Comic Relief

Go here for a laugh about Charles of LGF.

And here, too.

Tell Me Your Favorite Blogs And...

These are Laura Rozen's "Favorite Blogs":-

• Andrew Exum
• Ben Smith
• Bitter Lemons
• CFR
• Checkpoint Jerusalem
• China Matters
• Conflicts Forum
• Daniel Levy
• David Rothkopf
• DHS Blog
• DipNote
• DW's Across the Pond
• Foreign Policy
• FP’s The Cable
• Gary Sick
• George Packer
• Global Post
• Ha'aretz
• HuffPo World
• Hussein Ibish
• Informed Comment Global Affairs
• IPF’s Middle East Peace Pulse
• Ken Silverstein
• Kevin Drum
• Marc Lynch
• Marcy Wheeler
• McClatchy's Nukes & Spooks
• MESH
• MFAN
• Newsweek's Declassified
• Orthodox Union blog
• Peace Now
• Romenesko
• Ron Kampeas
• Rue 89
• Secrecy News
• SecretaryClinton
• Shmuel Rosner
• South Jerusalem
• Spencer Ackerman
• State’s DipNote
• Steve Coll
• Steve Clemons
• Taylor Marsh
• The Atlantic
• TNR
• UN Dispatch
• Weekly Standard
• Wired's Danger Room

Not a very well-balanced representation of outlooks, perspectives and information on the subjects she might well cover.

And Laura is who?

Laura Rozen's POLITICO.com blog "reports on the world of foreign policy from Foggy Bottom to the White House, the Hill to Embassy Row". Fairly important slot in the media/politics realm.

Tell me what your favorite blogs are and I can guess what your opinions are, how they are shaped and why you'll never learn better.

Expand your blog list and expand your mind!!!

Here It Comes, Again: Internet Content Control

Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) spoke against net neutrality regulations today...she said the creative community does not want the federal government to interfere with how they are able to get content to consumers via the Internet.

"Net neutrality, as I see it, is the fairness doctrine for the Internet," she said. The creators "fully understand what the Fairness Doctrine would be when it applies to TV or radio. What they do not want is the federal government policing how they deploy their content over the Internet and they want the ISPs to manage their networks and deploy the content however they have agreed on with ISP..."They do not want a czar to determine what speeds will be available...We are watching the FCC very closely as it relates to that issue."

What, you say?

Read on:

On 5-0 vote, agency moves ahead in push to regulate Internet

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) unanimously voted to open a proceeding that could lead to Internet regulations, although the two Republican commissioners dissented on whether rules are warranted.

The approval of the notice to consider net neutrality rules comes after weeks of intense lobbying by the telecom industry and a flurry of letters from members of Congress. Network operators...argue service providers should treat all traffic equally.

At the heart of the FCC proposal is a political debate over government regulations, with proponents saying they are needed in cyberspace to even the playing field while opponents say they would deter private investment.

With Thursday’s vote, the five-member panel began the process to move forward with the regulations announced last month by the agency’s chairman, Juilus Genachowski. His proposal would formally codify the FCC’s four existing principles, intended to prevent Internet service providers from giving preferential treatment to certain content and services. He also proposed two additional principles: one to ensure providers do not discriminate between applications; and another to require Internet companies to disclose their network management practices to consumers

.Obama-land.

New Obama Poster

In response to this item:

“I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,” he said.

and this too

The president said he is “happy to look at” bills before Congress that would
give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as
nonprofit businesses.

“I haven’t seen detailed proposals yet, but I’ll be happy to look at them,”

comes this poster:





(Kippah tip: Yid With Lid)

The Challenge of the New Social Media

Taken from here (with Kippah Tip to Max Boot):

Don’t view the new real-time information realities as a threat but an opportunity. Identify those elements of the fast-growing, almost infinite multi-media language where you can compete effectively for the information high ground, then do so with self-confidence. … Not to enter the immediate post-crisis media space will often carry a higher price than entering it imperfectly. The aim must remain to act assertively and swiftly in the hope of commanding that space, however briefly or imperfectly. … Remove any entrenched institutional resistance to being force to feed the news beast. … Shed the instinct of hierarchy and the need for executive control from the highest level. … Empower the junior...officials, executives, and public servants to respond. … Devolve responsibility for handling real-time information to lower levels...

Whew.

That's some challenge.

Nik Gowing(*), the author, explains:

...new information technologies and dynamics are together driving a wave of democratisation and accountability. It shifts and redefines the nature of power in such moments. It also creates a new policy vulnerability and brittleness for institutions, who then struggle even harder to maintain public confidence.

