• Charlie Beckett, POLIS Director » Blog Archive » Future of journalism: some principles and predictions (Polis in Stockholm Pt 3)
  Charlie B on future of Journalism - very clear framework and argument as ever
  (tags: cbeckett polis journalism future futureofnews internet news digital)
• IGF 2009 event rattled by UN Security Office ( - Internet - Government )
  An anti-censorship group holding an event Sunday at the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, was disrupted by UN officials who demanded removal of a poster that mentioned Internet firewalls in China.
  (tags: igf governance access filtering china foi oni internet)

• In Internet Age, Foreign Correspondents Have Local Audiences - NYTimes.com
  Foreign correspondents no longer cover one place for the exclusive benefit of readers somewhere else. In the Internet age, we cover each place for the benefit of all places, and the reported-on are among the most avid consumers of what we report.
  (tags: NYT india foreignnews globalaffairs reporting journalism news digital internet future futureofnews)

• Kimberly Abbott: Working together, NGOs and journalists can create stronger international reporting » Nieman Journalism Lab
  Kimberly Abbott of the International Crisis Group leads off by exploring the pros and cons of established news organizations relying on NGOs for help in their reporting.
  (tags: ngos news journalism crisis humanrights)
• WNYC - The Brian Lehrer Show: Tweeting Tragedy (November 10, 2009)
  Tweets from inside Fort Hood were used in news reports about the shooting there last week. But some of the tweets turned out to detail false information. Paul Carr, columnist for TechCrunch and author of Bringing Nothing To The Party, and Jeff Jarvis, professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and author of the blog BuzzMachine.com, discuss the role of 'citizen journalists'
  (tags: twitter wnyc socialmedia citizenjournalism paulcarr jjarvis lehrer USA digital internet news journalism future futureofnews)

• Mobile Phones in Human Rights: Reflections from Open Mobile Camp | MobileActive.org
  (tags: A19 humanrights mobile)
• Rupert Murdoch vows to take all of Newscorp's websites out of Google,
  Boing Boing analysis of Murdoch interview on SKy News AUstralia
  (tags: murdoch newscorp sky newspapers business media pay digital internet future)

Also speaking, David Elstein, Brent Hoberman, Julie Meyer, Peter Barron from Google and Sky's Adam Boulton. Andrew Neil in the Chair. 

Consensus: the motion is wrong to pitch a person against an organisation. In the short to medium term influence is with Print and in particular Murdoch.  In the medium to long term, however, it flows Google's way.

David Elstein made the anti-competitive complaints about Google that he often makes about the BBC and offered a historical perspective - big companies come and go, but Murdoch has been steadily growing for 50 years. 

Brent Hoberman was powerful in challenging Google for the risk their market dominance presents. In the end there is no transparency around how their algorithm works - or why some sites fall from first to a hundredth in search rankings overnight. Adam Boulton suggests regulation may come in as a consequence. So - Google is the new Microsoft. 

I talk about the growing importance of engagement over reach in driving ad revenues and atomising content undermining brands. Julie Meyer talks about VRM, the trade-off of personal information and identity for levels of service,  and how market dominance can be undermined by entrepreneurialism. 

Peter Barron was deft in correcting myths and deflecting criticism with grace and humour. Being a BBC editor turns out to be the perfect training for a Google Director of Comms....

We all seem to agree that, in the end, influence lies with the consumer. A couple of people Tweeted it under hashtag #ygs

• Social Entertainment 050909
  Presentation on Social Media and entertainment brands
  (tags: socialmedia entertainment digital internet)

Twenty years ago today, I was sitting in the BBC's London newsroom editing the 9 O'Clock News - the main evening TV news bulletin. I can't remember what else had happened that day but I know we had the programme pretty much sorted out when, as I recall, just after 7pm a piece of copy landed from Reuters that was either the biggest story of my career or the biggest mistake Reuters could have made. Needless to say it was the former. A live news conference in East Germany had announced, in a confused way, that East Germans were free to cross into the west and vice versa. The Berlin Wall was over. 

