Chris Boese's Weblog

Democratized Media: YouTube for whistleblowers?

FORGET "TWO CHINESE BOYS" LIP-SYNCHING TO THE BACKSTREET BOYS.

The applications for YouTube continue to expand. I keep wondering what the "Democracy Now" journalist Amy Goodman and videographer Max Stahl could have done with YouTube.  When they were in East Timor in 1991 with important footage of civilian massacres, they almost got their video taken away by the Indonesian police. They had to smuggle it out of the country in a different way, but what if they had been able to upload it straight to an open posting video site like YouTube?

The Rodney King effect, writ large?

But would it be harder to fact-check and refute a video than it is to fact-check and refute a blogger?

Link: ABC News: Desperate Whistleblower Turns to YouTube.

Link: YouTube - Homeland Security - Coast Guard Issues.

Desperate Whistleblower Turns to YouTube

Former Engineer Accuses the World's Biggest Defense Contractor of Knowingly Jeopardizing National Security

By JONATHAN SILVERSTEIN

Aug. 29, 2006 — "What I am going to tell you is going to seem preposterous and unbelievable."

Those are a few of the first words of a video posted on YouTube by former Lockheed Martin engineer Michael De Kort, claiming that the defense contractor had built and the Coast Guard had accepted a number of boats that fall far short of government standards and leave our national security in question.

De Kort had tried going through the chain of command at Lockheed, and had contacted the government, the Coast Guard and various members of Congress, but no one seemed willing or able to help.

"YouTube was my last best shot — I never wanted to do this publicly," he explained. "I had gone there to look at entertaining videos and saw that hundreds of thousands of people were visiting the site, and I thought that if there was something that was novel … maybe just the fact that I was doing it would be the story."

[...]

YouTube playing a "gotcha" role in this fall's political campaigns

I'd noticed YouTube was changing the face of war coverage with citizen journalism on the ground in Lebanon and Israel.

Then my friend at Bluestem Prairie was linking to what would have been an obscure debate in an out-of-the-way place (pole barn at a county fair, with sheep baa-ing and cows moo-ing in the background, for Minnesota's first congressional district) and now I hear YouTube is becoming a factor in Montana too. Conrad Burns catching some zzzzz-zzz-zzz's, talking about his illegal immigrant workers at his house. Heh.

Interesting development to watch.

Link: The Albuquerque Tribune: Election News.

The political uses of YouTube.com

By Associated Press
August 22, 2006

WASHINGTON - When Republican Sen. Conrad Burns briefly struggled to keep his eyes open at a Montana farm-bill hearing last Thursday, a state Democratic party operative was right there taping it. Within hours, the video of Burns was on YouTube.com and available to viewers around the world.

SMART BOX

"It's an enormous opportunity for the public to get access to, in some cases, less filtered information. Video is fascinating." Roy Temple, Democratic strategist and blogger

"It speaks to the faster pace of campaigns in the Internet world," said Matt McKenna, spokesman for Jon Tester, Burns' Democratic opponent. The operative, 23-year-old Kevin O'Brien, follows Burns and tapes him whenever he can. If the video is good enough, the Tester campaign will post it on YouTube, the popular video-sharing Web site.

While viewing the video of an apparently sleepy Burns, YouTube visitors are given a menu of several other videos posted by the Democrats, including Tester's campaign ads. None of Burns' ads appear on the site.

"We direct people to our Web site, not YouTube," said Burns spokesman Jason Klindt. He characterized the YouTube posting as a "gotcha" video, saying Burns had gotten little sleep the night before the farm hearing because a flight had been canceled.

YouTube has become yet another Internet tool to rouse party activists, political junkies and office procrastinators. Strategists say it's an entertaining new way to directly connect with voters.

Campaigns "have always used video cameras, but the difference this cycle is that YouTube allows information to get uploaded and out to the public a lot faster than it has in the past," said Phil Singer, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

[...]

Republicans appear to have fewer postings on the site, and National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Brian Walton said the party has not made a specific effort to use YouTube. He said Republicans have used the Internet in other ways, including Web sites that mock Democratic congressional candidates.

Mocking and poking fun are part of the new campaign age, said Democratic consultant Jenny Backus.

"The Internet has proven there's an audience for funny and weird," she said.

[...]

One YouTube video has caused major difficulties for the re-election campaign of Sen. George Allen, a Virginia Republican. In the video, Allen calls a rival's campaign staffer "Macaca" and tells him, "Welcome to America."

