Blogger Launches E-Book Venture February 8, 2012
Posted by Joanne KY Teoh in Journalism, News, Trends.Tags: content, e-books, Publishing
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Indie e-bookstores may be the next big thing. Lifehacker editor Jason Chen has left Gawker Media to launch an e-bookstore of his own, StoryBundle. He joins former Gawker editor Emily Gould and GigaOm’s Michael Wolf who launched their own e-book ventures in recent months.
Chen believes “making things easy to buy, easy to get and easy to consume will be the key to StoryBundle’s success. He will sell bundles of DRM-free e-books under a pay-what-you-want plan, with the average price of a bundle around $5 in most cases.
Chen is modeling StoryBundle after “Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Rdio, Steam and indie game bundles” — particularly Humble Bundle for games—that “deliver content without having a bunch of physical stores get in the way.” He is “publishing in all genres” and plans “themed bundles of different genres down the line.”
StoryBundle is most unorthodox in the way it charges for content and the way it pays authors. First of all, readers pay what they want for a bundle of e-books. Not only do they decide how much they want to pay, they decide which percentage of that payment they want to go actually go to the authors.
That payment is split among all the authors in the bundle. They designate the remaining percentage of their payment “to charity and to keep the site running.” Readers can choose to give 100 percent of their payment to the authors.
Reuters TV Launches On YouTube January 17, 2012
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YouTube has boosted its premium channel lineup with a Reuters TV partnership. Adding a hard news channel is part of the push by YouTube to create new original content destinations. Reuters TV will offer programs devoted to news and analysis, and will cover breaking events, finance, politics, technology, and special investigations.
Reuters has chosen an editing style for its online videos that looks more at home on the Web and should appeal to younger viewers. It carefully avoids mimicking the look of traditional TV news. Channel videos will also be used on Reuters.com.
This deal with YouTube gives Reuters a way to showcase our collection of talented journalists and compelling video from around the world. It will offer unique insights and images that other media companies simply can’t match.
Dan Colarusso, Global Head, Programming at Reuters
Reuters TV will offer 10 original shows that should bring plenty of exclusive video and attention to YouTube. The shows developed by TV news veteran and Reuters global executive producer Barclay Palmer, will feature highly produced reports and commentary from many of Reuters nearly 3,000 journalists around the world. They include:
Reuters Investigates, featuring investigative journalism and special reports from around the world, in coordination with Reuters award-winning Enterprise unit.
The Trail, with Reuters political reporters covering the presidential candidates on the campaign trail.
Felix TV, with Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon, named by Time magazine one of the top 25 financial bloggers.
Media Bite, featuring Peter Lauria, editor of technology, media and telecommunications, and his team of reporters covering a media world experiencing massive change.
Tech Tonic, with Anthony De Rosa, Reuters Digital’s social media editor, dubbed by The New York Times “the undisputed king of Tumblr.”
Freeland File, with Reuters Digital editor Chrystia Freeland interviewing top news-makers.
Fast Forward, hosted by Chrystia Freeland and featuring Reuters’ top commentators and journalistsMoney Clip, with Lauren Young, personal finance editor and former editor at BusinessWeek and SmartMoney.
Rough Cuts, with Jen Rogers, showcasing the remarkable news video that Reuters video journalists shoot around the world, allowing viewers to see and hear that video in greater depth than most television networks can offer.
Decoder, explaining in succinct and surprising ways the key topics in the news, ranging from the debt ceiling to the Strait of Hormuz.
Reuters TV is the biggest news channel among the push by YouTube to create new content channels. Having Reuters among its lineup shows the leading video site is more than just a destination for quick entertainment.
The Reuters website gets over 40 million unique visitors each month. It is the biggest news provider among the nearly 100 partners YouTube is working with as it creates original Web-based programming and reinvents itself as a channel-based video site. YouTube counts 800 million users, collectively watching 3 billion hours of online video each month. That’s 30 minutes for every human on earth.
Also recently launched is the Young Hollywood Network, a YouTube channel that focuses on exclusive sit-down interviews with buzzed-about young celebrities. Other original content channel partnerships include Madonna’s DanceOn, World Wrestling Entertainment’s Fan Nation, and exclusive bits from the Onion News Network.
Presenting the keynote for the CES Entertainment Matters program, which highlights the convergence of entertainment and technology, YouTube VP of global content Robert Kyncl looked back at how YouTube has changed the industry.
