Zebra 3 Report by Joe Anybody
Thursday, 12 November 2020
The Shortwave Report 11/06/20 Listen Globally!
Mood:  amorous
Now Playing: World News - Anti War - Independent Media - Shortwave Report
Topic: MEDIA

The Shortwave Report Listen Globally!

 http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2020/11/439610.shtml

A weekly 30 minute review of international news and opinion, recorded from a shortwave radio and the internet. With times, frequencies, and websites for listening at home. 3 files- Highest quality broadcast, regular broadcast, and slow-modem streaming. Radio Deutsche-Welle, Spanish National Radio, NHK Japan, and Radio Havana Cuba.

 

Dear Radio Friend,


This week's show features stories from Spanish National Radio, NHK Japan, and Radio Deutsche-Welle.
 http://www.outfarpress.com/swr201106.mp3
(If you have access to Audioport there is a highest quality version posted up there {33MB}  http://www.audioport.org/index.php?op=producer-info&uid=904&nav=&)

From GERMANY- In Poland protests continue over new abortion restrictions and in Britain the terror threat level has been raised. In Europe Covid cases are increasing rapidly and lockdowns are in place in many countries. China is angry that the US has approved the sale of attack drones to Taiwan. The US election is being followed globally, RDW has spent several days talking about little else. Here is a report on the change in relations between the US and Germany over the past four years.

From SPAIN- Alison Hughes reviews the Spanish press that was published at the start of the US election. El Pais describes the election as a referendum on the global wave of populism. They also ran a piece on climate change, pointing out that another four years of Trump would have irreparable effects on efforts to counter the environmental damage. In El Mundo there was an analysis called "The intellectual legacy of a reality show president," pointing out how global politics have changed since his election. In Publico an opinion piece says that there are no leftist political parties in the US, just two right-wing parties, one ultra-right and one center right.

From JAPAN- A report on how countries across Asia are paying attention to the US election- with reports from Thailand, India, South Korea, and China. The new Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga says the government has no plans to build new nuclear power plants or reactors, while it aims for carbon neutrality by 2050.

From CUBA- The Bolivian president-elect, Luis Arce, has called for the rebuilding of peace and economic stability, rejecting right wing attacks on homes and businesses. Fires in the Amazon rain forest in Brazil surged in October. A super typhoon destroyed some islands in the Philippines, the 18th this year. An investigation by Reveal and the LA Times shows that the Obama and Trump administrations detained tens of thousands of migrant children for longer than previously known. Edward Snowden and his wife are applying for dual US/Russian citizenship. Trump has approved selling the F-22 stealth aircraft to Israel, to make up for selling F-35s to the UAE.

The latest Shortwave Report (November 6) is up at the website  http://www.outfarpress.com/shortwave.shtml in 3 forms-

(new) HIGHEST QUALITY (160kb)(33MB), broadcast quality (13MB), and quickdownload or streaming form (6MB) (28:59) Links at page bottom
(If you have access to Audioport there is a highest quality version posted up there {33MB}  http://www.audioport.org/index.php?op=producer-info&uid=904&nav=&)

PODCAST!!!- feed: www.outfarpress.com/podcast.xml (160kb Highest Quality)


BRAND NEW PODCAST (May 2020) about the history of The Shortwave Report on Humboldt Lighthouse with Nathan Hankes-  https://www.thehumboldtlighthouse.com/the-podcast/ep-75-dan-roberts (Interview follows 30 minute Shortwave Report)

Website Page-
<  http://www.outfarpress.com/shortwave.shtml >
¡FurthuR! Dan Roberts

"Every time the US 'saves' a country, it converts it into either an insane asylum or a cemetery."
-- Eduardo Galeano

Dan Roberts
Shortwave Report-
www.outfarpress.com
YouthSpeaksOut!-
www.youthspeaksout.net

homepage: homepage: http://www.outfarpress.com
phone: phone: PO Box 1162 Willits CA 95490
address: address: PO Box 1162 Willits CA 95490

 http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2020/06/438648.shtml


Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:03 PM PST
This Is Now: Bridge to a Better World PODCAST
Mood:  incredulous
Now Playing: Podcast: This Is Now
Topic: MEDIA

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2020/10/439571.shtml

In this edition of This Is Now: Bridge to a Better World-
A look at what unemployment statistics really mean
The president seemingly orders a death squad, and how that relates to the U$ history of imperialism
And finding inspiration and wisdom with our ancestors

 

 

Dissenting commentary now available on different platform

"Press**Watch/The News you're not supposed to know" was a long-running (3 decades!) program on KBOO Radio, produced by Theresa Mitchell. Now the headlines and commentary that ran every Thursday morning on the radio is available as a podcast, and the effort is combined with Ani Raven ("Positively Revolting Talk Radio," also a staple on the Boo for many a year.

This week's episode points to the real unemployment numbers, castigates the Feds for their wrist-slap of criminal bank Wells Fargo, and goes into a deeper discussion of the death-squad killing of Michael Reinoehl at the behest of the Orange Mussolini.

Here's the link!  LISTEN

 https://soundcloud.com/ani-40889941/this-is-now-bridge-to-a-better-world-episode-2

Your comments are welcome; please keep them on-topic and humane.

http://https://soundcloud.com/ani-40889941/this-is-now-bridge-to-a-better-world-episode-2

 


Posted by Joe Anybody at 11:45 AM PST
Sunday, 16 October 2016
Breaking: ND Prosecutor Seeks "Riot" Charges Against Amy Goodman For Reporting On Pipeline Protest
Mood:  on fire
Now Playing: everyone who thinks journalists who do their jobs in North Dakota should stay out of prison should sign this petition.
Topic: MEDIA

 

 


 

Bismarck, North Dakota–October 15, 2016 — A North Dakota state prosecutor has sought to charge award-winning journalist Amy Goodman with participating in a "riot" for filming an attack on Native American-led anti-pipeline protesters. The new charge comes after the prosecutor dropped criminal trespassing charges.

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/10/15/breaking_nd_prosecutor_seeks_riot_charges

 

State’s Attorney Ladd R Erickson filed the new charges on Friday before District Judge John Grinsteiner who will decide on Monday (October 17) whether probable cause exists for the riot charge.

Goodman has travelled to North Dakota to face the charges and will appear at Morton County court on Monday at 1:30 pm local time (CDT) if the charges are approved.

“I came back to North Dakota to fight a trespass charge. They saw that they could never make that charge stick, so now they want to charge me with rioting, " said Goodman. "I wasn’t trespassing, I wasn’t engaging in a riot, I was doing my job as a journalist by covering a violent attack on Native American protesters."

In an e-mail to Goodman’s attorney Tom Dickson on October 12, State’s Attorney Erickson admitted that there were "legal issues with proving the notice of trespassing requirements in the statute." In an earlier email on October 12, Erickson wrote that Goodman "was not acting as a journalist," despite that fact that the state’s criminal complaint recognized that, "Amy Goodman can be seen on the video …interviewing protesters." In that email Erikson justified his quote in the Bismarck Tribune in which he had said that "She’s [Amy Goodman] a protester, basically. Everything she reported on was from the position of justifying the protest actions." The First Amendment, of course, applies irrespective of the content of a reporter’s story.