The staffer, S.R. Sidarth, a native Virginian of Indian descent who works for Democratic challenger Jim Webb, has been following and videotaping Allen. After the campaign posted footage of Allen's remark on YouTube, it soon made its way to cable news shows and newspapers, provoking an outcry from Indian-American groups.

Minnesota and Missouri have also become YouTube battlegrounds.

Users in Minnesota have posted critical clips of Democratic Senate candidate Amy Klobuchar and her Republican opponent, Mark Kennedy, on the campaign trail.

[...]

A girl I know from high school beat incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski in the Alaska primary

She was Sarah Heath when I knew her. I played basketball against her from a rival Valley school for five years. She was a tough competitor and a sweet person then, and it looks like she's still both of those things now. And she clearly has widespread support with GOP voters (in a red state), because a good bit of the Mat-Su Valley (her home region) was dealing with terrible flooding and damage on election day.

Here's this morning's results from the Anchorage Daily News:

Link: adn.com | elections : Knowles, Palin in November.

Knowles, Palin in November

By KYLE HOPKINS, TOM KIZZIA and KATIE PESZNECKER
Anchorage Daily News

Published: August 22, 2006
Last Modified: August 23, 2006 at 04:24 AM

Former Wasilla mayor Sarah Palin knocked embattled incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski out of office in the Republican primary race for governor Tuesday, setting the stage for a general election showdown with former two-term Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles and for a potential shake-up in her own party.

Palin’s advantage looked insurmountable while Knowles walloped lesser-known challenger Eric Croft, an Anchorage state representative, after a wild election day marked by flooding in the soggy Mat-Su Valley, downpours in Anchorage and a Murkowski campaign volunteer falling victim to stray gunfire.

[...]

Knowles and Palin offered a similar message Tuesday night. With her supporters sensing victory at her campaign party in the Hotel Captain Cook, Palin talked about the problem with “politics as usual.” Someone in the crowd shouted “Let’s take Alaska back!” to roaring applause. Former Alaska Gov. Wally Hickel, a Palin supporter, smiled and raised his fist.

Maybe half an hour later, Knowles and his running mate, Anchorage Rep. Ethan Berkowitz, addressed the Democratic faithful. “This is our state and we’re taking it back,” Berkowitz said, drawing cheers. Knowles said it was time to reclaim the state from cronyism and favoritism.

The Republican contest emerged as election day’s main event, because it could — and did — guarantee a new governor at a time when Alaska politicans are trying to spark the next economic boom with a natural gas pipeline. John Binkley, a former state senator and Fairbanks businessman, was in second place — well ahead of Murkowski but with no chance of catching Palin.

[Sarah got 51% of the vote to Binkley's 29%. Murkowski got 18%]

In his campaign, Binkley often talked about trust and presented himself as a thoughtful alternative to Murkowski’s sometimes gruff style. Palin painted Binkley as part of the same Republican party machinery that she defied as a member of a state oil and gas commission when she told the state that party chairman and fellow commissioner Randy Ruedrich was mixing his political and state jobs.

Will the party rally in support of Palin now that she’s the nominee? “That’s a good question,” she said. “I never had help from the party from the beginning, it’s been an independent run.”

Later, Palin suggested Ruedrich should resign.

Ruedrich said he doesn’t intend to step down as head of the party. “I was elected for four years through a normal process and I look forward to working with her (Palin).”

[...]

WashingtonPost.com plans system to help B- and C-list bloggers?

I'm not sure I understand exactly how this system would do what it claims to do. Does the blogger have to pay to make the list? Or does selection for it imply an endorsement of the blog's quality by the Washington Post? Depends on what the Post means by the term "sponsored." Generally, that would mean money changing hands somewhere, right? And there's some sort of advertising hook-up implied here that I'm not really clear on.

Link: Adotas | WashingtonPost.com Launches Sponsored Blogroll.

WashingtonPost.com Launches Sponsored Blogroll

Written on August 18th 2006
Author by Editor 

The Washingtonpost.com has launched a blog promotion program called Sponsored Blogroll, which aims to give B and C-list bloggers a taste of the Washingtonpost.com’s 8 million monthly readers and help connect them with Washington Post advertisers. The Sponsored Blogroll project is the brainchild of Jeff Burkett, head of the WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive’s sales development team.

