Second prize was won by OhmyNews newcomer J.N. Paquet, for his piece on "Britain's Got Talent" contestant Susan Boyle, who took the world by storm on the Internet with her amazing voice...
We're happy to announce that the winners are from a predictably diverse group of citizen reporters, in keeping with the demographics of our 6,000 reporters worldwide. In first place is an OMNI featured writer...
Our third citizen reporter winner is a middle school student in Korea. Park Jeong-eun attended our January OhmyNews English News Camp. Her assignment to write about a hot issue in Korea regarding the relocation of...
There are seven billion people in the world, and each and every one of them has some special ability. Everybody has to find out his or her inner calling. That is the crucial thing....
Some of the journalists ask at press conferences about the situation and what UN officials or Security Council members are doing to solve this problem. It gets frustrating to keep asking, as it seems that there is no...
Hauben has reported from the UN for OhmyNews International since October 2006. In 2007 she was told she had been on the short list for an award. She won the award this year for articles she wrote between Sept. 1, 2007...
For students, it was not only a good chance to improve their English skills and to be introduced to journalistic writing but also a great opportunity to meet friends from different ages and schools. Although the camp was...
The full aim of this campaign is to introduce the stories of over 100 'lonely new students' entering grade one without a single fellow classmate. OhmyNews will share stories about rural communities and their schools in...
Many questions stem from whether this shift in the media landscape is temporary or whether it is here to stay, heralding a fundamental change in media leadership. As more and more citizens participate in the shaping...
This year's forum will focus on "Candlelight 2008" and its effects on media leadership. Korean media outlets that engaged with the "Candlelight 2008" both directly and indirectly, will actively debate related issues in...
Michael Stutchbury nails Kevin Rudd’s backdown over book imports as yet another hard decision dodged: KEVIN Rudd’s cultural protection sends a clear message that…
Mark Vieira's biography of Irving Thalberg captures the genius of the man who transformed movies from mere escapist ephemera into something capable of nuanced expression and deep feeling.
Day 2 of HASS on the Hill, being written a day after due to late flights and lots of October 30 deadlines around the place.Going to New Parliament House (using that term because we had dinner the previous night in the Old Parliament House) is a lot of fun. This is the political class in its natural habitat, and the designers of the building created a caverno […]
Being late October, it is time for HASS on the Hill, which I am attending as ANZCA President.My trip to Canberra turned out to be more eventful than expected for three reasons. First, I discovered the night before that in the course of changing the timing of my return flight to allow for my meeting with Senator Mitch Fifield at 4pm on Wednesday, someone (eth […]
• ‘Homo economicus strips the sovereign of power inasmuch as he reveals an essential, fundamental and major incapacity of the sovereign, that is to say, an inability to master the totality of the economic field. The sovereign cannot fail to be blind vis-à-vis the economic domain or field as a whole. The whole set of economic processes cannot fail to elude a […]
• The problem of homo economicus and its applicability to domains that are not immediately and directly economic (crime, marriage, child rearing etc.) is interesting as it posits a notion of the “rational subject” that bears no relationship to the work done in the social sciences on how individuals respond to behavioural stimuli, but it also presents homo ec […]
• Paradoxes of German neoliberalism (Ordoliberalism):o How to maintain “light” regulation that dies not act directly upon the market but only in favour of promoting the economic process?o How to address the tension inherent in generalizing the enterprise form to balance the promotion of “warm” moral and cultural values with the “cold” mechanisms of competiti […]
Fascinating paper by Michel Bauwens from the Foundation fro Peer-to-Peer Alternatives and Institute for Distributed Creativity, published in the Fibreculture journal, on the layers of content co-creation:Albert Boswijk, of the Amsterdam-based Center for the Experience Economy, asked me a set of interesting questions: What is the reality behind so called best […]
• American neo-liberalism had become a hot topic in France by the late 1970s. Foucault sees key contextual differences between The United States and Germany (and France) as being:1. It emerges as a reaction to the Keynesian policies of Roosevelt and the New Deal, from about 1934;2. The policies of economic and social intervention are motivated in the U.S., a […]
• Why this topic? The methodological reason is to give ‘concrete content to relations of power’ by understanding how the ‘grid of governmentality’ operates at the level of economic policy or social management. He also wants to get beyond the moralizing of critiques of the state because:1. It defines the state as the opposite of civil society;2. It wrongly co […]
• Social policy of neo-liberalism (Gesellschaftpolitik) is ‘active, intense, and interventionist’, but is not a compensatory policy for impacts of the market economy on the social fabric. It is rather ’a historical and social condition of possibility for a market economy, as the condition enabling the formal mechanism of competition to function’ (p. 160)• Th […]
As Google Wave starts to surface as a quite different way of conceiving of e-mail, and article in The LA Times discussed how it could change journalism towards a more collaborative practice.