The charge in State of North Dakota v. Amy Goodman, stems from Democracy Now!’s coverage of the protests against the Dakota Access pipeline. On Saturday, September 3, Democracy Now! filmed security guards working for the pipeline company attacking protesters. The report showed guards unleashing dogs and using pepper spray and featured people with bite injuries and a dog with blood dripping from its mouth and nose.

Democracy Now!’s report went viral online and was viewed more than 14 million times on Facebook and was rebroadcast on many outlets, including CBSNBC,NPRCNNMSNBCand the Huffington Post.

On September 8th, a criminal complaint and warrant was issued for Goodman’s arrest on the trespassing charge.

"Filming Native Americans being violently attacked as they defend their land is not rioting, it’s called journalism, it is protected by the First Amendment, and indeed, it is an essential function in a democratic society," said Professor Katherine Franke, chair of the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The pipeline project has faced months of resistance from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and members of over 100 other tribes from across the U.S., Canada and Latin America.

Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning public television/radio news program that airs on over 1,400 stations worldwide. Goodman has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers and won many of journalism’s highest awards in more than three-decades working as a reporter.

You can see Democracy Now!’s coverage of the pipeline and the protests here.

Press information:

Contact Denis Moynihan:
+1-646-217-7231
media@democracynow.org

or Reed Brody +1 917 388 6745

Press Statement by Amy Goodman in front of Morton County Courthouse:
Expected Time: 1:45pm CDT, Monday Oct. 17th, 2016.

Live camera positions with satellite uplink connection available onsite to interview Amy Goodman or for use by your correspondent.

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/10/15/breaking_nd_prosecutor_seeks_riot_charges

 


Posted by Joe Anybody at 11:28 AM PDT
Monday, 19 November 2012
what is open publishing - Archive.org Wayback save
Mood:  happy
Now Playing: Open Publishing - Info save by Archive WAYBACK MACHINE
Topic: MEDIA
Wayback Machine
JUN JULAUG
Previous capture 19Next capture
2005 20062010
59 captures
9 Feb 02 - 21 Jul 11
sparklines
Close Help

Open publishing is the same as free software

http://web.archive.org/web/20060719020350/http://www.cat.org.au/maffew/cat/openpub.html

Matthew Arnison <maffew@cat.org.au>
composed March 2001
$Revision: 1.23 $ $Date: 2006/01/21 06:42:39 $
Translations: French, Portuguese

A working definition of open publishing
Open publishing means that the process of creating news is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available. Those stories are filtered as little as possible to help the readers find the stories they want. Readers can see editorial decisions being made by others. They can see how to get involved and help make editorial decisions. If they can think of a better way for the software to help shape editorial decisions, they can copy the software because it is free and change it and start their own site. If they want to redistribute the news, they can, preferably on an open publishing site.

The full rave

Open publishing is the same as free software.

They're both (r)evolutionary responses to the privatisation of information by multinational monopolies. For software it's Microsoft. For publishing it's CNN. For both software and publishing it's AOL Time Warner.

Free software is a gift to humanity. If you have a piece of free software, you can give it to someone else for free. You can charge for free software, but once someone else has a copy, they can give away as many copies as they like. So free software often comes at no charge. Let's call it free beer. But this alone is not free software. Free software is also free as in free speech, not just free beer.

It's about software freedom. A software liberation movement. The source code, the genetic blueprint, the internal mechanics are open for others to see (hence free software is also called open source). So others can take it and change it and pass on their changes to other people. The product is freely available, and the process of production is free and transparent.

If someone doesn't like it, they can take it and change it. The one thing they can't change is its freedom. The only strings attached are there to stop people from tying it down. The strings of freedom are called the GNU copyleft, a beautiful subversion of copyright law that guarantees freedom for a piece of code and all its mutations.

The means is the end. The journey is the destination.

You might think this process wouldn't produce anything truly creative, awe-inspiring, staggering, huge, complex, simple, small, pedantic, reliable, random or enjoyable.

If you thought that, you'd be drastically underestimating what humans get up to for fun. Because all of those adjectives apply to free software. Geeks like to joke about what free software needs to do next to achieve world domination.

Microsoft doesn't think this joke is very funny. Microsoft is one of the biggest corporations in the world. Microsoft spends billions of dollars to pay programmers to keep their software closed and internals secret.

Free software is overwhelmingly written by volunteers. Free software runs the internet and Microsoft does not. The number and diversity of people using free software is accelerating.

Microsoft usually responds to such threats by buying them out and assimilating them. But free software cannot be privatised. Free software is not frugal with its genetic code. Free software spreads itself like a benevolent microbe after an evolutionary leap forward.

Microsoft assumes people are stupid and holds focus groups to determine exactly in what way are they stupid. They then pay a small number of people a lot of money to engineer that stupidity into software. Sometimes this works well, because everyone is stupid sometimes. But it doesn't cater well for everyone being smart.

Free software assumes people are smart and creative and can choose for themselves to swim in the shallow or the deep end of the technology pool. Even the geekiest programmer might want to have their feet planted on the bottom sometimes, and the freshest beginner might make the biggest splash diving into the deep end.

Free software programmers still manage to eat despite giving away their code.

Software is information. So are news stories. So are opinion pieces. They can be easily copied and shared. Maybe information wants to be free?

Under the dominant multinational global news system, news is not free, news is not open. It is very expensive. It is highly secretive.

To see the news you need to pay with money or with your time spent watching ads (usually for cars) or both. To create the news you need to pay expensive public relations consultants. To write the news you need to obey corporate news values, making stories on a production line, for maximum advertising impact at minimum cost. To edit the news you need to be a global stock market newswire service or a multinational media company. To distribute the news you need to have one of 6 TV transmission towers in a city of millions.

Media corporations assume the viewers are stupid. In their eyes the total creative potential of the audience is Funniest Home Videos. Creative people do not buy more stuff, they make their own. This is a problem for media multinationals. They do not trust their audience to be creative. It might be bad for profits, bad for executive salaries.

But it's OK. The audience doesn't trust the corporate media either.

This situation has led to rampant confusion and alienation of society. We are disconnected from ourselves and our ecology. Our planet is functioning as a global ecosystem more than ever before due to the global nature of human activity, yet the humans don't have any way of communicating with each other. Systemic problems go unseen and unsolved by billions. Only the issues that are important to sell ads or grease the stock exchange have reliable global news impact.

What we have is a very complex system within which the humans have recently gained enourmous power but as yet they have no correspondingly powerful network of communication infrastructure to support it. We have no neural network to process information. Not so much a global village as a global megaphone.

Then the internet was added to the global communications pool. If you can read the internet, you can also write to it. If someone else has told a story on the internet, you can choose to hear it. Information flows between the net and other communication systems: the phone, the TV, the radio and newspapers, forming a much more balanced web of information transfer. This is a global village where you can climb out of the traffic jam and bump into people on the electronic street and have a chat.

The internet makes possible open publishing on a citywide and global scale. Citizens finally have access to the same cheap and powerful two-way global communication that colonial governments and multinationals have had access to for centuries.

