Sep 26th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
When the Soviet Union was under Communist rule, dissidents in Soviet countries exchanged information and commented on current events using photocopied newsletter-style publications called “samizdat” that were handed around from person to person. Now, the Internet allows dissidents and protesters of all kinds to get information out of totalitarian countries much more quickly (although there are still restrictions that authoritarian regimes — such as those in North Korea and China — can use to make Internet access difficult or even impossible).
The latest example of this phenomenon in action is the steady flow — or at least trickle — of information that has come out of Myanmar over the past week, as hundreds of thousands of Buddhist monks have taken to the streets to protest the totalitarian rule of the military junta that controls the country (formerly known as Burma). Although many of the posts are written in English, some are unreadable because they are written in Burmese, the language spoken by citizens of Myanmar (which is related to languages spoken in Tibet and China).
As a story in The Age notes, posting photos on blogs or even sending them via cellphone can put a Myanmar resident at risk of arrest, or worse. One blogger known as Moezack was posting photos of the protests regularly, according to a Myanmar native who runs a website for ex-patriates in Thailand, but his blog has since gone dark. Another prominent blog that has been posting updates comes from someone called Ko-Htike, who appears to work in the emergency department of a Myanmar hospital. He has been posting his thoughts as well as photos.
Another blogger named Mr. Jade has also been posting photos of the protests, including recent attacks on monks by Myanmar police and members of the army. According to at least one report, the army has been dressing soldiers in local police uniforms to try and disguise the fact that the military is part of the crackdown. One place Myanmar residents and ex-patriates have been getting information about the protests is a newspaper-style website called Mizzima. The site won an award from the International Press Institute earlier this year for its reporting.
Global Voices Online, a blog network spanning dozens of countries that was put together by Rebecca MacKinnon and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, has also been carrying news updates and commentary from bloggers in Southeast Asia related to the Myanmar protests. And so has another site for Myanmar ex-patriates called The Irrawaddy.
A blog called Justice and Injustice has photos pf the protests and a statement from someone named Aung Way that says: “We want three Fs. First we want freedom — we want freedom for our future; second, we want friendship — we want friendship between our army and our people; third, we want food — we want food to live peacefully.”
Sep 25th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
In a recent interview with the Jewish Journal — which I found via Martin Stabe, who wrote about it for the Press Gazette after getting it from Mark Hamilton, who got it from the Canadian Journalism Project, who originally got it from Romenesko — Seymour Hersh talks about online journalism. He says:
“There is an enormous change taking place in this country in journalism. And it is online. We are eventually — and I hate to tell this to the New York Times or the Washington Post — we are going to have online newspapers, and they are going to be spectacular.
And they are really going to cut into daily journalism. …We have a vibrant, new way of communicating in America. We haven’t come to terms with it.
I don’t think much of a lot of the stuff that is out there. But there are a lot of people doing very, very good stuff.”
An interesting viewpoint from one of the deans of investigative journalism in America. He adds that:
“I’ve been working for The New Yorker recently since ‘93. In the beginning, not that long ago, when I had a big story you made a good effort to get the Associated Press and UPI and The New York Times to write little stories about what you are writing about.
Couldn’t care less now. It doesn’t matter, because I’ll write a story, and The New Yorker will get hundreds of thousands, if not many more, of hits in the next day. Once it’s online, we just get flooded.”
The full interview is here.
Sep 22nd, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
I don’t want to spend a huge amount of time on it, because frankly it isn’t worth it, but I thought I should take note of the fact that BlogTV.ca — the video-streaming experiment from Alliance Atlantis that launched with much fanfare (or at least a big, fancy party) in March — is getting the chop. According to an internal memo from CanWest, its new part-owner:
“When the site first launched back in March, initial traffic surged, but then declined and over the past quarter we’ve seen a steady decline, indicating that high usage is not likely.
Moreover, the site has not produced the sales interest we expected, and as such we felt that winding the site down was the most fiscally responsible option.”
In other words, it tanked. I don’t want to be accused of saying “I told you so,” but well… I told you so. Before the site was even out of beta, it seemed clear to me that it wasn’t going to work — primarily because it was restricted to Canadians only (in part because of a licensing agreement with the Israeli company that developed the platform).
As much as spokespeople for BlogTV and Alliance tried to argue (as they did in the comments on my post) that the restrictions were a feature rather than a bug, and that Canadians wanted a kind of playpen/ghetto where they could share with other Canadians, that just never proved to be the case.
Sep 21st, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
I remember not so long ago, the news that Amanda Congdon was splitting from Rocketboom — the video blog she either co-created and co-owned or was hired to front, depending on whom you believe — was the biggest news in the blogosphere. It was all over Techmeme for days, as everyone pored over her blog posts and comments by Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron (which I wrote about here after he responded to an email).
Now, there are reports that she has parted company with ABC — where she was doing occasional video reports — and there has been barely a peep. Why? Hard to say, really. I think that the attention she got when she left had a lot to do with Rocketboom, and what her acrimonious departure said about it as a new media venture (hint: don’t give the talent 49 per cent of the venture unless you really mean it). And the fact that she could go from a video-blog to a major TV network also said something about old media turning to new media for talent, which is something everyone loves.
So why the lack of interest now? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that one of the reasons is that she just isn’t very good. She was quirky and refreshing in a way when she was on a show filmed in some guy’s basement (and yes, she has a couple of prominent assets as a video-blogger), but on TV she is just… well, irritating. That hasn’t stopped other people from a successful TV career, but most of them have had actual talent to fall back on.
Sep 21st, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Congratulations to Mike Arrington on hiring Erick Schonfeld as co-editor of TechCrunch — extending his hand to the Business 2.0 writer and editor as he stepped from the wreckage of Time Warner-owned magazine, which has gone down in flames. Erick seems like a solid writer and a pretty good blogger too, and should be a great addition to TechCrunch.
As Ashkan Karbasfrooshan also discusses here, this is just another in a series of dots connecting the decline of magazines — particularly tech-related magazines, although celebrity-oriented mags aren’t doing all that well either — and the rise of blogs. As Ash points out, Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton both gave the process a big push with Gawker and Weblogs Inc.
Om Malik gave things another boost when he left Business 2.0 to run GigaOm. That spurred editor Josh Quittner to give all of his writers blogs, in an attempt to blend the immediacy and community that blogs generate with the relatively stale environment of a monthly magazine. He even tried to compensate them based on the traffic they generated. And now, Business 2.0 is no more.
The inescapable fact is that if you’re interested in anything remotely time-sensitive — technology (and particularly the Internet), news about celebrities (where TMZ.com and PerezHilton rule) and even sports or investment-related news (Marketwatch) — then some kind of blog platform or Web-based magazine just makes more sense than print.
It’s not that the two can’t co-exist — they can, and Business 2.0 may have given up the fight too soon — but the Web is the most important part now, instead of just an add-on or afterthought. Tony Hung wonders whether TechCrunch will still be a blog, but in many ways it and GigaOm and the Gawker and Weblog sites are hybrids. Maybe we should call them blog-azines 
