A barking mad alternative medicine practitioner “‘The Barefoot Doctor'”:http://www.barefootdoctorworld.co.uk/mainpage.htm published (for some reason) in a regular column in The Observer went online recently for a “live chat”. What resulted was a hugely entertaining hour-long session of abuse where several indignant and sarcastic people ask questions like, “To the best of my recollection, you have said in various columns that massaging your kidneys with your fists 44 times a day can help relieve:
* baldness
* bad breath
* bad dreams
* indigestion
* migraine
and many other conditions beside. I was just wondering what therapy you would recommend for someone who has problems with their kidneys?”

(If you want to see an example of one of his columns, “here”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1061077,00.html is a recent one).

Thanks to “NTK”:http://www.ntk.net/ for the link.

A new, more computerised television production system being tested at the BBC could help feed the organization’s promised “Creative Archive”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_online_media.html#000861 of publicly-downloadable BBC content. Among the new capabilities on offer:

New footage will be catalogued after it is shot, so different producers can access the same content simultaneously.

“In theory, all newly shot material will be digitised so it can be made available to all BBC programme makers. Think of the advantage: you don’t have to go to an editing suite with four hundred tapes,” Ms Romaine [the BBC’s director of production modernisation] explained.

Computer-based production can allow programmes to be enhanced with additional information (metadata) enabling archiving and content searches based on internet technology.

One might think this sort of thing would already be routine in a large, well-resourced organization like the BBC, but it’s hard to change complex production processes to keep up with the changes that technology makes possible. I hope this experiment proves successful, because it is not until new production techniques like this one become routine that the Creative Archive will really start to take off.

When I “posted earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_online_media.html#000877 about The New Standard I forgot to mention another interesting example of alternative media different both from the IndyMedia and The New Standard styles. OhMyNews, a newspaper from South Korea, has thousands of “citizen reporters”. These get paid and go through the conventional editorial process but the pay is less than for conventional journalism and no credentials are necessary. This would seem to allow for the kind of “native reporting” (reporting by “ordinary people” and those directly involved in news events) that Chris Atton and others find a particularly appealling function of the new alternative media while preserving some of the quality standards that ensure good material is read and bad material hidden or discarded.

Significantly, OhMyNews seems to be successful as a business and a social phenomenon, though this may be in part simply because South Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world.

“Indymedia”:http://www.indymedia.org/ and similar sites – created by unpaid, largely un-edited reporters – are one way in which the Internet is enabling alternative voices to be heard more widely, but this publishing model has its weaknesses. Because participants are unprofessional and unpaid, there tends to be more opinion venting and comments on existing coverage than original research. Also, the lack of editing means contributions can be ungrammatical, unreadable or even occaisionally “anti-semitic or racist rantings”:http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=44851. While many Indymedia sites have now started to hide or remove such postings, the problem is still bad enough that it is hindering the acceptance of Indymedia sites by the mainstream media and even “search engines”:http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/09/1639862_comment.php.

The New Standard wants to be a different kind of alternative media entity- one a lot closer to traditional news sources. It intends to pay its contributors to do real investigative research not just produce opinion pieces, and it will “charge its readers”:http://newstandardnews.net/promo/membership.cfm $4 to $10 a month when it launches in December.
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There seems to be a gulf between what the BBC reported its head to have said and what a transcript of the speech revealed. There has been some excited discussion by Danny O’Brien and Alan Connor (and, inevitably, on Slashdot and kuro5hin) that seem based on what they would like this announcement to be rather than what it is.

Matt Jones (who works at the BBC) says the move is, “brave and disruptive – and will have to be executed as such, with no half-measures or compromises to vested interests.”

In fact, while BBC News’ summary suggests Dyke said the Creative Archive would contain “all the corporation’s programme archives”, the speech actually promised to allow “parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download” (emphasis mine). Nothing there about all of the BBC’s archives. And the example he uses – kids downloading, “real moving pictures which would turn their project into an exciting multi-media presentation” make it sound like a collection of digital clip-art.
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The BBC’s director general has announced “plans to give the public full access to all the corporation’s programme archives… everyone would in future be able to download BBC radio and TV programmes from the internet.”

Well, the announcement certainly sounds huge, but as Danny O’Brien reflects, “Sorting out the contractual issues with anything but completely internally produced content will be difficult ” – a huge understatement! And who will pay the cost to digitise and index all that content? Who will decide when enough has been digitised? Will it be seen as a waste of license fee payments to “super-serve” the broadband-using public? Will the BBC actually encourage the use of file sharing applications in order to reduce its bandwidth charges? The list of questions goes on and on…

But even if a fraction of what is possible is achieved, this is a great step forward and it will open a number of important debates.movies blonde free sexfree throat deep moviemovies pussy eating freefacial movies gay freeporn gay movies men freefree samples movie gaymovies free gay postporn movies free granny Map

Yesterday I handed in my dissertation – my MSc in New Media, Information and Society is now officially over and in a month and a half I return to the LSE to start a PhD in Media and Communications. Here’s the abstract of my dissertation, which I hope to turn into a published paper later. I am also keen to summarise the results for a non-academic audience for a thinktank or newspaper so if it sounds interesting, give me a call!

