Webs@Work

It helps when you’re the leader of 1.3 billion people and you put your popularity on the line online. Flush from the accolades for his sympathetic response to the Sichuan earthquake, Chinese leader Wen Jiabao has gone Web 2.0 with a profile on Facebook.

You can be friends with Grandpa Wen, the moniker for China’s 66-year-old premier who has always cultivated a populist image unlike many of the Communist Party’s aloof leaders. And with 15,000 Facebook ’supporters’ as of this writing, he’s more popular than US President Bush on the social networking site.

As the face of China’s grief, Wen’s knack for looking sympathetic has won him supporters offline. Hours after the quake hit Sichuan province, he was on the scene with a bullhorn. TV cameras followed him for days as he tried to comfort children and put on a hard hat to enter a collapsed building.

Full of laudatory comments, the Facebook page was set up two days after the 12 May quake. It has photos of Wen walking through the rubble, comforting victims and breathless posts such as: ‘I love you, oh my God,’ ‘A model Premier for the world!’ and “Go Grandpa Wen! Go China!”

The profile creator had uploaded a mournful “We Are The World” - style music video that interspersed horrific images of the quake’s aftermath with shots of musicians wearing white T-shirts with “5-12″ printed on them.

Facebook lets users create personal profiles. The page appears to have been set up recently though it’s not clear whether it’s the work of Wen himself, a government official or someone with no ties to the premier. The page bears the official government photo of Wen in a gray suit.

The Chinese leader is one of hundreds of politicians on Facebook. He joins Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, Taiwan’s Ma Ying-jeou, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and every major US presidential hopeful who have Facebook pages. The site has a section where users can ‘Browse All Politicians’ and see them ranked by their number of ’supporters.’

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

eEmmys? Oscars 2.0? The people have spoken, and viral clips along with Web stalwarts won big in the second annual YouTube Video Awards recognizing the top user-created videos of 2007.

The honors include “bragging rights, a trophy and a special invitation to an event later this year.” YouTube users voted from six nominees in each category: music, sports, comedy, instructional, short film, inspirational, commentary, creative, politics, series, eyewitness and “adorable.”

My Name is Lisa, a drama about a young girl and her mother who has Alzheimer’s, triumphed in the newly added Short Film category.

Honors for top Web Series went to The Guild, whose creator and star Felicia Day is getting lauded left, right and center for her quirky online comedy chronicling the relationships among a fictional team of online fantasy gamers. Here’s a profile of the series.

Chocolate Rain stole the thunder in the Music camp, having already morphed Tay Zonday from an unknown musician to Web superstar.

Stop the Clash of Civilizations by AvaazOrg topped the Politics category.

The Original Human Tetris was Creative video of choice.

Battle at Kruger took Best Eyewitness Video for its astonishing footage of a baby water buffalo surviving an attack by lions and a crocodile in the African prairie.

The journalism of PBS FRONTLINE is recognized every week for in-depth, no-glitz examination of something significant. On Monday March 24, the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, PBS will retrace the path of the war in a two-part documentary that draws on its FRONTLINE reports to examine the legacy of the Bush administration.

Once in a rare moment, a work comes along to reconcile our hopes in the Web as a documentary medium. “Bush’s War” elevates the telling of true stories by weaving facts with technology in innovative ways to illuminate the enduring myths of our culture. Conceived last November, FRONTLINE’s New TV/Web Experience offers the definitive documentary analysis by veteran producer Michael Kirk.

Here’s how PBS describes its political thriller:

Across the entire four-hour Bush’s War series that will be streamed online, FRONTLINE will integrate and embed in its video player an array of related interviews, background material and video that can be viewed with just a click. In addition, more than 100 video clips of key moments and events in the Iraq war will be the centerpiece of an annotated master chronology which FRONTLINE will publish on the Bush’s War site.

The interviews, video and background material are drawn from one of the richest archives in broadcast journalism: FRONTLINE’s 40+ hours of documentaries and 400 interviews done since 9/11 on Iraq and the war on terror, as well as new interviews conducted for Bush’s War.

Did the Web make a difference in the elections in Malaysia? Early results show the opposition are set to trounce the ruling Barisan Nasional as blogger-politicians poise to make history. The opposition has taken the northern island state of Penang, with blogger Jeff Ooi successfully using his blog as a platform to launch a political career.

Ooi contested a seat for the opposition Democratic Action Party, which has claimed victory in Penang, ousting the government for the first time since 1969. Economic grievances, inter-religious disputes and unfulfilled pledges have spawned a unifying disillusionment with PM Abdullah’s administration, eroding popular support for his United Malays National Organization party at the ballot box.

