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.

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:

All this talk of the death of the newspaper reminds me of when the record industry went all Chicken Little, screaming the sky was falling in a thunder-storm of free music all over their profits. Napster and Kazaa (now replaced by Bittorrent) were letting people get music for free-a problem for sure. But what did the record industry do? Sweet F.A. They wasted all their time suing people and crying over ever-decreasing album sales. This made room for ITunes. Apple saw oppurtunity in the change instead of doom and well, the rest is a fruity piece of history.

A similar thing is happening to Journalism, except it’s not illegal to download free news (yet). Blogs and online news are filling the role that newspaper no longer can… providing instant news and opinion. Basically, the role of newspapers has changed to one of analysis, rather than breaking the story.

‘Citizen Journalism‘ though, is an entirely new thing. There are two-types of CJ’s -the eyewitness with a camera or mobile who gets that one-in-a-million shot of something huge, and the professional, one-man newsroom.

Check this out: Steve Garfield from The Uptake (a video-journalist website) beats CNN to a scoop about 2008 Presidential candidate, Duncan Hunter and explains how he streams news live from his mobile phone…

Steve Garfield – Citizen Journalist, beats CNN to their scoop

and just for fun: