I really like maps. OK, I love maps: on Google, on the metro, in my GPS, on the golf course, at the tourist station, bound in a state-by-state collection of road maps or hanging on the wall.
And this is not just because I’m extremely prone to getting lost.
I can stare at my office wall map (which has sadly become a floor map of late, because I’m too lazy go to HomeDespot and find a new thingamagig for the back of it) for at least the duration of two TV commercials (hey, it’s the digital age!); I quite frequently do. The yet-to-be-visited southern hemisphere drives me mad. Vast expanses like central Asia beckon. I gaze at the islands of Hawaii and marvel that my national cell phone plan works there. I wonder nerdy things like, “Gosh, map makers must love when states like Kosovo declare independence - everybody needs new maps!”
OK, OK, so wall maps are so 18th century. Fast forward to the digital era, in which I am totally that girl who thinks it’s cute to see the London Tube map replicated on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs.
Maps have been Internet trendy for years now, and are being used for all kinds of purposes you or your seventh-grade colored pencils could have imagined. My faves include the Web Trend Map, a super groovy example of how maps can convey all kinds of meta-level info. Then there are the cool mashups like WikipediaVision, which helped me realize that duh, of course the people who edit English-language Wikipedia mainly come from England, the U.S., South Africa, India and Australia (and the French-language Wikipedia from France & Africa… and so on). Then there’s HerdictWeb, which helps me see watch which websites are being censored where. Want to see more GoogleMaps mashups? Yep, there’s a blog for that!
I’m just really amazed at how much information can go on a map. It’s enough to make a girl want to learn Flash (or at least some decent Photoshop skills, eh). I love this Golf World map of Pebble Beach, it’s basically the realization of an idea I pitched to the local paper for its U.S. Open coverage after I sat through a presentation about the fab multimedia section of the Las Vegas Sun, home to this super cool interactive map of the history of the Vegas Strip.
In recent weeks I’ve made a Google mashup showing where the EJC is currently training journalists, a second mashup showing spots in Maastricht a new colleague might want to visit (which I actually think is one of the nicest ways I’ve thought of to help someone who is new in town) and created an annotated map using the free photoediting tool Gimp to help my boyfriend with a presentation.
Yes, the terrorist cutouts are tacky. But with beards like that, they asked for it. And my boyfriend earned a good grade on his presentation, so there.
I should be writing this from the Netherlands. But instead of flying back to Maastricht today to work from the offices of the EJC, I’m home in Monterey.
Until May.
That’s because a volcano in Iceland is emitting tonnes of ash and limiting air traffic into and around Northern Europe to nearly nothing.
Probably, you, like me, have been reading or hearing about these events via whatever media you normally consume. Copy editors and announcers alike have been tormented for nearly a week now trying to spell and/or pronounce “Eyjafjallajökull”, the name of the volcano that has been puffing ash clouds into the air above Europe and grounding airplanes around the world.
The only people who have not been following this gigantic news story?
The men and women who man the phone lines at call centers of airline companies.
The people at United Airlines - which I was supposed to fly with from Monterey to Denver, on to Newark and finally to Amsterdam - seemed particularly uninformed.
Sure, I received several e-mails urging me to change my flight plans prior to my scheduled departure from Monterey. That was nice; I have never received this kind of prior notification from an airline company (then again, they’ve never had to deal with a disruption like this).
But when I called to find out about my options, I found a very uninformed group of employees. That, or I found a very good group of actors playing the part of uninformed employees.
While I could see at its website that Schiphol airport, for example, was closed at the time of my flight from Monterey, the United people couldn’t. News media like the BBC were reporting that the situation with the ash cloud was worsening. The United people had no idea what was going on. It appeared highly likely that I wouldn’t be able to go, but United’s website still said my flight was a “go”.
At the same moment, Google News was brimming with stories about airport closures.
Scotland opened its airspace, then it closed again.
The front page of Schiphol airport’s website warned travelers that the airport was not sure when it would re-open. Check with your airlines, Schiphol’s website suggested.
Ha!
photo from Flickr user deeknow
United employees apparently aren’t allowed to use the Internet at work. I inquired about my options and told the United employee I reached after a half hour delay (nothing compared to the 160-minute delay I faced just three hours prior to my scheduled departure from Monterey) I figured she knew more than I did (being on the inside of the situation) and hoped she could talk to me about my options. She chuckled.