 The wall was real for me. I had a friend whose family lived in West Berlin who I visited, walked beside the wall and saw how it tore the city in two. I heard the stories of the night the wall was built, the sound of the tanks and the desperation of families broken overnight. And I'd grown up with Kennedy's "Ich Bin Ein Berliner" speech, Reagans "Tear Down This Wall" and the cultural icon it became. So I was never in doubt this was a moment of history.

We re-worked the programme trying our best to rise to the event and overnight, with a clutch of colleagues, I flew to Berlin to produce the BBC's coverage for the next 6 weeks. When we arrived, the party was still growing. Along the wall were elated Germans from both sides of the divide, many hacking away at the long prison-grey wall. East German guards, who only a day earlier might well have shot at anyone doing that were standing on top looking bemused. The excitement was tangible. For the next few weeks we tried as many ways as we could to illustrate what this meant and how lives were changed. Swiftly afterwards, Prague, Budapest and finally Romania, the only bloody revolution in eastern Europe, followed.

This year we are awash with reminiscence and analysis. It was an inflection point in history which dictated much of what has followed. Although, as we now know, it was not the New World Order or End of History in quite the way imagined at the time.

I won't add to the weight of thumbsucking, but if you want to know the inside story of what happened and why (including the bungling of the announcement and why Gorbachev was not woken or told what had happened until the following morning) I recommend "Revolution 1989" by Victor Sebestyen.

• NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth
  Paul Carr on the case against Citizen Journalism...
  (tags: twitter socialmedia news journalism iran US techcrunch)

Report from BBC Monitoring:

Before the meeting, ICANN President and CEO Rod Beckstrom said: "This is an extremely important meeting for ICANN, since the IDN programme is moving one step closer to reshaping the global internet landscape. In Seoul, we plan to move forward to the next step in the internationalization of the internet, which means that eventually people from all corners of the globe will be able to navigate much of the online world using their own native language scripts".

The decision will reform both generic top level domain names (gTLDs) and country code top level domain names (ccTLDs), starting with the latter. ICANN coordinates TLDs worldwide with the aim of ensuring that each internet address is unique. Some examples of top-level domain names are endings like .com, .org, or .net. Examples of country-code top-level domain names include .ru for Russia, .ir for Iran, or .af for Afghanistan.

Up until now, all country-code domain names have required Latin characters.

Beckstrom said that, in the future, internet addresses would need no longer use limited top-level domain names and would be able to use more flexible IDNs such as ".post" or ".bank".

Applications by countries for ccTLDs under the IDN Fast Track Process endorsed by the Seoul meeting will begin to be accepted from 16 November, Beckstrom said, and the first entries into the system would likely come sometime in mid 2010. The use of new IDNs will eventually be expanded to all types of internet address names, he said.

After the meeting of the 15-person ICANN board which unanimously endorsed the change, Beckstrom declared: "We have just made the internet more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia."

He said that the move emphasized that the internet belonged to everyone, no matter what language they speak. "The internet is about bringing the world together and this will facilitate that effort," he said.

Peter Dengate Thrush, ICANN chairman, said the introduction of IDNs came after years of study, research and testing. "To see this finally start to unfold is to see the beginning of a historic change in the internet and who uses it."

And Edward Yu, CEO of Analysys International, an internet research and consultancy firm based in Beijing, said the news was "delightful". It meant the internet would become accessible to millions of users with lower incomes and education standards, he said.

Many countries had been lobbying ICANN for some years for such a change, and some, like China, have partially disengaged themselves from ICANN, creating Chinese versions of .com, .net and .cn domain names.

But the Chinese internet creates an "island effect" that "does not favour businesses that want to communicate and sell products and services to the rest of the world," said Steve DelBianco, executive director of NetChoice, a coalition of trade associations, e-commerce businesses and online consumers.

It was possible that the next 2 billion internet users would not speak Latin-based languages, and it was only fair that the domain name system should allow them access to the internet in languages they understood, he told Computerworld magazine.

