Results matching “wikipedia and facebook a”

Twenty-five journalists were arrested in Somaliland: eight for having protested about the closure of the TV station HornCable TV and thirtheen more who went to their aid, Roy Greenslade reported on the his blog on the Guardian via Reporters Without Borders.

Reuters announced today the launch of Reuters TV, a new YouTube channel featuring ten new commentary and analysis shows from the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, TechCrunch reported. According to the company's announcement, the YouTube channel won't mimic traditional TV, but will use an editing style that's "suited for Internet programming", the article said.

The founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales announced that the site will go dark for 24hours on Wednesday in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), The Next Web's Insider reported. The Next Web also reported that, in reply to a tweet that queried whether Twitter's Dick Costolo, Google's Eric Schmidt or Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg would follow Wikipedia's protesting footsteps, Costolo responded by saying that the decision was foolish.

The Media Development Loan Fund is seeking an experienced journalist with expertise in on-line publishing and journalism to lead the work creating, synthesizing and publishing information on the digital transition of news businesses. See here to apply.

For more industry news please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service.

A 'news 2.0' experiment was carried out yesterday, November 3, in Italy: a three-hour news programme was streamed on multiple platforms, a joint effort of SkyTG24, local satellite TV stations, radio shows and the web.

After seeing his news programme Annozero - which used to air on national broadcasting channel RAI2 - cancelled, anchorman Michele Santoro decided to launch a new programme called "Servizio Pubblico" (Public Service) which is the official description of what the national broadcasting network is supposed to be.

"The civil revolution" - as described by Santoro - was a way to bypass the TV 'monopoly which exists in Italy, aiming to shine a light on the censorship that doesn't provide Italian citizens with all the information they would need, and to show the power of free information which is possible due to the power of the web.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been holding a forum in Paris on May 24-25, ahead of the G8 conference that will start on Thursday 26th May in Deauville.
 
The forum, dubbed the e-G8, focuses on the future of the Web and its sovereignty and brings together the biggest names in Internet business and new media, including Facebook founder Marc Zuckerberg, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, News Corp's Rupert Murdoch and Google's Eric Schmidt, Deutsche Welle reported.

Amongst the main issues addressed during the conference were the regulation of the World Wide Web, privacy and copyright, and net neutrality.

Critics said that some countries are going in the direction of restricting Internet freedoms and handing the net control to companies and governments, going against the principle of the net neutrality (which is a principle that advocates no restrictions by Internet service providers or governments on consumers' access to networks that participate in the internet). 

On Monday May 16 Blottr, a citizen and collaborative journalism site, broke the story about a bomb alert in London.
 
As virtualeconomics.co.uk reported, the news was first tweeted early in the morning by one user who noted that the bomb squad was inspecting a suitcase and some others who tweeted that the area around Trafalgar Square had been closed as the police was carrying out a controlled explosion around 9am.
A few minutes after 10am Blottr published the story adding pictures, detail and coverage of the events in the square.
Sky News first, and BBC next picked up the story only 3 hours later.

The story appears as the result of a powerful combination of citizen journalism and social media: Twitter first announced the news, then Blottr broke the story gathering, curating and publishing news, and then Twitter let it spread linking to Blottr's story.

People who think to have been publicly misrepresented or wrongly and inaccurately represented have the right to ask for a correction and to re-establish the truth about them. There is no doubt about it.

Accuracy and fair reporting are the fundamental pillars of journalism. It's the basis of professional ethics.

The need to maintain true accountability demands that the press publishes a correction whenever it is found to be necessary.

That's why many news media not only have correction pages but have also established internal watchdog system such as an ombudsman or have subscribed to self-regulation bodies as news (or press) councils. 

It's a fascinating question with the anticipated answer of "yes, of course blogs are changing journalism"--a kind of knee-jerk response that celebrates social media and the way in which the modern newscape has become more democratically leveled and networked--whereas, upon deeper reflection, this is followed by a more nuanced response that perhaps blogging has changed the style, delivery, and consumption of the news rather than changing the hallowed principles of professionalism, ethics and accuracy in the field of journalism.

What do you think? Yes more than no ... or the other way around?

In his blog for Reuters, titled "A slice of lime in the soda," Felix Salmon responds to a series of interview questions from Benzinga's Laura Hlebasko that are elucidating enough in their raw form, but for the purposes of this entry are boiled down to the essentials in answering the question about blogging and its impact on journalism. 

It has been about a year now since Diaspora and its four founders made ripples through the blogosphere and mainstream media, including in this New York Times article, following the $200,000 plus donations that the budding alternative social networking site received through crowd-funding site Kickstarter.

Haven't heard of Diaspora?

Simply put, the website aims to provide the functionality and offerings of existing social networks (namely Facebook), minus the loss of privacy and personal information for its users.

"With Diaspora, we are reclaiming our data, securing our social connections, and making it easy to share on your own terms. We think we can replace today's centralized social web with a more secure and convenient decentralized network," declared the founders on their Kickstarter page.

