Clinton Urges Web Freedom January 22, 2010
Posted by khengze in Civic Media, Convergence, Essays, Journalism, News, Social Media, Trends, YouTube.Tags: censorship, China, Clinton, freedom, Google, human rights, Internet, net neutrality, Newseum
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Boo China, yay Web neutrality! Fasten your belts for the “next great global battle of ideas!” Depending on which side of the great firewall you’re on, the “iconic infrastructure of our age” will be the site for a cyber showdown.
And that’s to ensure that the Web remains “a tool of openness, opportunity, expression, and possibility rather than of one of control, surveillance, suppression.”
American State Secretary Hillary Clinton underlined that reality when she called for an unfettered Internet and delivered a tongue lashing to China in an impassioned policy speech at the Newseum journalism museum in Washington.
Read entire transcript of Clinton’s speech here. The virtual volleys have begun, with China slamming the speech as “information imperialism.” Read the rebuff on China’s foreign ministry Website here.
We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship.
We are providing funds to groups around the world to make sure that those tools get to the people who need them in local languages, and with the training they need to access the internet safely.
Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State
That America’s top diplomat champions “freedom to connect” as a basic human right is a huge stake, especially when the US State Department is funding the development of tools to help Web users circumvent government censorship online.
Poised to be the Web’s first diplomat, Hillary Clinton has jumped right into the fray of the Google vs China spat, calling Web curbs the modern equivalent of the Berlin Wall and warning of a new information curtain descending on the world.
It’s fascinating how Google’s corporate move has turned into an international incident. Web freedom has joined trade imbalances, currency values, human rights and Tibet among the quarrels straining ties between the world’s biggest and third-biggest economies.
Clinton’s call for global condemnation of those who conduct cyber attacks is an important opportunity to counter governments who want to censor and conduct surveillance on individuals. The challenge is how the State Department will walk the talk by incorporating Web freedom into diplomacy, trade policy, and meaningful pressure on companies to act responsibly.
The speech is a huge stake in net neutrality and its meaning cannot be overstated. The Web was born and nurtured in America, with input from other countries. Now a top US official and arguably the most prominent female political figure is seeking to shape the Web’s evolving ethos and guiding principles.
In parts of the Middle East, women are beaten and killed in “honor” beatings by relatives who find out they are using sites like Twitter and Facebook. China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are among countries that censor the Web or harass bloggers. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked in China.
Early in her primary campaign, Clinton was considered less Web-savvy than Barack Obama and online attack ad that spread on YouTube foreshadowed the narrative of her fight for the Democratic nomination, portraying Clinton as the old PC and Obama as the shiny new Mac.
The YouTube video, which mashes up Apple’s 1984 ad with Hillary Clinton’s own campaign imagery.
Clinton is now leading the way within the Obama administration in recognizing the transformational opportunities of the Internet. Speaking in broad strokes and finer details, she outlined what she called the five key freedoms of the Internet age: Freedom to connect online anywhere. Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Freedom from fear of cyber attacks.
Of course that didn’t sit well with the “What Internet censorship?” crowd on the other side of the planet. There’s an argument that the technical architecture of the Web is different from the values of people who use it. If parents can limit what teenagers can see, then governments can limit what citizens see. If citizens can circumvent governments, teenagers will be able to circumvent parents.
But we’re talking about a generation of citizens who have never typed the words “Falun Gong,” “Dalai Lama,” or “Tiananmen Square massacre” into their search engines. Information openness for them is just a crack in a dark room without electricity.
A Chinese flag flutters near the Google logo on top of Google’s China headquarters in Beijing.
The blowback against Google’s announcement that it was hacked by Chinese cyber agents – and in response would be lifting the restrictions that keep users of its Chinese search engine in the dark – has been fascinating. Clinton upped the ante by calling for global Internet freedom.
When Google threw down the gauntlet to China’s Web censors, it also challenged the loyalties of the nation’s wired generation. Tech-savvy Chinese in their 20s and 30s grew up in greater affluence and openness than their parents. Many are pulled between patriotic pride and a yearning for more say over their own lives.
The Google dispute may become a telling test of how China’s wired generation balance loyalties to their country with their desire for free expression and access to information, and this response could shape how Beijing handles the dispute.
The Obama administration has shown it wants to court this emerging generation of connected Chinese. China’s latest survey of Web use found 60 percent of the nation’s online population of 384 million was aged 10 to 29.
Despite censorship, China’s Internet can be a potent public forum, with bloggers and amorphous online groups hectoring the government over pollution and corruption. Last year, the government abruptly abandoned a plan to force all new personal computers to come with a copy of “Green Dam” Internet-filtering software that had been derided by online critics as intrusive and ineffective.
Related reads
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are Tools for Diplomacy.
China Slam’s Clinton’s Internet Speech as Information Imperialism
China rebuffs US Internet demands
Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC?