What is open publishing?

Like free software, with open publishing the news is often distributed at no charge. There are no ads to eat up your time and corrupt the content. But that is not the most important thing.

Open publishing means that the process of creating news is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available. Those stories are filtered as little as possible to help the readers find the stories they want. Readers can see editorial decisions being made by others. They can see how to get involved and help make editorial decisions. If they can think of a better way for the software to help shape editorial decisions, they can copy the software because it is free and change it and start their own site. If they want to redistribute the news, they can, preferably on an open publishing site.

The working parts of journalism are exposed. Open publishing assumes the reader is smart and creative and might want to be a writer and an editor and a distributor and even a software programmer. Open publishing assumes that the reader can tell a crappy story from a good one. That the reader can find what they're after, and might help other readers looking for the same trail.

We trust the audience and it seems that the audience trusts us in return.

Open publishing is playing at the opposite end of the trust spectrum to the corporate media.

We are not working to convince people that this is a good way to do things. We are providing a space in which people might decide themselves if this is a good way to do things.

The journey is the destination.

Open publishing is not new. It is an electronic reinvention of the ancient art of story telling.

Open publishing is free software. It's freedom of information, freedom for creativity.

Open publishing is overwhelmingly done by volunteers.

Who will do the investigative journalism? How will people give a perspective from overseas? What will provide a sense of overview, connectedness and common identity? Will anyone get paid for their work? What will become of motion pictures? Of musicians? Where will be the sustained efforts by hundreds of people?

I am hoping the above questions about open publishing have already been answered by free software. And partly by indymedia, and thousands of other open publishing websites. Open publishing is merely taking an existing trend and identifying it, amplifying it, and strategically applying it to weak points in the global monopolies on power and information.

The pyramids are awe inspiring. They were also built by slave labour. We've evolved as a species. We can do a lot of amazing things without brutal Egyptian slave handling techniques. We can do without new pyramids.

We are in the middle of a mass extinction of species. We need to figure out how to live in harmony with the ecosystem of this planet before the ecosystem goes into negative feedback and kills lifeforms by the billions. We're not going to get there by sacrificing our lives for the motor car, trading our human rights for shoes, killing our people for drug companies, hiding our creativity for the multinationals.

We can do better. Forget the pyramids. Bypass world domination.

Free software is wiring the globe. Open publishing just might help us use those wires to save the planet.


footnotes

Examples of open publishing: None of the above meet all the criteria above for open publishing. But they're pretty close. There'd be heaps more out there. Suggestions welcome.

Note that while slashdot.org has many open publishing features, and was an important inspiration for open publishing, I don't think it really is open publishing. Significantly, the stories (as opposed to the comments) are taken from reader contributions, but are processed behind closed doors.

By the way, none of the above four sites would exist without free software. I guess it's one more reason why open publishing is free software.

................

Obviously I think we can learn a lot from the free software movement. One idea we haven't developed much yet is an open publishing copyleft, similar to the free software copyleft. The copyleft defines how the information can be shared, hijacking the copyright laws to ensure that the free information may only be re-used in a free context. This encourages growth of free spaces, autonomous zones, as the process of sharing information is spread along with the information itself. This may be a key part of what we need to define open publishing to ourselves and potential collaborators. It doesn't have to be legally watertight to be useful. That can be evolved in later, The most useful thing would be to start playing with the definition. This is partly what we are doing with our work on defining the indymedia network. But I think we will also need to define how we share chunks of information smaller than that involved in total membership of the network. And the basic chunk of information is a story and the copyleft license that applies to it.

The most interesting idea to me so far in this area applied to news stories is the idea that a story can be reused anywhere, but only if all readers/viewers exposed to it, can easily identify and reach the source of the news story. For example by a subtitle on the picture with the web address of the indymedia site the story came from. This means the viewer can not only verify the original version of the story, but also add their own creative juices to the flow. This would help ensure that whereever the story goes, there is a solid link back to the working parts, the raw process that made it possible and allows new people to contribute and mutate and evolve.

This does involve giving up the right to demand payment for every copy made. Free software sacrifices the same thing and it turns out there that it really works. We need to try it for news stories and documentaries, and see if it works equally well.

One key point is that yu can still charge for copies of copyleft information. You just can't stop someone else from giving away the copy they bought, including access to the source materials. And the source materials have to be available for no more than the raw cost of distribution.

And it turns out that people still do buy free software. An awful lot of it in fact.

And that in addition, the reputation of free software spreads very quickly if it is good. Which benefits the software project by providing more feedback, more volunteers to help improve it, and in some cases more money.

The analogy for a video documentary would be placing it under copyleft so that anyone could copy it as long as the copy prominently said it was copyleft and any viewer could find a link back to the source (e.g. the indymedia web address for the city it came from). But the video maker could still charge for copies to be made. They could charge especially high rates for multinational TV networks that want copies urgently for example. The TV network would have to pay if they wanted the footage quickly without chasing down someone else who had it and was willing to copy it fast. And regardless of how badly they edited the piece, because of the copyleft license, they would legally have to give over some of the attention of their viewers to a web address for the source. That viewer attention is an extremely valuable resource for the network, because it is extremely powerful. It can also be powerful for us. If they fail to give the web address, they can be sued for the value of that viewer attention. That's quite a liability.

There are ways to play the system. I'm not sure if this would work, but it might be fun and I think it's worth a try!

Update April 2003: I just discovered these great creative commons licenses, which I think could be perfect for the job.

.......

Ideals and reality: many of the things I say above are ideals. They do not match reality exactly. But they are useful as a way of thinking about different approaches.

For example free software and open publishing are not actually free of charge, but the charge is reduced to the bare cost of distribution. This is hundreds of times less than the previous cost of purchase, which tended to include the cost of luxury cars, houses and jets for multinational executives. There is a real difference.

Another important point with free software is that programming is a skill in very high demand, which gives programmers an unusual amount of power as a group of people at this point in history. Historically I think this has lead to great social change. A flaw in this rant might be that programmers may become far less in demand and that story tellers and journalists are already in oversupply in economic thinking.

However, once we turn down various patterns of overconsumption, we can create a virtuous circle that gives us more leisure time, greater quality of life for both us and people living in other countries poorer (financially) than ours (I live in a rich country, this is written for a rich country audience). For example, getting rid of a car creates a huge amount of leisure time because you no longer need to spend all that time earning enough money to sit in traffic jams. Again, this is simplistic, there are urban planning issues to consider, but I believe a lot of it is cultural and information exchange is part of changing our culture to be more responsive to our own needs as well as the planet's.

In other words, with any luck and lots of hard work and fun, things might just start falling into place in time to grow and evolve as a species and a global ecosystem.

...

It seems many parts of society are being privatised. Health, water, communications, community media. Being owned by the government or a non-profit is no guarantee. Sometimes there are some benefits from privatisation. But I'm not convinced it's the only way to get such benefits, and there are heavy costs. Particularly in poorer countries, where prices for basics (such as water in Bolivia) can become suddenly way out of reach.

Free software can't be privatised.

Especially copyleft free software.