The blogosphere heralds a new reality in democratic citizenship as agile opponents use the Web to rustle up support and deny the ruling coalition of its near monopoly over information flow. Independent Websites and blogs such as Malaysia Today and Malaysiakini have kindled lively debates to challenge the ruling coalition stranglehold over TV and radio. They engage their publics around complex, controversial subjects in which mainstream media are seen to have failed to address and convince citizens.

Media analyst Mustafa Kamal Anuar said, ”A lot more people have become more discerning especially after recent demonstrations revealed the stark contrast between the mainstream media’s coverage and the bloggers.” Last week, the senior cabinet minister who heads the ethnic Indian party in the ruling coalition was jeered when he officiated at a dance competition in Penang. It would have passed unnoticed if a video of that incident had not been quickly posted on YouTube.

Certainly the Web has lowered barriers to political participation and revitalized civic life. In the northeast constituency of Kuala Terengganu, a barely literate 89-year-old granny has outfitted her campaign with every trick from the Web 2.0 toolkit.

Like her Western counterpart Barack Obama, Maimun Yusuf, the oldest election candidate in Malaysia, reached out to her voters with a Facebook profile. It’s set up by her Web savvy supporters who are also running a blog for her, a Gmail account, a YouTube channel and a Picasa album.

Web 2.0 tools empower individuals and provide new opportunities for political involvement. Detractors may argue for methodologies to isolate the cyber chatter and quantify the effect of online videos on Youtube to determine whether online participatory culture translates into tangible offline outcomes. The trouncing handed out to Barisan National speaks for itself.

After newspapers, TV could be the next roadkill on the Web. With Web video shaping up to be viewers’ platform of choice, the migration of eyeballs and time spent watching video online is eating into broadcasters’ advertising pie.

Google’s plan to wring advertising revenue from its Youtube videos will keep broadcasters up on many a sleepless nights. If Google succeeds in marrying advertising to online video, broadcasters could find themselves in a bind similar to newspaper publishers. The familiar scenario - declining circulation and advertisers switching to cheaper, more effective online distribution.

For me, watching ads-infested TV sucks. With so many multimedia offerings online, scheduling must-watch shows is really a pain. I’m switching to Web video because I don’t want to waste time sitting through the TV ads. Here are the Web video hits that are making roadkill out of TV:

AOLin2TV
BBC TV News
ChannelChooser
cciTV.com
Democracy Internet TV
Live Online TV
PBS Frontline
PeekVid
Yahoo!TV

The Jeff Pulver Blog has a great collection of video Websites grouped into five zones, from professionally “produced” TV shows to personal video blogs:

1. “TV on the Net” - sites for TV shows that are, or have been, on TV/Cable and are available for viewing on the Net.

2. “TV Shows Only Available on the Internet” - new programs produced for the viewing on broadband.

3. “User Created Content sites” - sites like Veoh and YouTube which let community members upload video to share with others.

4. “Sites to View TV” - sites like ChannelKing and ChannelChooser where someone can watch commercial TV stations.

5. “Misc” - for websites that didn’t fit in any of the above.

CNN’s public journalism initiative, “beta” iReport is inviting anyone to send in photos, video, stories and more, creating instantly one of the biggest sites online for “unfiltered, uncensored user-powered news.”

Youtubish and video-centric, the site includes standard user-generated features, such as rating contributions, search by subject or submitter, sort by most popular. Anyone from around the globe can contribute pictures and video of breaking news stories from their towns and neighborhood.

Unlike iReports on CNN.com which are vetted by CNN, the iReport portal is unmoderated and stories appear on the site the moment they’re uploaded. CNN makes no guarantees about the content or the coverage.

The site isn’t co-branded with CNN yet in a clear effort to seperate the CNN brand from the unmoderated content on iReport.com. The majority of iReports are on this site — about 90,000 — while CNN has only used about 900 of those on air or on CNN.com

CNN has been experimenting with citizen journalism since 2007. One event in particular catapulted such citizen journalism onto the international stage. On April 16, 2007, video submitted by graduate student Jamal Albarghouti captured the sounds of gunfire during the Virginia Tech massacre.

CNN paid Albarghouti an undisclosed amount for the exclusive rights to the video he shot on his Nokia N70. The immediacy of the pictures demonstrated the potential for such content.

So is citizen journalism inevitable? Is this another step by MSM and its archaic practice of editing to embrace new ways? Only time will tell whether this experiment will end up being a popular entertainment portal or a valuable news source.

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?

Here’s a chance to be a YouTube millionaire, but only if you’re a top content creator. In the US, users of video-sharing site are already making money from the videos they post on the site. The project is being extended to other countries, starting in the UK.

Those signing up to the YouTube Partner Programme will be offered a share of the revenue generated from advertisements that run next to their video. Partners are independent video creators and media companies who are looking for online distribution. New YouTube partners include LisaNova, renetto, HappySlip, smosh, and valsartdiary.