Increasingly routinely, a cheap, "go-anywhere" camera or mobile phone challenges the credibility of the massive human and financial resources of a government or corporation in an acute crisis. The long-held conventional wisdom of a gulf in time and quality between the news that signals an event and the whole truth eventually emerging is fast being eliminated. The new lightweight technologies available to almost anyone mean a new capacity for instant scrutiny and accountability that is way beyond the narrower, assumed power and influence of the traditional media...

..."information doer": one of the hundreds of millions with an electronic eye now found anywhere...The core implications are twofold. First, this new technical reality has dramatically foreshortened the news and information cycle from a few hours to often no more than a few minutes. Second, those cellphones and digital cameras of the proliferation of new "information doers" have swiftly modified and broadened the assumed definitions of the media landscape in a crisis. The new ubiquitous transparency they create sheds light where it is often assumed officially there will be darkness.

(*) A 1996 piece he did.

Arab Blogosphere

This came across my screen:

Internet & Democracy Project, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, June 2009

We conducted a study of the Arabic language blogosphere using link analysis, term frequency analysis, and human coding of individual blogs. We identified a base network of approximately 35,000 active blogs, created a network map of the 6,000 most connected blogs, and with a team of Arabic speakers, hand-coded 4,000 blogs. The goal for the study was to produce a baseline assessment of the networked public sphere in the Arab Middle East, and its relationship to a range of emergent issues, including politics, media, religion, culture, and international affairs.

The Arabic blogosphere is organized primarily around countries. We found the primary groupings to be: Egyptian (largest, with distinct sub- and associated clusters, e.g., Muslim Brotherhood bloggers, including some women); Saudi Arabian (second largest and focused comparatively more on technology than politics); Kuwaiti (divided into English and Arabic language sub-clusters); Levantine/English Bridge (bloggers in the Levant and Iraq using English and connected to the US and international blogospheres); Syrian; Maghrebi/French Bridge; and Religion-Focused. Demographic results indicate that Arabic bloggers are predominately young and male. The highest proportion of female bloggers is found in the Egyptian youth sub-cluster, while the Syrian and Muslim Brotherhood clusters have the highest concentration of males.

What happened to the "West Bank and Gaza"?

P.S.

It's 62 pages.

Now, There's A Media Idea

The Printed Blog, the idea is called.

And it describes itself as "blog driven publishing".

Details:

"

Amid the din of naysayers who insist that newspapers are on the verge of death, a new company wants to start dozens of new ones — with a twist.

The Printed Blog, a Chicago start-up, plans to reprint blog posts on regular paper, surrounded by local ads, and distribute the publications free in big cities.

The first issues of this Internet-era penny-saver will appear in Chicago and San Francisco on Tuesday. They will start as weeklies, but Joshua Karp, the founder and publisher, hopes eventually to publish free neighborhood editions of The Printed Blog twice a day in many cities around the country.

“We are trying to be the first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated content,” he said. “There were so many techniques that I’ve seen working online that maybe I could apply to the print industry.”

Source

HH #191

West Bank Momma is hosting the HH collection of this week's picks of Jewish blogging.

Here.

The Jewish Bloggers' Conference - Medad's Three Ms

It's late but I can't not post something. So, here's my badge (*):-



And first impressions:

a. Kudos to the organizers, the sponsors, the guests and the crowd of some 200 in the hall and, at the height of the on-line broadcast, another 1300 viewers.

b. food was GREAT. real good cold cuts and lots of. salads and desert. but, next time, some normal tea, please? i'm not a newager.

c. very good bunch of people on the panels and in the hall.

d. everybody spoke well although Bibi spoke for a bit too long, at least within the context of the program.

e. the Foreign Ministry person had a good point about branding (even if Moshe Burt insisted and insisted that Israel is a Jewish state) and it was good that the idea was presented, even if a bit depressing regarding the knowledge of Israel displayed among regular people but she didn't fully succeed in connecting it to bloggers and the blogosphere.

f. I won the waffle maker!!! (another piece of technology I don't know how to run) Now, in my presentation, I noted that behind every married blogger is a spouse, waiting quite impatiently for his/her turn at the computer.

Then I outlined the "Medad's Three Ms":

bloggers must seek to successfully Magnetize, that is, we must draw readers to our messages.

bloggers must Motivate, that is, send out strong positive messages and vibes

and bloggers must Mobilize, that is, there is an activist purpose and goal even for those whose blogs are more personal rather than political.



