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Archives for April 2007

173rd Takes to the Air-waves

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Chris Vallance | 23:48 UK time, Sunday, 29 April 2007

Peter talk to a Seargant from the 173rd Peter Franklin is a New York taxi driver also known as the and something of a regular guest on Up All Night. Peter's youngest son, Alexi, is to be deployed to Afghanistan for the first time from his base at Vicenza in Italy. Peter ably assisted by Howard Benson recorded some interviews for Up All Night as he went to visit Alexi before his deployment. Peter's interviews are well worth a listen:

More photos from Peters trip here We'd love to have more reports like this on Up All Night, so if something in your life might make good radio and you fancy reporting for us, why not drop us a line with your ideas

Hack Day

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Chris Vallance | 23:52 UK time, Saturday, 28 April 2007

In case you don't subscribe to the 大象传媒 Backstage blog (and if not why not I might ask) then please allow me to draw your attention to the event of the summer for the computationally gifted, What is Hack Day? Ah that would breaking the first rule of Hack Day..but I can reveal that there will be wifi, beer and an awful lot of very clever people...Space is limited, special skills are needed, for more info

A Day of Action for Kareem

Chris Vallance | 13:01 UK time, Friday, 27 April 2007

Today bloggers are rallying in support of jailed . You can read more about the case and, if you wish, help . This 大象传媒 News :

An Egyptian court has sentenced a blogger to four years' prison for insulting Islam and the president.
Abdel Kareem Soliman's trial was the first time that a blogger had been prosecuted in Egypt. He had used his web log to criticise the country's top Islamic institution, al-Azhar university and President Hosni Mubarak, whom he called a dictator. A human rights group called the verdict "very tough" and a "strong message" to Egypt's thousands of bloggers.

Up All Night plans to cover today's events in support of Kareem.

A new net boom?

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Chris Vallance | 11:56 UK time, Friday, 27 April 2007

c4cameracrew.jpgAre we in a new dot com boom? Is this irrational exuberance2.0? filmed at an event in London jointly organized by (I think) and On the next Pods and Blogs we'll feature an interview from the event with .

Blog reaction to the . It's easy to say that this is a new internet bubble, but the dynamics of this market seem to me to be very different from the late 1990's. Having produced radio in the US during the first web boom, when every investment analyst under the sun was advising people to pile into the market, this boom feels different. It's not powered by individual investors (in the main) and if it goes wrong, in large part it will be the institutions and VC's who bear the brunt. There's not the same momentum trading that we saw as individuals brought stocks purely on the basis that they were going up without understanding the businesses behind them.

As for the events themselves, it's great to see capital and innovation coming together - too often in our industrial history that hasn't happened. There's a bit of glitz and glamour true, but a bottle of champagne does not a bubble make...if that isn't a bit Yogi Berra2.0

PS If you look very carefully you can see the glamorous half of the . I won't tell you which half that is :)

Pods and Blogs Twitter

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Chris Vallance | 23:37 UK time, Thursday, 26 April 2007

. If you are not sure what that is you . I'll be using it to let people know when new segments are up and to ask the twitter community for help with stories. But any other creative ideas for a way to use this tool very welcome.

Google doesn't know your intentions...

Chris Vallance | 22:06 UK time, Tuesday, 24 April 2007

As part of the developing online conversation about press intrusion into social networks in the wake of the Virginia Tech murders more evidence is coming to light of our sometimes paradoxical attitudes to online publishing.

In a wide ranging and thoughtful post Guardian blogs editor and former PodsandBlogs'er Kevin Anderson writes

Last autumn, Guardian journalists asked me to find people struggling with alcoholism who were blogging. It wasn鈥檛 easy in the UK, but I found a couple of blogs including one person who wrote eloquently about his struggles with alcohol. We linked to his blog. He called us after seeing Guardian URLs in his trackbacks. He was furious and said we had no right to link to his blog, even though it was public. In retrospect, I probably should have contacted him considering the sensitivity of this issue, but -not only as a journalist, but also as a long-time internet user - I had difficulty understanding his outrage over a perceived transgression of privacy when he had written his thoughts on one of the least private of spaces: a blog.

