Lonelygirl15 Creators Rely on Open Source

September 20, 2006 at 10:03 pm · Filed under social media

Creators behind the Internet video phenomenon Lonelygirl15 will rely on open source technology and a newly launched Web site to explore possibilities in storytelling. The inventors — Greg Goodfried, 27; Miles Beckett, 28; and Mesh Flinders, 26 — plan to take the video-saga experiment in social networking much further by using technology to build a Web-site community around the show. Through an active forum, fans can provide feedback on daily decisions made by the 16-year-old video star Bree. “The community is the key to the show,” Goodfried said. “If the fans didn’t have the ability to comment and interact, the show would die.” (link)

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The Immigration Debate

September 20, 2006 at 1:25 pm · Filed under media, politics, software

Some of the material from Al Gore’s Current.tv has ended up on Youtube. This video about immigration has parallels for Australia.

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Australian soldiers use of Youtube

September 20, 2006 at 12:58 pm · Filed under politics, social media

Here is the article that broke the story about the Australian soldiers in Iraq and their use of Youtube

Australian soldiers serving in Iraq as part of Operation Catalyst have become accustomed to bad news and unwanted publicity. The mysterious death of sniper Private Jake Kovco in his room in a Baghdad barracks in April—and a bungle over the repatriation of his body—was a private tragedy that escalated into a public-relations disaster for the Australian Defence Force and the Howard government. Now the ADF’s image is under assault again. Last month, a man claiming to have served eight years in the Australian Army published on Youtube.com pictures and videos that appear to feature serious wrongdoing by Diggers during 2004 and 2005 operations in Baghdad (link Time Asia).

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How to write an academic essay

September 19, 2006 at 1:10 pm · Filed under pedagogy

Here is an excellent guide by Professor David Gauntlett of the Institute for Communication Studies in the UK on how to write an academic essay (link). Thanks for making it publicly available!

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Bush administration to post anti-drug videos on YouTube

September 19, 2006 at 12:01 pm · Filed under politics, social media, video

The Bush administration is taking its fight against illegal drugs to YouTube, the trendy internet video service that already features clips of wacky, drug-induced behaviour and step-by-step instructions for growing marijuana plants. The decision to distribute anti-drug, public service announcements and other videos over YouTube represents the first concerted effort by the US government to influence customers of the popular service, which shows more than 100 million videos per day. (from The Age link).

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hypertextual video

September 19, 2006 at 12:39 am · Filed under hypertext, internet, social media, video, web2.0

Youtube doesn’t really do anything new. It it just the ‘delivery boy’ of online video. But how about this innovation? This is similar to what I was trying to do in my own work 5 years ago with milkbar.com.au. It is what you call ‘hypertextual video’ in that it allows the user to embed links within the video and link between and within the video. Pretty nifty huh? In my own work, I used oral history recording and indexed them according to 4 analytical themes. I am not completely sure how this system is going to work, but I can’t wait until it is released next month. (Thanks to Techcrunch for the link)

The keystone feature here is the ability to add tags and comments tied to particular points in a video. Those tags are then searchable, so if I want to find the particular point in one of my videos that I tagged “touchdown,” that’s easy to do. I can also have a conversation with other users regarding a particular moment in a video and choose to embed the video on another site in it’s entirety or only from a particular point I select. While users can link to particular points in a Google Video as of last month, that’s easier and is just the beginning in Viddler

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BBC’s Editorial Blueprint for the future

September 16, 2006 at 10:18 am · Filed under media

BBC Director-General Mark Thompson today launched an extensive cross-media, audience-focussed project entitled Creative Futures which will produce an editorial blueprint for BBC programmes, content and services during the next Charter period. Following publication of the Government’s Green Paper on the BBC’s future last week, Mr Thompson said: “This project is designed to turn the purposes and objectives we set out in Building Public Value and the challenges now laid out in the Green Paper into an inspiring editorial strategy.“I want the team to come up with specific proposals to ensure that we’re ready for the next chapter in the BBC’s history.”We need to meet – and exceed - audiences’ rapidly changing expectations, make difficult choices and take calculated risks, while maintaining our commitment to excellence and innovation.” (link)

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50th Anniversary of Television in Australia