Tiger Woods as Web Fodder December 13, 2009
Posted by khengze in Journalism, News, Social Media, Web Video, YouTube.Tags: celebrity, golf, scandal, Tiger Woods
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By all accounts, the media frenzy around philandering golf star Tiger Woods is a scandal fueled by the Web. While old media has largely closed its eyes to the excesses of athletes, social media has pounced on Tiger, selling magazines along the way and raising traffic to Websites.
In the realm of celebrated athletes, Tiger stands out. He has evolved into a billion-dollar corporation with tournament victories, golf course design, and endorsement contracts. By using the media to develop a persona, the Tiger Woods brand made an estimated US$100m annually from sponsorship deals.
Now Tiger the disgraced husband is discovering media cuts both ways as his sexual antics fuel porn spoofs and make tabloid fodder. Netizens follow Tiger’s bedroom games with dread and delight. His personal Web site has turned into a kind of town hall meeting since he admitted to cheating on his wife and letting his family down.
TIGER GIRLS CHEAT SHEET
Woods underestimated the pervasive power of the celebrity media in exposing his double life and his pleas for privacy are unlikely to be honored in an era when scandal is big business for traditional media fishing the bottom lines.
In the wake of damning text and voice-mail messages that he allegedly sent to paramours, we now know Woods isn’t the upstanding family man the world once thought he was. From finger-wagging at his sexual indiscretions to support of his misdeeds, the scandal as elevated TigerWoods.com’s traffic.
It wasn’t long ago that the site was a benign place for Woods to exist in his corner of the Web. That recent past is still visible, in his blog posts, answers to “Dear Tiger” questions, photo galleries, golf tips, outtakes from commercial shoots, fitness advice, career statistics and a “Tiger vs. Jack” comparison.
Little detail seems to be known about the affair. While Woods admitted to “transgressions,” everything else, seemingly, is pure speculation. Woods needs to help himself by telling the story personally to clear the air instead of taking an “indefinite break” that has sent shudders through the golf industry.
The latest Web hit is a spoof of golf’s possible loss of sponsors and fans after Tiger’s “indefinite break.” from the game. Woods made golf cool. But with traditional golf media, his publicists could vet questions and restrict access to friendly sports journalists. Celebrity media is a nastier creature and Woods is discovering it cuts both ways.
Journalists used to be gatekeepers, checking tips, rumors and leads before they got to the public. But the Web and social media have blurred the lines and journalists cannot keep the gates up and unsubstantiated rumors wind up reported as fact.
The star has not publicly surfaced since the scandal broke. Perhaps appearing on a TV chat with media personalities like Oprah Winfrey or Diane Sawyer puts you in the glare of TV spotlights, which could show up the reported facial bruises…
His only comment so far was via a now infamous statement posted on his website on 2 December in which he apologised for his “transgressions” and “letting my family down”.
Until we hear it from the tiger’s mouth, the accepted narrative is that Woods’s wife, Elin, beat him when she learned of his infidelities, precipitating Woods’s car crash in the early-morning hours after Thanksgiving. That’s fodder for tabloid and mainstream media and certified as fact by a “Saturday Night Live” skit.
Website dailycomedy.com has collected hundreds of Tiger Woods jokes. An animated game that has gone viral called “Tiger Hunting” has Woods dodging obstacles in his SUV pursued by a golf-club wielding blond.
The Woods story follows a pattern of celebrity scandal coverage in recent years. As the deaths of Anna Nicole Smith and Michael Jackson illustrated, speculation, facts and gossip all become so conflated and widespread on the Web that the mainstream media can no longer ignore the rumors.
The mainstream media doesn’t want to be first on these stories. They’d prefer to let the supermarket press break these things, so they can remain at arm’s length.
Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism
The mis-reporting of the Woods story suggests that once the National Enquirer or TMZ serves up the raw details of the story, the mainstream media can’t always be relied on to separate fact from fiction.
Woods has won an injunction banning English media from publishing new details about his personal life, after instructing London-based lawyers to take legal action. The move prevents English media from information freely available in the US, prompting an outcry about the ability of foreign litigants to take advantage of repressive English laws.
Polanski Wiki Page in Edit War September 29, 2009
Posted by khengze in Civic Media, Convergence, Journalism, News, Social Media.add a comment
Roman Polanski is in the news these days more for his sex crime than for his artistic accomplishments. The Web is so abuzz with The Affaire Polanski that a Wikipedia page devoted to the filmmaker has been locked due to a tug-of-war between editors convinced it should stress his film career and those who think his sex crime should define his life.
Let me weigh in on the ruckus here first. I say, give the old man all the accolades he deserves for his art, but make him serve time for his crime. No artist however big-time, should be able to use his cash and connections to live a charmed life and enjoy immunity from transgressions for which the less accomplished (and the rest of us) would be condemned.