The amount earned will depend on the number and popularity of the videos. YouTube says those making “several thousand dollars a month” are regularly producing videos with over one million views

The first wave of US partners - including singer/songwriter Tay Zonday, wordsmith hotforwords and comedians apauledtv and peteandbrian - have already become responsible for a significant percentage of YouTube’s total traffic, according to YouTube.

As people spend more time on social networking sites, they are increasingly thinking about how to monetise it. YouTube is part of the trend of social networks and user-generated content sites offering people a chance to make money for the content they create.

Here’s a great guide on citizen media, aimed at non-technical readers. Produced by Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices Online, An Introduction to Citizen Media, offers context and case studies on how people across the world use blogs, podcasts, Web video and digital photography to engage in an unmediated conversation transcending borders, cultures and languages. A Spanish version is available.

From the Introduction:

A change is taking place in how we communicate. Just ten years ago we learned about the world from newspapers, the television, and radio. Professional journalists would go to faraway places and bring back stories, photographs and videos of situations they witnessed and people they met.

Just ten years ago we rarely, if ever, communicated directly with the journalists themselves. Leading members of society wrote editorials expressing their opinions about various issues, but the rest of us could only share our opinions and thoughts with a small group of friends.

Bow thanks to new tools like weblogs, it is now possible to easily publish to the Internet. From Turkey to Kenya to Bolivia, everyday people are starting to share stories and opinions with the rest of the world. While this new form of communication is now freely available, most people participating still live in the wealthy neighborhoods of urban cities.

While there are already several excellent introductions to the principles of citizen media, they tend to focus on citizen media initiatives in North America and Western Europe. This guide hopes to showcase some of the most exciting and innovative developments on citizen media in the non-Western world.

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.

2008 is beginning to look like 1984 behind the Great Firewall. China’s economic juggernaut reveals its darker side yet again as Beijing moves to nip a blossoming online video industry in the bud with new rules that could block YouTube and other services in the country.

Starting Jan 31, sites that provide video programming or allow users to upload video must have a permit and be either state-owned or state-controlled. Permits for video hosting sites will be subject to renewal every three years and operators who commit violations may be banned for up to 5 years.

Politically or morally objectionable content will be forbidden under the new rules. That digital contraband would include politically sensitive messages about racial minorities and human rights as well as sexual images, although most are banned already. Providers will be required to delete such content if it is uploaded and to report each incident to the State.

This new policy about video sharing sites may or may not be a big deal. Youtube was blocked for several weeks at the end of 2007 after a Chinese version of their site was launched, but normally there is no official notification or justification that a service has stopped working. One day, you can access it and the next day it is blocked.

Perhaps Youtube will become semi permanently blocked like Wikipedia, but Google has a history of adapting itself to be compliant with China’s culture of Internet censorship. It is more likely that the China’s Youtube copysites like tudou.com will have to register with and be subject to more control from the Chinese government.

CATSHANGHAI

To be sure massive censorship in the US exists though mostly driven by special interest groups and corporate advertisers. These manipulate investigative reporting and block facts from getting into the media by threatening to pull ad dollars from newspapers and TV stations.

Google is well known to the gay blogging community for unfair adjudication of standards when it comes to adwords account approvals. It is known in China to be a partner and advocate of censorship as long as currency, American or Chinese, is involved.

While the statute could limit online video to state-controlled media sites and ban foreign-owned video-hosting sites, it may also go unenforced, serving more as a threat to coerce video-hosting sites to police themselves. China’s popular video websites are run by private companies, and have in recent years been the focus of attention from venture-capital investors.

If it feels like everyone is crying “wolf” or “totalitarian” too early, it bears remembering that China is a hotbed of bad Internet activity. Presently the government lacks the technology to filter video as selectively as it filters text. The move may scare sites into censoring the content authorities want banned.

All said, the Chinese are fine, hard working people with a great and proud history. You can’t stop the Chinese, but it’s unfortunate that a state with a distrust in its own citizens has chosen affirmation power through control of information.

Related post:
Journey Into China’s Internet Censorship

Can Web video bring the world closer? Images alone can’t effect change but people moved by the imagery can. Let 2008 be the defining moment.

On May 10, Websites in Cairo, Dharamsala, Kigali, London, New York City, Ramallah, Rio de Janeiro and Tel Aviv will be linked to produce a four-hour program of powerful films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music.

Known as Pangea Day, the program will be broadcast live to the world through the Web, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones.

To register as a film-maker or learn how to get involved, visit http://www.pangeaday.org. Here’s the trailer:

If you use Skype for interviews, here’s a great tutorial on all you need to know to get true broadcast-quality recordings. Thanks to Doug Kaye and Paul Figgiani of Blogarithms.

