Webs@Work

In the end, it took a national tragedy of horrific proportions for a country with a history of contempt for free speech online to loosen its grip - but only a bit, and perhaps in a mere flirtation with unfettered information gathering.

The Web and mainstream media are abuzz with news and commentary of Monday’s earthquake in China. Amid the outpouring of grief and anger, a one-party state long wary of citizens’ access to sensitive information is letting a lot more reporting out, and with uncommon candor.

To be sure, scenes of devastation and suffering are staple media fare in the coverage of catastrophes. I’ve seen my share in the wires and feeds from international news organizations such as Reuters, AP, IPTV, APTN.

But the news of this quake disseminated by journalists and witnesses in China is remarkable because images and information are being let out uncensored from a country long suspicious of citizens and foreigners conspiring to undermine the state.

Thanks to lessons of the past, China’s media is living up to global standards for once - and about time. Lest we think this is a defining moment, remember that the men in Beijing are trying to balance hardline impulses with a nimbler grip on information as they limber for the Olympics.

This country with a history of covering up natural calamities and bungling responses is set to stage the Olympics in the full glare of international media. A media with third-world repute is trying to live up to first-world expectations. In experimenting with a new openness, a recent law requires public officials to provide information to the news media during natural disasters.

China knows the world is watching its behavior in a humanitarian crisis. Certainly it wants to avert the international scorn that the junta in Myanmar earned for their xenophobic response to the cyclone in Irrawaddy Delta.

As they say, if you can’t beat them, join them. Certainly, you can’t keep the digital arena sterile when a disaster of such magnitude hits home. You can’t muzzle netizens when you lead the world for mobile phone and Internet users.

You can’t dam the flood of searing images from being uploaded to the Web with mobile phones and digital cameras wielded by tens of millions of citizens. You can’t silence the blogs, the chatter and the Twitter on the Web. You can’t cover up. You can’t hide.

The Great Firewall that has kept the Chinese digital realm sanitized cracked this week, yielding to the murderous temblor that united the country in grief and mourning. Chinese mainstream media have found greater freedoms to show graphic images of devastation without the sanitizing that censors demand. Foreign media are getting unrestricted access.

Images of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao directing disaster relief officials and comforting survivors dominate the airwaves. This openness appears to be paying off. Websites and chatrooms are full of praise for the rescue response.

Witnesses to the devastation have been flooding the Web with homemade videos, filling chat rooms and Twittering tidbits of information from their mobile phones at a furious pace. Popular video-sharing site, tudou.com, now has about 1000 clips related to the quake, including appeals to locate relatives.

With uncharacteristic vigor, party organ Xinhua News Agency has stepped up to plate, offering a stream of updates on the rescue operation. Here’s a roundup of other compelling quake-related acts of journalism from China and elsewhere on the Web:

Global Voices Online: Roundup of blogging and local nonprofessional reporting on the quake.

QQ.com: Chinese video-sharing service has a special page aggregating contributed videos.

Yupoo: Gallery of earthquake photos from a major Chinese photo-sharing site.

CNN iReport: Aggregator page of all contributed content posted about the quake.

NowPublic: All submissions tagged “earthquake” on this citizen reporting site.

Shanghaiist: “Metroblogging” site offers several quake-related stories.

Flickr: All photos on this photo-sharing site tagged “China” and “earthquake.”

Tweet Scan: What the Twitterati is talking regarding the China quake.

Related read:
Chinese Internet Censorship

The first wired generation raised in the virtual realm is coming of age and recreating the world in their image. Digital natives are deserting traditional sources of information for an emerging journalism of interactive multimedia experiences informed by the timeless dynamics of story.

This was the theme of my talk this week at a conference in Singapore on computer games and multimedia. I spoke about how news organizations are experimenting with storytelling in virtual worlds and the need to re-imagine journalism in a game environment.

Serious games and their potential for interactive, player-directed storytelling are great at illustrating complex situations. The concept is not far-fetched. Journalists must re-imagine story narratives and experiment with computer simulations to help digital natives learn about news events and trends.

Such an approach envisions new narrative forms as sophisticated play to engage a tribe of gamers who demand stimulating complex systems. The medium of games has matured along with the digital natives who grew up with it. In a galaxy not too far away, this generation will be learning about politics - not by reading or watching the news - but by playing games with peers in virtual worlds.

For example, news on the Olympic Torch and the shadows that dog it can be created as a game that immerses people in the real world, full of real-time political crises. Players create avatars modeled on characters such as the Dalai Lama and politicians caught in the fray. The route to Beijing offers rich scenarios for the virtual reconstruction of real cityscapes.

In his keynote, David Wortley of the Serious Games Institute in UK shared a glimpse of the future of serious play. The movement has serious brain power behind it. Advocates and nonprofit groups have joined forces to search for new ways to reach young people, while tech-savvy academics are keen to explore video games’ education potential.

Serious games are already being developed to help players learn about health, social, political and economic issues. The United Nations has released Food Force, a game that helps people understand the difficulties of dispensing aid to war zones.

A newspaper or other local news organization needs to be more than just a pipeline for informing people about current news and events.

PAUL GRABOWICZ University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

News games are more than voyeuristic mindless fun. They can be a medium for change. At Carnegie Mellon University, a game on the Middle East conflict is being developed. In the game Peacemaker, players assume the role of either the Israeli prime minister or the Palestinian president.

The idea of games for journalistic storytelling is in the skunkworks. The New York Times has published a game to help readers understand immigration legislation that was up for debate.

News media can use games to provide context for young people to understand their community and its history. Journalism professor Paul Grabowicz says video games let people re-live the history of their communities and understand not just what’s happening today but what came before.

Funded by a Knight News Challenge grant, Grabowicz and his students are developing Remembering 7th Street, a virtual reality game that replicates an Oakland street known for its jazz and blues club scene in the ’40s and ’50s.

Educators and traditional media approach games with fear. There is much to celebrate and little to fear when a young medium and old media converge on new media to reach a post-MTV audience. When information is retooled as enthralling experiences that tap the emotion and intellect through the interplay of narrative, performance and play, the consequences of this fundamental shift in media creation and use are profound and promising.

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. Augmenting play with media narratives can connect audiences to current events and issues.

We need 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.

Serious Games sites:
Water Cooler Games
Social Impact Games
Games for Change
Impact Games

Related Read:
Why Journalists Should Develop Video Games
Using Video Games to Tell the News

It’s been four days since Mas Selamat Kastari answered nature’s call and put Singapore in the global spotlight. The city’s most wanted man, and now ubiquitous poster boy, gave his guards the slip during a toilet break in a top security detention facility on the island. Accused of plotting to crash a plane into Changi Airport in 2001, Mas Selamat was never charged in court. At the time of his escape, he was being held under an internal security law that allows for detention without trial.

The circumstances surrounding the prison break in a city-state that touts itself tops in everything - from being a terror target to policing and ministerial pay - are as incredulous as the escape is audacious. It’s been 86 hours. Tens of thousands of police and security personnel are still looking for this middle-aged Singaporean national with a limp.