In a second piece of good news to come from the Federal government today, the Productivity Commission’s mooted changes to the import regime for books have not been accepted. The argument about consumer benefit was always spurious – the purported reduction in prices would have been small (and well run public libraries exist precisely to stock [... […]
Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett has declined to give Anna Bligh’s Traveston Dam the tick of approval. Bligh inherited this project from Peter Beattie, and I, and a lot of others, always thought its conception in the first place had been as a political wedge. It had a lot more to do with Beattie’s manoeuvrings [...]
On this Remembrance Day, Armagny chooses to remember the horror of total war: Behind such particular, smaller scale, analogies and partisan arguments, played out in nations largely benefitting from a sustained pax, there is the big thing that happened in the two World Wars. There is total war. Slaughter of millions. Loss of entire generations. Loss [...]
In this post I reminded people of Gwynne Dyer’s warning that: “…the first and most important impact on human civilisation will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply.” He reckons that food supply issues will become acute after the the temperature rises by 1C. I also relayed Hans Joachim Schellnhuber’s warning that under business as […]
Competition lawyer Professor Frank Zumbo studied food prices in the OECD from 2000 and found price increases in Australia at 41.3% were the third highest behind only New Zealand and South Korea. He had no doubt the evil duopoly of Coles and Woolworths was to blame. Graeme Samuel, the chairman of the ACCC, was more inclined [...]
Brian
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May 29, 2008 — Deb
I’ve moved my selection of music to another blog: http://shakindog.wordpress.com
Last night, the Royal Television Society hosted its annual Innovation awards. At the ceremony, our Controller of BBC Online Seetha Kumar, collected the final award of the evening - the prestigious Judge's Award. The RTS tell me that they created this award to pick out "the greatest vision in determining how the media might develop in the future and […]
Danielle Nagler, Head of BBC HD and a regular contributor to this blog was interviewed on yesterday's Points of View. Among the topics covered was picture quality which has provoked a lively discussion on Danielle's previous posts. Here's a link to the programme. The interview with Danielle is the first item. There's also an extended inte […]
Editor's note: In a previous post: Sky can help project Canvas unlock public value, the Director of Canvas Richard Halton responded to Sky's submission to the BBC Trust. This week's Ariel, the BBC's staff paper, carried an interview with Richard about Canvas by Ariel's Clare Bolt. NB: This is the copy that Clare submitted rather than […]
Tom (whose team are leading the upgrading of BBC blogs to BBC iD) tells me there are no less than seven different systems involved. So it's not suprising that we've had one or two problems as some of you have commented. However, broadly speaking we're happy. The vast majority of you have successfully switched over to BBC iD and are using it to […]
Some people will have had trouble accessing the BBC website in the past few hours. We've had a network failure that has resulted in access to the site being slow and at some points inaccessible. Our network provider's engineers are working on restoring normal service as soon as possible. We're sorry for the inconvenience. Update, 11:07: I […]
You'll no doubt recognise the face above as belonging to Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC's technology correspondent who can be found posting most days of the week on the dot.life blog. Rory made it into last week's Round up with his post about Ubuntu (372 comments and counting). The photo was taken at a get together of BBC bloggers where Rory descr […]
Subtext was one of the first projects to be originated by the Learning Development team, and answered a call to create a low barrier to entry social media project that could engage one or several of BBC Learning's core audiences. We reflected on how we had studied key texts when we were at school - I remembered paying my school to keep a copy of Hamlet, […]