The 76-year-old Polish-French film maker was arrested on decades-old charges of having sex with an underaged girl after he flew in to Zurich to collect a lifetime achievement award. He left the US in 1978 before he could be sentenced and has not returned to the country since.
Wikipedia administrators blocked the filmmaker’s Wikipedia page from being changed after an ‘edit war’ broke out following the news of the arrest.
Polanski’s Wikipedia page has a note at the top alerting users, “This page is currently protected from editing until September 28, 2009 or until disputes have been resolved.” Increasing the protection level of an entry means that only Wikipedia administrators can make edits to the page.
Discussion on the free encyclopedia’s forum indicates that there was disagreement about whether Polanski’s sexual exploitation of a 13-year-old girl should be given more prominence than his professional achievements.
A Wikipedia editor wrote in a forum that the fact Polanski is a rapist ought to be the first thing the reader sees in the article. Another argued Polanski is notable for his films and without those accomplishments he would not make news.
One contributor said Wikipedia breached its commitment to neutrality by describing Polanski only as a “Polish-French film director, producer, writer and actor” in the entry, because “he’s just as well known as a child molester as he’s known as a writer.”
After one contributor deleted a reference to the initial charges, another tried to get them reinstated, writing: “I’m very concerned by the attempt to remove this information from the article. After all, this is what the whole case is about.”
In the past, WIkipedia has locked other controversial entries from being edited because of the disputes over their content. In May this year, members of the Church of Scientology were banned from editing articles about their church. Wikipedia has also been used by Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups to push their attempts to correct historical “errors.”
Wikipedia has acted to improve the accuracy of its articles in recent years, after criticism that its commitment to collaborative editing can produce unreliable and biased entries. It frequently increases the “protection” level of controversial entries of people involved in running news stories.
Google Plans Paid News Platform September 10, 2009
Posted by khengze in Advertising, Convergence, Journalism, News, Social Media, Trends.Tags: Google, micropayment
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Google is developing a payment platform for newspapers that would allow them to charge for content online, contending that the service will drive traffic to news websites.
Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab said Google had submitted a proposal to the Newspaper Association of America in response to a request made by the NAA to major technology companies. Download the document here.
The Web giant says micro payments will be a payment vehicle available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year. The idea is to allow viable payments of a cent to several dollars by aggregating purchases across merchants and over time.
To mitigate the risk of non-payment, Google proposes to assign credit limits based on past purchasing behavior and using its proprietary risk engines to track abuse or fraud. Revenue may be shared in a similar fashion to the iTunes App Store and Google’s own Android Market, both of which take a 30% cut of revenue.
We believe that content on the Internet can thrive supported by multiple business models – including content available only via subscription. ‘While we believe that advertising will likely remain the main source of revenue for most news content, a paid model can serve as an important source of additional revenue. Google
Given ‘the newspaper industry’s tenuous relationship with Google, the move is surprising. ‘Google’s popular news aggregator website Google News has drawn fire from some US newspaper publishers for linking to their articles without payment.
The micropayment system is likely to have bigger implications outside of the news industry. Other companies too are seeking to develop a payment platform for newspapers.
Journalism Online, a company launched in April which seeks to help news organizations make money on the Web, says it has more than 500 newspapers and magazines agreeing to join the venture as affiliates.
A payment platform would go online later this year to allow subscribers to access paid content at the websites of the affiliates using a universal Journalism Online account.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has held talks with The New York Times Co, Washington Post Co, Hearst Corp and Tribune Co, publisher of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, on forming a consortium that would charge for news online
Wikipedia Rolls Out Page Controls August 25, 2009
Posted by khengze in Civic Media, Convergence, Journalism, News, Social Media, Trends.add a comment
Wikipedia, the site which ostensibly allows anyone to make changes to almost any entry, will launch page controls. In a major revamp to how people contribute to some of its 3m pages, the online encyclopedia will now insist that any changes made to pages about living people and a number of organisations will have to be checked and given the go ahead by an editor.
This marks a major change for the site which is known for allowing anyone to add changes. The changes will be discussed in Buenos Aires this week at the annual Wikimania conference
The proposal was first outlined by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in January this year and will be rolled out in the coming weeks. It was met by a storm of protests from Wikipedia users who claimed the system had been poorly thought out or would create extra work.
The system has already been in operation on the German version of Wikipedia for more than a year. The two-month trial will be carried out on Wikipedia’s English-language site and means a new user or a user not known to the site will be unable to make any changes to entries without an editor checking the content first.
Whilst the changes are being mulled over, readers will be directed to earlier versions of the article. The system is “essentially a buffer, to reduce the visibility and impact of vandalism on these articles”.
There have been several high-profile edits to Wikipedia pages that have given false or misleading information about a person. In January this year the page of US Senator Robert Byrd falsely reported that he had died.