3.9 million mobile subscribers in the city will receive a photo of Mas Selamat via multimedia messaging from Singapore’s three main telecommunications companies. Singtel, the country’s biggest telco, will also send the fugitive’s photograph and a physical description to Internet subscribers.

There is no official word on how Mas Selamat breached one of the tightest security apparatus in the world. MSM has not raised the tough questions which are being asked on the Web with increasing derision. Mas Selamat’s face in possible guises are beginning to appear on blogs and portals. As much as the case is grist for conspiracy theorists, The Great Singapore Escape is becoming fodder for Photoshop artists and mash-ups. Here’s a sampling of the fare:

Possible Guises of Mas Selamat from NEW PAPER

Possible Guises of Mas Selamat from TALKINGCOCK.COM

Spoof: Mas Selamat Kastari - Confession of a Terrorist

Apology: DPM Wong Kan Seng Informs Parliament

Related Reads:
Interpol Global Red Alert
Comments by Deputy Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng on 2 March 2008 at the Visit to the Special Operation Command
MHA Press Release: Escape Of JI Detainee Mas Selamat From Detention

The Great Escape
Was Mas Selamat Kastari Assisted in His Escape? And By Whom?
Questions That Wong Kan Seng Must Answer
My Theory of the Great Escape of Mas Selamat

Farewell Netscape, thanks for the surfing memories. You started it all for me in the early days of the Web. Though your graphical user interface is a relic in my memory, you were the Web for me back in 1994.

In a few hours time, the icon that gave people their first experience of the Web will no longer be around. Owner AOL will no longer support Netscape Navigator from 1 March 2008 and recommends users to upgrade to Firefox or Flock which are based on the Navigator technology.

Created by Marc Andreessen, Netscape helped make the Internet a mass market phenomenon when it was launched in the mid 1990s. But it could not compete. Its hey days were numbered when its user base and market share were eroded by Microsoft, which bundles Internet Explorer with its Windows operating systems.

Recent surveys suggest that Netscape currently has only 0.6% market share among browsers, compared to IE’s 77.35% and Firefox’s 16.01%. This same underdog once claimed more than 90 percent of the market, sparking the browser wars of the 1990s and the subsequent Microsoft antitrust trial.

Users can visit the UFAQ and the Netscape Community Forum for support. AOL is also setting up a Netscape Archive where users will be able to download old versions of Netscape, without any support.

Netscape Navigator introduced me to the World Wide Web by enabling me to access information online. Those were the good old times, but I won’t miss Netscape. I write this on the Safari browser which I have come to love. No doubt an underdog touches a soft spot, but Netscape had its day. Rest in peace Navigator. The Web and I will cherish your legacy.

Related reads:
Official Netscape Blog: End of Support for Netscape web browsers

The order by a California court to muzzle anti-corruption site Wikileaks smacks of contempt for free speech online that parallels practices in repressive countries committed to Web censorship. As feeble as it is offensive, this abuse refocuses attention on the idea of a whistle-blower wiki whose time has come.

Prompted not by government but corporate interests, the restraining order on Wikileaks betrays an ignorance of the Internet domain system and an unfamiliarity with the instinct of Web communities to counter hostile action against free online speech. Outraged netizens have rushed to publicize alternate addresses of backup sites that remain online in defiance. The gag order has the opposite effect of what it intended.

Wikileaks is up from Sweden at (http://88.80.13.160) and mirror sites hosted in Belgium (http://wikileaks.be/), Germany (http://wikileaks.de) and the Christmas Islands (http://wikileaks.cx). Fans of Wikileaks have distributed copies of the offending bank information on their sites and via peer-to-peer file sharing networks. Now even folks who have not heard of Wikileaks or Julius Baer know about the fiasco.

Swiss Bank Julius Baer, registered in the Cayman Islands, sued Wikileaks and successfully requested that its Website be blocked. Wikileaks had posted documents about off-shore trust structures in the Cayman Islands which allegedly implicate Baer in money laundering and tax evasion. Baer claims Wikileaks published and altered documents stolen by a former executive. A recap of Wikileaks coverage of Bank Julius Baer is mirrored here.

Founded in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and computer specialists from around the world, Wikileaks is a wiki platform for whistle-blowers to safely post documents in a manner that cannot be traced. Other users could then analyse the information and discuss its reliability and significance.

Wikileaks says it has published more than 1.2 million documents. They uncover dirt ranging from rules of engagement for American troops in Iraq to the operation of prison at Guantánamo Bay. Though it focuses on government and corporate wrong-doing in Asia, Africa and Middle East, Wikileaks has received most attention with secrets revealed in the US, Europe and Caribbean.

This major test of First Amendment rights is unheard of in the West. As the case heads for the appeals court, one wonders why Wikileaks must explain the meaning of the First Amendment in the land of free speech. “There is no justification under the First Amendment for shutting down an entire Web site,” say David Ardia, Director of Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School:

First, the banks overreached. They worked out what appears to be a sweetheart deal with Wikileaks’ domain name registrar, Dynadot. Even though Dynadot appears to bear no liability for the material at issue, the banks added Dynadot as a defendant in the case.

No doubt thinking they had come up with a legal “silver bullet,” the banks and Dynadot signed a joint stipulation in which Dynadot agreed to, among other things, “lock” and “disable the wikileaks.org domain name” in exchange for being dismissed from the case (a case in which, it appears, Dynadot bore no liability). To give their stipulation the force of law, the banks slipped an order to the judge, which he promptly signed.

DAVID ARDIA
Director of Citizen Media Law Project, Harvard Law School

Wikileaks is getting legal help in its court fight. Freedom of speech group, The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and digital rights advocacy, Electronic Frontier Foundation plan to argue on its behalf at a legal hearing on 29 February.

On another note, the European Parliament has accepted a move by Dutch conservative member Jules Maaten to consider Web censorship a trade barrier. This was first reported in Dutch, on the Web site of Maaten’s political party, the VVD. When the proposal is accepted, the EU has to take measure against countries who deploy Web censorship.

Related reads
Wikileak Blog
A Coming Chill over Internet Freedom

The heartbeat of electoral politics in the US has moved online, and Barak Obama is leading the charge. In bringing about new levels of civic engagement, the participatory culture of the Web is changing not just the face of politics, but the way presidential candidates are marketed.

DREAM TEAM?

Obama campaign managers say their focus online is to drive supporters to the Web site so that people can participate in the process by hosting house parties, writing their own campaign blogs and starting grass-roots groups in their communities.

Techpresident.com, a nonpartisan “group blog,” tracks the effect presidential candidates are having online. For example, in terms of MySpace friends, Obama is leading Democratic rival Clinton, with more than 268,400 friends linked to his MySpace page while Clinton has more than 179,300 friends.

Not since the fireside chats of Franklin Roosevelt has a communication medium played such a pivotal role in electoral politics. With the presidential election shaping up to be truly the first of the digital age, hearts and minds are being shaped online.

Can Web 2.0 technologies bring about a sea change in politics, much like TV swayed political behavior in the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960?. They were the first major presidential debates on television, a venue in which a youthful John Kennedy outshone Richard Nixon, who was less telegenic on camera.

PEW Research Center found that the Web is living up to its potential as a major source for news about the 2008 presidential campaign. Online is the key place to get news about the elections, with almost a quarter of Americans now learning about the campaigns online on a regular basis.