And in a very who we spoke with last night points to an earlier example of MySpace users objecting to press intrusion into their community. Martin's summary of the issues raised by that and other cases is worth repeating:

Lower-profile bloggers, like the students in both cases, tend to think of their use of these technologies as a semi-private conversation among their friends, often forgetting that they are actually putting private material into the public domain. Is this a matter of educating journalists about the changing meaning of 鈥榩ublic鈥 and 鈥榩rivate鈥 online, or a matter of educating the wider public that everything online is in the public domain and therefore fair game?

This is just the same question Robin Hamman raises on the 大象传媒 Manchester blog. This thought provoking post attracted some great comments. But I found Julia's answer helpful in coalescing some vague ideas of my own

...the web is a massive publishing tool. Like publishing, it's not private, unless the user makes it such. And it's the user, to begin with, who has to make such decision. With journalists using a potentially private content, a lot will have to do with the angle they take on developing a news story. But if you publish any content on the web, you've got to be aware that it can become public.... Finally, let's not forget about search engines syndication. Any "private" blog is already in search engines and can end up in anyone's browser

Julia's comments echo a quote from Danny O'Brien posted here by the 大象传媒's Alan Connor:

"they're talking in the private register of blogs, that confidential style between secret-and-public. And you found them via Google."

Indeed Journalists are not the only people trawling our stuff. When we post to MySpace, or Livejournal or Flickr everyone from future girlfriends to prospective employers

As Julia points out your content is not controlled by how you want it to be used. Google images, to take one example, doesn't know that your familiy snaps are meant for close friends only. Societal clues that content is "not intended for public consumption", mean very little to search engines, only code can truly enforce privacy. Google doesn't know what your intentions were when you published to the web.

Yet we are often blind to just how little privacy we can expect to have online. Our expectations of privacy and community are adapted to real life not virtual life. The Virginia Tech controversy is just one aspect of the troubles we face as our data trails lengthen like evening shadows. I remember months ago in a Pods and Blogs interview the President of the British Computing Society Nigel Shadbolt warned of a time when everything we did could be recorded on a chip the size of a sugar cube. Shadbolt agued that we needed new online tools to help preserve our existing notions of privacy and community: content that disappeared after a period of time, and data that included the ability to "self-destruct"

We do, as Robin put it, often feel the virtual community we live in is like the pub, and we imagine our conversations are, like the pub, lost in the morning fug. But technology is outpacing our expectations. Inspired by a talk with anthropologist Charles Armstrong of Tramponline Systems, I wrote about this while we were in the throws of the blogger code controversy, before the horrible events at Virginia Tech:

many of the problems we experience start because people forget that writing online is an act of publishing. It is easy from within an online community, to view that community as a virtual island, and that what we say will be shared only among its members. But this clearly isn't the case, the waters of the web visit all shores. When we blog, podcast or post to Twitter or MySpace, we are, in effect, publishing to an audience that extends beyond our PC, and is potentially as large as the web itself.

Twitter Tools....

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Chris Vallance | 13:45 UK time, Sunday, 22 April 2007

I've been looking at web tools that let you do things with Twitter. Top of the pile is a search engine and trend analysis tool. In a similar vein is a tag cloud generated from twitter posts, with links to tweets (twits?) including the tags shown. (tip )

is a fun but rather headache inducing look at what people are posting in real time displayed on a map. looks at what people are linking to on twitter. (thanks )

Finally, since the preceding post was about social bookmarks you might want to take a look at what seems to be the first Twitter social bookmarking service

UPDATE: Also found another twitter search engine.

Any other suggestions for Twitter tools welcome. I appreciate I haven't touched upon the DIY opportunities opened up by the various feed mashing services out there.

Social Bookmarks Explained....

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Chris Vallance | 16:25 UK time, Friday, 20 April 2007

If you鈥檙e reading this, you鈥檝e probably noticed the five 'bookmark' links which now appear at the foot of most 大象传媒 blog entries:

Social bookmarking links

Want to know what these links do? Read on鈥

These five links represent a selection of 'social bookmarking' sites. Sites like these allow you to store, tag, and share links across the internet. Unlike your browser-based 鈥渇avourites鈥, social bookmarking allows you to share those links with friends, or access them from any computer you happen to be using. As a member of a social bookmarking site, you can save the link of any web page you come across, in order to create lists of useful or interesting internet resources. You can then share these lists with friends, people with similar interests, or the public as a whole.