“We’re usually told last,” she said.
Great. Helpful.
Meanwhile, I was searching for information about the situation by using a number of media tools. I think my instinct to reach for these tools is reflective of the evolution and sophistication of Web 2.0 tools for enabling people to connect with each other to find out “what’s happening on the ground.”
But it’s also indicative that the “best” legacy media brands - like BBC, for example, - are still important. Their reporters are the ones with more access to the kinds of “official sources” that are making decisions about things like keeping airspace open.
I probably refreshed BBC.co.uk more times yesterday than I have on any other day. They do a great job of time-stamping their stories, which was a major help.
Other key resources I used to track the news events that impacted my flight plans:
- EUfeeds.eu: The web development team at the EJC created this tool, which aggregates and nicely displays news headlines from the newspapers of each European companies. I was able to quickly find out what Dutch media were reporting about the situation at Schiphol (the airport I was trying to reach).
-Google Translate: I can usually get the gist of articles in Dutch, but I’m not experienced enough with the language to get the details. But when I used my basic skills to find an article that seemed useful, I could pop it into Google Translate and learn more.
- Skype: Being able to instantly reach my colleagues in Europe, in particularly the Belgian web projects manager I work with, was great.
- E-mail: I could use CC to quickly inform groups of colleagues about the changes in my plans. And it’s great that Gmail automatically groups e-mails as “conversations” so that I could respond to individuals on the e-mail thread who replied to me individually.
- Smart phones: I myself don’t use one, but my colleagues do. My Belgian web projects manager was able to advise me throughout his Saturday night with his iPhone (that, or he added the “Sent from my iPhone” tag to his e-mails to convince me that he was having a night on the town rather than geeking out in front of his computer ; ).
- Twitter: I used Twitter in several ways. The people I follow linked to useful news articles and blog posts from other travelers (including a link to the Flickr pool of ash cloud photos) I searched “ash” to find out general information about the situation. Later, as it emerged, I followed the #ashtag. I also searched “Newark airport” to see what was going on there. I found several Tweets about the dismal situation at the international departures area at Newark.
photo from Flickr user johnmcga
I also amusedly followed Jeff Jarvis, a New York journalism professor who is well-known for his active blog Buzz Machine and book “What Would Google Do,” as he attempted to leave the re:publica conference in Berlin and catch a flight back to New York. Jarvis used Twitter and his conversation skills to hitch a ride to Munich and get on a standby flight after his Berlin flight was canceled. He Tweeted throughout the saga. Reading about his struggle to get a flight convinced me that I’d be an idiot to go to the airport.
- Radio - It’s a vintage medium, but important. When I had to run some errands Friday, I kept the car radio tuned to BBC World News. I heard interviews with scientists and engineers who talked about why planes couldn’t fly through the ash cloud.
So, did the United Airlines staff use any of these resources? No.
In my opinion, that’s a huge problem for the United corporation.
I truly believe United could have better helped me figure out my travel options - and craft better policies to help their customers - if its employees were all able to have Hootsuite or Tweetdeck open in front of them.
As for United’s totally bogus “we-won’t-give-you-your-money-back-until-your-flight-from-Newark-to-Amsterdam-is-actually-canceled-nevermind-that-you’d-have-to-plan-on-being-stuck-in-Newark-for-a-solid-week-in-order-to-do-that-because-we-wait-until-the-last-moment-to-formally-cancel-a-flight-but-you-can-have-a-United-voucher-now” policy… That’s a different and entirely more annoyed post!
When Wikileaks unencrypted and published exclusive US military footage of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter gunning down 12 people in Baghdad – including two Reuters journalists – the organisation gained new viewers and international attention.
Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at Columbia Journalism School, told The Independent:
“This might be the story that makes Wikileaks blow up. It’s not some huge document with lots of fine print – you can just watch it and you get what it’s about immediately. It’s a whole new world of how stories get out.”
Wikileaks is a loosely connected group of tech-savvy editors, cryptologists and activists. It doesn’t have a headquarters or office.
But it manages to break major stories the mainstream press was unable to report. Reuters had been working for two years to access the Baghdad video through the Freedom of Information Act.
In less than a week, the 18-minute version of the black-and-white footage – to which Wikileaks added narrative text and subtitles – was watched 4.6 million times on YouTube.