Partnering between old and new media adds even more legitimacy to emerging technologies. Like MTV and MySpace, teaming up to feature real time, dialogues between candidates and voters.

Certainly the rules of the game have changed and the politics much more distributed. There are many aspects of Web social marketing in this race. Campaigns are happening on people’s screens and no longer run from headquarters or driven by centralized purchases of TV advertising time.

What YouTube and other Internet sites seem to have done is they enable people to talk to one another. Allow voters to talk to one another without necessarily going to the campaigns. And so you see people making their own ads for candidates and that might be part of what is getting people so excited and what’s leading to this record turnout as well.

Much has changed since Democrat Howard Dean tapped into an online community for support and money in his 2004 campaign. Today top Web experts are hired to outfit candidates’ sites with fundraising tools, blogs and videos and post profiles on social networking sites.

Republican candidates are using the web to grab donations and build communities. McCainSpace allows users to build their own sites hosted on the John McCain site. Other Web features used by campaigns mimic those of YouTube, Google and Amazon.com. But instead of generating a sale or linking to an advertisement, candidates pitch supporters, pick up fundraising leads and potentially land votes.

Well the Internet has certainly been a big target of campaigns for two reasons. One, fundraising. It has made fundraising a lot easier. You can go out and find people to make donations. I think Internet has played a strong role in this record amount of campaign contributions that are flowing to the campaigns. The Internet also enables you to target voters and to target advertising. So it’s brought a lot of change to how campaigns operate in terms of fundraising and in terms of targeting

As people turn to the Web for shopping, banking and news, will getting and being influenced by political information be any different? Certainly, the ‘pull’ type of media on the Web may not get to the masses who are still unwired, and who need political information pushed to them by TV or newspapers.

What remains to be seen is how web-marketing techniques change as the electoral field is narrowed to two primary candidates. While the Web will matter in this election, will it also determine outcomes? Will these tools make or break a candidate?

Mirror mirror on the tube, who’s the changiest of them all? Notice how the political rhetoric in the US presidential elections is now down to a single word - change? Once upon a time in elections past, candidates fought to distance themselves from change - or flip-flopping - as it was called then.

Now change is so hot candidates are falling over themselves to flaunt their change credentials. Whatever the political stripes, whether in a dress or in suits, everybody wants to change their spots. Any change will do it seems. String these voices and mash ‘em up and presto! The Changiness Chorus:

Spare the change! It’s a word that has inflamed defenders of the status quo and media watchers. Jeff Jarvis, Associate Professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism rants in his blog that change is the “emptiest” word in politics:

“It’s an utterly empty word. Meaningless. The worst of political rhetoric. The worst of political bullshit. Pure spin. Cynical marketing. Juvenile pandering… Oh, just shut up and do something.”

I might be persuaded that progress comes through change, but don’t tell me all change is progress. Democrats will be a big change from Bush. Duh, but change in what terms? Didn’t America vote for change in 2000? Does change imply electing a female or a black President?

Change is the word of choice for an uncritical political culture. Any politician of any stripe can stand behind it without specifics or fear of contradiction:

Notice, when you hear the word “change,” whether the speaker or writer is using it as a noun or a verb. As a noun, the word is an empty abstraction. You don’t have to explain it, or give examples. You can simply invoke it, like “freedom” or “terrorism” or “amnesty.”

As an intransitive verb, “change” rarely helps: as in “I will change!” The politician who offers us the transitive, who gives us an object of the verb — “I will change the way we wage this war” — is at least giving us a small peg on which to hang.

POYNTER INSTITUTE

Out in the field, Obama is cool as a symbol and vessel for change. Clinton is cold and shrill in her naked ambition. Excuse me, is anybody thinking for a change? Changing the face and name in the White House is not change. Holding different perspectives and acting on those ideas is.

Blame it on TV and tube talk in an attention economy. So last century to be sure. Throw in the social networkers of MySpace and Facebook and you get a growing disconnect with the cuckolds. Can user generated politics predict election outcomes?

As people begin to switch off their TV and “live” online, the Web will define politics. If this has become a contest about who represents change, perhaps it makes more sense to talk about who owns the change. Voters own change, not candidates. Voters can vote out representatives and replace them with candidates who deliver more than promises.

Come to think of it, change is no big deal. Talking is the easy part. In the final scrutiny, who can change his or her spots?

There’s a zero-sum flavor to the arguments of Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, at the Hugo Young memorial lecture in London. Misdiagnosing the threat facing media today, he warned that reliable news reporting is dwindling in the face of bloggers.

Dubbing the Internet a “media tsunami,” Keller flailed at blogs and pilloried sites like Wikipedia and Google News, insulting the Web products for not having things like foreign bureaus in war zones and because they don’t create content but aggregate it from other media.

“The civic labour performed by journalists on the ground cannot be replicated by legions of bloggers sitting hunched over their computer screens,” he declared. Hold it a sec. Google News and Wikipedia never claimed to be a news organization.

While the dinosaurs lay their last eggs and take swings at the new pamphleteers, perhaps we should revisit the history of The Press to remind ourselves why it exists. Perhaps at the top of their pyramids, old media dinosaurs fail to see that they have lost their monopoly on information.

Rather than being the sole source of information they once was, the press and TV are now part of a new information distribution structure. Content will always be king, and readers will go to wherever they can get the highest quality, most credible news. Good journalism is always in demand, whoever delivers it.

There is room for bloggers to contribute to the conversation. Instead of competing, bloggers and journalists should focus on good reporting. No model has worked so far. In a truly robust press, trained journalists and ordinary folks work to improve understanding of the communities. Professionals form the backbone with citizens in their various communities providing ideas, information, and old-fashioned legwork.

Well and good, problem is why would people offer time and knowledge to help out the journalists? The results of the Assignment Zero debacle portend the potential of citizen journalism. The concept of user-generated content is in danger of becoming a distraction from the real discussion about how professional journalism will navigate the rapids of technological evolution.

Steve Outing said recently in an item on the demise of his user content-powered Enthusiast Group, “I believe that what user content needs to succeed as a business is professional editors to be the ones to sift through it all to find the stuff that people will care about.”

Crowd sourcing works fine if you want to buy stuff and exchange verifiable info with peers in a Web forum. But news consumers want accurate, reliable, fair, credible, relevant and useful information which the citizen journalism model has yet to provide.

Michael Hedges notes in his Follow the Media post that citizen journalism, a term invented by accountants, is past its prime when listeners, viewers and readers lost interest in ‘reports’ from the 16-year old on the corner with a cell-phone camera:

Blogs, touted as giving voice to many, became, largely, ranters ranting to themselves or PR people posting the daily spin. Blog creation has peaked, wrote the Pew Research Center in a 2007 report. The successful became niche publishers, albeit of the traditional media model. The rest are just out there, hanging by the Web.