When 'bookmarking' a page, it's good practice to add 'tags' or 'keywords' to describe the link, making it easier for others to search and find it. Some social bookmarking sites then rank pages in order, according to the number of people who have bookmarked them.

As you can see, entries on many of the 大象传媒's blogs now come with links to , , , , and . So how do you use them?

Well, firstly you'll need to register with at least one of the sites. Registration is free. It doesn't matter which you use, but each of the five sites listed has a slightly different set of features. Why not have a look around and take your pick? Once you have registered, you can begin bookmarking.

If you come across a 大象传媒 blog entry which you find really interesting and want to save for future reference, just click the link below the entry. When you bookmark a blog entry, a link to it will be saved on your profile within your chosen social bookmarking site. It's not all about blogs, though. You can bookmark any web page you like, inside or outside of bbc.co.uk.

If you want to find out more about social bookmarking, try or this article at 大象传媒 Collective.

Happy bookmarking!

Show Notes: Virginia Tech

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Chris Vallance | 11:44 UK time, Wednesday, 18 April 2007

We changed the segment to reflect the horrible events at Virginia Tech, even at that early stage there was some discomfort at the way media handled the incident. You can hear the archive here


  • Student and blogger . Among other things he was concerned about the images being used by media

  • spoke with us.

  • Countey Thomas news editor of Virginia Tech's student joined us

  • Jane Stillwater spoke about her embed in Iraq and the

  • Mohammed Fadhel (not Fasil sorry I misheard when taking his name down) of the Bahraini Journalists Union on the libel trail of

  • Jeff Ooi on Malaysian bloggers

  • Former infrantry platoon commander Seth Moulton on and the treatment of translators in Iraq

Apologies to Vividora for - please check out her blog it's a very good read. And we'll be talking to blog critic next week. Questions comments on his critique of blogging and social media very welcome.

Not a race....

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Chris Vallance | 12:55 UK time, Tuesday, 17 April 2007

Speaking to student bloggers last night about the mainstream media coverage of events at Virginia Tech one or two were very uncomfortable with what they regarded as the intrusive nature of press coverage, the graphic images of injured students/friends being pulled from classrooms. It was hard not to sympathise having heard one major network news anchor begin an interview with a wounded and hospitalised student with words to the effect of , "How do you feel?" But on the other-hand the news is regularly filled with graphic footage, we see similar images of civilian suffering from Iraq. It's a difficult issue, one I won't pretend to know the answer too.

But social media were also treading a fine ethical line at times, with links to Facebook memorials to students before any confirmed casualty list had been issued. Was it right to link to these sites? Arguably they are there for all to see, but on the other hand what if these posts had been, not just unconfirmed, but wrong? Another tricky issue balancing intrusion with the "public interest" and public grief.

Yet Facebook was clearly where most students were writing about their experiences - the Virginia Tech group which had 38,000(ish) members last night was over 39,000 today. Joining the V Tech community requires a valid Virginia Tech email, and there are further ethical questions we can ask about whether it would have been right to join without being a student, staff-member or alumnus. Fortunately members and college journalists have been posting some accounts of what people are writing within Facebook on other sites like this from the and also on thread.

The widespread scouring of students websites for news wasn't without it's problems though. One young interest in guns caused some people to put two and two together and make five. His livejournal site is Here's how he describes what happened as he was misidentified as the shooter:

Coming out. I am not the shooter. Through this experience, I have received numerous death threats, slanderous accusations, and my phone is out of charge from the barrage of calls. Local police have been notified of the situation.

I'll be the first person to say how great the internet is, but it doesn't give anyone (journalist or blogger) a holiday on fact checking. it like this:

He is Asian, he lived in the dorm where the first shooting occurred and he recently broke up with his girlfriend -- he also happens to have a web blog packed with pictures in which he poses with firearms. On the Internet, Wayne Chiang is as good as convicted.