From a world with four television channels in the 1970s, viewers now have nearly endless viewing options on TV and online. This is all possible because a closed system is now opening up. The rise of mobile devices has spread the growth of YouTube, as has social network sharing.
Webs@Work 2011 In Review January 1, 2012
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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 30,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 11 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
The Evolution of The Web November 18, 2011
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Web technologies have evolved to give developers the ability to create new generations of useful and immersive online experiences. Today’s Web is a result of the ongoing efforts of an open cyber community that helps define technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and WebGL and ensure that they’re supported in all browsers.
Web design has come a long way since the first site was published by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. Early sites were entirely text-based, with minimal images and no real layout to speak of other than headings and paragraphs.
The Evolution of the Web presents an animated info graphic that delves deep into the evolution of technologies that made the Internet, which is still in its infant stages. This timeline shows the reign of major web browsers (remember Netscape?) and the advent of key Internet technologies. The timeline was produced by the Google Chrome team in celebration of the third birthday of their browser.
There’s a subtle marketing spin that has all of the lines converging behind the Google Chrome logo in 2008 and then exploding into the future. And the HTML5 line seems to imply that it will take over the Internet in 2012.
Google Adwords for Video October 3, 2011
Posted by Joanne KY Teoh in News, Reviews, Trends, Web Video, YouTube.Tags: Advertising, Google Adwords, Web video
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The long-awaited Google AdWords for Video is finally here, in beta. Billed as a service that “combines the science of online advertising with the emotional engagement of video” Adwords brings Google’s auction-style advertising to the world of online video.
It’s something that the video community has been expecting ever since Google purchased YouTube in October, 2006. With AdWords for Video, advertisers pay only when their video is viewed; since viewers have to choose to watch the video, that ensures an interested audience.
The system offers four types of placement: In-stream (including pre-, mid-, and post-roll, with an opt-out option after five seconds), in-search (in the viewers’ search results), in-display (showing against similar content), and in-slate (the viewer chooses which ad to view while watching longer-form content). Video ads can show on YouTube or the Google Display Network.
AdWords for Video offers targeting options, so that advertisers can select the group they want to reach. They can target based on demographics, interests, and keywords. They can also choose to display an overlay ad on top of their video, giving more information or prompting an action. The advertising system ties in with Google’s existing analytics tools, so advertisers can monitor performance and make changes, if needed.
Google is offering a simple five-step setup guide for new customers. The steps include linking to an account, creating a campaign, creating an ad, creating a group to target, and then measuring the campaign’s performance. Go here for a ste by step guide to get started or watch Google’s video below:
How The Web Can Change Education July 18, 2011
Posted by Joanne KY Teoh in Essays, News, Reviews, Trends.Tags: e-learning, Education, eG8, Lessig, Murdoch
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by Joanne KY Teoh
The Web has freed people from the “tyranny of time and distance” and is now poised to create a culture for learning innovation, expanding classroom walls to bring the best learning resources for kids of the world.
No surprise Rupert Murdoch of News Corp has been enthusing about the commercial potential of eLearning, using the e-G8 Forum “The Internet: Accelerating Growth” in Paris to talk up the Web’s power to transform education in his presentation.
Of course, Murdoch lauds commercial educational initiatives and products while ignoring Open Access resources like MIT OpenCourseWare, and many others. While one should beware ruthless tycoons peddling their wares, the point is that even Murdoch sees the future of education, and his words are accurate in many respects.
If schools today have not changed much, and the classroom is still defined by a teacher with a book and a blackboard, what should change? Computers aren’t enough. Software that engage students are also critical. If possible, equip students with tablets to let them become more interactive in their learning.
Digital technology allows for personalized or individualized learning. Students can work at their own pace with online tutors and videos featuring, for example, master teachers from anywhere in the world to monitor each student’s performance.
What does it look like when the Web positively impacts the daily practice of a learning community through communication and collaboration? Some schools have shifted their thinking to transform best practices, utilize project-based learning activities, and implement school communication initiatives that involve blogging, wikis, and social networking tools.
Education and creativity expert, Sir Ken Robinson also criticized outdated schools in his classical 2008 A Change of Paradigms lecture at the Royal Society of Art. But he addressed technology from the viewpoint of its effect on cognition and culture, and how educational politics should take this into account. Certainly a more fruitful and far-sighted approach than Murdoch’s promotion of exclusively commercial tech solutions.
Animation: Changing Education Paradigms by Sir Ken Robinson
While Murdoch advocates for less government in education as a software seller, Lawrence Lessig advocates socially ethical “less government.” Below is a video of his e-G8 keynote which focuses on his slides.