User-generated content is another concept designed to warm the accountants’ books. Couple it with the much vaunted social networking sites and zillions of web hits are created. All content may, indeed, be equal for 20 year old user/creators but an adult looking for knowledge and clarity is left empty. Unfortunately, sources for adults have evaporated into the dither of click-through ads

All said, is there a self-sustaining Website that actually practices journalism out there? Kara Swisher, who covers technology for the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital said this of Keller’s speech:

Actually, I think Keller’s real problem is the audience, especially young people, who are increasingly using those sites and others. The fact of the matter for an awfully long time now is that consumers of information are sampling all over the Web and don’t just rely solely on the New York Times for info.

That’s too bad for Keller, I guess, but not bad at all for consumers, who Keller never assumes are discerning at understanding what they are getting. But they are and are simply not a mass of dumb sheep just taking it all in and not questioning anything.

But I cannot imagine he lives in the present-day world when he claimed in the speech: “Most of the blog world does not even attempt to report. It recycles. It riffs on the news. That’s not bad. It’s just not enough. Not nearly enough.”

This is simply not true going forward, and he should have done some reporting on the subject to find out. There is an ever-increasing number of online outlets who are doing most excellent online reporting.

Read his full text here.

In the domain of civic media, Singapore is a poor cousin to its Third World neighbors in South East Asia. Given the hype of its First World online opportunities, the city does not have a single professionally-run, stand-alone Website delivering local news.

A few ventures are mere branding opportunities for old-media outlets looking to stay relevant. STOMP, the online portal of the Straits Times newspaper showcases almost every trick in the social media toolbox including user contributed content, blogs, social networking, auctions and classifieds. Its Singapore Seen allows people to tell stories about their community in video.

But you don’t have to click deep to encounter a sludge of hyper-local trivia such as “Seamstress leaves needle in bridal gown, injures bride;” “Waiter hurt while catching thief at restaurant;” and “Python at Potong Pasir swallows animal.” Citizen journalism? Nowhere close.

Where is content that foster real sharing of ideas and socio-political commentary? For all the hype, these supposed opportunities for citizen engagement in Singapore ring hollow when they happen on mainstream media platforms controlled by the state.

Information is most useful when thrown into a digital pile to be organized by users and creators themselves, as David Weinberger contends in Everything is Miscellaneous. User-generated content cannot pass for citizen journalism when co-opted by MSM as a commodity vetted by salaried gatekeepers.

BlogTV.sg and its purported agenda to bring the hard talk of the blogosphere to the idiot-box mustered merely tired banter on trivia tricked up with digital bells and whistles.

The cyber activism of Think Centre and Sintercom’s harnessing of a virtual community hold out in an arena where online dissent is thwarted through threats of jail or legal suits. In cyber activism, neighboring Malaysia has several more well-organised activist sites than Singapore.

The Web has empowered a new digital disorder whose principles are remaking media with far reaching consequences for how we live and work. It has set the stage for a civic journalism where groups of passionate people use its tools to make meaning and invent their own ways of what they know and want without the protocols of the newsroom.

TV folks still don’t get it! When I’m consulted by broadcasters planning to launch an accompanying Website for a TV series, I am often floored by the silo-thinking that an online presence is merely something nice to have to reinforce the brand and generate awareness.

Little wonder that so many micro-sites purporting to be the online arm of a TV show are, well, so small and mono-dimensional. Sure, the bean counters on the board ask for the business case. It’s about time they drop the blinkers and TV-centric thinking and build the Website as a product.

The Website cannot be conceived as a brochure for reinforcing the TV brand, but rather as unique content sold as its own entity. It’s about leveraging the resources unique to broadcasters to implement a successful online strategy.

With Web content eating into the profit pies of print and TV, online financial success for broadcasters lies in creating true cross-platform integration with the TV side of their business. Traditional media are not getting the share of advertising because they have not got past the ways to monetize their Websites.

ESPN.com and CNN.com got it. And it’s simply that people will pay for content if it is valuable to them. What ESPN and CNN have done is increase cross-platform reach to their audiences by investing in and building their Websites. It’s about taking the information the networks have and knowing how to feature it.

ESPN.com developed cross-platform storytelling by streaming video and creating interactive games for their users. CNN.com emphasized the cable network’s strength in delivering breaking news by expanding on the I-Report feature which allows the portal to receive a large volume of breaking news without actively soliciting.

So instead of using third-party and costly software, broadcasters should create a local network of sites, organize the local Web and take advantage of what’s already available to create unique community. Some of the brightest minds in the industry know where the future lies and are steering their online products in that direction.

Surely and swiftly the military junta in Burma have returned a veil of ignorance to the country while they shoot people on the streets. But the week has been an extraordinary moment for civic media and the Web, with grassroots witnesses to a pacifist struggle posting images and accounts out of Burma for global scrutiny.

The last time Burmese soldiers fired on their own people there were few witnesses, and those who were there had no way of telling the story. This time, the demonstrations had persisted and spread in part because of new technologies.

What’s amazing is the cadre of people on the ground, gathering and disseminating information through the sieve of the state despite low internet penetration, low connection speeds and the need for proxy servers. This uprising in Burma is a compelling argument for citizen media forcing the world to confront a reclusive regime with draconian Internet control.

People sharing photographs and writing blogs aren’t doing it because they are journalists, but because it is a natural impulse to want to share experiences. Images of chaos and casualties have circulated with a battery of videos and an outpouring of comments (see here and here)

The Burmese people know must keep international attention on themselves if they want to succeed. Armed with mobile phone cameras, they have become the eyes of the “saffron revolution”. For days they risked their lives to stand in for the hundreds of foreign journalists banned by a government with much to hide.

To be sure, citizen media will not be the only source of information in events like a revolution, coup or civil war. They are welcome complements and sources of experts.

It is a risk. The soldiers arrest anyone who takes photos, destroy their phones and beat them up. But we have to show the world what is happening. Kyaw, medical student

I’m scared that if we stop sending photos and video the world will forget about us. Lynn, Burmese

Raw footage capturing the last gasps of Kenji Nagai has been aired on Japanese TV and posted on the Web, raising official suspicion that the 50-year old photo-journalist was murdered by Burmese troops.

The footage shows Nagai on the edge of a crowd of panic-stricken demonstrators, shoved to the ground by a soldier and shot at point-blank range, clutching his video camera to protect it from the fall. Evidence like this contradicts official Burmese explanation that Nagai was killed by a “stray bullet”.

The monks were moral shields; without them the marchers had lost a lucky charm. They felt less like crusaders for justice and more like what they resembled – scared, angry kids in T-shirts facing well-drilled troops with automatic weapons. TIMES ONLINE

The images have certainly spoken louder than words, catalyzing action by the international community. So far, UN talk of sanctions has been mere slaps on the wrist that failed to force the junta’s hand.

Weasely diplomatic response by Burma’s allies did not lead to wider influences. The tired rhetoric of outrage from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is motivated more by threat of financial sanctions from the West than compassion.

Elements of the armed forces may rebel and overthrow the old guard. But this has not happened yet. The junta will ignore international calls for restraint, unless China, ASEAN and other nations that hold the most leverage on Burma join the outcry.

From the point of view of TV, the situation is the same as it was in 1988. No foreign TV crews have been able to enter Burma and networks such as BBC and CNN have been reporting from neighboring Thailand.

