Archive for December, 2005
Milblogging: Exposing sensitive information
The worry about military blogging is the fact that many military officials want to control the information being disseminated over the Internet. Sensitive information could accidentally become available to the enemy. But, milbloggers intially just want to communicate with family back home.
Blogs offer taste of war in Iraq
By Kevin Anderson
BBC News
The war in Vietnam is often referred to as the first war on television, and the wars in Afghanistan and now in Iraq will be known as the first wars to be blogged.
A new generation of soldier bloggers in the US, known as milbloggers, are both fighting in the field and writing about their experiences.
It is opening up a new window on modern warfare and is creating a new genre of war-time writing.
However, some of these pioneering frontline bloggers fear that the golden age of milblogging has already passed as military officials begin to clamp down on the unfettered online writing.
And here’s another article: US Military Finds Soldiers’ Blogs Too Close For Comfort
Is a Citizen Journalist a Citizen Journalist if paid?
A Chicago News Site will start to pay citizen journalists. Is this still considered citizen journalism?
Hyper-Local Chicago News Site to Pay ‘Citizen Journalists’
NEW YORK With ChiTownDailyNews.org, former Chicago Tribune staffer Geoff Dougherty is going where few so-called “citizen journalism” practitioners have dared to tread: he’s offering to pay his amateur news reporters a regular stipend.
The standard $25 contributor reimbursement ($100 goes to the writer with the most-viewed story of the month) is certainly not a king’s ransom, but it marks a distinct contrast from the majority of citizen journalism sites that have sprung up over the past year or two.
Dougherty, 35, aims to use these citizen contributors to cover the type of “hyper-local” neighborhood news he said is not being offered by the Tribune and the Sun-Times, Chicago’s big daily papers.
Gender differences
A new Pew survey found the differences between male and females who use the Internet. I didn’t see any great finds. They found women like to communicate online ,while men just want the facts!
Study Shows Differences in Internet Use
By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer
NEW YORK - Women are now as likely to use the Internet as men — about two-thirds of both genders — yet a new study shows that gaps remain in what each sex does online.
American men who go online are more likely than women to check the weather, the news, sports, political and financial information, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported Wednesday. They are also more likely to use the Internet to download music and software and to take a class.
Online women, meanwhile, are bigger users of e-mail, and they are also more likely to go online for religious information and support for health or personal problems.
“For men, it’s just, `Give me the facts,” said Deborah Fallows, who wrote the report based on six years of Pew surveys. “For women, it’s `Let’s talk about this. Are you worried about this problem?’ It’s keeping in touch and connecting with people in a richer way.”
About two-thirds of the 6,403 adults surveyed by Pew during 2005 said they use the Internet. By gender, it was 68 percent of the male respondents, and 66 percent of the female participants — a statistically insignificant difference given the study’s margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
CBS Commerical free
You can watch two CBS sitcoms for free on Yahoo this week. Not only are they free, they are also commercial free!
Two CBS Sitcoms Can Now Be Viewed Online
NEW YORK - Joining the trend of TV shows migrating to the Internet, a pair of episodes from the CBS comedies “Two and a Half Men” and “How I Met Your Mother” are being offered for free video streaming this week from the Yahoo! Web site.
Educating Students in Blogging…
Message of the day, beware of what you say on a blog, it may come back to haunt you…
Freedom of speech redefined by blogs
By Bill Schackner, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“In another generation, these students would have simply been users of a computer,” Dr. Jerz said. “Now, they are co-creators of the Internet.”
That is both good and bad.
“I remind students that their blogs are public,” he said. “Someday, they’ll be in a job applicant pool, and a potential employer will run their name through Google, and the angry ranting Web log they wrote at age 17 will turn up.”
By all accounts, there has been exponential growth in the number of blogs, where people post everything from vacation photos to amateurish poetry to scathing political commentary, often with frequent updates and room for others to post responses. There are almost 24 million blogs, nearly double the number from five months ago, with 70,000 new blogs created daily, according to Technorati, a San Francisco-based Web site that tracks them.
Maybe it’s no surprise, given how empowering it can be to have one’s own thoughts transported instantly across the globe. But once there, they become fodder for anyone who is inclined to turn an author’s words against him.
Merry Christmas!!!
How do people around the world celebrate Christmas? Check out The History Channel’s World Tradition Christmas map.
Christmas as we know it today is a Victorian invention of the 1860s. Probably the most celebrated holiday in the world, our modern Christmas is a product of hundreds of years of both secular and religious traditions from around the globe. Click around this map to learn about traditions from different regions and, along the way, learn about the history of this most cherished of holidays.
Wikipedia: Credible?
Wikipedia is a source that anyone at anytime can alter. My journalism students think this is a reliable source until I tell them otherwise. I feel as if Wikipedia is great for common knowledge, but I soon try to find more information to back up everything AND one should NEVER use Wikipedia as a resource for ANY TYPE of research unless one is doing a scholarly research project about Wikipedia.
Here’s the latest on NYTimes.com:
Still, Wikipedia, which dwarfs traditional encyclopedias in scope, faces the potential for inaccuracy - or abuse. Anyone can edit any entry at any time. The entries for George Bush and John Kerry had to be frozen during last year’s election because of constant vandalism. There are dozens of accounts of people editing entries to suit their own business or personal interests, or their biases.
But Wikipedia’s weakness is also its greatest strength. With thousands of editors, most of them interested in accuracy, errors and vandalism are usually cleaned up quickly. And entries are living organisms, constantly updated. Within hours of his death, the entry for the actor John Spencer carried the news.
Cell phone movie contest
Cell phone movie contest! Could you make a blockbuster in just 30 seconds?
College Launches Cell Phone Film Contest
ITHACA, N.Y. - An Ithaca College dean is encouraging students to instead think small — and she’s offering a $5,000 prize to do it. The school has invited high school and college students across America to submit a 30-second movie shot entirely with a cell phone.
It may come off like a gimmick, but Dean Dianne Lynch has no doubts about the contest’s academic value.
In today’s media marketplace — where cell phones can take pictures, play music and games and connect to Web sites — it’s all about thinking small and mobile.
Portable Yule Log
As a teenager, I would turn on WPIX-TV in New York City to watch the Yule log burn each year… well, now, you can take that same yule log with you.
Check it out the Portable Yule Log.
Book Recommendation: Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The New York Times recommended this book about Elizabeth Cady Stanton…
Some Books Are Worth Giving; Some Books Are Also Worth Keeping
The first is “The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” by Vivian Gornick, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Stanton belonged to that astonishing band of 19th-century American radicals who changed the way we live - among them Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Abolitionism taught the women to fight for justice; feminism challenged the men to expand their vision of what justice means.
I love writers who treat thinking as a dynamic process. Ms. Gornick does - here, and in all her books. Imagine a photographer of the psyche. She studies her subject from all angles. Whether in close-up or on a landscape crowded with political and religious movements, she explores the public and private selves.
