Archive for October, 2003
Friday, October 31st, 2003
Those looking at the strap-line will have noticed that I recently added two 'sub-sites' to funferal - a media site, and a news site.
The media site contains the media related posts from funferal, sorted by area (currently Ireland, USA, International) as well as links to media research resources (activist groups, ...
Posted in Meta | Comments Off on New sub-sites
Thursday, October 30th, 2003
One of the highlights of my day today was when a friend passed me a story about the Simpsons' parody news ticker. Enjoy
Posted in Trivia | 2 Comments »
Thursday, October 30th, 2003
Howard Rheingold has a piece in In These Times where he talks of MoveOn, weblogs, and varied other components of what he calls 'we journalism'. It's a very optimistic piece, except for a cautionary note at the end:In the next few years, peer-to-peer, self-organized, citizen-centric movements enabled by smart mob ...
Posted in Alternative Media | Comments Off on Rheingold on ‘we journalism’
Thursday, October 30th, 2003
Hidden in an item about the new fund 'for commercial broadcasters' in Ireland is word of proposed new structures for regulation of Irish broadcasting. It's only a new years since the IRTC became the BCI, but now they plan to merge the BCI (the regulatory body) and the RTE Authority ...
Posted in Media regulation | Comments Off on New fund for non-state broadcasters
Wednesday, October 29th, 2003
The Diebold memos, and the controversy around them, has been swirling around the net for a while now. Wired has a useful summary of the situation. If this doesn't persuade politicians of the pernicious dangers of electronic voting, I don't know what will.
Posted in Computing Technology, Electronic Voting | Comments Off on Electronic voting is dangerous
Wednesday, October 29th, 2003
Looks like the EU may soon launch an investigation into media ownership, under the rubric of fundamental rights and freedoms, with Italy likely to be the first target. Italy is an extreme case of media concentration, with the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, controlling 90% of public and private media. There ...
Posted in International Affairs | Comments Off on EU to target media concentration – as affront to fundamental freedoms
Wednesday, October 29th, 2003
On RTE this morning the presenter said a publican at last night's meeting of the VFI had said words to the effect of "Let's be frank, we're the ones who run the country" in arguing that publicans should not implement the new smoking ban. I'm not really surprised at the ...
Posted in Tobacco and drugs | Comments Off on Publicans and the smoking ban
Wednesday, October 29th, 2003
An intriguing report claims that over 80% of information flows online are due to email. What may surprise people however is that over 96% of information flows are due to telephone calls. The internet is over 2%, with radio and TV broadcasting making up the difference. Much, much more information ...
Posted in Computing Technology | Comments Off on Estimate of information flows
Wednesday, October 29th, 2003
A short piece in Poynter praises teh BBC's new iCan project as creating the participatory journalism that "newspapers that provide blogs to a few readers" have not, and cannot, provide.
Posted in International Affairs, Online communication | Comments Off on You Can with the BBC
Wednesday, October 29th, 2003
The situation with the Daily News in Zimbabwe continues. From InterWorld Radio:Four directors of Zimbabwe's only independent daily newspaper are being imprisoned in inhumane conditions, says their lawyer. The four were arrested after their newspaper resumed publishing when a court overturned a government ban. Their legal representative says they are ...
Posted in International Affairs | Comments Off on More newspaper directors imprisoned in Zimbabwe