According to Burkett’s blog, “The idea came to me while reading ‘Blogs to Riches’ in New York Magazine back in February of this year. The article discussed the fact that it is very hard for bloggers to get noticed. Basically, all of the B-list and C-list bloggers (who may well be very talented) link to the A-list blogs in hope of getting noticed. All this accomplishes is making the A-listers more powerful, while the B’s and C’s stay where they are. It is very hard to break through the clutter.”

The Blogroll process goes like this: A blogger signs their blog up as a candidate for the program. Once a blog has been accepted, a link to it is featured in the Washingtonpost.com’s Sponsored Blogroll index, and a box featuring regularly updated Sponsored Blogroll links appears on the Washingtonpost.com front page. Washington Post sales reps will also contact the blogger and try to connect them with the right Washingtonpost.com advertisers. Both the blogger and the Post split any ad revenue.

Burkett and the Washingtonpost.com team are still experimenting to see what the response from bloggers will be. At launch, the Post has partnered with three sites: Creative Weblogging, BootsNAll and AllBusiness.

Google this!

The news that Google was going to legally go after people who attempted to google things just turned me into a quivering mass of jello and I started to cry. I grabbed some kleenex so that my face wouldn't be too wet when I went into the copy room to xerox my face in its obvious distress, to send copies to the folks at Google so they could see how upset I am. While taking the copies out, I got a paper cut, so I slapped a band-aid on it, then stopped at the vending machine and got a coke. My work here is finished.

Link: All Headline News - Google Takes Legal Steps Against Using Its Name As A Verb - August 16, 2006.

Google Takes Legal Steps Against Using Its Name As A Verb

August 15, 2006 2:49 p.m. EST

Julie Farby - All Headline News Staff Writer

(AHN)-Search engine giant Google has sent off a series of legal letters to media organizations, warning them against using its name as a verb.

The California-based company is becoming concerned about trademark violation, with a spokesman confirming that it had sent the letters, saying, "We think it's important to make the distinction between using the word Google to describe using Google to search the internet, and using the word Google to describe searching the internet. It has some serious trademark issues."

In June, Google won a place in the Oxford English Dictionary, while "to google", with a lower case "g", was included last month in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, America's leading reference book.

Meanwhile, the online service WordSpy, defines "google" as: "To search for information on the Web, particularly by using the Google search engine; to search the Web for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend." This is also what pops up first if you type "googling" into Google.

[...]

A fun story, and it has a moral too!

Link: brandsizzle: Controversy: Diamonds & Internet Infamy are Forever.

I'm having some fun reading around on brandsizzle with Anne Simons, and I found this little, ahem, gem. As a photographer who found my images spreading far and wide online in the 1990s (until I had to take them down), I can relate. I'm only now posting things to Flickr, and very cautiously, holding back my best portfolio pieces.

I just had to share the story, which seems to be destined for "alligators in the sewer" folk wisdom greatness. Here's the gist of it:

Controversy: Diamonds & Internet Infamy are Forever

Justice in the blogosphere is swift. It's also long lasting.

Earlier this year a photographer discovered that his photographs were allegedly being ripped off by another photographer on Flickr. He was outraged as anyone would be. So he blogged about it as any blogger would. Just seven minutes after the post appeared, the offending photos were removed from the site. End of story.

Um, not quite.

Two weeks ago the blogger photographer got a letter from the alleged plagiarist's attorney threatening to sue him.

Huh?

Seems that when the alleged plagiarist's name was typed into Google, the third item that came up was the aggrieved photographer's post. So he sued the photographer for damage to his professional and creative reputation.

This really pissed off the blogger and he did what any blogger would do: He posted the attorney's letter on his website and pointed out the unfairness of being sued by someone who has stolen your work. And a whole bunch of people who wouldn't have heard about the 'incident' otherwise are now passing the attorney's letter around and writing their own posts about it.

[...]

And here's the moral of the story:

So, children, what have we learned?

1. Don't steal from someone who has more Google juice than you.
2. Better yet, don't steal from anybody.
3. If you do steal from someone, don't sue them when they catch you. It will only piss them off and next thing you know, you'll be in line at the DMV wearing dark glasses and trying to get your first and middle name switched on your driver's license.
4. If you're an attorney and you send a letter to a blogger they will post it on their blog because that's what they do and letters from attorneys are one of their favorite things to post.
5. When you want Google juice you can't get it; when you don't want it you get too much.
6. A diamond will disintegrate before Google juice dissipates.

Story alert courtesy of Thomas Hawke's Digital Connection

Is this an ominous development?

Advertising money is flowing through a siphon from print versions to electronic for most media properties, and Columbia Journalism Review decides the trend is going in the other direction?