September 16, 2006 at 10:15 am · Filed under history, media

FIFTY years ago the box in the corner flickered to life. From a curiosity it became a living room fixture. Now television is moving in new, uncertain directions.Rove McManus is at the top of the TV tree, with three gold Logies and just under a million viewers tuning in weekly to his show. However, he can see an internet-powered future without the need for television networks to distribute moving pictures to a mass audience. Perhaps in just five years. “Ultimately, something like a timeslot — say, we’re on Tuesday 9.30pm on Channel Ten — will almost be superfluous,” he said yesterday. “It will just be accessible from a certain time and you can carry it around with you.” (link)

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dotMobi Tool Shows Mobile Viewing Quality of Popular Internet Sites

September 14, 2006 at 10:09 am · Filed under mobile

dotMobi, the company behind the first and only Internet address created for mobile phones, today announced the availability of the .mobi mobile emulator. Users can now find out if their favorite PC-oriented Websites are ready for mobile viewing by visiting dotMobi’s homepage or http://emulator.mtld.mobi.

“The .mobi emulator is a great tool for trademark holders. It gives them an instant glimpse of how their important brand looks to millions of mobile phone users,” said Trevor Shonfeld, Chairman and CEO of Roundpoint, one of the world’s premier service providers for Web sites wishing to publish content to PDAs and other mobile devices. With the exponential growth in the number of mobile users worldwide, it’s paramount for companies to understand how they are represented over the pervasive mobile channel and why appropriate optimization is a prudent step.”(link)

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What is dropping knowledge?

September 13, 2006 at 4:12 pm · Filed under internet, social media, web2.0

Ask yourself. Express yourself. Raise questions and seek solutions…

Browse our ontology of over 20,000 interlinked topics. Connect with people from all around the world. Link us to knowledge-resources across the Internet. Upload material to content-donation sites and link it back to us. Ask questions and answer them. Comment on the questions and answers of others. Invite your community to dialogue with you here, where people who share your concerns, will join the conversation.

To begin, input a word, a phrase or a question. Enter a search and see where it takes you. Or pursue an advanced search through multiple layers of the ontology. Or use the visual browser. Enter the dialogue through the selection of a search result that matches what you are looking for. Start a new dialogue by asking a new question. Answer a question if you believe you have the answer. Otherwise, simply comment. Always remember…

dropping knowledge is a way of asking and answering questions that recognises multiple viewpoints. When you ask in order to understand, when you answer in order to share, you are dropping knowledge (link)

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Australia: A Nation of Village Idiots

September 11, 2006 at 10:42 am · Filed under politics, web2.0

Australia under the Conservatives has become divided and fragmented. But it is not only the Conservatives who are to blame; it is the changing way in which industrial societies are structured, especially culturally. As the larger cultural ‘meta-structures’ collapse to be replaced by smaller cultural entities of the labyrinthine ‘information society’; then we are left with a cultural system which is much more complex, much more treacherous, and difficult to navigate. ‘Cultural syntax’ has never been more important as it is today.

I suppose that this is why I found the comments by Germain Greer about Steve Irwin so insightful. Here was a man who appeared to have no ‘cultural syntax’; in fact he could rough ride over any ‘habitat’ no matter how sensitive. This is old-fashioned Australia, the simple and boorish form of egalitarianism that one time in our past, used to speak for us all. But it doesn’t any more. The village that Steve Irwin came from may be a big one, but it is only one of many and many Australians can’t see beyond it. It is an Australia within Australia; an historical relic that most of us have let go of years ago, except the Americans who like to see us as a nation of rustic boors. Try and convince an American that we are more sophisticated then them and you are likely to be labelled a southern toady.

A broad liberal arts education will give you the skills to navigate through the Australian villages and the idiots at the centre of each one. But the Conservatives know that to reinforce a ‘village mentality’ is to dis-empower people and keep then away from the structures that they control. This is the big challenge of the Left; we need to look beyond the ‘grass roots’ and claim the larger structures in the name of common intelligence and common equity. Meta structures for the people I say and I am sorry, but Steve Irwin is no where near a representative icon of a larger Australian cultural landscape nor identity. He was good at B-grade US TV, and hats of to him, but let’s leave it at that.