A 40-minute, unedited version was viewed half a million times.
Those counts don’t include copies and versions shown by broadcasters like CNN.
What is Wikileaks?
Wikileaks has been receiving and publishing leaked memos, reports, databases and briefings since 2006. It publishes explanatory press releases alongside the documents it receives from whistleblowers around the world.
Much of the information published by Wikileaks has resulted in front-page stories that lead to political or regulatory changes. These kinds of changes are the primary motivation of the site.
Wikileaks says it has published more than a million documents without revealing an anonymous source.
A few major Wikileaks scoops:
A report from the commodities company Trafigura about toxic waste dumping in Ivory Coast. Wikileaks published the information after Trafigura successfully filed a “super-injunction” against The Guardian. This was lifted after Wikileaks published the documents.
The site published a membership list of the secretive British National Party. Policeman and other professionals are not allowed to join the far-right political group; a few of the members Wikileaks exposed were fired from their jobs as teachers, policemen and clergymen.
Operating manuals for the US prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay. These described prisoner intimidation tactics involving dogs and described hiding prisoners from the International Red Cross.
A list of websites blacklisted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
A recording of a top state official in Peru talking with a lobbyist about payments to help Discover Petroleum of Norway firm win contracts. Peru’s energy and mines minister resigned as a result of the story.
Internal documents from Kaupthing Bank, an Icelandic bank taken over by that government in 2009. The documents exposed large loans the bank made to its shareholders in the weeks prior to the financial crisis in Iceland.
Kaupthing Bank’s lawyers fought to keep the story off of RUV, the national public broadcaster in Iceland. They filed a successful injunction against RUV, but the news anchors mentioned the story on air – as well as the injunction – and referred viewers to Wikileaks for more information.
National outrage over the injunction sparked a movement called the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI). It is an ongoing attempt to craft media laws that would attract media businesses – particularly those with an investigative bent – to set up shop in Iceland.
Wikileaks has been recognised with awards like the 2008 Economist New Media Award and a 2009 Amnesty International New Media Award.
The “wiki” prefix rather reflects the concept guiding Wikileaks: For anyone to be able to upload and post sensitive documents – like the encrypted US Army video – without editorial interference.
There is no relationship between Wikipedia and Wikileaks.
Who is Wikileaks?
Journalists at Wired UK, Mother Jones and Al-Jazeera have written stories profiling the shadowy and small organisation.
All reach the same conclusion: There are more questions than answers about Wikileaks.
Two things about the people involved in creating and propagating the site are certainly true:
They’d rather journalists didn’t bother profiling them. Rather, Wikileaks organisers seem to prefer that journalists focus their attention on materials leaked through their website.
They’d rather not give out any information about themselves. This ethos evokes images of spies and so-called “hacktivists.” And of course, they refuse to give any information about their sources.
An Australian man named Julian Assange is the public face of Wikileaks. Little is known about Assange’s background, place of residency or daily whereabouts. His behaviour during one-on-one interviews with journalists has been described as erratic and slightly paranoid.
He has left comments on articles about Wikileaks in which he says the articles contain inaccurate or unfair information about the Wikileaks. But he does not typically respond to the resulting offers to provide more detailed information about his Wikileaks colleagues.
Assange did research for the 1997 book, Underground: Tales of hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier.
The book profiles the lives of early Internet hackers. Some bloggers have speculated that Assange is himself one of the pseudonymous hackers profiled.
A podcast related to the book is available here.
Verifiable information about other Wikileaks contributors is difficult to find.
Conspiracy theories
Wikileaks is the kind of organisation about which it is easy to spin conspiracy theories:
It regularly publishes sensitive information governments and big companies don’t want the public to see.
Little is known about where its servers are – some reports say Sweden, others Iceland – although its main domain name is registered in California. It also has, though, mirror sites and country-specific domain names.
While it is customary in Western journalism that whistleblowers remain anonymous, information is usually available about the journalists or media outlets who gather and publish scoops.
One of the sources cited by conspiracy theorists is John Young, an American who runs the website Cryptome. It has a mission identical to that of Wikileaks; it has posted around 54,000 documents
There is a connection between Young and Assange – the two corresponded at length in a series of e-mails Young posted on Cryptome – but the tone of their current relationship is not clear.