If a page has a number of controversial edits or is repeatedly vandalised, editors can lock a page, so that it cannot be edited by everyone. For example, following initial reports of the death of Michael Jackson, editors had to lock down two pages to stop speculation about what had caused his death.
The focus is on pages of living people because they have the highest probability of causing harm. The trial may also be extended to organizations.
Malaysia Mulls Web Controls August 7, 2009
Posted by khengze in Civic Media, Convergence, Journalism, News, Social Media, Trends.1 comment so far
Malaysia is seeking tough Internet laws to control bloggers and prevent them from spreading “disharmony, chaos, seditious material and lies” on their websites. The move would not be unlike what China and Iran did – blocking sites like Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Twitter when widespread use of social media networking tools to share information about politically explosive events was seen to threaten social order.
In a move described by the opposition as “horror of horrors,” Kuala Lumpur is mulling an Internet filter to block “undesirable” websites, on the grounds of maintaining racial harmony in the multicultural nation. A senior official of the National Security Council (NSC) said such a move is to “keep out pornographic materials and bloggers who inflame racial sentiments.”
Speaking on condition of anonymity to AFP, the official confirmed reports that the coalition government was considering imposing controls – effectively scrapping a 1996 guarantee that it would not censor the Internet. Any move to filter the Internet is against the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) Bill of Guarantees.
The Information, Communication and Culture Ministry is commissioning a study which is to be completed in December to filter blogs and websites. A tender is out for companies to help the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission evaluate an Internet filter. According to tender documents seen by The Malaysian Insider, the tenderer is:
• to evaluate the readiness and feasibility for the implementation of Internet filter at Internet gateway level, through assessments on the existing infrastructure and existing products in the market.
• to evaluate and estimate costs for the implementation.
• to study the existing legal framework in addressing content filtering and no censorship issue, including the impacts that are caused by the implementation to Internet users and the Malaysian economy.
The successful tenderer will visit Internet services providers (ISPs) in countries which have some form of Web filters to study the suitability for the Malaysian environment. Among the recommended countries are India, Pakistan, Australia and Hong Kong. It is not known whether these countries use filters or what they are filtering.
Malaysian news websites and blogs are well known for providing alternate views to mainstream news coverage. The vibrant blogosphere has been a thorn in the side of the Barisan Nasional government, which was been in power for more than half a century but was dealt its worst ever results in elections a year ago. Many in the Government have blamed the critical Web culture for Barisan’s losses, and there has been pressure from some quarters to muzzle the medium.
Critics are drawing parallels to China’s aborted ‘Green Dam: project, a plan to introduce Internet filtering software on 1 July on all new computers sold in the country. Beijing had said the Chinese-made Green Dam software would filter out pornography, protecting young people within the world’s largest online population. It backed down after widespread protests by Web users in and outside China.
An image from the official website of the Green Dam-Youth Escort project.
The Chinese software known as “Green Dam Youth Escort” filters image and keyword to block pornographic, violent and politically sensitive content and monitor behaviour. Critics fear it will be used to curb access to information and keep track of users.
Content filtering is outdated. Apart from being largely ineffective, most Web surfers can circumvent filters through proxy servers. If the intent is block unsavory sites, a better and more viable approach is to teach good Web surfing habits and educate the public on the consquences of spreading harmful content.
Related read:
Beat the Web Censorship Phenomenon
China’s Green Dam-Youth Escort net filter draws fire
Video Way to Go, Here to Stay July 11, 2009
Posted by khengze in Civic Media, News, Social Media, Trends, Web Video, YouTube.2 comments
Online video is unstoppable and breaking barriers between TV and the Web. 14.3 billion videos were watched online in Dec 2008 in the United States alone, according to ComScore. Google is by far the most popular destination for video, with a 43 percent share of the US market in January.
Video is here not just to stay, but moving images have become a commodity on the Web, especially for news sites. Video exhibits classic long-tail distribution. While YouTube remains dominant, video is rapidly moving from destination sites to the rest of the web, with millions of sites streaming video as the new mode of communication.
The conversation is shifting from the technological to the value aspects: not how to build a player or convert between formats but, how to foster audience engagement and monetize on these billions of streams.
The bottom line is, if you are a publisher, a developer, a creative shop, a content owner or a media company, should you join the open source video bandwagon, and start driving more value today? Open source proponents say it is the key to creating a robust, innovative new online video market, rather than influence an old market.
Lots is happening around open source video today. Open-source video companies and project have banded together to form the Open Video Alliance to show that open source can not only innovate, but also surpass proprietary software and standards in innovation. Members include Kaltura, a pioneer in the area of open source video, Participatory Culture Foundation (creators of the popular Miro software), Wikipedia, the Mozilla Foundation, and 20 other organizations.
The OVA is centered on raising awareness and developing standards that promote open source video and coordinate members’ activities. Other initiatives in the market include Akamai’s as well as several other open source video player and transcoder projects.