The junta has calculated that it can again win the propaganda battle if it controls traditional media. It is countering the impact of information smuggled out of Burma with news broadcasts, and surreal official versions describing the soldiers as victims.

Indeed, TV has made us so used to seeing popular uprisings topple authoritarian regimes that the difficulties involved can be underestimated. The first flush of images and accounts from citizen witnesses may create premature expectations about a new era of public protest.

It is unclear how much this “saffron revolution” resembles the “color revolutions” that took place in Georgia and Ukraine, where “networked” movements maximized cell phone technology and used the Internet as a platform in political mobilization for new elections.

To be sure, protesters in Burma faced an implacable military junta that showed subtle and malignant cunning in moving against the monks. The crackdown is a reminder that street protests do not necessarily lead to revolution.

Citizen journalism is a movement in progress. Where sovereignty is at stake, there will be the struggle between the Utopian roots of the Web, and the hegemony of the state. As much as we would like to think the Web is an unbridled new frontier, realistically on the ground, the force of law, or in Burma’s case - the might of the fist - will be invoked at tipping point.

It would be naive to think that a media of the people has immediate power to undermine hard power. While the Web ensures that the world will continue to keep watch, the question is whether this will sway a regime which cares nought about its image.

In many countries of Asia, journalism is battle ground territory between authority and media. It is worth remembering that however cyber the space is, it is also real and subject to real space power.

Since Thursday the military junta have made themselves felt in cyberspace, blocking Websites and cutting mobile phone lines while they shoot people on the streets. But a handful of people has already ensured that the perpetrators will face some measure of accountability for their repression.

Related:
Trade and Security Trump Democracy in Burma

So it’s no sale with paid content. The New York Times is joining the crescendo of falling walls at news sites including The Economist and CNN by ending its experiment with charging for select online content. The Times today restored free access to most of its columnists along with many articles, blogs, video, podcasts and archives.

It sure is good Maureen Dowd and the cast of Times columnists are firmly back into the public conversation. Columnists like her must be clicking their champagne glasses now their verbiage is accessible to a larger audience. But I’m raising my glass to a move that opens access to journalism’s most definitive moments on the Web.

The more important meaning for journalism here I say, is opening up the Times archives. With a perma-link on each article, Times’ stories will become the de facto primary sources for people around the Web, and around the world. So on topic after topic, the Times stories will move near or to the top of the search engine rankings. They will become more valuable for keyword and advertising once people click through to the actual stories.

Readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs and other online sources. In light of this shift, we believe offering unfettered access to New York Times reporting and analysis best serves the interest of our readers, our brand and the long-term vitality of our journalism. We encourage everyone to read our news and opinion – as well as share it, link to it and comment on it.

New YorK Times

This was a money decision to be sure, and it could well be the start of the end for paid news on the Web. It is not so much that ads on the columnist pages will bring in that much new revenue but rather people looking at those pages will then go elsewhere on the site and the more eyeballs looking at more advertising, the better.

By lifting the gates on Times Select and returning its website to a completely ad-supported model, the larger significance is a resounding victory for the idea that information wants to be free. The Times site, nytimes.com, is the most popular newspaper site on the Web, with 13.1 million unique visitors. But its middling results with paid content, neither validation nor failure, strongly suggest that very few content publishers should even consider playing in the pay arena.

Lifting the ramparts on paid content shows the Times is taking seriously the prospect that Rupert Murdoch will drop access charges for most or all of The Wall Street Journal Online. The Journal is now the only major newspaper charging subscriptions for most of its online content.

Incidentally, Murdoch gave his strongest statements to date the WSJ.com will go free. He says the company doesn’t feel it would hurt subscriptions and any lost revenue would be more than made up from increased readership and search engine traffic.

There’s talk the UK’s Financial Times web site with around 100,000 subscribers will also open up. Which begs that question - if we can read newspapers for free on the Web, why should we pay to read it in print? How come one model works for the Web and another model is used for print. The print model needs revisiting.

The once hot online-newspaper ad revenue is slowing as a result of competition from Web portals and TV networks. Nielsen/NetRatings show Yahoo News and Time Warner CNN Web sites posting strong growth over newspaper sites. Although online ads still make up a small portion of total newspaper revenues, the downward spiral of print revenues, has pushed print media to grab as big a slice of the online-ad pie as they can.

The Times introduced Times Select in September 2005 to wring subscription revenue from its website and shore up sales in print, where ad rates remain much higher than they are online. It admitted that the power of search engines, which often drive traffic to the Times Online even when people looking for information don’t necessarily set out to find it, meant there was too much potential to pass up in free access underwritten by marketers.

2007 is emerging as a watershed for advertising, once seen as only part of a broader revenue play. Media owners are recognizing there is more money to be made reducing barriers to usage and selling advertising against that increased usage. So far in 2007, publishers have abandoned the paid ramparts at outlets including CNN, The Economist and The Financial Times.

Sure it’s nice for advertisers to know that a consumer loves a publisher’s site enough to pay for it. Opening the gates do let in riffraff who may not be so desirable. But from a marketer perspective, the more, the better. You potentially create greater scale for advertisers, and they want as much scale as possible.

Essentially, the Times is betting it can generate enough advertising revenue and/or goodwill to more than make up the loss of $10 million in subscription revenue. That’s a lot of ads, but the popular columns and archives that were behind the pay wall are popular material and should generate a lot of page views.

Of course, niche sites with unduplicated or especially compelling content will always be able to charge something for content. In addition to the free photos and articles Playboy posts online, it sells three tiers of paid access.

The Times is ending its premium service with 227,000 paying subscribers, 471,200 people who got access as part of their print subscriptions and 89,200 college students and employees who signed up for free access. It has sold sponsorship ads to American Express across The Content Formerly Known as Times Select.

Talents prosper in connections with others in the new digital disorder. But then, connections have been with us forever - from the Guanxi of Chinese society, to the deep external European connections that were integral to the breakthroughs of Picasso and Gutenberg.

Web 2.0 just made connecting so much easier, bypassing institutions that have decided what is talent and what is not. This is what gets the goat of Andrew Keen in Cult of the Amateur. To be sure, he’s raising controversy with an eye to top the non-fiction bestsellers list.

His polemic goes something like this - people on the Web, thou shalt not criticize the gatekeepers of institutions such as the Beeb, the NY Times, Le Monde, etc. because they are professionals. But after the Beeb phone-in fakes, can we trust the gatekeepers? See my post, Can You Still Trust Your National TV?

In Keen’s universe, people who use the Web - wikis, blogs, forums, mailing lists - for activism and to develop communities are no different from the chimps who fling poo on primetime for profit. The Wall Street Journal online has published a debate between author of Everything is Miscellaneous, Dave Weinberger and Keen.

Their central point of disagreement is about the importance of authority. Bear in mind that both have books to sell. Keen is a non-authority arguing for the importance of authority on the web. Weinberger is an authority on the emergence of a non-authoritative new world order. Two books, two views - no agreement, but certainly a lot of sparks when both square off. The dustup is well worth reading.

Keen argues that a user-driven web is undermining our institutions, values and culture. Not unlike the mass media that gave us TV drivel, Keen asserts a “dot com” sound-bite about the Web that is neither about its ideas nor the people among those ideas. To him, the Internet is full of junk and by killing off the conventional media we are losing all our good information sources.