Corporations can use it, improve it, but they can't get an exclusive hold of it, they can't deny others from using it and changing it.

Can open publishing be privatised? I think the right definition will be strong protection against privatisation. But the large effects of the subtle difference in licensing between copyleft and BSD shows how important the definition can be. Let's play with a few and see which ones work best.

...

All the fuss about sharing music and dotbombs in the mainstream media is hiding an important trend: the most successful internet sites rely on the creativity of their users, not on professional producers as was the tradition with earlier electronic media.

  • geocities.com is a universe of web pages which anyone can add to, and last i heard it's a top-ten website (imagine a TV channel where viewers could contribute whatever they liked, and it having shows in the top-ten: it sounds unlikely, and this is an example of why the net is so different to TV)
  • amazon.com relies heavily on readers for book reviews (and they've bought imdb.com, which is a massive compilation of user data on movies)
  • egroups.com is about people getting together in groups and yakking about whatever they're passionate about
  • ebay.com is about people selling stuff to each other: a bazaar, not a mall full of franchises

These are all sites with very big audiences, and they all facilitate creativity, rather than have their staff create it directly. Of course, when anyone can contribute, you have a problem where users need to figure out what things they can trust. Most of these sites are successful because they've figured out some neat ways of helping that to happen, often using some sort of user-ratings system (user-editorial). So these sites all have some of the spirit of open publishing.

On the old one-way systems, community media was the exception. On the net, community media is very much a part of the mainstream.

Yes, there have been stories showing that AOL users spend most of their time just using AOL services, implying that people are happy to stay in AOL corporate land. However, those stories did not reveal what those users were doing. I reckon they'd be doing email, instant messaging, and just a little browsing. Since they use AOL tools to do email and messaging that counts as AOL time, so in fact a better indication of the diversity of their surfing would be found by looking just at the time spent browsing. The rest of the time they're spending communicating with other users. Every time in the past that a closed network has been tried, it's failed when faced with the internet (the biggest example was compuserve). So AOL may be closer than anyone else to creating a shopping mall version of the net, but they're still a lot further away than they'd like you to believe.

People want to communicate, they want to be creative. TV is a technology that can't handle such things very well, yet we've managed to convince ourselves after decades of TV that we need professionals to do our story telling.

Imagine if you tried to sell phones but they could only dial Pizza Hut or send messages written by Hallmark? Nobody would buy them (it's been tried: a very early marketing idea for the telephone had people using it to listen to opera). People are social animals, we want to use our communication tools to talk to other people. The only reason this didn't happen with TV, is because TV technology is one-way only.

So just because TV didn't live up to idealistic expectations, doesn't mean that the net has to follow the same path. The net is a fully two-way technology, and that makes a very big difference. The reason you mightn't hear about this trend is because a lot of the internet commentary we see is still coming from the old one-way media.

For more on this point, see my rant Is the internet elitist?.

...

open editing

Jan 2002

Indymedia is struggling to cross a threshold in the size of its audience and in the sheer number of indymedia collectives. Many indymedia groups are also grappling with what to do when they are not covering a major event.

As the size of the audience goes up, so does the number of people posting stories, and therefore the number of stories that are more annoying than useful to most readers. A classic example is the rising tide of american postings on sydney indymedia. The posters don't seem to realise that we are quite capable of clicking on an american indymedia site if we wish to hear american news.

Open publishing I think has been very important in helping us to find new ways of organising media, often taking advantage of what the internet makes possible. A crucial part of Seattle Indymedia's success in Nov 99 was the automated online open-publishing newswire. I think what indymedia needs to get to the next level is automated open-editing.

Just as open publishing allows any readers to also write stories, open editing allows any reader to help sub-edit other people's stories. They might help sort stories by whatever criteria they think are important, or rewrite story summaries, translate to different languages, or compile groups of stories into a feature. Changes would be tracked so that original authors do not get trampled on. Much of this is already happening, but automation would turbo-charge it.

Done well, it will clear a lot of bottlenecks and allow a lot of exta creativity to plug into the network. It will make the sites more approachable for new readers, and more useful for activist media hacks. I think it could have a similar impact to open publishing. All we need is some geeks to implement it.

It's a bit like web search engines. Altavista was much better than all the rest back in the late 90's, but then the web got too big, Altavista's approach became ineffective, and google stepped in with an enhanced method for making sense of the net without imposing entralised order or missing things out. Interestingly, google introduced the idea of weighting search results by the number of pages that link to each other. Which is a bit like the user highlights stuff that some of us have been talking about for indymedia.

Google deals usefully with the explosion of information and diversity on the web in a way that heirachical and even simple raw search methods do not. Expect a similar leap in the impact of indymedia if and when open editing starts to kick in.

For more on open editing see:

...

I think my rants could do with some open-editing.

...

What's in the open publishing and open editing toolbox?

June 2002

Hopefully at the bottom of a news story in the near future you'll see tools like these:

  • Open publishing tools:
    • contribute a story
    • add a comment
  • Open editing tools:
    • highlight this story (add this story to your highlights page, which in turn allows you to email newsblasts of your highlights, and to collect stories into a feature for consideration for the front page)
    • choose a topic area for this story (is this story about poverty? human rights? forests? then help us make sense of the flow and pick some keywords. also, what lifespan does this story have? short-term, long term? is it a local story or an international one? does it include local perspective?)
    • check the facts (add sources for facts cited in this story)
    • major revision (make it clearer, tighten the writing, add new points; revisions appear in the sidebar; the contributor or their delegate must approve before it becomes the version displayed by default)
    • cosmetic revision (spelling, grammar, formatting; as above author or delegate approval involved)
    • translate (into another language, into another culture e.g. from english to spanish, or from academic jargon to straight journo style)
    • verify this story (I'm not sure what this really means, maybe if a story has collected enough highlights to be considered for the front page, or keywords have been proposed, or a revision or translation has been proposed and an author has delegated the audience to subedit; then random people will be asked to verify if a proposed action is a good idea; a formula based on audience size and creativity determines the threshhold for action)
    • list other stories needing verification (if the user has been given random votes I guess)
    • flag this story as wildly inappropriate (strict conditions: a verbatim duplicate, summary does not match story, story contains a software virus, spam, or shocking images with no political context - the flagger must provide a short (and optionally additional longer) comment as to why; low karma users can only flag limited numbers of stories, e.g. one per week)
    • ignore this story, show me another one (if the story is boring, then just move on to the next thing, no need to take explicit action)

Sidebar:

  • Story status: is it a fresh contribution? is it in the bin? number of comments, highlighted N times, is it proposed for the front page? Link to full log of editorial actions for this story.
  • Highlighters: link to people's highlights pages which have picked this sstory
  • Keywords: list keywords and list recent stories with the same keywords
  • Revisions: list proposed revisions and older versions
  • Translations
  • Fact checking: list sources for information and statistics in this article
  • Comments: show a selection of comments attached to this story; show total number of comments; give tools for diving into discussion (e.g. top rated comments? recent comments?)

Now the tricky part is how to balance the creativity of the audience with the very small percentage of people who want to disrupt a creative space.