Open-source video lets individual developers focus on their respective core competencies, while customers get lower costs and reduced lock-in. It may be a viable, free-market alternative to how the monopolistic media industry has traditionally formed: one big vendor corners the market, and the rest of us spend decades trying to get out of its grip.
For anyone who is part of the video universe, the key question that remains open is what drives value in this brave new world. How can publishers, advertisers, and technology enablers make money in a world in which delivery is commoditized, display opportunities are abundant (driving CPMs for video advertising down), and audiences expect to get everything for free? The short answer, I believe, is to focus on innovation–of formats, user experiences, content, or delivery.
And here is where open-source video enters the picture: It is a development methodology and distribution strategy that allows each company in the ecosystem to focus on what it does best, instead of replicating the efforts of others. Open-source video…is being adopted at every level of the ecosystem by industry leaders such as Akamai, Mozilla, and Wikipedia.
Its premise is simple: Video is too important of a medium to be controlled by a single player. By espousing the principles of openness at all levels, including formats, technology, and content, and by collaborating in the development process, video can enjoy the force multipliers that we have seen in other areas of open-source software. The result is a better user experience, a reduction in the total cost of ownership, and a focus on innovative value-driven results.
Dr Shay David
Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Kaltura, an open-source video company.
On a related note, the BBC Two has launched a collaborative documentary series, Digital Revolution, which uses open source to produce the content.
We don’t want this to be one medium reflecting on another from a safe distance. We want to bridge the gap. So we have decided to adopt a radical, open-source approach to the production process. We don’t just want to observe bloggers from on high; we want to blog ourselves and get feedback and comment on our ideas.
Russell Barnes
Series Producer, Digital Revolution
Watch Tim Berners-Lee’s keynote speech at the launch of Digital Revolution, an open and collaborative BBC documentary on the way the web is changing our lives.
The concept of a [TV] channel is going to be obsolete on the internet – it’s not relevant…
When you use the Internet it is important that the medium should not be set up with constraints. The Internet should be like a blank piece of paper. Just as governments and companies cannot police what people write or draw on that sheet of paper so they should not be restricted from putting the web to their own uses. The canvas should be blank. While governments do need some powers to police unacceptable uses of the web; limits should be placed on these powers.
Tim Berners-Lee
Inventer of the World Wide Web
Related Reads
Open Video Conference in New York
The Promise of Open Source Video
Moving images a commodity for news sites
YouTube Helps You Report the News July 10, 2009
Posted by khengze in News.add a comment
YouTube has launched a video journalism project called the YouTube Reporters’ Center, a collection of videos from journalists around the industry providing advice for aspiring citizen journalists. You’ll find pieces from media veterans such as Katie Couric, Bob Woodward and Arianna Huffington, among others.
The Reporters’ Center is a new resource to help you learn more about how to report the news. It features veteran journalists and news organizations sharing instructional videos with tips and advice for better reporting. If you have experiences on reporting the news yourself and would like to share your tips, this is the site to submit them for webcast.
Pop and Protests Stopped the Web July 1, 2009
Posted by khengze in Civic Media, Convergence, Journalism, Social Media, Trends, Web Video, YouTube.add a comment
The deaths of a pop legend and a faceless woman consumed and stopped the Web this week. Michael Jackson and Neda Agha-Soltan had little in common in life but their deaths in Los Angeles and Tehran once again show the emotional and political power of the nature of social media.
Both events became emblematic of the flow and character of modern many-to-many communication. The day Michael Jackson died on 25 June, many of us discovered the news on TV because all the social media networks on the Web were out of service or were too slow.
Fans of Jackson went to the Web to find instant news about the death of the pop culture legend and to seek collective commiseration in their virtual grieve. On the day of his death, interest in Jackson was so high that many Websites with the most popular Jackson pages experienced outages and slowdowns.
After the celebrity gossip site TMZ.com first reported that Michael Jackson had died the afternoon of 25 June, activity all over the Web increased to near-record levels. Twitter received 5,000 Jackson-related messages per minute during its peak – noticeably slowing its service. The Los Angeles Times Web site received more than 2.3 million page views in one hour, causing several outages there.
Accompanying comments from bloggers mostly expressed shock at the singer’s death and offered moving accounts of his influence.
In Iran, an online video becomes the galvanizing moment in Iran’s troubled election, declared by some outlets as a “Twitter revolution.” The image of “Neda” has become a symbol of the Iranian protest movement after an amateur video of her death spread rapidly through Youtube and other emerging media.
While reports about her death conflict, images of Agha-Soltan’s last moments symbolized for many, the cruelty of the Iranian government in response to the protests. The graphic video imagery galvanized people as the Iranian government began to drive protests underground, forcing coverage to recede.
A graphic video of Agha-Soltan’s death was the most viewed news video of the week on YouTube.
Yet even the iconic video was not enough to sustain the coverage. By the middle of the week, Iran started to lose steam as a story as the protests grew smaller and the story of political turmoil grew more complex than simply protests in the street.