Civil society campaigning organizations have an important role to play in the public sphere according to deliberative democratic theory. The new communicative capabilities offered to such organizations by the Internet in recent years must be evaluated in the light of a digital divide that has persisted even in developed countries. This study measures and attempts to explain patterns of Internet usage among activists, and examines the possible implications of these choices for the public sphere and political participation.

Drawing on a postal survey of 109 London-based activists and open-ended interviews with four of those surveyed, respondents were found to have predominantly high levels of education, higher than average incomes and high levels of access to the Internet consistent with those factors. However, high levels of access did not translate into high levels of use in all contexts.
While email was extensively employed, other uses like participation in open online discussion or web-based publishing were much less prevalent than traditional campaigning activity. Some access and skill barriers were noted but the principal barrier to greater use of the web in campaigning appeared to be a perceived lack of its relevance or importance in that context. The fact that much Internet use by activists is via email and therefore tends to be “invisible” except to participants in the dialogue might contribute to that perceived lack of relevance.

The study also suggests that the existing socio-economic divide between the “core” activists surveyed and the broader public could be accentuated if, for reasons of efficiency, those activists moved their attention away from traditional activities like meetings and newsletters towards email-mediated dialogue or if the Internet does make it easier for the relatively privileged who are already online to become more involved at the expense of those who continue to fall on the wrong side of the digital divide.

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ChefMoz is a clever idea but a little under-cooked at present. Looking at the London section it has 172 restaurants listed and categorised (out of c. 10,000 available restaurants) and just 24 reviews linked – the Paris entry has 226 entries and 31 reviews. The search engine is pretty limited in its ability to use the categories that have been input. Nonetheless, it is an idea that deserves to go far and I hope it gets developed a little more. If you want to know where to eat in, say, Afghanistan (where conventional restaurant guides may fail to cover you) dmoz may have the answer one day – right now it just has one review.

The main existing London restaurant guides I used to rely on online – Zagats, the Evening Standard and Time Out – all now charge to use them.

Thanks to Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka for the link

I’m coming a little late to this – it’s something I meant to blog a while back but haven’t had time to. Salon writer Farhad Manjoo has written an excellent piece on interactive television spyware – how cable companies and makers of “personal video recorders” like TiVo have the potential to track every programme you watch (and every interactive TV feature like gambling or gaming you use) and send that information to advertisers so they can target you more accurately. He also deals in passing with the debate over whether future PVRs will allow you to skip “regular” ads or whether they will actually add new “interactive” ads.

David Burke of White Dot – one of the only people I know who appears to be following this issue regularly – points out the risk that, for example, political advertisers could use this technology in future to tailor their messages more precisely at each viewer, pandering to their prejudices. I am more worried that if advertisers know down to the individual home whether an ad is likely to work, they will eventually want to be able to heavily subsidise packages of cable programming aimed at the rich and will want to yank their ads (and their subsidy) for poorer households, so multi-channel TV will be even more expensive for those least able to afford it.

P.S. Sorry this is a Salon Premium article and there is no longer a “see for free” option, but a year’s subscription is just $18.50 if you accept ads. Moreover, Salon allows existing subscribers to give gift subscriptions to people for $20 (without ads) or $12.40 (with ads). If you would like me to sign you up just email me a note and credit my paypal account using the link on the R accordingly (no I won’t get any commission on that – Salon seems to have stopped its affiliate programme – but if you would like to slip me a few extra $ because you like my content, please do!).8100 lg mp3 ringtoneindian alcatel ringtone8250 ringtonessamsung ringtones a800ringtone nokia 62253155i free nokia ringtoneamerican missed ringtone one callringtone 3560 nokia 3520 Map

Despite the media coverage of weblogs, Pew finds they are barely on the radar of most Americans:

“Some 4% of online Americans report going to blogs for information and opinions. The overall number of blog users is so small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses blogs.
The early data suggest that the most active Internet users, especially those with broadband connections are the most likely to have found blogs they like. ”

Pew’s research suggests between one and four percent of Americans publish online depending on what you ask – 1% “Create a web log or “blog” that others can read online” while 4% “Create content for the Internet, such as helping build a web site, creating an online diary, or posting your thoughts online”. That could even just include posting your thoughts to someone else’s messageboard.

To my mind this emphasises the importance of making the weblog and other content publishing tools we have easier and promoting the possibilities they offer over making the tools more sophisticated (though we should be doing both).

Of course making them work multilingually is also going to be key to international adoption, and making them work well offline (so you don’t have to compose while connected).union credit 1stadvantageagricredit iowaunion allegany credit teachers countycredit counseling ammendalice opening credits show videoof tvameritrust credit card financialcsun school accreditation businesscredit union lubbock alliance Map