Critics of the move to IDNs say that the ICANN reforms could have the opposite effect from that intended, renewing fears of fragmentation of the web and the erosion of its global, albeit US-regulated, character, a process sometimes referred to as Balkanization of the internet. The creation of "walled gardens" in the internet ecology could ultimately be fatal to the spirit and current practice of the "world wide web" as a civilizing influence, they argue.

In an April 2008 post on the ZDNet technology website, editor-in-chief Larry Dignan warned that "the openness of the internet could fall to nationalism." He added: "On paper, ICANN's plan makes sense. However, the unintended consequences need to monitored." Around the same time, Columbia University Law Professor Tim Wu was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying: "We are facing a step-by-step Balkanization of the global internet. It is becoming a series of national networks".

The move has also been criticized for risking the emergence of "language ghettos" inaccessible to computer users who lack the correct character sets or keyboards. It is anticipated that many sites will retain Latin character addresses to alleviate the problem. Sites will still be accessible to technically savvy users who know the numeric internet protocol address, or via a translation solution that is available, but remains expensive for the time being. However, many experts believe that users will find their own solutions.

Beckstrom has acknowledged that "the idea of multiple internets is a potential threat", but he believes that the creation of IDNs, together with multi-stakeholder sharing by the international community of global internet governance under a new regime agreed in September, will counter it to the advantage of all.

Some media freedom groups such as Reporters Sans Frontieres are sceptical. The temptation for authoritarian governments to opt for online environments with more localized language-specific webs that they can monitor, control and police could be too great, they argue.

Under the 30 September agreement by the United States Department of Commerce (DoC) to end its oversight of ICANN, the organization is now "independent and not controlled by any one entity", and will come under a more internationalized control structure, of which the DoC will be just one member.

The Seoul conference welcomed the Affirmation of Commitments document that embodies the new international status of ICANN. The document had also endorsed ICANN's rapid action plan for IDNs.

France and the European Union both welcomed the long-awaited change in global internet governance. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said: "France has always been in favour of responsibility for guaranteeing the safety and stability of the internet not falling to a single government or a single privately-owned organization."

Swedish Infrastructure Minister Asa Torstensson, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, said of the agreement: "A global, resilient and open internet is a common responsibility. The EU looks forward to a continuous positive dialogue with ICANN, US authorities and other stakeholders, to ensure an open and transparent internet for the benefit for all internet users."

And on 7 October, Russian Deputy Minister of Telecommunications Aleksey Soldatov allayed fears of "unconnected deglobalized nets", saying that while Russia was moving towards Cyrillic addressing, there were no plans to route Russian internet traffic through centralized servers, and that there were no plans to implement screening of the internet in Russia. (BBC Monitoring research 30 Oct 09)

• Twitter Co-founder Jack Dorsey On Using Twitter For Social Change
  How Twitter may develop and how to use it effectively
  (tags: twitter socialmedia change)
• New Advocacy Site Maps and Tracks Journalists in Peril
  New media journalists around the globe face technological barriers and increasing dangers when reporting from within the boundaries of protective governments. A new site by Global Voices Advocacy maps and tracks journalists who have been threatened or arrested and aggregates the information into a robust map database with real-time statistics and details of each case.
  (tags: journalists safety INSI CPJ humanrights foi freespeech blogs)
• So what exactly is newspaper web ‘premium’ content? Please tell me: SteveOuting.com
  Steve O asks for ideas on premium content
  (tags: newspapers business internet digital future futureofnews outing)
• Rebooting the News #31 « Rebooting The News
  Notes of the podcast episode with Cody Brown on his ideas about future of news.
  (tags: rebootnews news journalism future futureofnews internet digital rosen winer)
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions the news consumer of the future » Nieman Journalism Lab
  more personalized, much deeper, capable of deeper navigation into a subject. Also, show me the differential. Since you know what you told me yesterday, just tell me what changed today.
  (tags: google news journalism future futureofnews digital internet)