entering Iran, so standard mainstream media techniques can't be used. Almost all footage of these events (and if you go looking, some of it is really bloody) has been uploaded via cell phone cameras and home video cameras, giving us eyes on this situation. I've been stunned all day knowing that web 2.0 has actually trumped both the Iranian government and the mainstream Western media (I'm including everybody here, because I'm sure the BBC, Sky News, and other european news entities have also been blocked). Update: there was a BBC correspondent there, but he's been expelled.

If something major happens, this will be the defining moment for web 2.0. Most of us view it as an addictive waste of time as we view each other's profiles, watch what everyone else is doing, setting up dates and events, and making random comments about other stuff. The way it is being used in Iran could change everything. It creates a blueprint that if accessed by other countries, could revolutionize revolutions, as strange as that sounds. This would work wonders in places people never see, like some of the internal strife in China (even though it's open, it's highly censored) or in North Korea. I would love to see this taken to North Korea, a country known as an information black hole. I have to applaud Twitter for delaying on a server upgrade to help people spread the word in Iran. That takes a lot of guts adn a lot of foresight, and they deserve a huge hand for that. We can only hope now that real change happens, and that the true nature of Iranian human rights abuses forces the world to act in a way it never has before.