All Wired Up

Global Voices is another site that operates under a Creative Commons licence.

It describes itself as “a non-profit global citizens’ media project founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society,” which “seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.”

Global Voices works not only as a news source in its own right, but as a wire from the blogosphere (a blogwire?).

It works with traditional media rather than against it, transcending the online vs traditional journalism debate by encouraging both sides to work together.

It’s For Media section is a comprehensive resource for editors and journalists and encourages mainstream media to use the site to generate story ideas.

This spirit of cooperation is refreshing -a perfect example of how the quality of journalism (in all its forms) can be enhanced by combining new and old reporting methods.

Navigating the site is incredibly easy and I found it’s search by country method (accessed in the top-right of the homepage) a fantastic feature. For example when I chose Australia I found this blog post from John Kennedy about the reaction in China to Kevin Rudd’s election victory.

The post compiles translated Chinese blog posts praising the victory. It’s effectively a blog within a blog within a blog within… you get the picture and shows just how good GV is at bringing the global blogosphere together.

Trawling the internet to find this sort of material could take days without an innovative site like Global Voices to do it for us.

In case you can’t tell from my glowing praise above, I found Global Voices to be the best blog I came across during ALJ301 and will now be a frequent visitor.

Jeff Jarvis has pulling power the average Joe Blogger can only dream of.

So when he blogged about how mad he is at Dell computers and their poor customer service, people paid attention -millions of them in fact.

Traffic to his media analysis blog, Buzzmachine, doubled after word spread of his hatred for Dell, now famously named Dell Hell (Google it). Here is what he posted on June 21, 2005:

Dell lies. Dell sucks

I just got a new Dell laptop and paid a fortune for the four-year, in-home service.

The machine is a lemon and the service is a lie.

I’m having all kinds of trouble with the hardware: overheats, network doesn’t work, maxes out on CPU usage. It’s a lemon.

But what really irks me is that they say if they sent someone to my home — which I paid for — he wouldn’t have the parts, so I might as well just send the machine in and lose it for 7-10 days — plus the time going through this crap. So I have this new machine and paid for them to FUCKING FIX IT IN MY HOUSE and they don’t and I lose it for two weeks.

DELL SUCKS. DELL LIES. Put that in your Google and smoke it, Dell.

Trying to imagine how Dell would go about smoking through a Google is blowing my mind and probably yours to, so watch this instead:

I like Jeff Jarvis and I like Buzzmachine even more. It’s simple, it’s smart and it’s so popular it can actually change the way a corporation the size of Dell conducts business.

BTW: For the record Jarvis and Dell have since kissed and made up.

During my research on the mojo phenomenon, I can’t help but mourn how far behind the times Australia is in terms of our broadband and 3g data charges.

I had a friend from Germany stay with me last week and he could not believe I pay $99 a month for my home ADSL2 account with a 20 GB download limit.

His german account is 20 euro a month with a terabyte of downloading at his disposal.

Mobile phone browsing plans in Australia are even worse.

Much has been made of the Iphone’s brilliance, but little of the whopping excess data charges users are being slugged with for surfing the web, downloading music or turning their phone into a lightsaber.

When the latest genY magnet was announced, no carrier announced how much it would cost.

But this didn’t stop thousands of people from pre-ordering one.

Even once it was released, Vodafone still didn’t announce the cost.

A quick check of the latest iphone plans reveals that no carrier is offering no more than 6 GB download plans.

That’s not much if you plan on streaming video to the web, watching Youtube clips or using it as an all-in-one journalism tool.

Of course, iphones aren’t made for mojos, but the point here is the miniscule data limits that will keep the mojo phenomenon out of Australia for now –it’s just not a viable alternative here until we get better coverage at cheaper prices.

The latest Vodafone plans for the Nokia N82 -considered by many as the best mojo phone- say nothing about data limits and costs on their website or in the fine print.

This means one of two things:

Either they are hiding the costs because they are too high, or even scarier, web capability isn’t even a selling point for mobile carriers. This article from PC mag gives a neat rundown of vodafone charges though.

We used to watch the 6pm news to see live footage of the big stories.

This worked great for years, but in an increasingly controlled world, forward-thinking people began to question whether what they were seeing on the news was really the full picture.

Just as it has almost everything else in the world, the internet changed all that.

Now we can tune into Youtube, vlogs and any news source we like and get the side of the story we want to see, not a polished edition made for dinnertime viewing.

At the beginning of the ‘War on Terror’, much ado was made about Al Jazeera being the mouthpiece for Al Qaeda. (For more on that watch the fanastic doco ‘Control Room’. You can watch and/or download the whole thing here).

In an increasingly muddy war however, Al Jazeera proved to be more democratic then western media who shy away from the blood and guts reality that face Iraqis and Afghanis every day and that Al Jazeera are not afraid to report on.

But even Al Jazeera has an agenda.

The internet liberates us all though and with a simple Google search you can find some completely unadulterated footage from all sides of the war, including the extremists’.

Trust me, I did it and in my first page of searches I had easy access to a video of the beheading of Nicholas Berg… truly disturbing stuff and I don’t recommend you go looking for it.

As the website that hosts the video says though, it is important it is made available to those who wish to view it.

Back on topic now, I don’t think vlogs are ‘online tv’.

TV is a regulated medium governed by advertising. The one thing vlogs have going for them, is they are completely independent. Vlogs are now just as important contributions to the media as broadcast journalism.

The only problem is that for every Alive in Baghdad, there is a million of these:

Ok. I don’t doubt that Straits Times’ UGC website, Stomp has been very successful, but I do find it hard to take seriously and I truly despair for Singapore’s youth is this is how they get their news.