We should say to modern democratic government, you need to beware of incumbents bearing policy fixes. Because their job, the job of the incumbents, is not the same as your job, the job of the public policy maker.
Their job is profit for them. Your job is the public good. And it is completely fair, for us to say, that until this addiction is solved, we should insist on minimalism in what government does.
The kind of minimalism Jeff Jarvis spoke off when he spoke of “do no harm”. An Internet that embraces principles of open and free access, a neutral network to guarantee this open access, to protect the outsider.
But here is the one thing we know about this meeting, and its relationship to the future of the internet. The future of the internet is not Twitter, it is not Facebook, it is not Google, it is not even Rupert Murdoch.
The future of the internet is not here. It wasn’t invited, it does not even know how to be invited, because it doesn’t yet focus on policies and fora like this. The least we can do is to preserve the architecture of this network that protects this future that is not here.
Lawrence Lessig, Professor, Harvard Law School
Keynote – e-G8 from lessig on Vimeo.
Reads
e-G8 – Rupert Murdoch: Education Is the Last Digital Holdout
Hypervisualization in a Screen Culture June 26, 2011
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This is an interesting resource about the use of data visualization as a seductive material in the advertising business.
Mobilizing for Web Policy Activism June 2, 2011
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Major international decisions are being made about the Internet in the coming weeks – decisions that could affect the Web as we know it forever. Last week, tens of thousands of Web users successfully petitioned the G8 summit in Deauville, France to keep its hands off the Internet.
The show stoppers were activists of Access Now. This global movement is premised on the belief that political participation in the 21st century is increasingly dependent on access to the Web and other forms of technology. Determined to represent the interests of the non-invited, Access Now, staged an ad-hoc counter-forum civil society press conference where a petition, signed by citizen-users from over 100 countries, was presented.
Although it was the first time the Web and its determinant role in the global economy was explicitly discussed, the invitee list highlighted the flawed approach to the forum. Sure, industry and innovation digerati, from Schmidt to Murdoch to Zuckerberg, were at the Tuileries gardens to discuss Internet governance. But the real future of the Web – civil society bloggers and citizen-users – was not invited.
In fact, as Lawrence Lessig noted, this group does not even know how to be invited. Lessig, one of the few civil voices officially invited to this landmark occasion, called on participants to preserve its open architecture, explaining that the most groundbreaking innovations – Google, icq, skype, kazaa, youtube, and so on – were borne by kids, drop-outs and non-Americans.
Giving primacy to corporate interests, forcing intermediaries to police their customers, filter speech, fight terrorism, protect children online and punish copyright infringers is not the ‘future of the internet’. In fact, this approach risks destroying its innovating, democratizing and participatory characteristics.
Access Now
The final G8 communiqué committed to broadening quality access to ICT, recognizing that Internet access is vital to the flourishing of human rights in the 21st century and ensuring the protection of individual privacy online. But almost completely absent from the document was any commitment to uphold principles of net neutrality or the dangers of censorship by ISPs and governments.
This week Access Now steps up again! The United Nations Human Rights Council will receive its first ever official report on freedom of expression online – and this is one report to support. How UN members respond will determine how, and if, countries commit to protecting the rights of their citizens on the Web. And it is one step further toward access to the internet being properly recognised as a fundamental right.
Related read: World Rallies to Save the Internet from G8
Online News: Information Feast or Famine? April 27, 2011
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Does the abundance of information on the Web make it possible to have a healthy media diet? Or are we just snacking on the news equivalent of junk food, and starved of the kind of information needed to be informed citizens?
How important is the element of mass in mass media, when the Web makes it possible for many more people to set the political agenda? In a world where Wikileaks can set the whole world talking, niche news sites collectively have clout, and may help fill a vacuum in public affairs reporting and agenda setting.
Research into changes in the nature of news supply and demand shows that people consider public affairs news anxiety-provoking, requiring a lot of cognitive effort, and pay attention to serious topics primarily during momentous times, after which they return to their normal news diet, rarely clicking on or tuning into stories journalists consider headlines.
As a result, news publishers in all media, in an increasingly competitive environment, feel pressure to cater to consumer demand. The growing tension in newsrooms between the logic of the profession and the market threatens to reduce public affairs coverage in many broad-based, traditional publications, leaving serious news to “niche sites.” This may lead to a “deepening of information inequality.”
Two panelists, Pablo Boczkowski and Joshua Benton debate the issue at a recent lecture at MIT, and differ on the basic questions.