Young responded on his website to recent questions about his opinion regarding Wikileak’s potential CIA ties:
“Copying the behavior of spy agencies is exactly what they want in order to legitimate their criminal chicanery. Until Wikileaks becomes a fully open and accountable operation it is the same as the spy agencies and indeed helps legitimate their manipulation of public opinion on behalf of their self-promotion “in the public interest.”
Business models
In early 2009 Wikileaks suspended operations to focus on fundraising.
It took all its material offline – although distributed copies remain scattered around the Internet – and said it was focusing on meeting a fundraising goal of $600,000 with a minimum of $200,000.
The site says it accepts no government or corporate funding. It relies on private donations and pro-bono support from lawyers.
The staff who manage daily operations – which Assange has said is himself and four others – is not paid on a regular basis. As for keeping fed, Assange has said he “made money on the Internet.”
In 2008, Wikileaks experimented with auctioning exclusivity rights to thousands of e-mails between Hugo Chavez and his speechwriter (himself a former ambassador to Argentina).
The auction was logistically difficult to arrange and was the subject of more media coverage than the content of the e-mails. Wikileaks has not since attempted duplicate such a large-scale auction.
Me: Law-abiding journalist who takes blurry photos. Looking for illustrative photograph to run alongside article or blog post. Editor at a not-for-profit by day, sometimes producing video for established media brands.
What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons licences are an evolution in copyright.
Copyright law has so far developed mainly within nation-states; copyright law in the UK developed differently than copyright law in Italy or Germany.
The Internet enables more collaboration between people and businesses in these countries, though, necessitating a harmonized way to share.
Creative Commons licences allow creators of original works – be they photographs, articles or videos – to easily label their works with copyright permissions.
There are six versions of the licences, ranging from restrictive “Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives” permissions to an “Attribution” licence that allows the work to be used for commercial and not-for-profit work as long as its attributed.
Permission granted
Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, the not-for-profit that helps write and distribute the licences wrote:
“Imagine an amateur filmmaker creating content to upload to their website as they try to clear the rights of music that they’ve gathered from across the Internet.
Or imagine someone who wants to give a television broadcaster the right to use, with attribution, a photograph that they had posted on their blog.
In most cases, the legal fees would exceed the value of the transaction and the sharing would fail, either because the parties would ignore the law, or opt not to share because the legal cost of doing so was prohibitive.”
Creative Commons allow for a reversal of permission paradigms.
Editors or filmmakers previously had to find and ask authors or studios for legal permission to use a particular original work.
Creative Commons allows authors and studios to label their original work with legal permissions. Anyone who sees the work is then aware of how they may or may not legally use the work. They don’t have to ask permission.
What’s happening in Europe?
Creative Commons licences have been written for 25 of the 27 member states of the European Union. Legal experts in each country have written the licences to comply with the basis of local legal codes.
Proliferation of Creative Commons seems to be in line with current thinking in Brussels. Fostering a climate that enables Internet users to easily share their creative work is a priority within the EU.
Original signatories to the manifesto include Knowledgeland, a Dutch thinktank working toward a knowledge-based economy; iCommons, a UK charity promoting open-source software; and Digitale Allmend, a Swiss association dedicated to securing public access to digital assets. Other original signatories include like-minded Italian, Slovinian, Croatian, Brazillian and American groups.
The COMMUNIA is mainly concerned with open access and making analogue versions of cultural heritage available to the public in digital form. The Commission-funded digital museum project, Europeana, is a reflection of this effort.
The COMMUNIA defines open access as:
“a movement away from an ‘all rights reserved’ approach, by which rightsholders reserve every single use possible, towards a “some rights reserved” approach, by which rightsholders voluntarily renounce to some of the exclusive rights granted by copyright law.”
Future of EU copyright law
Addressing the future of copyright law online in Europe was from 2006-2010 the job of commissioner Viviane Reading, who for the second Barroso Commission has shifted to work on another portfolio.
Before Reading took this role in the second Barroso Commission, she
spoke in favour of reforming European copyright law to better enable protection of orphan works as well as the digitalisation of cultural heritage.
Dutchwoman Neelie Kroes now presides over the task of online copyrights. Like Reading, Kroes has said that allowing for the development of a single market for online content is the best way to fight Internet piracy. (Other commissioners may disagree with this approach.)