ABC go on to describe how three different agencies confirmed Wayne is "not a suspect or a person of interest." As we race to cover a story we need to remember that it isn't a race. There are serious questions here about how we deal with corrections in the social media and further questions how the mainstream media interprets and deals with items posted to popular social sites.

While many issues arose out of the coverage of this story - the student online-reporters of showed their quality. We spoke to Courtney, Andrew and Suzanne last night, and we are very grateful for their time and help and their courage in reporting this terrible story.

One final thought. Twitter is the darling of the social media world at the moment, and sure enough there were twitters from VT Twitterer Kevin Cupp kept his twitter network up-dated

There are two cops outside the window with guns watching for the guy. We've made breaking news on CNN, etc. about 21 hours ago from web
Trapped inside of Pamplin, shooter on campus, they won't let us leave. about 22 hours ago from txt

From what I know about social networks, and looking at who Kevin's friends are, I would have expected this to spread like wildfire around that network, but as far as I can tell it didn't. Perhaps that's just as well, but I wonder what the slow spead of transmission between friend groups says about Twitter?

UPDATE: Robin Hamman

UPDATE II: Martin Stabe looks at the issue in

Virginia Tech Shootings in blogs

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Chris Vallance | 18:13 UK time, Monday, 16 April 2007

Following the some links to blog/social media content I'll update these as I find them:


  • Twitter postings of a staff member

  • Extensive coverage

  • Cell phone footage of the incident in which the shots can be heard.

  • Just watched CNN report that facebook is the place where students are exchanging information. There are now reports of some online-memorials already forming on facebook. I won't link in case the memorials are wrong or next of kin don't know

  • is concerned about her friends

  • Planet Blacksburg has

  • icantread01's Livejournal Page with some posts

  • Flickr photos

  • The livejournal page

  • Eyewitness emails from what looks like a

  • Virginia Tech's President's

  • Student paper is


YouTube footage filmed by a student:

Views of Iraq: Jane Stillwater, Seth Moulton

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Chris Vallance | 23:07 UK time, Thursday, 12 April 2007

You may have read yesterday's piece in the blogging "hippy grandmother" (sic) from Berkley, CA who "spent a year living off peanut butter sandwiches" so she could afford to got to Iraq.

Well Jane is now cooling her heels with the press pack in Baghdad, and though she's still waiting for her chance to embed with troops, she's certainly seen plenty of action. Today she had a lucky escape as suicide bombers struck at the heart of Iraqi politics:

"After I had written and filed my story this morning, I returned to the convention center in order to see if I could give a copy of it to my two female Parliamentarian interviewees. I entered the front of the building and climbed the stairs to the second floor but after a visual search of the many delegates gathered there to caucus between sessions, I was unable to find who I was looking for and so I left.

An hour later an apparent suicide bomber somehow managed to enter the restaurant and set off an incendiary device which, according to Reuters, injured over a dozen delegates, some of them seriously. Two delegates were allegedly killed. "
()

We spoke to Jane from the press HQ. An interview for Drive (audio about 1hr in) and a longer interview that will run on Pods and Blogs. Having spoken with Jane it's interesting to hear her describe how being in Iraq has changed the way she views the situation; I don't think George Bush will be on her Christmas card list anytime soon, but she acknowledges Iraq is more complex than she first thought.

Jane's story resonates with another interview I did today with former Marine infantry officer (and Harvard grad) , of the hit Iraqi TV show Seth recorded the programme with his Iraqi translator Mohammed both are now out of the army and in the US. The show was pretty honest about the problems faced by Iraqi's, and Moulton and Mohammed sometimes found themselves at odds with the US military and the Iraqi government. Ordinary people appreciated the honesty to the extent that Seth says jokingly that he misses being asked for his autograph by fans. Autograph hunters are not something concerning Mohammed at the moment, he is worried that he will have to go back to Iraq soon. From the little I know of the situation there, his . Seth for his part thinks western organisations and military should do more to look after Iraqi's they work with once their employment ends.

I finished both these interviews with the conviction that Jane, Seth and Mohammed, genuinely want to tell what they see as the truth about Iraq even at some personal cost to themselves, even if it conflicts with their background, beliefs or their employers views. Of course, what they see as the truth will differ, but whether we describe ourselves as professionals or amateurs, citizen journalists or broadcast journalists, it is surely this commitment that matters, how we describe it is largely irrelevant.