Business Brilliance 101, or a Rectal-Cranial Inversion?

More traffic for the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, which is the better site anyway. Integrates blogs and covers the beat better too.

Link: 2 Editors Resign at Web Site Linked to Journalism Review - New York Times.

2 Editors Resign at Web Site Linked to Journalism Review

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: August 11, 2006

The managing editor of CJRDaily.org, an online adjunct of The Columbia Journalism Review, and his deputy both quit yesterday  after the dean of  Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism told them he was cutting the site’s budget nearly in half.

The dean, Nicholas Lemann, said in an interview that the amount of money raised for the Web site could not sustain the online staff, and he was using a portion of the magazine’s discretionary money for a direct-mail campaign to try to increase subscriptions to the print magazine. The journalism review, which comes out six times a year, has a circulation of 20,000.

Mr. Lemann said he was faced with the same quandary confronting most news organizations today — how to pay for an online staff when the site is free to readers.

The Web site will soon start to sell advertising, hold conferences and sell archival material, he said, but even that revenue will not support the cost of the staff. He said he had been “out fund-raising every day,” but had not scraped together enough to finance the site at full strength.

As a result, he said, he has decided that a campaign to gain subscribers for the print magazine, while expensive, will result in more income, which will help maintain an online staff that he said would still be bigger than that of most other magazines.

“I have the same issue that everyone else in journalism has, and this is our best lunge toward a solution,” Mr. Lemann said.

The decision prompted the site’s top editors to quit, reducing the staff from eight to six.

Both Steve Lovelady, 63, the managing editor, who had been managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and deputy Page 1 editor of The Wall Street Journal, and Bryan Keefer, 28, the assistant managing editor, resigned in protest yesterday.

“It’s a fundamental policy dispute about the allocation of resources,” Mr. Lovelady said. “Nick has decided to spend the money on a direct-mail campaign for the magazine, in hopes of saving subscription revenue. To me, that sounds like something out of the 19th century. He’s taking the one, fresh, smart thing he has and gutting it.”

[...]

The decision prompted the site’s top editors to quit, reducing the staff from eight to six.

Both Steve Lovelady, 63, the managing editor, who had been managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and deputy Page 1 editor of The Wall Street Journal, and Bryan Keefer, 28, the assistant managing editor, resigned in protest yesterday.

“It’s a fundamental policy dispute about the allocation of resources,” Mr. Lovelady said. “Nick has decided to spend the money on a direct-mail campaign for the magazine, in hopes of saving subscription revenue. To me, that sounds like something out of the 19th century. He’s taking the one, fresh, smart thing he has and gutting it.”

[...]

Jay Rosen, a blogger and journalism professor at New York University, said the move was a “strategic error” and that the review should drop its print version to reduce costs and go entirely online.

“I’m sure their current subscribers want it in print, but you have to look at your potential subscribers,” he said. “Since the profession is going toward the Web, in the long run, that’s the smarter move.”

Pretty goofy thing to do when you're planning something like this, and coming out with a contradictory New Yorker article at the same time. Do they have anybody working in the PR office at Columbia?

What I've been up to...

I've been kinda quiet here because I did a rush launch of a new blog, a memorial site that just went live this morning for a longtime friend who passed away over the weekend.

Link: In Memory of Dr. Susan Barnes.

Susan is someone who had online friends literally around the world, and, starting when the site went live in the early A.M. with people in New Zealand and Australia, the response to it has already been tremendous, and it's a fitting tribute to Susan.

It's also amazing to me, the power of the Xenaverse, the fans of the show Xena: Warrior Princess, still out there as a force in the world, looking to make significant donations to Doctors Without Borders in Susan's name. It was a factor I documented in my dissertation ethnography of the online Xena fandom community, and it is still going strong.

Now I need to get some SLEEP!

Chris

Riverbend, on what it's like in Baghdad right now

These are the kinds of things I don't want to forget. Iraq is being bumped out of the headlines as bombs fall just miles from the site of the archeological site of the Tel of Megiddo. But fallen, fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great, and that's where people are dying at a rate of 100 a day.

When I think about the interesting discussion elsewhere on this blog about looking at women and men and remarking on whether they are attractive or not, bimbos or not, technologically-savvy or not, what I really want to think about is how the patriarchial power structure that objectifies and is threatened by women and wants to erase them (like celebrity anorexics and their imitators) or hide them or keep them down, that SAME power structure is going a good step further RIGHT NOW in Baghdad, where even Christian women are now wearing headscarves in the street, to stay safer.