Kroes, who worked on international competition issues during the first Barroso Commission, is most famous for imposing fines on Microsoft related to an antitrust case with the American software maker.
Kroes’ stated priorities in her new job include creation of a single clearinghouse for music rights in the EU.
She could be supportive of initiatives like Creative Commons, according to Reuters reporting from 21 January, 2010:
“Kroes, however, has shown little appetite for extending crackdowns on piracy — France, for example, has legislated to disconnect consumers from the Internet for illegal downloading — before a properly functioning market is in place.
‘Copyright is important for economy and culture, people deserve its protection, but no proper action is possible while there is no single market,’ she told the European Parliament last week in a final “interview” for the Digital Agenda post.”
So what?
Whether you’re working on a non-profit media site like this one, a private media startup, a government or a blog, Creative Commons makes it possible for you to share or use writings, photography or videos.
In January, 2009, Al Jazeera began hosting a repository of Creative Commons-licensed footage from Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza.
With seven reporters based in Gaza, Al Jazeera had access to exclusive footage while the Israeli Defence Forces would not allow more journalists into Gaza. Al Jazeera could have charged other broadcastors by the second for its exclusive content.
Moeed Ahmad, the head of new media for Al Jazeera, said his company benefitted from incoming links from sites like Wikipedia, which used still images from Al Jazeera videos.
In the summer of 2009, Al Jazeera opened its blog section for re-use with a Creative Commons license.
What for photographers?
Many photojournalists worry that the proliferation of free photography will lead to the devolution of photojournalism as a profession.
Others have used Creative Commons to search for new ways to profit from photography.
In autumn, 2009, professional photographer Jonathan Worth circulated Creative Commons licensed photographs of science fiction writer Cory Doctorow. The images were licensed for commercial and non-commercial use.
Alongside these, Worth began selling series of limited-edition prints of his work alongside Doctorow’s book, For the Win. He wanted to see if the free photos generated publicity for the paid-for versions of his work.
“What’s at stake here is the possibility of identifying practices that enable community-building and audience-building on the fly, around an idea, something we’re seeing more and more of.”
Think legacy media brands are not reinventing and repackaging themselves?
Check out some video and print ads I’ve found online promoting news products from Russia Today to O Globo (Brazil) and TV3 (Estonia).
A slick Simpsons parody advertises Estonian news (Thanks for the tip, RFE). I was told via Twitter that the ad was very believable in its portrayal of Estonian life (kidding!).
In Belgium, this quirky ad showcases an artist frying a steak to promote cobra.be, a culture site with content from Belgium’s state broadcaster. The theme in this campaign seems to be that whenever someone famous in Belgium - like actress Marie Vinck - Cobra.be will be there to cover it.
These nice videos (with subtitles, helpfully!) come from Brazil, where they promote O Globo. It is the biggest newspaper in Brazil.
This one is my favorite. I love the action of the “mouse” picking up trash or helping students. The ad shows the paper as a partner for motivated citizens.
This one promotes O Globo as being more than “just the paper” in a newspaper
This cheeky ad comes from France, where it advertises Le Monde Magazine. The tagline is “Bring the world into focus.” It seems to be a big hit online; the two YouTube versions of it that I’ve found each have more than 50,000 views.
Finally for now, these ads promoting the international TV channel Russia Today are causing a stir in the United Kingdom. The theme here is promoting Russia Today as a channel whose journalists ask tough questions and challenge commonly held beliefs.
They may appear just another group of anonymous geeks banging away behind laptops in your local café. But online — and in Brussels — the bloggers who write about the European Union are starting to be noticed.
“There is some kind of European blogosphere evolving, at least for some issues,” prominent EU blogger Julien Frisch wrote in one of his first posts of 2010.
“And that if (influential) national blogs take up European questions, they can become more important than one might initially expect.”
One of the best places to delve into this community is Bloggingportal.eu, which promotes the most interesting posts of the day from among more than 500 EU blogs. Frisch’s site is among them.
The team of 25 volunteer editors at Bloggingportal.eu reads hundreds of posts every day. They link to the most interesting of the bunch on their front page.
“We want to reach people that do not necessarily read blogs and we want to show that there is a quality debate going on when it comes to the EU and European debates,” said Andreas Müllerleile, one of the site’s founders. He also blogs on EU issues at Kosmopolitio.
