media, politics and the web - a german point of viewPosts RSS Comments RSS
I don’t have to complain to Chris Anderson. I heard his book ‘free’ mostly on the subway. The audio book was free in it’s german double meaning of ‘umsonst’ (free of charge/without any effects) in any meaning. The time I spent was ‘too small to meter’, just to quote Andersons main thesis.
Some weeks ago there was a lively discussion on the reporting and / or journalism quality Twitter allows, influences or stands for. My position was: without referencing, twitter is nothing. Today, a plane went down at the Hudson River in NYC.
Within seconds it was reported by several Twitter users, for example @manolantern, by @trappedinabay, by @jdackerman and by @jkrums.
Janis Krums said to be on a ferry which was getting as close as possible to the watered plane and trying to rescue it’s passengers. He took a picture which will make it around the world during the next hours, sent it via TwitPic into the world. Even though TwitPics servers did not survive the massive amount of requests, the picture was republished by several others [I include it here, too, will change that to a reference link later on when TwitPic is back].
Some of the most interesting pictures I saw yet are to be found at the Flickr stream of user GregoryLam, who started taking pictures obviously within seconds after the plane watered (notice the wave trails behind the plane). They are also interesting to all kind of media, since they are published under a Creative Commons 2.0 BY license, which means: you just have to name the photographer and might use the pictures for whatever purpose you like to.
But what happened on Twitter after the crash? Loads of people reported that others reported that a plane fell into Hudson River. Most of them did not even reference sources or started chatting about it, so their content was mainly meaning- and worthless - twitter search was flooded with plane/hudson posts within 30 minutes, it was hard to find the original posting. There was no journalism on twitter, after the reporting had ended/was replaced by those who do traditional media.
To me, this was the most interesting tweet of the day. Oh, and by the way, it’s good to have a good positioning system.
The New York Times sent a News Alert about an hour after the plane went down. It’s content: flight route, no. of passengers and cabin crew, expected reason for the watering. Twitter was not mentioned.
Over there at TechCrunch, people discuss whether Twitter is a news source. I think it’s easier than you might think it is.
It won’t hurt. I’m sure.
For the young department of ZEIT online ZEIT Zuender, I took a look on which european nations are using which Social Networks (The text behind the link is German only, but I think you will understand it anyway). While researching, I stumbled across some sites new to me. The result might be read within minutes - but working on it was quite some work (especially, since you won’t believe that some nations seem not to use any social networks).
Not mentioned in the article, since not in the EU: Одноклассники (to be read: Odnoklassniki, in english “classmate”) from Russia, saying it would have 15 Mio registered users. Russian, too: В Контакте (”in contact”), the first Facebook clone looking even more like the original than 2006 started German StudiVZ.
Not available since a few days is Ekipa.hr (in english something like “Team”), which even though I don’t know croatian seemed to be quite interesting, regarding technical issues.
My virtual desk is aching and so do I. It turns out to be a little bit problematic that days are limited to 24 hours. I don’t feel that well, since I feel that some of the things I do are not of the quality I’d like to see them.
In fact, I’m working on 7 different projects at the same time right now, just one of them to be ending during the next week. I think that’s nothing you should try out yourself, it makes your head burst, sleep less than what’s acceptable.
On the other hand, a lot of what I’m doing right now makes me happy. Things are going in a good direction, some projects I had in mind for a while are most probably going to be realized. Need some vacation soon, anyway. Between articles, concepts, ideas and long lists of lovely stuff, my head gets heavier every day.
Something quite remarkable about the number of paper based magazines/newspapers which are printed on no demand:
But the problem isn’t with individual magazines but with the whole industry: As long as publishers consider it acceptable to destroy, unsold, twice as many copies as they ship to newsstands, the word “magazine” won’t deserve to appear in the same sentence as “green.” (Average newsstand sell-through is only about 34 percent.)
Jeff Bercovici at the Mixed Media Blog reports. Maybe that’s well known, but at least to me, that sounds very low. I don’t know the numbers for Germany, but I will try to find or research.
(via OTR)
Michael Arrington, the main writer and founder of TechCrunch, sometimes picks up topics from Germany. For example today. “German tech bloggers can’t stop posting” about a new startup which is announcing it’s upcoming launch by using some online spots without any message, he writes.
In fact, I never heard of it. And I think my eyes and ears are quite open to new stuff. “Deutsche Startups”, which Arrington links to, in my opinion is nothing but a PR blog (self description: “to inform in extensio about aspiring german startups”), financed by well known venture capitalists and investors.
The thing I wonder about the most is that Arringtons posting is showing his cluelessness about the German scene. Of course the german market is much smaller than the US market, but it’s much harder to find any successful “viral marketing”-dontknowwhat here. And according to the well-hated Technorati (which is probably wrong but the same degree of being wrong for all, so you can compare the data anyway), the buzz about this company is much higher in the english language world. For german language blogs, it counts 20 references only right now. That’s just: nothing.
I’m sorry Michael, but that’s something you could and should have checked out before writing your post.
Yep. You can buy me. Well, my content. A new (german language) blog will be starting in may.
I’m working on eCampaigning related stuff since 2002. This was the time when - during the Federal Election in Germany - many people believed we would see the internet to be the revolutionary power of campaigning. At that time, this was nonsense, of course. And it still is, since european politicians in general are offliners - mainly because of their age.
There is not much good literature on eCampaigning in a political context in Europe. At least, I do not know it and I strongly believe to be quite good informed on that. We have to read books like »Blog Wars«, like »The Revolution will not be televised« and to compare it to our political system and the background patterns of a very specific political culture in every single european country. To get a general understanding of what’s going on in terms of politica science, I usually recommend Pippa Norris «A Virtuous Circle», a truely great book on the change of campaign mechanism. Even though it’s not covering the last years of evolution of internet based political campaigning, it’s worth reading.
..I’m still protesting this shit« is written on a sign of a protester against Iraq war.
What I can’t believe: it’s obviously meant to be citizen media. But it’s “All rights reserved”, so nobody is allowed to reuse it without special permission of the person who made this shot.
I think it should - at least - be published under this license. This would help it’s spreading around the globe a lot, I think.