Related reads
Deaths of Michael Jackson and “Neda” Grip the Blogosphere
Digital Games as New Journalism June 26, 2009
Posted by khengze in Civic Media, Convergence, Journalism, News, Singapore, Social Media, Trends, YouTube.1 comment so far
The first wired generation raised in the virtual realm is coming of age and recreating the world in their image. In a galaxy not too far away, digital natives are deserting traditional sources of information for an emerging journalism of interactive multimedia experiences informed by the timeless dynamics of story.
Such an approach envisions new narrative forms as sophisticated play to engage a tribe of gamers who demand stimulating complex systems. Through their ability to renew age-old modes of cultural expression, games can be adjuncts to topical issues, providing fresh experiences to spur community interactions.
Educators and traditional media approach the medium of games with fear. Where do games belong in J schools?
I spoke about these issues at the Computer Games, Multimedia and Allied Technology 08 Conference in Singapore. My talk, Playing For Real: Re-Imagining Journalistic Narratives in a Game Environment, presented ideas on augmenting play with media narratives to connect audiences to current events and issues.
I shared best practices to re-imagine a knowledge aesthetic that provides core journalistic services built around a community of media producers, visual storytellers, information designers, narrative architects and game developers.
At the Games for Change Festival in Manhattan, Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof evangelized the idea that online games could teach people the news.
In his keynote to about 400 humanitarians, journalists, academics and game designers, Kristof said people can use games as an entry point, make an emotional connection, learn a little about the complexities and truly become engaged in an issue.
In fact, he’s developing a free online-social-networking game to go with his new book due out in September. Authored with wife, Sheryl WuDunn, the book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is a serious work about the oppression of third-world women.
Kristof explained how an MTV game had opened his eyes to the true power of that online messaging format as a reporting tool. Watch the keynote below:
It’s entirely possible to do journalism without the end product necessarily being a 20-inch story in a newspaper or a three-minute piece on the nightly news.The evolution towards allowing the reporting of facts and the investigation of circumstances, which is at the core of what journalists do, to exist in other forms is I think a necessary wrestling with the new medium.
Joshua Benton, Director of Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard
What is there to celebrate and fear when a young medium and old media converge on new media to reach a post-MTV audience? What happens when information is retooled as enthralling cinematic experiences that tap the emotion and intellect through the interplay of narrative, performance and play? What are the consequences of this fundamental shift in media creation and use? These are questions to be explored in the idea of games as journalistic narratives .
Related posts:
Could Online Games Save the News?
Newsgame, or Editorial Game?
History of Editorial Games, Part One
Where do games belong in Journalism schools?
Documentary Games & the Life and Dead of the Saga Song
Political Games Archives
Playing For Real: Re-Imagining Journalistic Narratives in a Game Environment.
The Darfur Case – Youtube video
Charting the Digital Revolution
Twitterers Defy Tiananmen Ban June 4, 2009
Posted by khengze in Civic Media, Journalism, News, Social Media, Trends, Web Video, YouTube.Tags: China, Tiananmen, Twitter
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Twitterers proved that there are ways to get round the great firewall of China on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen killings. Authorities in China had blocked social networking sites like Twitter and Flickr in an attempt to stop online discussion on the subject.
The Tiananmen anniversary is one of the hottest Twitter topics by users in China. Those too young to have personal memories of 1989 forwarded link to articles in foreign media or simply re-tweeted other people’s posts.
The wide reach of sites like Facebook, which remains accessible, are providing curious students with information they were previously denied. Fans of Tank Man – the man who stood in front of the tanks in the iconic photograph of the protests – were free to remember those who took part and victims of the crackdown.
China bans discussion of the events in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989, when troops quelled weeks of protest by students and workers. Beijing has never released a death toll on what it calls the “4 June incident.” Hundreds are believed to have died in and around the square.
In the anonymity of the online world, Web-savvy youths use mirror sites and proxy servers to explore alternative versions of the official history and to discuss their government’s clumsy efforts at censorship. With YouTube and several blog-hosting websites permanently blocked, advice on how to access Twitter via a proxy, VPN (virtual private network) or Hotspot shield spread around quickly.
Links to photos of policemen blocking the lenses of foreign journalists with their umbrellas was a popular tweet. Many tweets on unrelated topics carried the subject Tiananmen. People typed Tiananmen on every post so the topic is within the 10 most popular on Twitter.
Related posts:
How the Chinese reported Tiananmen
China Blocks Twitter, Flickr, Others as Tiananmen Anniversary Looms
Tiananmen killings: Was the media right?
BBC audio slideshow: Tiananmen Square
Google Wave as Reporting Tool June 1, 2009
Posted by khengze in Civic Media, Convergence, Journalism, News, Social Media, Trends, Web Video, YouTube.add a comment
Search engine giant Google last week unveiled a revolutionary open source project that could change how reporters and the public communicate and share information.