For next time:
1. Longer
2. Include hands-on workshops for those who are technically challenged (like yours truly).
3. Some sort of realtime hookup/video conferencing so that not only a chat room but real exchanges can take place.

And some pics and a video (more pics here):-

General Crowd View



Eats



Ma'ariv/Arvit




And a short video





-------------
(*)
I really feel bad and again, wish to stress to the NBN people, it wasn't me. Since my badge became unstuck early on, I simply stepped outside to get another. Seems, though, that someone found it and stuck it up on the wall, at the corner near the dining area. And stuck it was. They coul;dn't get it off and it might have caused damge to the paint or whatever. But it wasn't me.

The Conference Is Today

The First International Jewish Bloggers Conference, that is.

Hope to see you all and those who can't be there, hope you see us all (there's a real-time stream broadcast, or whatever they call it at the site).

I'm on at 8PM Israel time.

And note:

I really haven't the faintest idea why I was asked to be on the panel.

My daily traffic isn't stupendous (although I did once, once, hit over 20,000 within 36 hours).

I do not get commented on in any numbers whatsoever.

I don't think I pop up with any regularity at other bloggers.

Not that many argue with me.

I do not write in a very "personal" vein.

While I concentrate on political issues, themes connected with Yesha and media bias, I do try to include Jewish matters, humor, photographs and other weird posts just to be irregular.

I am not single so I lose out on the vast majority of the Jewish blogosphere (I think).

And you don't really have to listen to what I will be saying.

But it's nice to have been invited to a panel even if I didn't make the flight.

Blogosphere Critique

The Cult of the Amateur is a broadside attack on Web 2.0, a term we may hastily define here as that growing sector of the internet which serves mainly as a platform for user-generated content, including sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Typepad, Blogger and YouTube. The main thrust of his argument is that all this home-made content - blogs, podcasts, amateur videos and music - is an inadequate replacement for mainstream media. It may be a harmless, even occasionally enriching addition, but we can't have both, because the former is swiftly killing off the latter. Thanks to Web 2.0, newspapers, record companies, movie studios and traditional publishers are on the verge of extinction, he says.

- - - -

Keen claims he isn't really going after the bloggers so much as the influential idealists who actually run Web 2.0. "My real targets are what I would call the libertarians on the right and the left," he says. To Keen, the "democratised" web is actually a form of oligarchy, the product of an unholy alliance between old counterculturalists ("fat guys with beards, basically") and free-market fundamentalists (he offers Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, as an example). The former group, he says, reject "all forms of external authority"; the latter believe "that if you just leave everything alone it will work itself out".

One inviolable tenet of this twin-track libertarian ethos, according to Keen, is a misplaced faith in the integrity of the amateur - the citizen journalist, the self-published author, the mash-up musician - and a generic distrust of expertise. One does indeed find this attitude mirrored all over the net, where people frequently post sayings such as "Amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic". Mainstream media is seen as corrupt, compromised, lazy and fearful, while Web 2.0's army of amateur content-generators is dynamic, honest, worthy and wise. In Keen's estimation this idea isn't just absurd - it's dangerous. "For these Generation Y utopians," he writes, "every posting is just another person's version of the truth; every fiction is just another person's version of the facts."

Source

Weblogs - The Influential Citizen News Source

Another academic treatment of what we do here:-

Globalization and the internet have created a space for news and political discourse that overrides geography and increases opportunities for non-mainstream, citizen-based news sources. Drawing a distinction between emerging citizen and professional media, this study examines one rapidly expanding and increasingly influential citizen news source — weblogs. We analyzed the linking patterns, the online network led to by six of the most popular news and political weblogs to study their relationship to other weblogs and the traditional professional news media in the USA and internationally. Findings suggest a more complementary relationship between weblogs and traditional journalism and less echo-chamber political insularity than typically assumed. The blogosphere relies heavily on professional news reports and half of its linked-to sites can be considered non-partisan.

See

Mapping the blogosphere
Professional and citizen-based media in the global news arena

by
Stephen D. Reese
University of Texas at Austin, USA, steve.reese@mail.utexas.edu
Lou Rutigliano
University of Texas at Austin, USA, rutigliano@mail.utexas.edu
Kideuk Hyun
University of Texas at Austin, USA, kihyun@mail.utexas.edu
Jaekwan Jeong
University of Texas at Austin, USA, jaekwan@mail.utexas.edu

in
Journalism, Vol. 8, No. 3, 235-261 (2007)