Editor's note: This is an edited version of a speech Seetha gave at the Skills for Life Conference yesterday. It's a follow up to a previous post we had from Seetha, Why Digital Inclusion Matters. I am the Controller of BBC Online, but earlier this year I also took on the role of the BBC's Online Access Champion and it's in this capacity […]
BBC iPlayer has been a success on television. Since we went live with BBC iPlayer on Virgin Media in June 2008, there have been more than 200 million programmes viewed. This accounts for more than a quarter of all iPlayer viewing today. My colleague Kerstin Mogull has recently clarified how we plan to make BBC iPlayer available to audiences on other platform […]
Just a quick post to tell you that the BBC's new portal of parliaments Democracy Live has launched today. Mark Coyle has some background at About The BBC blog. "Blogs and websites have become as much a part of political reporting as traditional print and media outlets and that's why we're making as much of our video as possible available […]
With news choppers circling overhead, a scrum of reporters waiting down below and a barrage of puns waiting to be unleashed, Tiger Woods flew into Melbourne on Monday, where he will take part in the Australian Masters golf tournament, attend a gala dinner, play in a charity event for victims of the bushfires, promote Victoria as a golfing destination and poc […]
Last week, I ran into John Howard for the first time since election night in 2007, when, outside a ballroom scattered with discarded, half-drunk flutes of champagne, I confronted him with a conversational opening gambit that to this day makes me wince. My mother-in-law is an enthusiastic fan of the former prime minister, and was a near neighbour in north Syd […]
Ten years after the republican referendum, it is Australia's constitutional monarchists who have the most cause for celebration. And celebrating they are, with lunches in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth to mark what they call "Affirmation Day". Republicans, meanwhile, are gathering on the forecourt of Parliament House in Canberra, to remind their […]
So a galloper called Alcopop stands a good chance of running away with the Melbourne Cup. Talk about a journalistic gift-horse: the love of gambling and the love of booze all in one, and the opportunity, on this highest of high holy days, for a blog that sums up the nation. Alas, with Australia slipping down the global drink league table, the boozy stereotyp […]
I thought at the end of this month, I should do a series of blog shorts - updates on subjects raised by this month's blogs; additional information that I should have included first time round; stories or pieces which have caught my eye but didn't really lend themselves to the blogosphere. So here goes: ASYLUM SEEKERS: So first to the running story […]
Driving across the Nullabor Plain this week, I was struck, as ever on journeys through the outback, of the vast Australian emptiness - a sparseness of human life which is explained, of course, by a statistical gap. This is the world's sixth largest country in terms of acreage, but only the 52nd in terms of population - 22,026,000 according to the Austra […]
Why is it that asylum seekers who attempt to reach Australia by sea provoke a very different political reaction from those arriving by air? So far this year just over 1,700 unauthorised immigrants have arrived by boat, a tenfold increase on 2008. But the number is dwarfed by those arriving by air - over 50,000 who tend to overstay their visas, thus becoming […]
In his award-winning novel, The Slap, Christos Tsiolkas writes in the authentic voices of Australia's new polyglot surburbia, the home of Greek-Australians, Italian-Australians, Indian-Australians and other relatively newly-arrived immigrants. It also features an indigenous Australian, Bilal, who has converted to Islam. The book takes its title from the […]
The most pressing foreign policy issue of the day is what to do about Afghanistan. Within weeks of entering office, the Obama administration announced a troop surge of some 21,000 soldiers, and indicated it would be looking to its allies, including Australia, to bolster their own commitment. Now, a complete rethink is underway in Washington prompted by mount […]
The Channel Nine show Hey Hey It's Saturday was a staple of 1970s Australia. Last week's blackface skit, which has generated so many unfavourable international headlines, also had a distinctly retro and unreconstructed feel. Racist, too, according to the shows many detractors. For those who missed it, the variety show aired a talent segment in whic […]