It's enough to send you straight to your Margaret Atwood, "A Handmaid's Tale," which I bet even she did not think was as uncannily prescient as it is.

Read below, if you want to get freaked out.

Here are the parts of Riverbend's report that jumped out at me, that I want to memorize, and remember.

Link: Baghdad Burning: Summer of Goodbyes....

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Summer of Goodbyes...

Residents of Baghdad are systematically being pushed out of the city. Some families are waking up to find a Klashnikov bullet and a letter in an envelope with the words “Leave your area or else.” The culprits behind these attacks and threats are Sadr’s followers- Mahdi Army. It’s general knowledge, although no one dares say it out loud. In the last month we’ve had two different families staying with us in our house, after having to leave their neighborhoods due to death threats and attacks. It’s not just Sunnis- it’s Shia, Arabs, Kurds- most of the middle-class areas are being targeted by militias.

Other areas are being overrun by armed Islamists. The Americans have absolutely no control in these areas. Or maybe they simply don’t want to control the areas because when there’s a clash between Sadr’s militia and another militia in a residential neighborhood, they surround the area and watch things happen.

[...]

For me, June marked the first month I don’t dare leave the house without a hijab, or headscarf. I don’t wear a hijab usually, but it’s no longer possible to drive around Baghdad without one. It’s just not a good idea. (Take note that when I say ‘drive’ I actually mean ‘sit in the back seat of the car’- I haven’t driven for the longest time.) Going around bare-headed in a car or in the street also puts the family members with you in danger. You risk hearing something you don’t want to hear and then the father or the brother or cousin or uncle can’t just sit by and let it happen. I haven’t driven for the longest time. If you’re a female, you risk being attacked.

I look at my older clothes- the jeans and t-shirts and colorful skirts- and it’s like I’m studying a wardrobe from another country, another lifetime. There was a time, a couple of years ago, when you could more or less wear what you wanted if you weren’t going to a public place. If you were going to a friends or relatives house, you could wear trousers and a shirt, or jeans, something you wouldn’t ordinarily wear. We don’t do that anymore because there’s always that risk of getting stopped in the car and checked by one militia or another.

There are no laws that say we have to wear a hijab (yet), but there are the men in head-to-toe black and the turbans, the extremists and fanatics who were liberated by the occupation, and at some point, you tire of the defiance. You no longer want to be seen.

[...]

I realized how common it had become only in mid-July when M., a childhood friend, came to say goodbye before leaving the country. She walked into the house, complaining of the heat and the roads, her brother following closely behind. It took me to the end of the visit for the peculiarity of the situation to hit me. She was getting ready to leave before the sun set, and she picked up the beige headscarf folded neatly by her side. As she told me about one of her neighbors being shot, she opened up the scarf with a flourish, set it on her head like a pro, and pinned it snuggly under her chin with the precision of a seasoned hijab-wearer. All this without a mirror- like she had done it a hundred times over… Which would be fine, except that M. is Christian.

If M. can wear one quietly- so can I.

I’ve said goodbye this last month to more people than I can count. Some of the ‘goodbyes’ were hurried and furtive- the sort you say at night to the neighbor who got a death threat and is leaving at the break of dawn, quietly.

Some of the ‘goodbyes’ were emotional and long-drawn, to the relatives and friends who can no longer bear to live in a country coming apart at the seams.

[...]

I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever know just how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis left the country this bleak summer. I wonder how many of them will actually return. Where will they go? What will they do with themselves? Is it time to follow? Is it time to wash our hands of the country and try to find a stable life somewhere else?

Atlanta Media Bloggers group is going great guns

Link: Atlanta Media Bloggers.

I have recently fallen in with a great group of folks that meet monthly here in Atlanta to talk all things blog and media, and along the way, I got roped into putting up a new blog site for the group.

What I mean to say is, HEY, CHECK OUT THIS GREAT NEW GROUP BLOG!

I've had that un-used design lying about, and it was too fun not to use as a cool clubhouse for the group. I was always big on clubhouses and building forts when I was a kid, and I was hanging out with a terrific graphic designer last year, Denny Lester, who had a new Wacom tablet and wanted an excuse to play with it. This is what came out of that. I can't stop staring at it.

More importantly, I've met some very interesting folks in this group who are expanding my mind and perspective daily, and the contributions of the variety of group members are already giving this new blog an eclectic and interesting flavor.  These are discussions I hope to participate in often.

Watch for more cool things to keep showing up on this site!