How to track Iranian protests online #iranelections

June 15, 2009 at 9:53 pm · Filed under media, political communication, politics, video

Here is how to find out about the Iranian elections online. Please send me your links. Also, Twitter’s down time has been rescheduled because of the important role that it is playing in the US elections (see link).

Hash Tag: #Iranelections (search and post your blogs and tweets with this).

• Breaking Tweet http://www.breakingtweets.com

• Andrew Sullivan’s Blog (link) Thanks to D.P. for the link

• uk-iran.com (link) Thanks to Payman for the link

• Monitter.com (real-time trending tweets)

• Mashable.com http://mashable.com/2009/06/14/new-media-iran/ (and excellent guide to using new media to track the election in Iran).

• Google Blog Search http://blogsearch.google.com/

• (Flickr. search on Iran and Protests)

• Youtube (Citizenstube)

“The popular Iranian cartoonist, Nikahang Kosar, depicts Ahmadinejad as a bandit holding Iran to ransom. This is his take on the official result” (from the Guardian)

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Manual Castells at London School of Economics 9 July

May 20, 2009 at 3:35 pm · Filed under media, social media, web2.0

The acclaimed author of the Rise of Network Society, Professor Manual Castells  will be speaking at LSE on 9th July and launching his new book ‘Communication Power’.  I can’t wait for this one; I have wanted to hear Castells speak for years.  As a PhD candidate in the late ’90s, Castells changed how I though about nations and globalism and the way I interact with the world (perhaps I am not the only one!). His main contention is that the logic of globalism is networks; not geographic based industrial capitalism that defined most of the 20th Century.  A wonderful scholar; hope to see you there!

Thursday 9 July, 6.30-8pm, Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

LSE Summer School lecture with the Department of Media and Communications and POLIS present:

Communication Power

SPEAKER: Professor Manuel Castells

CHAIR: Professor Robin Mansell

This event marks the launch of Manuel Castells latest book, Communication Power, in which he analyses the transformation of the global media industry by the revolution in communication technologies. Manuel Castells is university professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair Professor of Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and research professor of information society at the Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona.

Info: Ticket from 10am on Tuesday 30 June at www.lse.ac.uk/events or by calling 020 7955 6100.

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Reclaiming the local…

April 13, 2009 at 7:14 pm · Filed under media, social media, software, web2.0

(thanks to the NY Times)

If your local newspaper shuts down, what will take the place of its coverage? Perhaps a package of information about your neighborhood, or even your block, assembled by a computer.  

Minh Uong/The New York Times

A number of Web start-up companies are creating so-called hyperlocal news sites that let people zoom in on what is happening closest to them, often without involving traditional journalists.

The sites, like EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch, collect links to articles and blogs and often supplement them with data from local governments and other sources. They might let a visitor know about an arrest a block away, the sale of a home down the street and reviews of nearby restaurants (link NY Times)

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Media Talk: Twitter @G20

April 3, 2009 at 4:14 pm · Filed under media, pod casts, political communication, web2.0

Here is a podcast (audio); a reflective analysis of the use of new media such as twitter at the G20 protests by a panel of media experts.

Matt Wells and the panel discuss Twitter and the new forms of digital journalism at G20 (link)

Here is the app. for the iphone called Audioboo that is discussed on the podcast (link).

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Google Street view

April 2, 2009 at 3:14 pm · Filed under media

This is how ridiculously large Google’s street view has become. This is am image of my mother house who lives in rural Tasmania about 5 miles outside of the nearest town!


View Larger Map

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Communication Power in the Network Society

March 31, 2009 at 12:11 pm · Filed under internet, media, pod casts

Manual Castells, who has a new book out in July called ‘Communication Power’ gave a lecture at the OII (Oxford Internet Institute), in October last year. Those kind folks at OII have provided a web-cast of it online.  There are also a number of other noterieties with web-cast-lectures. Most notable Ted Nelson, Jimmy Wales, Steven Colemen. Check it oot…(link)

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Winners Portable Film Festival

September 2, 2008 at 9:32 am · Filed under art, media, mobile

After a month of deliberation, fandom, and some pretty abject name calling, Portable is proud to announce the winners of its 2008 festival, chosen by the likes of you!

Specially designed robots, working an algorhythm between total views, total ratings, and overall rating for each film, have worked night and day in front of one of those Good Will Hunting-style whiteboards with intimidating looking equations on it to work out the following…

Congratulations (and free stuff) goes out to (link)

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Only one party’s in the game for attention in cyberspace

August 15, 2007 at 8:05 pm · Filed under media, political communication, politics, web2.0

From the Melbourne Age

Kevin Rudd has a genuine presence on the web. The Coalition seems to be lagging, writes Catherine Deveny.

LET’S be honest here, it’s a bit hard to sex up Kevin Rudd. Sure, he’s probably a good bloke. Actually, he must be a good bloke seeing that Howard and his mates have done their best to dig up dirt on him, and all they found out is that he speaks Chinese. The H Team kept opening closets hoping skeletons would fall out and all they found were doilies, neatly folded linen and a tea towel that read “WANDILIGONG! IT’S ABORIGINAL FOR PARTY!” (link)

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From Google to gaggle

August 13, 2007 at 7:12 pm · Filed under deliberation, media, political communication, social media, web2.0

From the Guardian Unlimited.

People quoted in featured stories on Google’s US news site now have the right to reply, marking a fundamental shift in the search engine’s role (link).

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The Portable Film Festival

August 8, 2007 at 7:18 pm · Filed under media, mobile, video, web2.0

A tiny word from the people at Portable.
www.portablefilmfestival.com

Speak to anyone who has attended a free bar event recently and
you’ll find out it is possible to have too much of a good thing.
Especially when that good thing is champagne. But here at Portable
we deal in content not alcohol, and we’re chucking the stuff
around like there’s no tomorrow.