“The long-term goal is to offer a selection of the best blog posts in as many EU languages as possible.”
Bloggingportal.eu turned a year old in January, 2010. The number of blogs it aggregates and monitors has doubled since its launch.
“It somehow shows that we are growing although some blogs stopped posting regularly and it is difficult to filter them out,” Müllerleile said. “However, compared with national political blogopsheres the number is still tiny and I think we still have not reached a critical number of people who write regularly on EU/European affairs.”
Bloggingportal.eu launched on 25 January, 2009, the result of follow-up efforts to a pair of 2007 blog posts about the development of an EU blogosphere. In these, EU blogger Jon Worth attempted to categorise and characterise prominent EU blogs.
“The sheer number of links below means I never quite know where to start for good EU analysis on blogs – maybe time for some better aggregation somewhere?,” he wrote.
So began Bloggingportal.eu. It started as a collaboration between Worth, Müllerleile, and Norwegian media professional Bente Kalsnes. Stefan Happer donated programming expertise and the site initially aggregated about 275 blogs.
“We do not have any funding so we have been working on it in our free time which has been a challenge. We are still beta and we are trying to implement new features. And we are always looking for new people who want to get involved,” Müllerleile said.
The community of people who are interested in closely following the political machinery of the EU may be small, with many a student among the bunch.
But most EU bloggers are focused on moving beyond surface-level EU stories that appear in traditional national newspapers. Many of these stories contain inaccurate information, Müllerleile said. The EU blogosophere is a realm in which to suss and discuss errors made in mainstream press.
To those Europeans surfing happily outside the existing EU blogosphere, though, examining and debating the inner workings of the European Union is a fantastically dry proposition.
Curation – employing editors handpick the most noteworthy posts – is an attempt to make the EU blogosphere more accessible, personal and relevant.
“So many Europeans feel disconnected from European issues and bogged down by the complexity of the institution itself. Having an editor create a path through the information can be a definite bonus for those not already familiar with the topic,” said Ruth Spencer, an editor at Th!nk About It, a European blogging platform supported by the EJC.
This idea is captured in the logo of Bloggingportal; here the stars of the European Union flag dance within what could appear to be a drop of water.
The drop represents the “pure essence” squeezed out of the EU blogosphere, Müllerleile said.
Will it catch on?
This may depend on the ability of writers, translators (machine or human) and readers to break through language barriers.
At the moment, national communities in Europe do not interact much with one another online, a report by French research agency Linkfluence concluded in autumn, 2009. Most interactions and conversations happen within the respective national communities, the report said.
“Bloggingportal isn’t a content creator but an aggregator,” said Spencer, the Th!nk About It editor. “The best they can do is take as much as possible from all the EU languages.”
Müllerleile said Bloggingportal.eu initially tried translating posts using automatic machine translation, but were unsatisfied with the results.
“We are thinking of other solutions but nothing has emerged just yet,” he said.
It’s indeed a good challenge for Bloggingportal’s future years.
After reading the first paragraph of this Advertising Age story about a pharmaceutical company petitioning the FDA to use its logo as a marker for social media posts that contain safety information from the Food and Drug and Ministration, I see the first possible solution to the FTC blogger restrictions has been suggested.
Kitemarks . As defined by Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism Blog, they are:
“… a symbol (expressed visually, and electronically as metadata) to convey to audiences, bloggers, journalists and others that a piece of news content had been intelligently labelled with relevant information and that it is open to derivative checking/use… similar in a sense to the Creative Commons ‘mark’ that travels with media content across the web.”> “… a symbol (expressed visually, and electronically as metadata) to convey to audiences, bloggers, journalists and others that a piece of news content had been intelligently labelled with relevant information and that it is open to derivative checking/use… similar in a sense to the Creative Commons ‘mark’ that travels with media content across the web.”
Could bloggers or other online creators who have received free products or services to review use a kitemark on Twitter, Facebook or their blog to indicate that they received payment?
Inserting a kitemark seems like an easy standard operating procedure for folks who craft and who read sponsored reviews. And it should be easy enough for regulators to search for this.
If it could work, by what procedure would society learn about this mark? And could someone make money by creating and marketing such a mark?
Money, maybe not… But reputation, probably. This seems like a good project for the Creative Commons folks, like Joi Ito, to discuss.