Weinberger thwarts with bite and intellectual grace - sure, there are lots of bad stuff on the Web as in the real world. But there are lots of good stuff too. More importantly, new mechanisms are being developed to let us find good stuff faster and sieve bad stuff easier. And guess what, the Web may make good stuff easier to find than currently possible in the analog world. Hear hear, pass the pizza Dave!

My own sense is that as a professional I am good at what I do and sometimes a poor excuse for a human being. As a professional many of us live in one of the “iron cages” that Max Weber describes, held in place by a business model, a business plan, an org chart, a supervisory mechanism, a regulatory mechanism, a public relations dept, a corporate style guide, a dress code, an annual performance review, a mid-year check point, a salary and bonus incentive system, a code of civility, and on and on.

As an amateur, well, then all bets are off. I am far more interested in what a Pundit thinks as an amateur, off the record, talking with a few close friends over a beer than I am in the talking points the Pundit iterates on Company Time or in the Corporate Media at the behest of their Supervisor and their Funders. Another name for professional is hireling. That was Jonathan Swift’s word. Another name for amateur is “citizen.” The web is a citizen-driven public space. To make it a medium for rich, branded, professional, corporate controlled, content would be a true tragedy of the commons.

PHIL CUBETA, the Gift Hub blog

Every country has a right to expect its national broadcaster to maintain rigorous levels of integrity. Every time you think a national broadcaster has sunk lower, a new breach in viewers’ trust hits the headlines.

The BBC admitted Wednesday that a series of flagship children’s and charity phone-in programs had deliberately deceived viewers. The moral rectitude revealed in the Beeb’s deception is an issue not only for the British broadcasting icon, but national broadcasters in general and Asia in particular.

Hit your remote. Deceit come in many guises over the airwaves where authority lies in the hands of the few. Look around and you see editorial failings; slants endorsing pay and political masters.

Look around and you see manufactured non-news; advertorials couched as content; sponsored lifestyle programs pimped by moonlighting news readers; product placements and commercial puff.

We’re talking stitched-up productions, stretched-out crews and big pay-offs. The only surprise is that it took this long. Auntie - the moniker for the once honored and trusted broadcaster, is now seen as a bunch of ‘crooks and liars’.

BBC production staff lied to the audience by posing as winners of phone quizzes (never mind that practices like this is a criminal offence). The programs identified are:

Comic Relief - Friday 16 March 2007 on BBC One
A caller was heard on air answering a question to win prizes belonging to a famous couple when in fact the caller was a member of the production team.

TMi - 16 September 2006 on BBC Two and CBBC
A member of the production team posed as a member of the audience who had won a competition which was open to the public.

Sport Relief - 15 July 2006 on BBC One
Viewers were led to believe that a member of the public had won a competition open to the public when it was a member of the crew.

Children in Need - 18 November 2005 on BBC One Scotland
A fictitious competition winner was announced during a segment called Raven: The Island following technical problems.

The Liz Kershaw Show - 2005/6 on BBC 6 Music
During pre-recorded programmes presented as live, listeners were led to believe genuine competitions were held when in fact there were no contests or prizes and all callers were production staff or their friends.

White Label - World Service until April 2006
On more than once occasion a fake winner was announced when no winning entries had been received.

The same day, media regulator Ofcom published a damning inquiry into recent phone-in scandals and concluded there is a “systemic failure” in the way broadcasters operate premium rate lines. Ofcom is the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries.

“If broadcasters want audiences to go on spending millions calling in, they need to show they take consumer protection as seriously as programme content,” said former Deputy Chief Executive of BBC News Richard Ayre, who led the inquiry.

Ofcom accused telecoms operators, producers and broadcasters of a lack of transparency. It said there was a need for clearer pricing schemes, fairer competitions, and greater external auditing. The investigation looked at 20 alleged phone-in quiz scandals involving networks.

Related: What A Month For The BBC’s Reputation For Excellence.

Suits brought against students by the record industry bring up issues around the role and identity of University and copyright. Go take a hike, say Harvard Law School professors Charles Nesson and John Palfrey of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Their essay is reproduced below:

Recently, the president of the Recording Industry Association of America, Cary Sherman, wrote to Harvard to challenge the university administration to stop acting as a “passive conduit” for students downloading music. We agree. Harvard and the 22 universities to which the RIAA has sent “pre-litigation notices” ought to take strong, direct action…and tell the RIAA to take a hike.

This Spring, 1,200 pre-litigation letters arrived unannounced at universities across the country. The RIAA promises more will follow. These letters tell the university which students the RIAA plans on suing, identifying the students only by their IP addresses, the “license plates” of Internet connections. Because the RIAA does not know the names behind the IP addresses, the letters ask the universities to deliver the notices to the proper students, rather than relying upon the ordinary legal mechanisms.

Universities should have no part in this extraordinary process. The RIAA’s charter is to promote the financial interests of its corporate members – even if that means preserving an obsolete business model for its members. The university’s charter is quite different. Harvard’s charter reflects the purposes for which it was founded in 1636: “The advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences; the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences; and all other necessary provisions that may conduce to the education of the … youth of this country….”

The university strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities. The university has no legal obligation to deliver the RIAA’s messages. It should do so only if it believes that’s consonant with the university’s mission.

We believe it is not.

Universities are special places, set off in time and space for students to have an opportunity most will not again have: to learn together in a community that cherishes openness above all else. If the university is perceived as doing the bidding of any particular industry, the message we’re sending to students is that the university is willing to let commercial interests intrude.

Of course there are times when that intrusion is warranted. The horror of Virginia Tech is on all our minds and in our hearts. There are far lesser justifications for allowing the arms of government and commerce to interrupt the secular sanctity of the university’s educational space. But protecting claims of copyright – whether or not legitimate claims – by passing along messages requiring students to pay lump sums to record companies just doesn’t warrant the betrayal of student’s trust and privacy.

The university does have an obligation to teach our students to be good citizens. Good citizens should be accountable for their actions. If our students are breaking the law, they should pay the price. That’s not the issue here. The RIAA has already sued well over 10,000 people, including many students, directly. They seem to be engaging in a classic tactic of the bully facing someone much weaker: threatening such dire consequences that the students settle without the issue going to court. The issue is that the university should not be carrying the industry’s water in bringing lawsuits.

The subtitle of the RIAA’s own press release puts a far more pleasant gloss on this: “New Program Invigorates Campus Conversations About Consequences For Illegal Downloading.”

If the RIAA wants to stimulate conversation, then it should engage in genuine dialogue. Come join us on campus. Come talk to the digital natives who are our students, to the faculty who care about fair intellectual property protections, and to the university counsel and technical teams who manage our strategies and operations in cyberspace. The RIAA should be asking, along with the rest of us, if we can come up with models that reward artists for their work while allowing the maximum circulation and use of their creations, as our Founding Fathers intended.