Twenty years ago to the hour I sat in an army bus of the (West) German Bundeswehr in the town of Dannenberg, stuck in a traffic jam caused by (East) German Trabis exploring their new-found freedom to travel. My unit was posted right on the border to the East, charged with listening in to radio communications of the East German and (more importantly) Soviet f […]
(Crossposted from Produsage.org.) I'm delighted to note that three new reviews of my book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage - by Verena Laschinger, Alan Razee, and Erin Stark - have been published over at the Resource Centre for Cybercultural Studies. RCCS editor David Silver kindly also asked me to provide a respon […]
It's been a good week already - on Monday I've received notice that we've been successful with a major research grant application in this year's ARC Discovery round. The three-year project for which we're receiving $400,000 from the ARC, with my esteemed colleague Jean Burgess as the postdoc researcher, will extend the existing work […]
Milwaukee. The final speaker of this final session at AoIR 2009 is Raquel Recuero, who shifts our focus to Brazil and its adoption of Twitter and Plurk (another micromessaging tool, but one which has a horizontal rather than vertical logic and enables replies within the message - Google Wave-style, it seems). How is the appropriation of these different socia […]
Milwaukee. The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Katarzyna Chmielewska, whose focus is on Polish-language blogs, especially by Polish women. In 2006, an advertising agency created a controversial public service advertisement in Poland that was featuring a hospital delivery room with a birthing scene during which a vacuum cleaner is born, to suggest that too often […]
Milwaukee. The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Briana Fox, whose interest is in how gender and race shape family email networks. Are there perceivable differences in how families email amongst themselves that can be explained through such factors, and in the perception of such networks by families from different backgrounds? There is a perception that email in […]
Milwaukee. The first speaker in this final session at AoIR 2009 is Taina Bucher. She argues for an understanding of Twitter as a technology of immediacy - in this case, of immediacy in time, enabling users to cease the time and take action. Our being in time is characterised by the scarcity of time in the 24h society; Twitter reacts to that by encouraging sh […]
Milwaukee. The final keynote of AoIR 2009 is by Megan Boler, editor of Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. She begins by noting the shared sense of aporia at the conference. What do we do as we face the rapidly changing environments of social media - do we feel let down by the Internet, do we daily have to renegotiate the changing visage of t […]
Milwaukee. The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2009 is David Bello, whose focus is on Amazon's Mechanical Turk system. This is a form of crowdsourcing, which itself combines the outsourcing of labour to an external provider with community-provided open source labour; crowdsourcing thus exhibits an open quality where users are not employed or hired […]
Milwaukee. The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Kylie Jarrett, who moves on to problematising Google and its 'don't be evil' motto. There is a sense of disquiet about the absolute symbolic power enjoyed by the company at this point, but there are also many defensive responses as so many people are very attached to it. What is the source of this be […]
This is Jeremy Iggers, founder of the Twin Cities Daily Planet, a journalism organization that works with citizens and pro journalists. He’s speaking at a meeting of the Kettering Foundation. The video was created from a MyTouch phone, and was streamed “almost live” — the only delay was 3G network latency — as he spoke. Qik, [.. […]
Mark Briggs summarizes what we’re doing here in a blog post. Mark is author of the excellent book Journalism 2.0, and is on the verge of publishing a new and very updated version.
UPDATED In the minutes and hours after an Army officer opened fire on his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, last week, the media floodgates opened in a now-standard way. A torrent of news reports and commentary poured from the scene, the immediate community and the Pentagon, amplified by corollary data, informed commentary and rank [...]