Users' information, instead of being submitted to (and, in accordance with user agreements, thus essentially becoming owned by) a central hub, such as on Facebook, will be hosted on "seeds," user-specific servers that store their information and make it available only to friends of their choice. Different categories of contacts can be tailored into different groups called "Aspects," enabling users to segment and control distribution of content to their different groups of friends, such as co-workers, or family. Users will also have the possibility to host content on their own secure servers, as well as be in full control of their personal information and privacy settings.

Founded by four New York University students (Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg, and Raphael Sofaer, who are now based in San Francisco, as some of them have graduated, the others are taking time off from college to work on the project fulltime), Diaspora is open-source: in addition to the four founders and five other core contributors, there are at least a few dozen developers who regularly contribute to help improve and debug the website, currently in private Alpha. The project has been among the top 5 on GitHub, a crowd-sourcing site for developers.

Additionally, Diaspora's roughly 25,000 users are encouraged to provide feedback during this phase of development.

Hundreds of thousands of others have been waitlisted, according to Yosem Companys, Diaspora's self-described "non-tech consigliere." The next phases of development will include open Alpha, Beta, and advanced Beta - before Diaspora is launched, hopefully, later this year.

Could Diaspora eventually aspire to rival the likes of Facebook?

Considering Diaspora is still in its development stages, as well as Facebook's increasingly crushing dominance in the market (check out these 2 graphs to see some of Facebook's, and Twitter's, impressive usage numbers), any speculation on that subject would be just that - speculation.

But it's fair to say, as illustrated by Diaspora's success on Kickstarter (the founders had initially hoped to raise $10,000, far from the $200,000 they pooled from nearly 6,500 backers), as well as by the lingering controversy that has surrounded Facebook privacy and ownership settings in the past - see this Mashable article or click the image for some history -  that there is demand for a more user-centric, privacy-aware, social network.

It may be worthy to note, in that respect, that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg personally made a donation to Diaspora through Kickstarter - "Openness" is indeed among Zuckerberg's declared interests on his Facebook profile.

Perhaps, as Companys said, it's best not to think of Diaspora as "a threat to other social networks" since it will be inter-operable with other platforms. Yet, clearly, the intent of the site is to provide a viable and user-friendlier alternative to the current offerings.

"When you give up that data, you're giving it up forever," said Salzberg, one of Diaspora's co-founders, in the Times. "The value they give us is negligible in the scale of what they are doing, and what we are giving up is all of our privacy."

However, other such attempts have failed in the past.

"We will have to see how widely this will be adopted by the non-nerds," said Finn Brunton, a teacher and digital media researcher at NYU, in the same article. "But I don't know a single person in the geek demographic who is not freaked out" by large social networks and the (private) centralization of user information.

It's truly difficult to imagine at this point how the open-source and donation-funded Diaspora could face off Facebook, now valued at over $50b (some are already contemplating the $125b mark). Then again, by that logic, who would have thought that Wikipedia would compete with Encyclopedia Britannica (although some studies point to increasing challenges in sustaining the community-built online encyclopedia)?

And it's not yet clear how Diaspora aims in the longer run to compete with established platforms whose business model precisely relies on trading the highly valuable personal information that Diaspora wishes to leave to its users' discretion. (Perhaps one could imagine a system in which users choose whether or not to withhold this information, offering tradeoffs to those willing to part with some of their privacy?)

But right now, the founders and their community of contributors are "just focused on improving the product," said Companys.

"The extraordinary thing about this is that the guys really aren't spending any money on marketing and media," he said, "There's just been a great outpour of support."

"They're really just into changing the world."

Are we talking science fiction, outer space? Nah, Augmented Reality ("AR") in this context refers to smart phone apps from news sources and their inspired direction toward interactive graphics and illustrations, a kind of layered, enhanced reality made for the user, in this case the news source's demographic.

While journalists might not always be considered "in the know" about what is techy and marketable, The Boston Globe showed last weekend that the use of AR for phone apps can be done "quickly and cheaply, making it an experiment worth trying in the newsroom" according to Poynter.

A perfect test of this was the newspaper's annual Winter Arts Guide, which has schedules and previews of upcoming arts and entertainment events. The idea was to try something more animated this year, where the season comes alive. And so this became the theme of this year's section, and Dan Zedek, The Globe's assistant managing editor for design, asked, "What if we made the page come alive?"

"Quora, the innovative site begun by former Facebook staffers, sees its popularity to explode - and it looks set to get bigger", the Guardian noted.

Quora is a simple question-and-answer site, which uses Twitter-style following to track the best answers to any questions. Information is organised more like Wikipedia than Google, with answer prioritised by how useful they are. You have to sign in and like Twitter you can choose to "follow" any question.
It is an ever-growing database of knowledge.