Admittedly, I know little about the media industry in Singapore -maybe stories about public displays of affection, Sushi left abandoned on sanitary items and $115 crab legs are common-place?

Seriously, the ‘news’ on this site makes Today Tonight look like the BBC.

To be fair though, Stomp is more about social networking than journalism and is marketed as being a platform for Singapore’s citizens to create their own version of the news.

But with stories like the one above the most popular on the site, I can’t help but think that Stomp says more about Singapore’s excessive conservatism than it does about the real news going on in the country or elsewhere in the world.

Singapore’s media environment is highly regulated. Censorship is common, internet access is restricted and private ownership of satellite dishes is not allowed.

Hopefully initiatives like Stomp will help to liberate the media somewhat, but since Stomp is still owned by the ultra-conservative Singapore Press Holdings, it seems unlikely that it can ever be a truly democratic medium for user-generated or citizen journalism.

Here’s a lecture from Jennifer Lewis, editor of Stomp (warning, almost an hour long):

Since this week’s reading by Robert Niles is all about photo albums and integrating them into a blog, I thought I should give this a go.

I decided to go with the winner, Picasa. Since I use a Mac, I’m a bit skeptical, but Niles assures us the Safari problem has been fixed.

So I go to the Picasa site and realise there is no version yet for Mac, not a good start. Curse this PC dominated world.

Not to worry, they have a special ‘exporter’ for Mac which allows me to export pictures directly from iPhoto to a Picasa album… Cool, that’s even better.

So uploading the photos proved easy, but when I went to view the album I discover that my pictures have been put in reverse order.

So I click Edit>Organise and reorder>Sort by date and there is my picture sequence in all its kick-flipping glory. Now to embed the thing:

Success. Well that was pretty easy.

As for how slideshows fit into the realm of online journalism. Look at any news website, for example this one, this one or this one. When a big story breaks (especially a highly pictorial one) they usually incorporate a slideshow.

On a smaller scale, they are great ways for a small-time blogger or CJ to share pictures to go with their story.

NB: The photos in my slideshow are taken by my friend, Jon Scoble. He’s a professional photographer and I have his permission to use these photos (just wanted to clear that up).

The internet has given journalists many useful tools, so many in fact, that most of us find ourselves constantly chained to the computer.

The bitter old guard say this is the very thing that is destroying journalism and that real ‘in the field’ reporting is now dead and gone.

I don’t know about that, but I know that my work colleagues and I do 95% of our interviews over the phone and the majority of our research begins and ends with Google.

I don’t have the time or the word count to debate whether this is good or bad journalism, but I know it makes my job a hell of a lot easier and for this I am grateful.

But the internet has already progressed far beyond Google and we now have even more sophisticated tools at our disposal.

Here are some of them in easy to read point form. Click on each for a more detailed explanation than I have the room for:

* RSS or ‘Really Simple Syndication’ – Trawls the net for your favourite content and feeds it to your hungry RSS reader.
* Technorati – The Google of the blog world. Here’s an edublogger post with a good overview of Technorati.
* Moblogs – Not hip hop slang for more blogs, but actually geek slang for mobile phone blogs.
* Podcasts – Do I really need to explain?
* Vlogs – A blog… on video
* Twitter – What are you doing?
* Del.icio.us – The humble bookmark has evolved.

Just for fun, here is a twit’s guide to Twitter:

Please go here to sign the petition and show your disgust at Fairfax’s sledgehammer approach . More about this can be found at www.fairgofairfax.org.au and www.alliance.org.au.

As a journalist working for Fairfax Community Network, an email sent to my inbox yesterday was worrying. I’m sure you’ve all heard by now that Fairfax is slashing 550 jobs, mostly from the editorial department and as i write this, I’ve just found out that Andrew Jaspan, editor-in-chief of The Age was first to go under the chopping block.

I’m in no way qualified to make comment since I’ve only been with Fairfax for a month, but I will anyway.

The email was a pathetically overwritten piece of corporate wank. I’d post a copy but I’m not sure about the legality of that, so instead I’ll just link to Crikey, who in the spirit of true journalism, published the whole thing here.

Incidentally, we had a guest speaker come to work today. John Silvester, much respected crime reporter for The Age and author of Underbelly: The Gangland Wars gave us some sound advice: “No matter what happens, it’s the quality of journalism that counts.”

So from Australia we have the above story sounding like the far-off ringing of funeral bells. With the right kind of ears you can hear the nails being hammered into print journalism’s coffin. Compare this with the rise and rise of South korea’s Ohmynews, who are not just adapting to, but dictating trends in online news. Hard to believe when you consider the Korean War of the early 50’s. Infrastructure in the country was destroyed and an economy was virtually non-existent throughout the 60’s. The Koreans proved industrious though and slowly built a stable and profitable economy. Heavy censorship of South Korean media in the 80’s led to widespread condemnation and resulted in heavy liberalisation of the media in the late 80’s.

What I found most interesting in the reading this week, is the side-comment that legislation prevents Koreans from owning both a newspaper and a TV station. There’ll be no News Ltd or Fairfax duopoly in South Korea, thank you very much. They prefer to let the people do the reporting, and who could argue with that. It means no marketers, managers and faceless CEO’s wielding overwritten emails about “a period of centralisation of business support services” (read: over the next few weeks some of you will be sacked) and means free and unfetted journalism.

It’s not all roses though. Sure, the idea of anyone being able to report the news is irresistibly democratic and free-spirited, but where is the integrity we are guaranteed from a legitimate publication bound by journalistic ethics?

Ohmy I have so much more to say…