I think most Europeans will cringe as they watch this.
Why? The citizens of Europe who I know just can’t - for whatever reason - ever seem to just surrender to the tacky but warm embrace of sweet, tinkling music playing beneath images showing patriotic moments. This is in stark contrast to their star-spangled, American friends who tend to get teary anytime they hear Ray Charles croon America the Beautiful.
One Greek tweeter I am following referred to this video as “touching but contrived.”
In my opinion this is a very well-done video montage. It might be a little tacky, but the images and theme don’t seem to me at all contrived. It shows the life of a young family living alongside defining moments in recent history about which Europeans should be proud, especially those working toward a pan-European identity.
I think some of the reluctance on the part of EU citizens to embrace moments like this as positive developments toward a pan-European identity stems from a generational gap. But from what I can tell, the Erasmus movement and the emergence of English-language publications around Europe - many of them cooperative efforts - indicate a growing EU identity.
The news report, shown at the end of a national awareness month for breast cancer, depicts a victim of breast cancer giving herself a self-exam, with a doctor narrating and consulting. It is indeed slightly uncomfortable because of the personal subject matter. But it depicts what breasts in a way that must surely be easy for cancer sufferers to relate to: dealing with their breasts - so often seen by society as sex objects - as clinical objects to be poked and prodded by medical professionals.
I don’t know why some viewers want to pretend breasts and or cancer are not facts of life. But that’s what two Canadian women found earlier in October when a public service announcement video they produced to promote a charity event in Toronto called the BoobyBall that benefits breast cancer research.
As explained in this interview, the two women behind the ad and corresponding fundraiser are are marketing their efforts to young (attractive) philanthropists. Fair enough.
I liked very much this graf from a Newsweek article about the video:
“…Dennis Durbin, an associate professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC, ‘While the ad does push the boundaries a bit for a serious subject, note that beautiful women displaying large breasts are used to advertise everything from beer to cars,’ he says. The ads are a welcome contrast both to traditional ads that use sex, like beer ads, and to traditional perceptions of women with breast cancer, who were once seen as diseased and unworthy.
‘This ad takes women’s breasts back from being an object to sell products to being a symbol of beauty and life, something worth protecting.’ ”
Miss Earth contestants and their inability to use correct capitalization
1. Have native languages that call for capitalization of all nouns (This means you, Deutschland!);
2. Learned to speak MySpace before English.
Still: the awful Internet tendency to either capitalize or lowercase random words which should not be not capitalized or lowercased has to stop. Please.
I’m normally not a stringent grammar person. I thank goodness I have found the Grammar Girl podcast series (which is, happily, very searchable) so I can find quick and dirty tricks to help me remember how and when to use “comprise”. And I probably have to turn to my AP or Guardian (or EJC, or European Commission, or Times, or or or!) more times than I should.
But the capitalization issue, along with random or missing articles (the/an/a) are driving me crazy in an editing project with which I am currently busy. I’m editing what is essentially a series of encyclopedia articles about media conditions in a particular country, all written by non-native English speakers.
I thought Mario Garcia asked a great question on his design/innovation blog when he asked, “Do we associate all things Internet with lower case?”
This question, and Garcia’s redesign of the Daily Handelsblatt, a German newspaper, sparked a series of posts about whether the paper should use a logo with an uppercase “H”.
I most liked these two quotes Garcia posted on this topic:
From Oliver Reichenstein, lead designer of zeit.de, tagesanzeiger.ch and krone.at: “Yes, many internet users believe that internet is all about ‘lower case’ as the urls are fed so, therefore anything that is associated with it should reflect it. I think the truth is while the url in ‘lowercase’ is only a function of the medium, the internet, where the information being served, it has nothing to do with the branding of the Online product. On the contrary the Online property is best represented with a look that can then be extended to other areas and in this instance by the square in the brand colour and the cap ‘H’ - a direct take-out from the brick and mortar presence of the product.”
Also, from Rodrigo Fino, Garcia Media Latin America/Buenos Aires: “Lowercase was used because of technical restrictions years ago. Today all internet browsers and email programs understand uppercase.”
Exactly! So regardless of technology, branding or generational differences, can’t we all just go ahead and just embrace correct usage of English, which does not call for capitalization of anything other than proper nouns? Please?