We should also be discussing the most important issue of all. Universities provide an open space in which every idea can be heard and discussed. Every limitation on the circulation of ideas works directly against the university’s mission. How can we open up more ideas, more works, more conversations, while, of course, preserving the legitimate rights of creators? How can we make the university far more open than it is now? How can universities – just like the RIAA – embrace a digital future and make the most of its opportunities?

Being the unpaid enforcement arm of the provincial interests of the RIAA is no part of the answer to these questions.

Dave Weinberger of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has a great rant on net neutrality. Who can blame the incumbents for extending their old business model into the new world of the Internet, he asks. The business model rests on bedrock premises and works sweetly. Problem is, it requires carriers to work against the public interest.

Read Dave’s post “Delamination Now!”

Excuse me, are you a politician? Have you pimped your profile online? Forget kissing babies and door-to-door handshakes. That’s so 1.0. Get Googly instead.

Welcome to hustings 2.0! First, enlist YouTube for your campaign platform. Next, out-Google your opponents. How? Refine your search strategy to drive traffic to your campaign sites.

Psst! Did you know Al Gore is a senior adviser to top search engine Google? Mr Inconvenient Truth may be keeping mum on throwing his hat in the presidential ring, but brace for search terms around his pet peeves.

The Web is the channel flavor of the month to stump for votes. Don’t just stop at organic search results. You can buy search-term advertising to boost traffic from search engines. So if you’re passionate about your cause, issue, peeve etc etc fork out some $$ for those terms to stake your turf.

Take “global warming.” It’s so hot. Why not buy a sponsored listing for buzz phrase “climate change?” Here’s a search tip if you’re trying to get to Gore - go boolean, like “Al + Global Warming.” That’s because surprisingly so far, global warming and climate change are significantly absent from political search terms.

Why are people still cool to the scares trotted out about Gaia on heat? Apparently searches on these terms are sending Web users to news and educational sites. So either people are real interested in looking up the topic to learn, or warnings on global warming aren’t scaring folks anymore, or it’s just a political non-issue.

Incidentally, America’s top political-issue search term is “abortion.” That has been its most divisive political issue over the last several elections. So it behoofs the net-savvy candidate to purchase search terms like “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” Interesting to see the top politics-related search terms in prosperity-driven Asian societies like Singapore.

Search statistics offer glimpses into the candidates’ public image. What would you do if you were an online campaign strategist? If you drill down to search terms juxtaposed with a name, you may be confronted with an unsettling truth.

No prizes for Barack Obama. It’s “muslim.” But Hillary Clinton. The lady builds her profile to associate with political positions on health care. Guess what her searchers are focused on? Her theme song contest.

Republican candidates are more Googly then their Democratic counterparts. For the first week in June 2007, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani received over 41.4% of his official campaign site traffic from Google.

The current most-searched-for Republican, Senator Fred Thompson, received over 47.5% of his traffic. Hillary Clinton got 21.6% and Barack Obama 22.2%.

Clinton and Obama can take comfort in the fact that they have more MySpace friends than their Republican counterparts. Clinton has over 7.9% of her visits from the leading online social network while Obama trails at 3.9%

BILL TANCER
General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise.

This post was adapted for the current affairs TV program INSIGHT on Channel NewsAsia, Singapore. Written, directed and produced by the author, the program was broadcast internationally on 20 June 2007.

The Web has opened a new front in the war of ideas as Jihadists go online to reach their target audience. A fascination with websites espousing radical ideologies apparently led a model Singaporean middle-class professional down the “militant jihadist” path. From Toronto to London, Madrid to Morocco, in Holland and America, the effects of self-radicalization are becoming clear.

Within the Web’s borderless world, militants now proselytize across borders to make the case that jihad warfare is a religious responsibility. In doing so, they skirt open activity in areas where such activity might be viewed unfavorably. Internet chat rooms have replaced meetings in mosques, community centers and coffee shops, making recruitment more difficult to detect and disrupt.

Groups like al-Qaeda are becoming more sophisticated in recruiting, training and raising money online. The Web may be the extremists’ most powerful frontier, but governments are not doing enough to reclaim ground lost to net-savvy jihadists in the electronic battlefield. Time is not on their side.

The Internet has speeded the radicalization of young people. As the Basheer case suggests, young people can go from what would appear to be ordinary lives in a matter of months, to a position where they were allegedly prepared to commit violence.

The anonymity of the Web can lead to people expressing more violence than they actually feel, with repetition and enthusiasm steadily increasing. There is also a primary focus on youth. Web sites are often flashy, designed to appeal to a computer savvy, video game-addicted generation.

Here’s what militants do to spread their message online:

• Hacking legitimate websites to post training manuals deep in subdirectories where no one is likely to notice.

• Developing flashy video games that spread the message that Islam is under attack and young Muslims have a personal duty to fight.

• Using hip-hop and rap musicians whose catchy tunes and lyrics contain calls to violence.

According to a report, Internet-Facilitated Radicalization, presented to the US Senate, “a nation (America) that gave rise to Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Madison Avenue (has been) outplayed in the realm of ideas, effectively communicated in the new media.”

There’s only one side on the battlefield, and it isn’t us. We’ve created this global village — the Internet — without a police department.

Frank Cilluffo, Director, Homeland Security Policy Institute, George Washington University.

Singapore’s Home Affairs Ministry said in a statement Friday it arrested Abdul Basheer Abdul Kader with four other men suspected of being Islamic militants, and were preparing to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Basheer, a 28-year old former lawyer and lecturer, could have lived the Singapore Dream. He studied at top Singapore schools, a top university and worked at a top law firm.

Singapore authorities said he was “self-radicalised” and “deeply influenced by the extremist propaganda he read on the Internet.” He traveled to an unidentified country in the Middle East in 2006 to study Arabic, and by December “had decided to embark on `militant jihad’ immediately.”

Basheer was arrested in February and returned to Singapore. He had purchased an air ticket for Pakistan, where he planned to contact the militant group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and join the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan. We do not have the full picture because Basheer is detained under Singapore’s Internal Scurity Act which provides for detention without trial. Basheer has not had the benefit of trial or a chance to speak.

From information available, we can piece a profile which is typical of prospective jihadists whose self-radicalization begins the day they seek out jihadist websites - young, action-oriented types searching for causes that can be religiously and culturally justified. The jihadist agenda provides them a way to identify who they are. They are the most vulnerable to a cyber “call to action” and its fulfilment in the physical world.

The “killer application” of the Web is not as a broadcast tool, but a networking channel linking people online, who then meet and act in the physical world. Some governments are reportedly preparing an assault on websites propagating terrorism, though the physical community remains the first front in thwarting radicalization.

Singapore’s approach has been to enlist the community and implement educational programs at mosques and community centers to expose the nature of jihadist ideology. But the competition of ideas onine calls for a countervailing voice on the Web. Who is going to provide the moderate message? Who will craft the counter-narrative that mainstream society is not waging a battle against Islam? It cannot come from the West.

There must be a sense of proportion to the threat and the price weighed of applying counter terrorism measures to the Web. If Internet content can be controlled, as European governments argue, where should such control be located and can anti-jihadist messages be facilitated?

Domestic intelligence and countering dangerous ideologies are delicate undertakings. No doubt societies must be defended and sufficient deterrence erected against the influence of Web-savvy terrorists. It is easy to use society’s demand for pre-emption as the basis for a more permissive intelligence environment online.

