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Technology Can Improve Lives

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Cardboard Camcorders Take Playground by Storm!

by Andy Carvin, 9:11AM

There’s a short video floating around the Net right now telling the story about a school where all the students started to make toy cameras out of cardboard and pretended to film each other, YouTube-style. It paints a fascinating, and for some people disturbing, portrait of the cultural difference that exists between teachers and today’s students when it comes to understanding the role of media in everyday life.

Earlier this week I stumbled upon a post on the Boing Boing blog about a video segment that’s been produced for the TV version of the public radio program This American Life. (Note: the video has been getting a lot of traffic, so it may not play the first time you try it.) The video is an animated segment that illustrates a story of an elementary school where a large number of fifth- and sixth-graders began m

Sales of DVD players, MP3s, digital camcorders, games consoles and digital TVs are thriving, illustrating consumers’ gravitation towards a ‘digital lifestyle’. Nowhere is this trend more prevalent than in the Middle East, where the market is being dramatically transformed. Channel Middle East investigates the role that the regional channel is playing in the digital lifestyle revolution.

Embedded Edits

Is news coverage of Afghanistan straight from the source?

by Dru Oja Jay
embedded_web.jpgA Canadian soldier in Afghanistan. There are many obstacles to accurate information from Afghanistan. photo: Combat Camera

Many stories and facts are left out of the media completely, making media criticism a straightforward affair. To establish that a publisher's or broadcaster's other priorities are affecting its ability to tell the truth, the critic simply has to point to stories that were ignored altogether and account for why truthful, accurate reporting would not have ignored them.

Search and you will find ... an old news story?

Commentary: If j-sites hope to take advantage of search engine traffic and live up to their potential, a radical restructuring of online news may be in order.

By Robert Niles

Posted: 2006-02-26







Ten years ago, search engine optimization was simple: Just cram as many keywords on your pages as you can, then watch your site rocket to the top of the search engine result pages for those words. The result often left Web readers looking at bloated pages with hundreds of repetitions of selected words and phrases, in tiny type, colored to match the background of the page.In the late 1990s, Google changed that equation by giving greater weight to the number of inbound links to a page. The more other websites linked to your page using a keyword, the higher you ranked in the search engin

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- A few weeks ago, Newsweek put the ballyhooed skier Bode Miller on the cover of its Olympic Preview issue. The tag line was "Miller Time," a play on words about the high expectations by the media, among others, for the 28-year-old American as well as his stated proclivity to party hearty.
But in Turin, Italy, Miller, astoundingly, became the biggest bust of the games. Not only did Miller fail to win even a single medal but he seemed to care more about preserving his renegade image than explaining his dismal performance.

No Longer a Beacon of Hope���An African journalist laments the message Judith Miller%u2019s jailing sends to the rest of the world.By Alagi Yorro Jallow Alagi Yorro Jallow, who now lives temporarily in the United States, is managing editor of the Independent, and a former BBC correspondent in the Gambia and vice president of the Gambia Press Union. Jallow twice won Human Rights Watch%u2019s Hellman/Hammett Award, given to journalists who have faced persecution by their governments.����� On February 2, 2003, the police in my hometown of Banjul in the Gambia arrested and interrogated me about a lead story I had published in my newspaper, the Independent. The topic, an all too common one in my part of the world, revealed that the president of the country was the owner of a new five-star hotel and that several of his cronies were secret shareholders. The police demanded that I write a statement disclosing the source of my information. I refused. They threatened to send me to jail if I did not cooperate. I was held incommunicado in solitary confinement for nearly 48 hours. I was stripped naked and kept in a dank cell until my release. For me, this was nothing new. The police and the National Intelligence Agency have arrested, detained and interrogated me in the Gambia more than a dozen times in the past six years. Government forces have challenged the legality of my newspaper, for which I am the managing editor, and have pressed me to reveal sources for several investigative pieces. Back then, the United States, with its strong tradition of press freedom, was a beacon of hope. Journalists were not picked up by thugs and jailed for protecting sources. Like my colleagues who have struggled to publish newspapers that are not owned and controlled by the government, I have f

When Danielle Brian read that Time Inc. was giving reporter Matthew Cooper's notes and e-mails to the special prosecutor investigating the leak of a CIA operative's identity, she was stunned.
"It was a bombshell for us when we saw what Time had done," says Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group that works with media outlets and provides trusted reporters with names of government employees and contractors who must remain confidential. "We had always worried about a sloppy reporter, but I never thought there'd be a concerted decision made to turn over names."

The Lost World of Joseph PulitzerA century ago, newspapers were bigger, bolder, and more beautiful. What happened?By Jack Shafer

Why the Media Cover Pat Robertson
By Cliff Kincaid �|� September 12, 2005


This is the news business today: a major paper decides something is news and also decides that other people must comment or risk being portrayed as slow to respond in the same paper.




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Going completely over the deep end, former Nixon administration official-turned-liberal-anti-Bush activist John W. Dean has suggested that Pat Robertson broke the law in recommending the assassination of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. The law prohibits

One of the military's new wartime challenges is dealing with global media that can instantly spread around the world information that may be false or damaging to U.S. interests, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday.
The United States needs to respond to anti-American messages with greater agility and speed if it is to win the ideological struggle with Islamic extremists, Mr. Rumsfeld said in a speech to members of the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia.
%u201CWe'll need to develop considerably more sophisticated ways of using these new means of communication that are now available to reach the many and diverse audiences,%u201D he said.
Mr. Rumsfeld didn't delve deeply into specifics in his brief talk with members of the civic group. But in the recent past, news outlets have broadcast messages from terrorist groups, or reported stories that have fuelled rage against Americans in the Muslim world.

dominant ideologies are privileged on the whole over other more marginalized sets of belief systems. This is particularly true in mainstream media outlets