There may be different stages to go through. This is because of the ratios of audience participation (see below) change as the audience size increases. A smaller audience might have a more cosy feel, and therefore a higher percentage of creative contributors. A larger audience will tend to cross a threshhold where disruptive people are numerous enough to have a major effect.

There is also the difference between live coverage of a major event, as against ongoing coverage of a place or an issue.

So the default needs to be that people can contribute material that other audience members get to see straight away.

Then take away a small number of posts that are dangerous to the site as a whole. For example spam or viruses or items that attract lawsuits. Individual collectives will have to figure out where to draw the line.

For the rest, it's a matter of priority. For a busy site, a new article would need to go through various checks to get onto the front page. A key tension pops up during live coverage of an event, between the need to check stories and the desire to see news come through quickly. But presumably if there is a big audience for a live event (indymedia's audience usually explodes during such times) and therefore more people to help with open editing, and thus ways for important news to get to the front page more quickly. News junkines will drill down to the latest news, and we need exactly those people to help highlight stuff for wider viewing.

The main thing is that the checks on a story's priority can't involve too many built-in delays (e.g. waiting seven days for votes to come in from a fixed collective) if you want a flexible system. Ideally any ratios used are tied to some sort of rough average of the current audience and the number of stories and contributors.

Another thing to consider is that some stories have a short lifetime, maybe hours or days, and others - considered opinion pieces, deailed issue coverage - might be relevant for much longer.

But what checks do we need? Can we build some sort of rough framework that can stretch to fit these various scenarios?

Let's start by trusting most readers to be able to judge when a story is important and interesting enough to recommend other people look at it. That's when they might choose to highlight it on their personal highlights page. The cool thing about this is there's no need to verify that action, because that page is owned by that user, and any people they choose to share write access with.

Some readers might only highlight stories that many people think are useless. Well, that's still useful in a way, and it doesn't really harm anything at that point.

The next stage is how to use those highlighting choices (or other editorial choices like revisions and translations) to change the priority of a story.

This is where you need to try and weed out abuse of the system. Any such weeding of course needs to be documented in an open way (use free software, show logs of changes to an article's status, list the editorial actions a user has taken, require comments for such actions, and finally allow anyone to rummage through the bin).

A helpful characteristic of abuse is that (almost by definition) it seems to be remain a very small percentage of the audience. So a major tactic is to try and encourage as large a section of the audience as possible to get involved in open publishing and open editing, and for the collective running a site to set a good example using those tools. A healthy plant is less likely to be attacked by parasites.

Another tactic it to require independent and random confirmation. You should not be able to bump up the pirority of a story if you contributed it. You should not be able to (easily) organise a small group of people to bump up each other's stories. Tactics for doing this include handing out votes to random users, and limiting the number of votes (based on some formula tied to the audience and contributor numbers for that day or week).

Another tactic is the idea of karma. People who contribute to the site can build up a reputation within the software, so that they are trusted a bit more, or a bit less. You don't want to go too far with this or it encourages a clique and starts to leach diversity.

...

formulas for open publishing audience sizes and participation

1%, say, of your audience at an open publishing site will contribute stories

0.2% will help with open editing, including weeding out spam

0.1% will contribute stories with closed publishing

0.1% will contribute spam with open publishing

0.01% will help with closed editing

the figures are guessed, but they give an idea of the ratios, and are roughly based on my experience, e.g. with large mailing lists, and the statistics for www.indymedia.org in early 2002.

open publishing/editing also implies for me that it's encouraged and easy to use and well designed.

so if you only have 10 people in your audience, open editing isn't useful, and on average only 1 person is contributing stories.

if you have 1000 people in your audience (which actualyl translates to a lot of hits) then you have 100 people contributing stories, which is starting to get interesting.

if, say, it turns out you need 100 people doing open editing for it to be useful (no good if only one person is making ratings) then u need an audience of 10,000.

if anything, these percentages are actually a bit high. they probably decay a bit as the audience gets bigger. closed systems will tend to hit a hard limit, beyond which communication amongst the team becomes very tough, or increasingly heirachical, especially if the team is working long distance. lots of other factors of course too. and of course "open" and "closed" are pretty vague, in fact there's a full range between them, so a more open system will tend to push the numbers up, and a more closed one will push them down.

...

April 2002

The New York Times says communication is making the world less tolerant. But while they mention the internet at the beginning of the story, most of the piece is actually about global television. If anything, this makes the case for open publishing stronger. It's not just whether communications are global, but how they are global.

One of the slashdot comments on the story points out another problem: that viewers are most attracted to conflict.

Conflict is a basic element of good drama. If everyone in a story just gets along, it's a boring story. This is an issue that indymedia must deal with. So far the most popular indymedia coverage is of big conflicts with authorities during large protests. If we want to get away from that, we need to find a way to present the interesting conflict in a story that still presents positive possibilities rather than being all negative. Conflict and creativity. Co-operation and competition. We need to find a good balance between these extremes.

...

September 2002

Content is not king. I've been saying this for years, but nowhere near as elloquently as Andrew Odlyzko does.

What does this mean for open publishing? Why bother making the process of creating content open if the end product doesn't matter that much?

Because what does matter is communication, social interaction. And open publishing means the process of creating content is opened up for people to engage in. Automated software and the web make this accessible and possible for much greater numbers of people than ever before, despite the best, noble and admirable efforts of community media.

And that process of writing news, publishing it, commenting on it, editing it, that engagement of people in the fundamental task of telling a good story, of sifting through which stories are important, and having a good old chinwag when the storyteller finishes. That process, may turn out to be more important than the story itself. That process is what may open up new opinions, new opportunities, new action for social justice. That the process is open, that more people get in and help do it. That is what would strengthen the fabric of our society, to enable us to repair the wrongs and improve all our lives.

One thing I've been saying for a while is that the net is a communications crutch. Our cities have cut us apart and made it hard for people to come together and communicate. Shared space is all given over to cars and commerce. People don't feel safe meeting other people in public.

So the net is like a crutch, we are leaning on it heavily as we communicate and find each other, helping us to meet people with common ground, and figure out who we humans really are. But there's nothing like meeting in the flesh. So one day with any luck the crutch will fade away to a minor role, when we fix our cities and our lives, and find society in the street and buildings and open spaces of our lives.