Professor Walter Lewin’s Lectures on Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology are legendary for their clear and dazzling presentations. Now they can be viewed anywhere, anytime on the MIT OpenCourseWare site which shares free lecture notes, exams, and other resources from over 1800 courses spanning its entire curriculum.

The Walter Lewin Video Lectures

8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics
8.02 Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism
8.03 Physics III: Vibrations and Waves

Thanks to the global classroom the university has created to spread knowledge online, Lewin is today a Web guru. The professor is part of the Web generation of academic stars who hold forth in cyberspace on their college Web sites and iTunes U. MIT on iTunes U contains video and audio files of MIT faculty lectures, public lectures, and community events.

And if you’re thinking of homeschooling a high schooler or gifted teenager, here’s an invaluable resource. M.I.T. recently expanded its online classes by opening a site aimed at high school students and teachers. Lewin is among those featured.

Open CourseWare is not an MIT education. It does not grant degrees and certificates or provide access to MIT faculty. Most educators use it to plan and teach a course.

Who says YouTube is the preserve of fickle teens? At 81 years old, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has launched her own Royal Channel on the video-sharing website to broadcast a very traditional message on a very untraditional medium.

Going live just after midnight today, the channel is a royal first. The monarch will use YouTube to send out her 50th televised annual festive message at about 1500 GMT on Christmas Day.

Buckingham Palace plans on posting rare archive footage on the website, including her maiden Christmas Day television speech sent out to Britain and its former colonies in 1957. The Queen spoke presciently in that black and white broadcast from Sandringham about the impact of technology:

Today is another landmark because television has made it possible for many of you to see me in your homes on Christmas Day. . . I very much hope that this new medium will make my Christmas message more personal and direct . . . That it is possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us.

QUEEN ELIZABETH II
Christmas Day Message, 1957

Showing a canny knack for keeping ahead of the times, the Queen launched an official website for the British monarchy in 1997. Last year’s message was available for the first time as a podcast on the Buckingham Palace website.

By tapping into the YouTube community, the Queen’s advisers hope she will be able to broaden her appeal to more people of all ages across the world and keep up with technological innovation. Users will be able to rank the royal videos by giving them a star rating.

Those close to the Queen have said how, encouraged by her grandchildren, she has long been keen to learn about new technology. She has her own private email address, “surfs” the web and uses a mobile phone.

Tuesday’s television broadcast, which has been recorded at Buckingham Palace, will be in high-definition format to ensure a better picture quality.

Buckingham Palace’s news release announcing royal channel.

As 2007 winds down, it’s time to take stock of Web video over the past year and how the landscape is likely to evolve. Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove sounds off the Web video market in an article.

The central thesis is that two general categories have emerged in the Internet video market over the past year:

Aggregators - which include consumer sharing sites, commercial video portals, and social networks,

Platforms - such as Internet TV platforms, community platforms, and uber ad platforms.

For video content owners and website publishers, several major trends will shape strategies in the Web video market.

Branded Destinations - media companies with established brands and new start-ups will continue to build successful branded destinations so they can control the access to audiences.

Audience Networks - content owners will continue to develop distribution strategies that place elements of their content library into wide distribution, in most cases with advertising attached.

Audience Monetization - content owners will look for new ways to blend ad formats, insertion policies, and targeting tactics across pages, short-form video clips, long-form shows, and open distribution.

Contextual Publishing - short-form online video does best placed in a context created by web pages, comments from users, etc. Contextual in-page video publishing will grow.

High-Quality Video - the increasing access consumers have to long form, high-quality video will push Web TV closer to traditional broadcast TV.

Check out the Engagemedia wiki to review the best available tools for the creation, playback and embedding of online video using Free and Open Source Software video codecs. There’s also a set of recommendations for development to enhance their adoption by social change video projects on the web. You can give your feedback here. PDF Version

TOP 100 NEWSPAPER WEBSITES

Find out how newspapers can put your message in a whole new light. Here’s a site that gives you solid support as you evaluate your media strategies.

Tis the season to be silly, and the blogosphere is abuzz with delight and dismay over a rap video just YouTubed, featuring the theatrics of big wigs at the Media Development Authority of Singapore.

The MDA regulates and censors media and the arts in this prim city state. So one shouldn’t be surprised that its corporate cavort has all the cheer of mandatory office fun, replete with hip hop HOD mission statements and the vision thing, contrived to connect and show how open-minded government officials can be at their year-end office D&D.

The original MDA video was made for an internal staff conference in April. It was later sent to industry members with the media regulator’s annual report and put online. Since then, the MDA website has been visited twice as often.

The long thread of comments on the YouTube page shows netizens’ sentiment towards the caper touting Singapore’s media ambitions. A true Singapore-made rojak with all the right viral ingredients and that touch of (c)rap.

Related post:
Becoming a Star With Viral Video.