Slow Comments...

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Chris Vallance | 23:04 UK time, Thursday, 12 April 2007

If you are one of the exclusive band of people who comment on this blog..an apology..I'm having to manually rebuild to get comments to display. No idea why, but will put the big brains who undestand MT better than I onto it.

Show Notes: Wales, O'Reilly and shooting an iPod

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Chris Vallance | 03:12 UK time, Tuesday, 10 April 2007

As ever you can listen online via the archive. Tonight we featured


  • Wikipedia founder

  • does another comprehensive round-up of blogs from Iran

  • and his friend Danny explain how Flickr photos of an iPod taking a bullet (sort-of) dominated Digg and what it meant for the media

  • Professor Mark Graber on why

  • ...and on the Business of Blogging

  • and the newspaper industry

UPDATE: Here's more or less (until the camera battery gave up) the full interview with Tim O'Reilly in video form. We posted this earlier but there was a problem with the video file which meant it wasn't loading. Thanks to Ian Forrester for this:


A Blogger Code?

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Chris Vallance | 18:35 UK time, Monday, 9 April 2007

The of further developments in the effort to draw up a .

Not sure where I stand on this issue, but there can be no harm in a community collectively saying it values well mannered discourse. I would only add that speaking of the net generally many of the problems we experience start because people forget that writing online is an act of publishing. It is easy from within an online community, to view that community as a virtual island, and that what we say will be shared only among its members. But this clearly isn't the case, the waters of the web visit all shores. When we blog, podcast or post to Twitter or MySpace, we are, in effect, publishing to an audience that extends beyond our PC, and is potentially as large as the web itself.

Joshua Bell Busks

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Chris Vallance | 17:30 UK time, Monday, 9 April 2007

As well as a worthy read in its . The Post asked celebrated violinist Joshua Bell to try his hand at busking, filmed the result and then interviewed Bell, passers-by and an assortment of experts about the result. The video illuminates the text, letting us hear Bell's unscheduled performance of Bach's "Chaconne" and see the reaction of busy shoppers in the DC mall where he busked. The interviews with the few who stopped are wonderful, including this from a post office worker:

"There was a musician playing at the top of the escalator at L'Enfant Plaza."
Haven't you seen musicians there before?
"Not like this one."
What do you mean?
"This was a superb violinist. I've never heard anyone of that caliber. He was technically proficient, with very good phrasing. He had a good fiddle, too, with a big, lush sound. I walked a distance away, to hear him. I didn't want to be intrusive on his space."

The "good fiddle" btw was a Stradivarius . Gene Weingartens article is about an subject some regard as old-fashioned (classical music), it doesn't scream "interactivity" in a voice that would humble Pavarotti, but this is one of the best pieces of multimedia reporting I've seen. The web content is central to the article, but it doesn't overpower The Post's key strength: its writing.

More facts about Chuck Norris...

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Chris Vallance | 15:35 UK time, Tuesday, 3 April 2007

Thanks to an IM chat and a search of YouTube I'm now armed with a few more vital


  • Chuck Norris is a fill-in host on Fox News (inspired casting)

  • Chuck Norris recently interviewed

  • Chuck Norris doesn't do Web2.0, small caliber websites are for wimps


On a serious note it turns out and I'm sorry I found out about this too late to try and set up an interview with him while I was there for e-tech, it's an interesting story and a nice example of activism using music.

The oversight wouldn't have happened if my regular substitute presenter had been in charge....

Show Notes: DRM, Privacy and John McCain

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Chris Vallance | 12:03 UK time, Tuesday, 3 April 2007

You can listen to the segment online here. This week we featured

  • Thanks to Khalid for his tip about Google's

  • strike a deal on DRM. Reaction from our own Colin Patterson, and

  • reads the persian blogs for us as the crisis over the captured naval crew continues

  • explains how he sort-of-hacked John McCain

  • Should the net self regulate? With clips from and

  • on Privacy

  • on online video and being a billionaire

And that's it for this week. Tim O'Reilly in full next week, more on the business of blogging and your suggestions welcome for the rest.

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