...

indymedia, internet and the global middle class
December 2002
indymedia's third birthday

most of the people I have met through indymedia are white, middle class, from an english speaking background. people like myself.

most, but not all.

a lot of indymedia depends on the internet, and i think the internet is a middle class tool. that still makes a potential audience of hundreds of millions of people around the planet.

and i think many of those people are ignored in the mainstream media, dominated as it is by just 6 corporations. many of those middle class people are ignored in elections, where the president of the USA is voted in by just 1% of the planet's population.

i think when you criticise indymedia and the net, it's important to remember what we had before.

which is better? the corporate media, or indymedia? television or the net?

there are obvious limits to what can be done with a mostly middle class audience. by sheer numbers alone, it cannot be the sole basis for planetwide democracy.

the USA, for all its faults, did a lot of good things by empowering its middle class, rather than leaving all the power with the royal family.

throughout US history, people have been saying that more should have been done to respect all the people's rights. there is a very tragic history of what happened instead, what is still happening. but atleast, atleast they did as much as they did. after all, some people's battles were won. to say otherwise is to write off all the achievements, diversity, and people of the USA. i think we can acknowledge what's good, without ignoring the bad.

nowadays, with power gone global, i feel creating more power among a billion people has got to be better than leaving it in a handful of mega corps.

in fact i think one reason the US government has gotten so crazy over the last hundred years is because power went global, but democracy did not. which means even within the USA, and within other "western democracies", national democracy is meaningless and feels obsolete.

how can we do even better?

i think part of it is teaching people who have resources about the people who have not. and another part is sharing those resources.

many indymedia collectives are consciously working on this. they setup media centres and train people how to use them. they print out stories and distribute free papers. they collaborate with radio stations. there are links to resistance groups in poor countries, collaborations between north and south.

these sorts of things must be done before indymedia can really call itself a people's media. this truly democratic media would be a crucial part of achieving real democracy and human rights for all 6 billion people on the planet.

meanwhile, you can write off the global middle class if you like.

i am more optimistic.

...

the more i think about what the US and other middle class democracies have done to the poor people of their countries and of the world, the more i worry about global media democracy.

even middle class democracy these days can be a bit of a sham, but that doesn't make it any better to leave out the poor of the planet.

i still think indymedia has got to be a step in the right direction, but it still leaves so far to go.

but being conscious of this dilemma and caring about it is an important step to finding solutions and fixing it. let's atleast not pretend that indymedia is for "everyone" just yet. but make sure we acknowledge what we have done, and keep working to expand the circle of diversities of all kinds.

...

June 2003

Lots happening in blogspace.

Emergent democracy talks about how to bootstrap our global decision making to a level that can cope with global complexity. And has some details and speculations on how a blog-like communication structure may help to do that.

Key author of that piece, Joi Ito, later blogged that journalism has to change as well as it is part of democracy. That's why I'm linking it in here.

...

Many ideas in here are shamelessly ripped off from other places. I really should credit those places and people. Or, if you like an idea in here, please assume I ripped it off, and do a web search and find it (actually you might have to wait a few years for search engines that can actually find ideas as opposed to phrases).


The above article describes the first of three crazy ideas for webcasting. For more of my rants, see my home page

You can copy and distribute this article, as long as you include the web address of the original (http://www.cat.org.au/maffew/cat/openpub.html) in a way that the whole audience can see. Please let me know if you do reproduce it somewhere, especially if you make changes to it.

$Id: openpub.html,v 1.23 2006/01/21 06:42:39 maffew Exp $


Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:01 AM PST
Sunday, 29 January 2012
TWITTER TIPS FROM JOE ANYBODY
Mood:  energetic
Now Playing: TWITTER TIPS FROM JOE
Topic: MEDIA

 TWITTER TIPS FROM JOE


http://www.joe-anybody.com/id143.html

Twitter blocks by Country can be "circumvented very easily" read --> HERE
Read more about Twitter and extra features and add-ons --> HERE HERE and HERE
Wondering "Really whats so good about *twittering anyway?"
Then check this example--> HERE
And be sure to check this True Story about Twitter - HERE
and of course more Tips N Tricks HERE
Read here about Twitter acounts getting Hacked
Read about "RETWEETS" right from Twitters own website HERE
Read tips about HOW TO TWITTER "100 Twitten Secrets" HERE
You can see TWITTERS SAFETY page .... HERE
A Good Website to help you send Longer Tweets than 140 charcters HERE
Need help anaylizing your tweets effectivness? Well check this site - HERE
To organize your "incoming tweets"? -- > this site will help HERE


Posted by Joe Anybody at 3:49 PM PST
Updated: Sunday, 29 January 2012 3:51 PM PST
Saturday, 31 December 2011
What is a wish but a wish to build a dream on
Mood:  happy
Now Playing: Holy Wish List Batman
Topic: MEDIA
Solidarity 2012 Wish List - Donate with WePay

Posted by Joe Anybody at 7:35 PM PST
Updated: Saturday, 31 December 2011 7:51 PM PST
Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Information [links] from "Diary of a Waking Buterfly"
Mood:  not sure
Now Playing: Links and Tags
Topic: MEDIA

 LINKS AND TAGS


http://www.walkingbutterfly.com/

·  Tags

Antonio Gramsci Barack Obama Capitalism Christianity Class Consciousness Democracy Egypt Fascism Film Gender Germany Imperialism Ireland Islam Jesus Karl Marx LGBTI Liberalism Libya Links Love Martin Luther King Jr Marxism Materialism Music Poetry Propaganda Quotes Race Racism Religion Repression Resistance Revolution Sexism Sexuality Socialism Solidarity State Terrorism Utopianism Video Vision War

·  Links

 http://www.walkingbutterfly.com/ (original link of these URL's)

Posted by Joe Anybody at 11:45 AM PST
Thursday, 21 July 2011
CNET web tool suggestions for social media users
Mood:  special
Now Playing: web tools - worth knowing about sooner or latter
Topic: MEDIA

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/07/20/useful.apps.sites.tools/index.html

50 new tech tools you may have missed

 

50 new tech tools you may have missed

(CNN) -- Technology can make your life easier, but figuring out which tech tools to trust can be tiresome at the least and eye-poppingly stressful at worst.

To help, here's a list of 50 recently released or updated websites and apps that will make your mobile photos look better, improve your online social life and boost your productivity.

This list is by no means all-inclusive, so feel free to tell us about your favorite tech tools in the comments section or on Twitter. We're @cnntech.

Google Plus (free): It's too soon to tell whether Google's latest social network is social media's new king of the hill. However, one thing's for sure: The initial user reviews are very positive, and the strong bundling of social innovations make Google Plus -- often described as "Google's Facebook" -- worth the test drive.

Google Plus Nickname (free): Now that you've jumped in the Plus-pool, time to head over to Gplus.to for your own personalized URL.

Facebook-Skype (free): Made official last week at Mark Zuckerberg's recent announcement at Facebook headquarters, the service isn't yet available for all users. Users take advantage of the video-calling feature via Facebook without having to install any software. Some are criticizing the service for falling short of the Google+ hangout feature, where users can join group video calls up to 10 people. Facebook's video chat is only one-on-one.

Tout (free): Virtually no one had heard of this micro-video service until Shaquille O'Neal used it to recently announce his retirement from pro basketball. After garnering more half a million views in three hours, Tout had arrived with a splash, thanks to the larger-than-life hoops superstar. Capture 15-second videos and instantly share with family and friends. Downside: A Flash player is required to watch videos (sorry, iPad users).

Capture (99 cents): If you have kids and love recording those "first-moments," this app is probably worth considering. Once you install Capture, tap the app, and it starts recording video immediately. Once you're done, the video goes straight to your camera roll. No more missing moments by a split second.

Broadcastr (free): You bring the audio and plot the journey. Broadcastr weaves the story. This new social media platform enables the recording, organizing, listening and sharing of audio content on a map-based interface. Also works as great discovery tool for exploring personal and historical stories in new places. Available for iPhone and Android.