On May 20th, an eleventh-hour court proceeding, orchestrated by the Council of Muslim Theologians, ruled in favour of Johhannesburg's Mail and Guardian on the issue of publishing a Mohammed cartoon.  The uproar was over the latest drawing by South African cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro, better known as Zapiro.  Zapiro stated that the illustration was a response to "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day", an international incident that resulted in thousands of Mohammed cartoons being simultaneously published online and the subsequent blocking of access to the entirety of facebook in Pakistan and Iran.  In 2006, the same organization successfully obtained an injunction to stop South Africa's Sunday Times from republishing the famous 2006 cartoon of Mohammed with a sizzling bomb in his turban which caused intense riots in a number of Muslim countries.  

The Huffington Post, a liberal news website that plays the role of aggregator and blog, originally set up to comment on politics - has extended its coverage substantially since its start up four years ago - now becoming a one stop shop for business, entertainment, living, style, the green movement and world news.

Yesterday, HuffPost unveiled its latest addition to its site -a new Technology and Innovations section, "HuffPostTech." According to the sections new editor, Jose Antonio Vagas, the section will report on the latest gadgets and rivalries in the industry - as well as taking a more general look at technology and considering how it affects the people who use it. The section will also feature blog posts from Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wale and others.

WhoRunsGov.com, a Washington Post-run site that tracks D.C. politicians, emerged from beta this week with two new platforms for user-generated content. The site is billed as a "moderated wiki," with 700 profiles of US lawmakers, members of Obama's administration and other government officials.

The site first launched in January. Since the public launch, users can create new profiles or modify existing content, although WhoRunsGov.com staff will monitor their contributions. Profiles are a bit of a mash-up between a Wikipedia entry and a Facebook page, with photos and YouTube videos as well as links to the profiles of "key associates" and related news stories. Much like Wikipedia, the content is backed up by links to outside sources, most of which are not WaPo news stories.

Reports recently out say that the Telegraph online attracts an impressive 8% of its traffic from
news aggregators and social networking sites such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, Stumbleupon and Twitter.

The 8% figure is equivalent to a staggering 75,000 unique visitors daily. So, how does the Telegraph do it?

In an increasingly web-based culture of knowledge, it’s perhaps no surprise that websites like Wikipedia.org are now being consulted by credible news sources. Since it’s launch in 2001, Wikipedia has gained notoriety from its entirely user-contributed and edited online encyclopedia.

The Wall Street Journal, for example, has referenced Wikipedia on a piece it featured discussing “turducken” (a bizarre concoction in which a chicken is stuffed into a duck that is stuffed into a turkey). While some critics have judged this sort of Wikipedia usage as un-journalistic, others note, where else would you get information on a turducken? Certainly not from your standard encyclopedia.

However, as a result of its user-generated articles, many news and scholarly organizations immediately write the site off as “false” and “unverifiable.” For example, Mike Leary, managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, recently sent an e-mail to staffers forbidding the use of Wikipedia to “verify facts or augment a story.”

Even the French Agence France Presse banned its reporters from using Facebook and Wikipedia as sources, reported a previous Weblog posting.

Wikipedia’s leadership appears more than aware of the site’s strengths and potential shortcomings. The site features numerous disclaimers, one of which reminds users that "anyone with an Internet connection" can alter the content and cautions, "please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with complete, accurate or reliable information."

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, suggested that despite these warnings, more journalists are daring to test out the site.

"I think that people are sort of slowly learning how to use Wikipedia, and learning its strengths and its weaknesses," he said. "Of course, any reasonable person has to be up front that there are weaknesses... On the other hand, there are lots of sources that have weaknesses."

Wales thinks the encyclopedia's best journalistic use is for background research rather than as a source to be quoted, the American Journalism Review reported.

The Los Angeles Times has adopted a relatively open stance on the usage of Wikipedia sources. Melissa McCoy, the Times’ deputy managing editor in charge of copy desks, explained that the paper occasionally allows Wikipedia references.

"We're certainly not going to use Wikipedia as a stand-alone news source, but we're not going to exclude it if it takes us somewhere," she said. "If a reporters spots something in there and it makes them do an extra phone call, it's silly not to use it,” McCoy suggested.

With opinions on Wikipedia usage in newsrooms remaining mixed—with most opting to steer clear of the site—papers like The Wall Street Journal and the
are demonstrating that some journalists are discovering the value of the site as a roadmap for further research.


Source: ajr.org through cyberjournalist.net

Kaioo, the first non-profit “real social network on the Internet,” was launched in Beta two months ago. Unlike commercial social networks, its idealistic interest goal is to build a communication tool for users, said founder and CEO Thomas Kreye.

Agence France Presse banned its reporters from using Facebook and Wikipedia as sources last week, as news organizations still struggle to safely use online (re)sources.

Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washington Post examines Faye Anderson, a prominent citizen journalist, in order to examine citizen journalism, what exactly it is, the credibility issue, and where citizen journalism stands in the future.

In the online media world where choice is unlimited and generating content is on a level with consuming it, newspaper websites are faced with enormous competition. How to solve this problem? Why not offer tools known as widgets that create a branded presence that potential readers can integrate into their daily web habits?

Since 1927, the US Time magazine has been giving its controversial Person of the Year award to those individuals who most affect the news, for good or for bad. Who do you think won this year?