There are over 450 free downloads featuring some of the year’s
best short films, music videos from Willy Mason and The Shins,
and online serials including Lonely Girl 15 and Galacticast.

Log yourself in at www.portablefilmfestival.com and get glugging

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Australian Conservatives give MySpace a wide berth

July 18, 2007 at 9:56 am · Filed under media, political communication, politics, social media, software, web2.0

From the Melbourne Age. And Ironic considering that MySpace is owned by the biggest Australian Conservative of them all.

The Federal Liberal Party appears to be snubbing MySpace, after the social network publicly criticised the Liberals’ response to its new Impact political channel.

The channel – which MySpace says facilitates direct communication between politicians, non-profit organisations and voters – officially launched last Thursday, with profiles for 20 individual politicians.

It is understood the Prime Minister, John Howard, refused to create his own profile page because he did not want to lend his identity to a commercial organisation. (link)

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Virginia Tech Launches April 16 Archive

May 2, 2007 at 7:18 pm · Filed under media

BLACKSBURG, Va., April 30, 2007 – Virginia Tech’s Center for Digital Discourse
and Culture (CDDC) is pleased to announce the launch of the April 16 Archive
(www.april16archive.org). This new online archive assists artists, humanists,
social scientists, and all other scholars who seek, today and in the future, to
develop a better understanding of the violent events of April 16, 2007 at
Virginia Tech. It is also available to the general public of the Commonwealth
of Virginia, the United States of America, and the world at large as we come to
terms with a local, national, and global event that will have ramifications for
years to come. This archive works actively to deploy electronic media for the
collection, interpretation, preservation, and display of stories and digital
objects related to the tragedy of April 16, 2007 and its many effects as text,
image, and sound. Developed in cooperation with George Mason University’s
Center for History and New Media (CHNM), this project is receiving technical,
curatorial and administrative support from Virginia Tech students, faculty, and
staff.

The archive will preserve a diverse record of the events surrounding April 16,
2007 by collecting first-hand observations, photographic images, sound
recordings, media reports, personal writings, official statements, individual
blog postings, and any other documents that can be stored as digital files. In
addition to local reactions, the archive welcomes responses from across the
globe in any language. Through this archive, we aim to leave a positive legacy
for the larger community and contribute to a collective process of healing,
especially as those affected by this tragedy tell their stories in their own
words. The larger trend exemplified by this project is the “digital memory
bank.” Memory banks are being used to preserve the richness of the present as
it transitions to the past, thereby ensuring that the collected records can be
both readily accessible and carefully preserved for future access.

The April 16 Archive welcomes contributions from the Virginia Tech community, as
well as from anyone around the world who wants to share words of support or
reflection following the events of April 16, 2007. The attacks happened in
Blacksburg, Virginia, but they were experienced around the world through mass
media and community ties. The accounts of that day from any site across the
globe are, therefore, very important to the April 16 Archive as it documents
the full impact of this tragic event. For more information, visit
www.april16archive.org or contact admin@april16archive.org. For media
inquiries, contact Brent Jesiek, Manager of the CDDC, at (540) 231-7614 or
cddc@vt.edu.

Established in 1998, Virginia Tech’s Center for Digital Discourse and Culture is
one of the world’s first university based digital points-of-publication for new
forms of scholarly communication, academic research, and cultural analysis.
Virginia Tech’s College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences (CLAHS) as well as
the Institute of Distance and Distributed Learning (IDDL) actively support the
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture. The CDDC is also working with
Virginia Tech’s newly established Institute for Society, Culture, and the
Environment (ISCE) to develop new scholarly initiatives, such as the April 16
Archive, tied into the practices of rhetoric, representation and the public
humanities.

This story is also posted on the April 16 Archive website:
http://www.april16archive.org/news/

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BBC 15 Web Principles

March 14, 2007 at 9:14 pm · Filed under digital humanities, education, humanities computing, internet, media, social media, technology, web2.0

Tom Loosemore, the head of the BBC’s Web 2.0 project, talked at a conference that I gave a gave a demo of ICT Guides at yesterday (called the JISC Conference) on the BBCs web initiative. He has developed a set of good practice principles for the BBC’s Web 2.0 initiatives, which respects the web as a medium in its own right and not something to be civilised by ‘old media’.

Now if we could only get the academic community to stop imposing print publishing ‘ontologies’ on the Web and respect it as a medium in its own right!

1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (nicked from Google) 2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (again, nicked from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)

3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vicversasa.

4. Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.

5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site.

6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.

7. Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.

8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.

9. Remember your granny won’t ever use Second Life: She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.

10. Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.

11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.

12. Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users

13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site

14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale

15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent: After all, it’s your users’ data. Best respect it (link to ToLoosemoreses blog)

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BBC and YouTube

March 5, 2007 at 11:22 pm · Filed under media, social media, video, web2.0

The British Broadcasting Corp. began showing excerpts from its news and entertainment programs on the YouTube video-sharing website on Friday, becoming the first international broadcaster to ink a major deal with the Google-owned portal (from the Age, link)

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What is Annodex (hypertextual video)?

February 27, 2007 at 2:28 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, media, social media, software, video, web2.0

This fantastic film annotation (ie. hypertextual video) project is being developed by the CSRIO in Australia and other institutions.

When http, html and URIs were invented, the World Wide Web took its shape. With the technology provided here, we extend the Web to audio-visual data: Annodex, cmml and temporal URIs allow the creation of Webs of Videos. They also enable Web search engines to crawl and index audio-visual content. Just apply anything you know from the Web to audio-visual content – that’s Annodex (link).

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