Turntable.fm (free): The service combines music-streaming, chat rooms and voting, all through a Facebook portal. Friends either vote up (awesome) your tunes or they go the other direction (lame). Whether or not you're a big music fan, this product is very hip and very addictive.

Spotify (free/paid): After years of drooling with envy, music fans on the U.S. side of the pond now get a chance to stream with Spotify. The extremely popular music service in Europe finally soft-launched last week in the U.S. For the first time, major record companies in the U.S. have embraced an online music service that lets people play the songs of their choice for free.

Instagr.am (free): The good times just keep on rolling for the social photo sharing service -- after all, how many Web companies can boast more millions of users than individual employees? Five-plus million users and growing for the service, which remains available only for Apple iPhone. Instagram has done for bad cell phone pics what GPS navigation did for confused motorists. If imitation is the greatest form of flattery, the spinoffs and third-party apps are lining up.

Followgram.me (free): This Web app helps offset one of Instagram's primary limitations: no official website for users to log in, view and readily share photos. Followgram creates an Instagram follow button to be embedded on websites and blogs. Followgram also provides its users with a vanity URL, his/her photo gallery, friends, followers and following lists. Moreover, a Followgram user's page is fully customizable.

Webstagram (free): Another simple, aesthetically pleasing Web interface for viewing your Instagram photos as well as your Instagram peeps.

Postagram (99 cents): Makes it easy to send Instagram, Facebook and mobile phone photos as real postcards from your iPhone, iPod touch or Android phone. Imagine that: Photos that you can actually hold in your hands!

Keepsy ($29.99): Not able to view, print and share your Instagram portfolio? Not a problem with Keepsy: customize and order photo albums.

Tumblr iPhone 2.0 (free): The upgrade offers valuable upgrades: There's a new interface, it's easier than ever to create posts, it's much easier to reply to messages, there's address book integration, and now new users can begin building inside the mobile app. Tumblr has begun distancing itself from other micro-blogging publishing sites and now has a mobile experience that matches its Web version.

Klout (free): The days of measuring one's social media reach simply by number of followers, friends or connections is ancient history. Web tools like Klout are starting to measure the influence you have over your digital minions.

Empire Ave (free): It bills itself as the Social Stock Market, where you can grow your social capital online. Here's how it works: You discover people online and then based on scores or share price invest virtual currency in their profiles by buying shares in the Social Stock Market. After a bit, you'll get used to the weirdness of having strangers bid "social shares" on your "social wares." Sounds kooky, but all the cool kids are doing it.

Sonar (free): This app is kind of like a good party host: It introduces you to whoever else is in the room by leveraging what you have in common. Ease of use for navigating who's nearby and how to virtually connect with them makes this location-based app a must-have. Available for the iPhone.

Bizzy (free): A Web and mobile service for personalized local business recommendations. Bizzy recently updated its iPhone and Android apps to introduce a "Check Out" feature. Users can now check out to leave short, emoticon-style reviews of venues on their way out the door. The Bizzy venue checkout is meant to be the opposite of the check-in, which we've seen in a slew of applications, from Foursquare to Facebook Places.

Crowdbeacon (free): Craving the best sushi joint around, and prefer human interaction over indexed user reviews? Crowdbeacon can help. Crowdsourcing your social life, this is a location-based service focused on providing relevant, localized communication and information to users based on what they need and where they are.

Apptitude (free): This is a bit stalkerish, but for those curious about the Facebook apps your friends are using (and when they're using them), check out this iPhone app. Then feel free to razz your friends over how much time they're really spending on Farmville!

Shortmail (free): The Twitter effect. This app doesn't limit your emails to famous 140 characters. Instead, it forces brevity and concise thoughts via 500 characters. Let's face it, who isn't drowning in e-mail overload these days? It's unclear whether Shortmail will catch on ... but we can all dream, right?

Visualize.me (free): Standard formatted resumes just aren't cool anymore. You know what's cool? Infographic resumes. This site provides a creative way of getting your foot in the door at the workplace you so covet. Visualize.me is set to launch later this month to beta invitees, then the public in August.

Gabacus (paid): Navigating the massive Twitter firehouse is nearly impossible without a little help. Gabacus makes sense of the millions of tweets per day by summarizing and curating the topics you're interested in.

Regator (free/paid): Another tool that helps you easily find, read and share high-quality blog posts about things that interest you. It is available on the Web and iPhone. Rather than automatically fetching every blog under the sun, Regator uses qualified human editors to carefully select the most relevant, useful, well-written blogs across 500-plus topics.

Getaround (fees): Isn't it time you took advantage of your ride as it sits in the driveway or parking lot? This mobile app (currently only available in select cities) turns you into Enterprise Rental or Hertz by letting you loan out your car when it's not in use. Renters access your vehicle via an iPhone app after terms are agreed upon.

Do@ (free): Do@ doesn't index pages. Instead, it shows live sites or apps that have been optimized for mobile presentation. It's similar to Google's preview functionality for mobile, but all the pages on do@ are live and not cached.

NASA (free): The NASA app for iPhone and iPad has been around for a couple years, but the Android version just hit the Marketplace. It offers a huge collection of NASA content, including images, videos on demand, NASA TV, mission info and social media extensions. Definitely worth a look for all space nuts!

Twylah (free): Showcase your tweets in a more complete narrative story. Super-easy to use and a much better storefront for your Twitter brand than the somewhat wonky Twitter stream.

SkinScan ($4.99): This app helps you analyze and keep an archive of moles on you or members of your family, for later review and comparison of the results. SkinScan displays several disclaimers that the app is to be used for strictly informational purposes, but it's nonetheless pretty interesting to see how personal tech is impacting everyday health concerns.

Formulists (free): By far the easiest way to create and manage Twitter Lists. This application lets you organize Twitter into smart, auto-updating Twitter lists: filter based on location/bio keywords, Twitter activity and more.

FreeTime (free): Wondering where your day went? FreeTime can help. Using nothing more than the calendar on your smartphone, this productivity app finds time between your events. Powerful filtering allows you to locate your free time in any setting.

Redbox (free): More and more movie watchers are turning to services like Redbox. This simple mobile app helps narrow down where the nearest rental kiosk is located via GPS, find out whether they have your desired flick in stock and if you chose to register, can even reserve the DVD. Don't forget the buttered popcorn.

Appstart (free): Seconds after you've removed your shiny new iPad from the box, this is without a doubt the first app you should download. It's a great starter assistant for finding relevant applications based on your tastes.

Evernote (free/paid): One of the most acclaimed productivity apps around. Evernote boasts a suite of software and services designed for note taking and archiving. A "note" can be a piece of formattable text, a full Web page or an excerpt, a photograph, a voice memo or a handwritten "ink" note. Notes can also have file attachments.

Evernote Peek (free): Flash cards for the digital generation! Peek is the first Smart Cover learning app. Connect Peek to your Evernote account and brush up on a language, make flashcards for a quiz or test yourself based on your Evernote contents.

Photos 3D for FB (free): It's a 3-D photo viewer for Facebook. In this app you can easily browse, comment, share photos and so on. You've never viewed photos like this.