Google’s biggest product launch in recent memory has generated lots of buzz. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client.
The open source technology promises to let newsrooms take better advantage of real-time reporting tools that offer the public and editors functionality to work together on breaking news as it happens. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.
A combination of conversation and document, a “wave” enables people to communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. These “waves” offer a new experience of real-time collaboration, sharing, conversation and editing between multiple parties.
Essentially a real-time communication platform, Google Wave was the brainchild of a Sydney-based team, brothers Jens and Lars Rasmussen who were involved in Google Maps previously. Google Wave was announced at the Google I/O 2009 conference in San Francisco. Watch the demo video below.
In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.
Google says the product is expected to be available later this year. It is inviting developers to “add all kinds of cool stuff” before its public launch. News organizations can apply to get free access to the Wave developer’s sandbox and technology to start testing and modifying it for their own custom projects.
To make sense of it all, this guide provides an overview of Google Wave, key information, definitions, and links related to the launch.
Harnessing the Web to Fight H1N1 May 8, 2009
Posted by khengze in Convergence, Journalism, News, Social Media, Trends.Tags: disease, H1N1, surveillance, swine flu, WHO
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The Web is becoming a key source of information on emerging diseases and has become integral to public health surveillance. Internet-based systems have become a critical medium for clinicians, public health practitioners, and the public seeking health information. Data about diseases and outbreaks are disseminated not only through online announcements by government agencies but also through informal channels, ranging from press reports to blogs to chat rooms to analyses of Web searches.
These sources provide a view of global health that is fundamentally different from that yielded by the disease reporting of the traditional public health infrastructure. In the past 15 years, Web systems using informal electronic information have been credited with reducing the time to recognition of an outbreak, preventing governments from suppressing outbreak information, and facilitating public health responses to outbreaks and emerging diseases.
Web-based sources frequently contain data not captured through traditional government communication channels. This makes the Web useful to public health agencies, including the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network of the World Health Organization which relies on such sources for daily surveillance activities.
Early efforts in this area were made by the International Society for Infectious Diseases’ Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases, or ProMED-mail, which uses the Web to disseminate information on outbreaks by e-mailing and posting case reports, including many gleaned from readers, along with expert commentary. The Public Health Agency of Canada and WHO created the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), whose software retrieves relevant articles from news aggregators, using extensive search queries.
ProMED and GPHIN played critical roles in informing public health officials of the outbreak of SARS in Guangdong, China, as early as November 2002, by identifying informal reports on the Web through news media and chat-room discussions.
News aggregators and visualization tools have spawned a new generation of disease-surveillance “mashups” that can mine, categorize, filter, and visualize online intelligence about epidemics in real time. For instance, HealthMap is a public health intelligence system that uses data from disparate sources to produce a global view of ongoing infectious disease threats.
Similar systems include MediSys, Argus, EpiSPIDER, BioCaster, and the Wildlife Disease Information Node. Automated analysis of online video materials and radio broadcasts will soon provide additional sources for early detection. Blogs, mailing lists, RSS feeds, and mapping technology allows individual experts to create an important global resource.
For instance, Declan Butler of Nature took data from various sources to track the spread of H5N1 avian influenza on a Google Earth interface. Claudinne Roe of National Intelligence produces Avian Influenza Daily Digest and blog, a collection of unclassified information about H5N1 influenza.
Although news media are important to the public health infrastructure, the information they report pales in comparison to the potential collective intelligence that can be garnered from the public. The Web is also providing new opportunities for connecting experts who identify and report outbreaks.
Wikis, social networks, and Web portals can facilitate communication to quickly disseminate reports of infectious diseases and aid in mobilizing a response. Some scientific societies are leveraging technologies for distributed data exchange, analysis, and visualization. For instance, the International Society of Travel Medicine has created the GeoSentinel project, which brings together travel and tropical-medicine clinics in an electronic network for surveillance of travel-related illnesses.
Social-networking sites for clinicians, patients, and the general public hold potential for harnessing the collective wisdom of the masses for disease detection. Eventually, mobile-phone technology, enabled by global positioning systems and coupled with short-message-service messaging and Twitter might also come into play.
Information overload, false reports, lack of specificity of signals, and sensitivity to external forces such as media interest may limit the realization of their potential for public health practice and clinical decision making. Though promising, new Web technologies require careful evaluation and it is health care professionals and the public who will best determine how to use this channel for surveillance, prevention, and control of emerging diseases.
World Press Freedom Day May 3, 2009
Posted by khengze in Civic Media, Convergence, Journalism, News, Social Media, Trends, Web Video.add a comment
World Press Freedom Day today reminds us that censorship is another force muffling voices throughout the world. Booming online cultures in many Asian and Middle Eastern nations have led to aggressive government repression.
