 So, Herdick Web is part of a suite of tools we're developing to make surfing the web a less metaphorically autistic experience so that you can actually start to get a sense of what's going on and why when it turns out you can't get somewhere. And depending on where you happen to live in the world, this may turn out to be a phenomenon. It happens an awful lot. So we're starting at the Berkman Center homepage here in our web browser. In this case we're using Firefox, although the Herdick toolbar plugin works in both IE and Firefox with others to follow. And you see what it gives you up in the corner here is a little sheep. And the sheep turns color depending on whether the site that you're visiting has been reported by others as inaccessible. So in this case our own homepage has had three reports apparently which we could investigate if we wanted, but so it's not just all about us, we're going to go to amnesty.org and we're going to spell it right. And once we get there the sheep turns yellow which indicates that nobody in the US has reported it inaccessible but it has been reported inaccessible three times somewhere else. And you can make a report yourself if you like or learn more about it so that you can see what's going on. And here you can see since we started Herdick just a few weeks ago around the world we've gotten three reports of inaccessibility and 90 that say that no they can get there just fine. And we look to it as reports come from the Philippines with nobody saying they can get there and one from Saudi Arabia so the data is still a little bit thin and there's a chart showing the reports as they've come in over time. We can actually ask to test this site ourselves and what we see as it tries to load it is that surprise surprise we can get there just fine. Along the left is data that will be sent back to the Herd if we choose to report what we see in this case we can say we're coming from school and I suppose the category is closest to the politics. I'm going to be reworking those categories soon. Any comments that you might want to have and then you can say okay it's inaccessible. You can see other people's comments here as well in the bottom left corner. So I click accessible it thanks us for the report and then we can get into a queue basically inspired by the website am I hot or not where you get to look at people's pictures and say what you think here it will load in a bunch of sites that have been reported elsewhere as inaccessible in this case China digital times and then we say well can you see it and as you can see we can see it just fine so we say accessible and then it presents us with the next one here's a live journal URL that apparently is filtered somewhere in the world in fact we know that it is works fine for us so we'll say accessible and we'll see one site after another as it tries to load it. It turns out to have a kind of hypnotic quality going from one site to another in the reporter and it can be quite fascinating to see the sites that others are saying they can't get to even if you are as is the case here we're not only in the United States which tends not to have a technical program of filtering like some other states but we're connecting from Harvard University which has no filtering on its network either so we're likely to be able to see pretty much everything and the sites that we won't see will be sites that are down because the site themselves are down and herding should pick that up too we define inaccessible as meaning any site or any bit of information that you can't get to at all online and it might be because the government is trying to stop you from getting there it might also be because the website itself is down or unavailable which would be reported through this tool or it might be because the website is being selective about whom it will let view it YouTube for example has been known to take certain videos and on an individual basis look at that we just want a prize well that is all too accessible so we're going to the next one YouTube has been known with the state of Thailand to take videos on YouTube that might be insulting to the Thai king make them accessible worldwide but inaccessible if YouTube thinks that you're coming from Thailand and that's the kind of thing that hurt it would pick up as people make reports from Thailand and elsewhere one way or the other so that's basically the idea behind the reporter when YouTube itself was blocked by China just a few weeks ago we're at the moment in early 2009 herdict was able to pick that up and show people's reports as they came in so when we look at YouTube comm there's a graph of reports from everywhere if we zoom in on China which is where most of the action has been we can see a prior block a few weeks ago and then boom here's where there's a real spike in reports and then this gets down to the ISP level you can see who can't get there and who can and I think truncated because we may have asked to enlarge this web thing indeed there we are you can see some quite heated comments along the right as people are saying that they can't get there and perhaps providing a little bit more data so we're hoping that herdict web will become a kind of to borrow a term ill-used by Bill Gates digital nervous system for the internet something so that when something isn't working you can come here take a look add your own two cents and together what is easily accessible to us individually whether we can get somewhere or whether we can get to the information we want we can now collectively benefit from and come to an insight about blocking as it happens so here's hopes that you'll give it a try either generally if you've got nothing else to do instead of pulling out Minesweeper or Solitaire why not pull up the herdict reporter and start to learn about other sites that are blocked you might download the toolbar which you can get at herdict.org or you might be prepared as the time comes we're gonna have versions of this next in Arabic and in Chinese we're looking for help in porting it to other languages and eventually we'll have a screensaver so that your computer can be kind of like city at home telling you how it's crunching numbers it will tell you whether there are aliens around we'll have a screensaver that can check out sites and you can get kind of a view of sites as they're reported your computer can be with your permission making some reports in to the rest of the herd about what it can find not even needing intervention by you so thanks again for tuning in we welcome your comments you can visit us again at herdict.org