The best touch is a light touch that shapes a compelling counter-voice on chat rooms and websites to compete in the marketplace of ideas. People must not be denied their rights to share ideas on the Web. In trying to protect society against its ills, we must guard against destroying what may be the best defense, the great virtues of a free Web.

The Pentagon has banned Internet traffic on its military computer networks in a move critics call an attempt to muzzle troops delivering bad news or receiving it from videos posted by Iraqi insurgents on the Web. For sure it’s a step closer to the reality that the Web is the new battle space for information and ideas as are bombs and bullets in the field.

From today, the Pentagon bans soldiers serving overseas from using its computer system to socialise and trade videos. The American military is raising its profile on YouTube, posting official footage “to show another side of operations in Iraq beyond news reports of ‘the car bomb of the day.’

The popular video-sharing platform YouTube is one of 12 Web sites off limits. Others include MySpace, photo-sharing site Photobucket, videos sites Metacafe and IFilm, MTV and several other music sites. BlackPlanet.com, a social networking site popular among African-Americans, is also banned.

A Pentagon memo cites an overabundance of “recreational traffic,” saying use of those sites “impacts our official DoD network and bandwidth ability, while posing a significant operational security challenge.”

Okay, too many soldiers may be goofing off online and choking up bandwidth and posing a security risk. But it’s not rocket science to get around these obstacles. Plenty of other sites are out there, including proxies like YouTube Proxy.

Why do some folks always have to view things as an attack on liberties? The Pentagon has legitimate tech concerns, and soldiers are still free to communicate what they see without live footage. No one is muzzling the soldiers, only their Internet access — which companies do all their time to their employees.

News to the troops has been blocked right along. It’s important to do so in order to keep up morale, and the only way to do that is to keep them from knowing what’s going on. Just imagine what would happen if they found out why they are really there in the Middle East.

The US military has always barred members from sharing information that could jeopardise their missions or safety, but the new policy creates a blanket ban on soldiers exchanging messages, pictures, video and audio with family and friends, which could also be seen by millions around the world.

The latest ban and last month’s revision of Pentagon blogging policy prompt questions about whether military leaders are trying to muzzle voices of individual soldiers by making it more difficult to publish their own material.

Internet use has become a troublesome issue for the US military as it struggles to balance security concerns with privacy rights. As blogs and video-sharing become more common, the military has voiced increasing concern about service members revealing details about military operations or other information about equipment or procedures that will aid the enemy.

Soldiers and others in Iraq have been by passing traditional journalists via the Internet, posting videos and sharing views with the world, uncensored and unfiltered. YouTube has about 35,200 videos carrying Iraq as a keyword, many of which have been viewed more than 100,000 times. These videos are seeing more traffic from people hoping to understand the war through soldiers’ eyes.

Video-sharing Web sites are home to some of the most striking images from the war. Video showing the hanging of Saddam Hussein found a worldwide audience thanks to such sites, a citizen witness with a camera phone. The cockpit video of a U.S. pilot’s accidental attack on British troops, originally released by a British newspaper, almost instantly streamed around the globe.

As the Web has allowed more people to share their views, it has actually helped polarize opinions on the war. “With so many voices all at once, people had little difficulty finding those viewpoints that mirrored their own,” said Ralph Berenger, a journalism professor who has researched the role of the Internet in covering the Iraq war and other international conflicts..

Not all who post video online have an ax to grind. Some just needed to get the terror and horror out of their heads. Some are part tribute and part documentary. Many more are for fun and satire. They represent the best voices from the grassroots.

Whether they are music clips poking fun at compulsory military service in Singapore or a poignant video tribute to a soldier killed in a war waged by a Superpower, citizen-generated web videos have come to represent a postmodern phenomenon that draws its roots from an ancient impulse to share stories through image, word and sound to make sense of an uncertain world.

As word of shootings at the Virginia Tech campus spread on Monday, media convergence and user-generated words and pictures came into their own. No question this is a huge US media event. Electronically linked in shock by television, radio and the Internet, Americans didn’t just watch, they kept watch.

By the end of the day, the story was clinically summarized in statistics: 33 dead, about 30 injured, the worst mass shooting in America. Online, communities humanised the mass tragedy by sharing words and pictures. Those who lived through it democratised the sorrow, outrage and alarm on blogs, forums and websites.

On this story, the Internet and digital technology have been a driving force like never before. We’re using Webcams, we’re soliciting any video that viewers have, we’re monitoring the online communities of MySpace and Facebook to bring viewers as much information as we can from as many places.

Dan Abrams, General Manager, MSNBC.

Blacksburg is a remote college town so TV networks had no easy time moving in and setting up camp. The details and pictures trickled in throughout the day, with news wires initially quoting CNN, Fox and the Virginia Tech website.

Watching the tragedy unfurl via CNNI drives home how important civilian journalists have become to telling breaking news on television. As part of what CNN calls its I-Report, civilians on campus were sending their cell phone pictures and video into CNN’s Atlanta headquarters, and getting a good airing.

The most immediate and compelling descriptions of the massacre came not from seasoned reporters but witnesses. Never mind that the images were raw and the words often jumbled.

The earliest on-scene pictures and words were provided by Jamal Albarghouti, a Virginia Tech graduate student from the West Bank. His cell phone pictures of police charging Norris Hall as shots rang out were broadcast repeatedly through the day.

The wobbly video was chilling for its soundtrack. Gunshots could be heard coming from one of the buildings. By Tuesday, Albarghouti was standing on campus, microphone in hand, reporting from the scene as he talked with CNN anchorman Wolf Blitzer in the channel’s Washington newsroom.

Usually in tragic stories it is the witness who captures the feeling of the moment. Citizen witnesses offer something mainstream reports often lack - compassion. In his account, Albarghouti personalised his gripping account with these words:

“I just want to say how sorry I am for the families of all the people who got killed and injured here. I never thought that this could happen here.”

Now in the interest of “objectivity,” you will not hear reporting like this from mainstream journalists. As news organisations grapple with the power of connections on the Web, newsrooms are approaching the idea of crowdsourcing and citizen journalism at different levels and variations.

As the tragedy of the Virginia campus shooting unfolds, the productive potential of people armed with cell phones, computers and social networks will give us an inkling of how news is turning from a lecture to a global conversation.

POST-EVENT NOTE
One of the best recent multimedia coverage on the shooting I have visited is the New York Times’ interactive coverage. The online storytelling combines audio, video and information graphics to give users various levels of experiences in a gripping breaking news report. Registration is required to enter the site.

Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media has an essay on his blog as an op-ed piece in the Washington Examiner. His eloquent conclusion is worth noting.

Canadian journalism educator Mark Hamilton says in a fine analysis that this was a new mediascape in action, a potent mix of journalists, witnesses and aggregators telling the story better than any of them could alone.

In Slate magazine, media critic Jack Shafer praises journalists who have coldly pursued the story among the victims.

Journalist Adam Tinworth uses the terms “digital doorstopping” to describe journalists’ use of MySpace and Facebook pages to to make contact with and request interviews with victims and witnesses.