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The ABC supports racism

September 10, 2006 at 9:59 am · Filed under politics

There are two types of racism. There is your common street-style racism as per the Cronulla Riots. And there is also institutional racism, as per the Centre for Independent studies. Today the ABC aired a talk by two very articulate old racists; Mark Steyn and Owen Harries. Steyn tried to argue that the west had lost its nerve based on his imperialist and racist interpretation of multiculturalism. I won’t go into detail; you can download and play the podcast yourself. The conservatives always hold up the most boorish of thinkers; ones that articulate what is otherwise racism, in such a dignified and articulate manner.

• Background Briefing Sunday 10 September, 9.10am Regaining confidence in western culture Commentators Mark Steyn and Owen Harries on the battle of ideas going on inside western cultures. Has the West lost its nerve? Recorded at the Centre for Independent Studies. Repeated Tuesday 12 September, 7.10pm

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What is the Internet Governance Forum?

September 8, 2006 at 4:20 pm · Filed under governance, internet, politics

One of the initiatives to come out of the final Tunis round of the two-round UN sponsored World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS) last year was the set up of an ongoing international dialogue called the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). They have their first meeting in Greece next month. Here is the forums mandate:

The mandate of the IGF is set out in Paragraph 72 of the Tunis Agenda:

72. We ask the UN Secretary-General, in an open and inclusive process, to convene, by the second quarter of 2006, a meeting of the new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue—called the Internet Governance Forum (IGF).The mandate of the Forum is to:

1. Discuss public policy issues related to key elements of Internet governance in order to foster the sustainability, robustness, security, stability and development of the Internet;

2. Facilitate discourse between bodies dealing with different cross-cutting international public policies regarding the Internet and discuss issues that do not fall within the scope of any existing body;

3. Interface with appropriate inter-governmental organizations and other institutions on matters under their purview;

4. Facilitate the exchange of information and best practices, and in this regard make full use of the expertise of the academic, scientific and technical communities;

5. Advise all stakeholders in proposing ways and means to accelerate the availability and affordability of the Internet in the developing world;

6. Strengthen and enhance the engagement of stakeholders in existing and/or future Internet governance mechanisms, particularly those from developing countries;

7. Identify emerging issues, bring them to the attention of the relevant bodies and the general public, and, where appropriate, make recommendations;

8. Contribute to capacity building for Internet governance in developing countries, drawing fully on local sources of knowledge and expertise;

9. Promote and assess, on an ongoing basis, the embodiment of WSIS principles in Internet governance processes;

10. Discuss, inter alia, issues relating to critical Internet resources;

11. Help to find solutions to the issues arising from the use and misuse of the Internet, of particular concern to everyday users;

12. Publish its proceedings (link)

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Steve Irwin on Heggle

September 8, 2006 at 3:16 pm · Filed under internet, politics, video, web2.0

Heggle is a ‘video aggregation’ site similar to a ‘news aggregation site’. You can search this system for a topic like ‘Steve Irwin’ and it will come back with all the videos on all the video sites about this bloke.

http://heggle.com/search?t=steve+irwin&c=0

And yes, Irwin was a totally embarrassment and I do agree with Germain Greer and her timely and insightful comments. I was sad to see the bloke go, and I am sure a lot of people liked him, but it is also good to see some Australian academics with a bit of courage who willing to take on the rising tides of populists yobbo boys and their low brow heroes.We all have a right to speak, even opportunistic Premiers of Queensland who would chase any old ambulance as long as there was a vote in it.

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What is the Digital Opportunity Index?

September 7, 2006 at 1:04 pm · Filed under governance, internet

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) has identified the need to measure the advances made in breaching the digital divide and in promoting the broad development goals included in the United Nations Millennium Declaration through increased access and use of ICTs. To this end, the WSIS Plan of Action prioritizes evaluation and tracking of countries’ progress in adopting ICTs.

TheDigital Opportunity Index (DOI) was endorsed in the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society, adopted during the Tunis Phase of WSIS. Accordingly to para 117 of the Agenda, which encourages the further development of indicators in a “collaborative, cost-effective and non-duplicative fashion”, the DOP mobilized and coordinated efforts for further developing the DOI as a tool for better measurement of the digital divide, as a part of the ongoing work on the WSIS implementation. The Index was developed in close collaboration with the Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity and Promotion (KADO) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) (link).

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