FavFriends (free): Who doesn't need help breaking through the Facebook friend clutter? This service provides real-time notifications when a favorite Facebook friend posts a new status. Also you can sleep better knowing you'll never miss a friend who checked in somewhere when you were nearby at the same time.

Katango (free): Personal crowd control! This messaging app for the iPhone automatically groups together your contacts by life stage or activity. So groupings will include family members, high school friends, college buddies, co-workers and so forth. The application plucks out your address book contacts and Facebook friends and organizes these folks into groups based on patterns of previous social interactions. You can then tweak the groups to your liking and start sending photos or messages to particular groups.

Peel (free): This app is a handy little guide to point TV fanatics in the right direction for what's on the air. New hardware upgrades offer universal remote control option for all of your television/audio home equipment ($99).

Twicsy (free): View top Twitter picture trends and popular pictures. This app is functional and easy to use. It's beginning to stand out in the Twitter photo space.

Pixable (free/paid): It's no secret that photos are by far the most-shared pieces of content of Facebook. To that end, it ain't easy keeping up with the piles of pics. This app for iPhone, iPad and Web pushes the most commented, tagged and shared pics to the top of your radar.

True HDR ($1.99): Create full-resolution HDR (high dynamic range) pictures on your iPhone (4, 3GS), iPod Touch (4G) or iPad (2).

iMotion HD (free/paid): An intuitive and easy to use time-lapse and stop-motion app for iOS devices. Take pictures, edit your movie and export HD 720p videos to your device or directly to YouTube.

iPhone SLR Mount ($249): Size matters! This case-adapter combo lets you mount your Canon EOS or Nikon SLR lenses to your iPhone 4, giving your phone powerful depth of field and manual focus. Telephoto, wide angle, macro or your fixed-50 lenses all attach to this mount, giving you a full range of lenses at your iPhone-lovin' fingertips. (Note: also available for iPhone 3GS for $190)

Piictu (free): Think of this app as a scavenger hunt with cell phone pics. A simple way to talk and play with your friends from your mobile phone using pictures. You simply snap a pic and post it to Piictu and your social networks, and watch it get live picture responses from your friends and community at large.

Flixlab (free): Create professional style movies in seconds with Flixlab, a mobile application available for iPhone, coming soon to Android and Windows Phone 7. Also allow friends to keep the creative fun going with the option to "remix" your movies.


Posted by Joe Anybody at 5:16 AM PDT
Updated: Thursday, 21 July 2011 12:47 PM PDT
Thursday, 23 June 2011
Capitalist Corporate Big Brother Censorship - Apple's Video Kill Switch
Mood:  don't ask
Now Playing: Apple's Strike Against Free Speech - Kill Switch for Camera Phones
Topic: MEDIA

Join the discussion:

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org


Posted by Joe Anybody at 5:38 AM PDT
Monday, 13 June 2011
Video Conferencing - Is your Network Ready
Mood:  suave
Now Playing: 7 Ways to Preparing Your Network
Topic: MEDIA

Seven Ways to

Prepare Your Network

for Videoconferencing


 

http://www.shoretel.com/about/newsroom/newsletter/Seven_Ways_to_Prepare_Your_Network_for_Videoconferencing_.html?utm_source=eloqua&utm_medium=email&utm_id=&utm_campaign

 Seven Ways to Prepare Your Network for Videoconferencing

More workers are embracing desktop video and videoconferencing as they become accustomed to visual communications. Video and collaboration tools can lift the burden of distance, allowing people in different offices to collaborate as if they were in the same room. Workers can manage their real-time communications and move seamlessly between voice, video and instant messaging as needed. With easy-to-use integrated collaboration tools, organizations can cut travel costs and improve productivity.

Accustomed to high-definition television and streaming media, workers have high expectations for quality video experiences in the office. Proper planning and preparation can help organizations avoid surprises when deploying IP voice and video and ensure a quality user experience.

Workers want high-quality video, and without the proper preparation, organizations can slow the adoption of an important productivity tool for today’s distributed workforce.

Here are seven considerations to prepare your organization’s network for IP video and voice.


 

  1. Real-time communications are not forgiving. First and foremost, unified communications and collaboration (UCC) applications take place in real time. Unlike an email exchange or downloading a file from a server, where the time between sending and receiving the message is of little consequence, a phone or video call is highly sensitive to network latency, packet loss and jitter. Distance on the WAN circuit can also cause delays, which can ultimately interrupt the conversation flow. Make sure the delay, packet loss and jitter are below the acceptable thresholds for voice and video. Otherwise, users can experience interruptions or dropped connections.
  2. Does your network infrastructure have the design and capacity to support real-time communications? Most organizations have designed their networks to support data communications between users and centralized servers. But with voice and video, the communications patterns become a mesh, rather than a hub-and-spoke, as people in different offices communicate directly with each other. Video is bandwidth-hungry and can consume 10 times more bandwidth than a typical data transmission. That may mean upgrading the campus network to use modern, high-performance switches. And it will likely mean using high-performance Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) connections for the WAN.
  3. Quality of service is important. Many organizations use virtual LANs (VLANs) to segment voice traffic in their campus networks. But for a multi-site deployment with voice and video, using quality of service (QoS) across the entire LAN/WAN can make a big difference in the user experience. With QoS, voice and video traffic can be given priority access to the network bandwidth over less sensitive traffic, such as email, backup or Web surfing. It’s also helpful to allocate a specified amount of bandwidth per link to support the anticipated number of simultaneous voice or video calls. Using QoS can also help prevent packet loss and jitter for real-time applications, which will deliver a better user experience.
  4. Is the WAN connection to branch offices sufficient? Many organizations use Internet VPNs as an affordable connection for small branch offices. However, the performance can be unpredictable, which makes it unsuitable for supporting voice and video. Consider deploying MPLS to branch offices.
  5. What’s your plan for network resiliency? With essential voice and video communications on the network, a best practice is to install redundant WAN connections between critical sites to ensure that an unplanned network outage doesn’t disrupt communication.
  6. What’s your security plan? Strong security supports high availability of the overall system. And while cybercriminals have shown little interest in attacking UCC, it’s important to have protection. Using internal firewalls or session border controllers will give you protection.
  7. Consider adding WAN optimization controllers. WAN optimization appliances can also improve overall application performance for a medium or large multi-site organization. These appliances use a variety of compression and caching techniques that can effectively increase the capacity of the WAN links—and make room for real-time communications.

Resources

Download the whitepaper, “Is Your Network Ready for IP Telephony?”

Learn more about ShoreTel Implementation Services.


Posted by Joe Anybody at 5:40 AM PDT
Updated: Thursday, 21 July 2011 12:52 PM PDT

Newer | Latest | Older

« December 2024 »
S M T W T F S
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31
You are not logged in. Log in
Ben Waiting for it ? Well Look Here!
Robert Lindsay Blog
ZEBRA 3 RAG
Old Blogs Go to Joe's Home Web Site
joe-anybody.com
Underground
Media Underground
Joe's 911 Truth Report
911 TRUTH REPORT

OUTSIDE THE BOX
Alex Ansary