Reflecting the rising influence of Web reporting and commentary, more online journalists are jailed worldwide today than those working in any other medium. In 2008, the Committee to Protect Journalists found, bloggers and other online journalists were the single largest professional group in prison, overtaking print and broadcast journalists for the first time.
The CPJ has released a special report on the 10 Worst Countries to be a Blogger. CPJ considers bloggers whose work is reportorial or fact-based commentary to be journalists and its report calls attention to online repression, an emerging threat to press freedom worldwide. Burma leads the dishonor roll.
In Turkmenistan (above) soldiers guard an Internet café.
The fight against censorship doesn’t just take place once a year. Emerging media technologies are creating a new model of empowering communities affected by abuses to document their own stories and advocate for change.
Check out the Freedom House “Freedom on the Net: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media.” The World Association of Newspapers has launched WorldPressFreedomDay.org as a clearing house of related information.
Online censorship frequently takes place when netizens attempt to discuss issues related to human rights. This is one of the reasons that human rights organizations in Europe and North America have historically spoken on behalf of communities affected by human rights abuses.
The old model of advocacy campaigns speak on behalf of communities. The downside of this strategy has been that communities around the world have been depicted in traditional and emerging media by employees of human rights organizations rather than actual residents of the community.
The Web is linking scholars, activists and journalists dedicated to the study of public and participatory journalism. The best practices will be showcased on the Web at these events:
The Soul of the New Machine conference will present case studies of Ceasefire Liberia, Drop-In Center, HiperBarrio, and El Nula Por La Pazas as examples of such capacity-building programs.
Other speakers will examine the roles of mapping, photography, data collection, animation, corporations, video, and social networks as they all relate to human rights documentation and advocacy. Remote viewing hubs have been set up in New York City, Bogotá, and Medellín.
The New York City gathering will highlight Foko Madagascar, and its experience using technology to protect human rights in Madagascar. Fora.tv will broadcast the entire conference live and for free on Monday and Tuesday.
A community of anti-censorship activists at Global Voices Advocacy document the latest developments related to censorship, create guides to protect anonymity and enable circumvention, and advocate for free speech every day.
Upcoming workshops on citizen journalism workshops will take place in Moscow on May 21 and 22 and in Bangalore on May 9.
Do Pulitzer Prizes Have A Future? April 16, 2009
Posted by khengze in Civic Media, Convergence, Journalism, News, Reviews, Social Media, Trends.1 comment so far
It is said that when you win a Pulitzer Prize, you enter an aristocracy of excellence. The joke is that when you win a Pulitzer Prize, the first line of your obituary has been written. Now that newspapers are kaput (well, almost) will journalism’s highest honors need an epitaph? 
The winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes will be announced at Columbia University in New York on Monday. Almost a century after the prizes were founded, print journalism is in turmoil as papers struggle to stay afloat.
Now even the prizes are changing as the world of media evolves. Originally, there were no prizes for poetry and photography. Since 1999, the prizes have expanded its scope to include online material, which now cover all categories in all forms.
You could submit online material on newspaper Web sites. Interactive graphics to videos could be submitted in all the categories with the exception of photography, a category still restricted to still images.
2007 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography by Oded Balilty of AP. Image shows a Jewish settler challenging Israeli security officers during clashes as authorities cleared a West Bank settlement.
This year, the Pulitzers are expanded further to cover online-only news organizations that publish regularly, that are primarily devoted to original news reporting and continuing coverage of events.
Despite evolving with the media landscape, currently there are no prizes awarded specifically for multimedia content. The Pulitzer Board is encouraging entrants to blend online components with text components, which is really where journalism is today.
It’s this hybrid of text and images and graphics. I think that’s one of the strengths of the Pulitzer Prizes for journalism right now. They reflect the nature of journalism today. Other competitions have separate silos: They put the print material in one silo, and they put the online material in another silo. I don’t think that’s the way journalism is evolving.
Sig Gissler, Administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes
While broadening the competition, the Board stressed that all entered material – should come from United States news organizations that are “primarily dedicated to original news reporting and that “adhere to the highest journalistic principles.”
And do J schools get it? Journalism and digital skills must be taught in a more integrated way to give a better sense of the impact that the Web has on what a journalist does. Journalists today need a better understanding of how when they write for the Web, or produce for the Web, it changes the way they go about conceptualizing a story.
The problem with the media industry today is not the journalism. In fact, the more media change, the better the journalism. The problem is generating revenue to support the journalism as the industry goes through a transition.
A lot of what you needed to know to be a journalist five or 10 years ago was taught in the context of the traditional newsroom. There were lots of editors, there were lots of people with institutional knowledge and that kind of thing. What you need now is all that plus the new skills that readers expect, and the truth is that a lot of newsrooms aren’t well-equipped to teach you that.
Bill Grueskin, Dean of Academic Affairs, Columbia Journalism School