Pablo Boczkowski and Joshua Benton at MIT Communications Forum from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.
Presenting at MIT7 in Cambridge April 5, 2011
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by Joanne KY Teoh

I’m headed to Boston to speak at the Media in Transition 7 Conference, to be held May 13-15, 2011 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA. Here’s the abstract for a paper I’ll be presenting.
Spectacles of the Screen:
Video Sites as Alternative Forms of CitizenshipThe arrival of the all-video culture has been so quick and quiet that the implications of what a screen culture may mean are just becoming part of the business, political and intellectual conversation. The need to easily and quickly create and publish all kinds of video to all of today’s online touch points for a 360-degree view of urgent social issues has spawned new forms of journalism and community engagement in Asia.
Video is now everywhere – a Web experience, a mobile experience, as well as an IPTV, cable and satellite experience. As audiences move online, the very nature of online channels is changing. Gone are the days of the static one-way Web site. Today’s Web is interactive, participatory and video rich. It is about community, and building a two-way conversation that requires new types of video content that is both professionally produced and also citizen-generated.
As we enter the age of “all video all the time,” what do these new technologies and cultural advances mean? How are participants, spectators and sense-makers empowered by spectacles of the screen to build capacity and spur collective problem solving? This presentation showcases news coverage at ground zero of the Asian tsunami (2004), cyclone Nargis (2008) Sichuan earthquake (2009) and post independent Timor Leste (2009) to reveal how oral cultures in under-represented Asian communities in crisis are being transformed by grassroots video advocacy.
Anonymous in Tactical Protest Shift January 15, 2011
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Online protest group “Anonymous” have called for a global day of action on 15 January in defence of freedom of expression and attempts to close down Wikileaks, an amorphous organization based in Sweden that publishes anonymous leaks of sensitive documents from governments and other organizations, while preserving the anonymity of their sources.
The self-styled Web freedom fighters have in recent months staged some of the most stunning and audacious cyber-attacks yet seen on key corporate Web infrastructure, gaining notoriety for targeting Websites of companies it deems anti-Wikileaks.
A new video published to their central communications blog Anonops Communications calls for a series of offline protests:
The internet needs champions and we will rise…We are Anonymous and so are you. Stand up and fight. Every city, everywhere.
Anonymous
Details of the actual protests are hard to find because of the anonymous and loose-knit nature of the group, but the call for a real world protest signals a tactical change from the group’s distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDOS.)
In the DDOS carried out in support of Wikileaks, Anonymous members bombarded target websites with huge amounts of data in a bid to knock them offline. The targets were companies that had cut ties with whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.
DDoS attacks are more akin to sit-in protests than cyberterrorism. While a real-world protest is a change in tactics for “Anonymous,” it’s not unfounded for the group, which has no real individual leadership save but for the prevalence of ideas that gain popularity online.
The US Department of Homeland Security has mentioned “Anonymous” among a list of groups they believed could fuel a “resurgence in radicalization.” However, an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development report dismisses the risk of cyber war as over-hyped.
The OECD study says a vast majority of hi-tech attacks described as acts of cyber war do not deserve the name. Unlike pandemics and financial instability, trouble caused by cyber attacks is likely to be localised and short-lived.
Attempts to quantify potential damage that hi-tech attacks could cause and develop appropriate responses are hampered by the hyperbolic language used to describe these incidents. Under the heading of cyber weapons the report included viruses, worms, trojans, distributed-denial-of-service using botnets and unauthorised access to computers ie hacking.
Related read
Anonymous names Saturday a global day of protest to defend free speech
Anonymous urges global protests
Webs@Work 2010 in Review January 1, 2011
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The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.
Crunchy numbers
The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 19,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 4 fully loaded ships.
In 2010, there were 28 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 261 posts. There were 26 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 6mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.
The busiest day of the year was December 8th with 218 views. The most popular post that day was Wikileaks: Web Censorship Won’t Work.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were search.conduit.com, singaporedaily.net, en.search.wordpress.com, bshistorian.wordpress.com, and bigextracash.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for reykjavik, wikileaks, map of the internet, tigers girls, and singapore political blogs.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Wikileaks: Web Censorship Won’t Work February 2008
5 comments
Top 10 YouTube Tips and Tricks October 2007
11 comments
Top 20 Singapore Political Blogs July 2007
1 comment
Tiger Woods as Web Fodder December 2009
2 comments
An Offshore Journalism Haven? February 2010
2 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,








