Businesses expected to work around China’s recent online video restrictions
January 31, 2008
China – the world’s next to largest online population – gives a faster spin to country’s restrictions of Internet content, starting on Thursday, Associated Press reports. The authorities have ruled against non-state-owned video services in country’s cyberspace, which is in line with China’s restrictions on media ownership.
“The rules are aimed at expanding a Chinese censorship system that tries to block Internet use to spread dissent while promoting it for business and education,” the story reads.
Critics wonder about the fate of user-generated video content. “It seems to be that political content is the foremost concern,” said Duncan Clark, chairman of BDA China Ltd., a research firm in Beijing, quoted by AP.
Yet, private companies are expected to find a work around. Kaiser Kuo estimates on his DigitalWatch Ogilvy blog a continuation of operations, without having Chinese businesses crossing legal limits. “There’s definitely precedent for operating in a regulatory gray area until things sort themselves out, and as long as no one crosses major lines – pornography, politically sensitive content – my instincts tell me that none of these regulatory bodies are going to sink a major video sharing or P2P player, as ominous as this bit about limiting online video […] sounds,” the blogger writes.
Picture: Flickr
Monarchic speaker presides in oversimplified PowerPoint chair
January 29, 2008
PowerPoint presentations lead to disrespecting the audience, writes Edward Tufte in his recent Wired article. The author complains about the oversimplification of data and the imposing emergence of the speaker over its audience. “Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience,” the author writes.
Although PowerPoint presentations make the life of the speaker easier, and have a ready-to-grasp appearance, they transform the once coherent finished sentences into “infomercials” and “pitchable sales.” “PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play - very loud, very slow, and very simple,” Tufte writes.
The Blogosphere seems to show solidarity with Tufte on this issue. Lennox pointes out in his Blurgl Blog entry the similarity between numerous but, alas, less quality desktop publishing and the abundance of PowerPoint bulleted presentations. “The problem here […] is that using PowerPoint is likely to continue to be the easiest and quickest route for most people. And they don’t really care about how well you remember it or even if you had a good time,” the blogger writes.
Picture: Flickr
Banned books on digital display
January 28, 2008
Surprisingly or not, many authors that are labeled “classics” nowadays, went through banns, censorship and other suppresses of their works, on the grounds of obscenity, adult language, and other social claims. A Banned Books Online listing exhibits books’ censorship and prohibitions and some history of the letter-related violence.
Neither Shakespeare, nor Twain are strangers to book censorship, according to the listing, let alone works like James Joyce’s Ulysses or Voltaire’s Candide, to name just a couple.
Picture: Flickr
Gutenberg galaxy lags behind the shapeless web world
January 28, 2008
“Billions of web sources” sounds abstract. “Billions of stars” sounds like a universe. John Naughton points out in his Observer article how the Gutenberg universe evolves into a much less-known and difficult to envision world of web. The web transformed the processes of thinking and knowledge-gathering in a rather more dramatic way then even the Gutenberg bible did, Naughton writes.
Alan Moore reacts to the Observer article on his Communities Dominate Brands blog, and raises new challenges to the understanding of the digital world. “The point is,” Moore writes, “that our once familiar analogue world, which we understood, no longer exists in our digital universe.”
Picture: Flickr
Virtual worlds translate into palpable computing
January 25, 2008
When the first books were printed, the presses had little to debate whether they should use paper or energetic fields. There were simply no energetic fields. Today, computing is at a similar crossroads for the uninitiated, ICT Results seems to imply.
Palpable versus ubiquitous, as in computing that is complex and sophisticated yet transparent and fully comprehensible versus invisible computing. Morten Kyng, a researcher at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, stands for the palpable, leading a pan European team of researchers, who develop and implement palpable open source models. Their products currently range from large events monitoring to disaster alleviation and critical health interventions solutions.
Leaving aside the importance of computing per se in such areas, the user should be put in the center of technology and participate at its adaptation, while the ubiquitous technology would simply stay invisible to a user, the website argues.
Photo: Flickr
The New York Times delivers news via text messages
January 25, 2008
The New York Times launched its text messaging service to cell phones and mobile devices, reports Dennis Bouchand on 901am. By sending a text message with the appropriate keyword to 698698 (NYTNYT), users can receive the latest three articles from that given section or the most recent column from their favorite columnist. Articles can be displayed on any type of cell phone or PDA. The services are free to use, although standard carrier charges may apply.
Multi-language Facebook would claim world hegemony in social networking
January 25, 2008
Jennifer Woodard Maderazo digs in to discover why the all-English Facebook plays such a universal game and wins over the native-language social networks in non-English-speaking countries like Turkey, on the MediaShift blog.
It was initially designed for “a very specific audience” – American Ivy leage college students. Now, Facebook has infiltrated not only the American pop culture, but has also gained audiences worldwide, Jennifer writes. Australia and Canada are of no surprise, but there are less Anglo-Saxon countries out there that embraced Facebook as their first choice social network site.
Jenniver points out how language-independent the service gets, and even adjusts dynamically to a culture that is very different from the Western. For example in Turkey, users have developed applications that dub online the cultural traditions of the nation – sending “meze,” a Turkish entrée, from “one table to another.” This universality, adjustability and cleanness of its design generally allow Facebook to beat the existing local options, the author writes.
As a downside, in some countries users experience a social pressure to accept as friends people they wouldn’t necessarily call so just because the society asks for it. Jennifer also points out some other shortcomings that annoy the spam-tired user.
On a coincidental note, Nick O’Neill announced on allfacebook.com the network’s intention to go multi-language. Reportedly, Facebook would use crowdsourcing for translating its content, to defer the costless translation to “third party [application] developers who unlike Facebook will not necessarily have the financial backing to have their [applications] translated,” Craig Bovis writes in a comment on the same blog.
Picture: pbs.org
US newspapers’ online audiences grew about 6% in 2007
January 24, 2008
Websites run by newspapers had an average of 60 million unique US visitors per month in 2007 — up from 56.4 million the year before, according to the Newspaper Association of America, reports Jim Romenesko.
ShareThis reaches 26 million users in 2 months
January 23, 2008
ShareThis revealed its growth since launching its unified sharing button in November 2007, writes Cristina Ledesma on 901am. The ShareThis button enables users to share content with one click. Since its launch, this button has been installed by thousands of publishers, generating 100 million plus views from more than 26 million unique users every month.
ShareThis is not a destination site. Its button can be deployed on any site to drive traffic, stimulate viral activity, and track the sharing of content. ShareThis also simplifies social media services by reducing clutter on webpages, and providing instant distribution of content across social networks, affiliate groups, and communities, and its growth demonstrates the demand from publishers and users to make sharing easy.
Microsoft Joins Dataportability.org
January 23, 2008
Microsoft’s David Treadwell, a VP at Windows Live, joined the Data Portability Working Group, reports Marshall Kirkpatrick. The Working Group aims to foster standard protocols for users to port their identities, friends and digital assets across the web.
Earlier key individuals from Google and Facebook joined the Working Group.