大象传媒

It's 31.08 so it must be BlogDay! Nir Ofir the man behind it and I do an interview yesterday so bloggers can share and post it on their own blogs. Part of the idea behind blog day is to recommend five blogs that people may not have heard of previously - here are my five purely personal picks - there are many more that I could have recommended. A trawl through our show notes will find many, many more

• with a terminal cancer diagnosis muses on life


• a blog by a Baghdad dentist. Well written, interesting and moving


• , so we'll see how it develops, but the concept Madagascar bloggers coming together to fight slash and burn farming is very interesting


• Worth it for the pictures alone.


• "Statler and Waldorf's teasing and smartly-worded jibes are sure to rub some people up the wrong way, far more than the elected members' efforts" - 'Between the Lines', Barnet Times. I can add no more. Oh and the 大象传媒 isn't responsible for the content of external links.

Those are my blog day picks. Do let us know about yours - we're always on the look-out for cool new blogs

Tagged

Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University is one of Britain's leading experts on computer security - he and his colleagues maintain an excellent blog too . He's been a guest on Five Live numerous times talking about computer security and what the banks and police could and should be doing to keep us safe from scams, spam and fraudsters. It's always frustrating having to end the interview after 5 minutes (the usual length for news items on most of our programmes) Here on a Google video he talks about the, "work a number of us have done on searching for covert communities, with a focus on reputation thieves, phisherman, fake banks and other dodgy businesses." Fascinating.

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You can subscribe to the podcast here. We rocked-out at the start of this week's show thanks to contributor Ewan Spence's home-brewed podcast intro, featuring the song Bleed by The Revolutions. On this week's shorter than usual edition (because of athletics coverage) of Pods and Blogs we featured:

• The resignation of US attorney general, Alberto Gonzales with , the blog that, in a powerful display of the power of collaborative journalism, kept stories about failings in his department on the news agenda


• Journalism Professor and blogger at


• The 大象传媒's Clark Boyd updated us on the for persecuted Chinese bloggers


• The Britblog . Some very strong stories this week I thought. I should point out that while we pick 4-5 stories to feature on the radio, the editor of the full written BBRU doesn't have the same control over the blog-posts featured, those are very much determined by the suggestions received.


• and Matthew Cashmore (see picture) explore the future of TV at the


• And our sequences of fakes and parodies, Slikstr (), News Groper (), and the infamous (myself included) a little bit wiser about the ways of he web

A shorter show, but we enjoyed playing the musical intro - our first- keep them coming in, something folky would be good for next week. Thanks also to Ian Forrester for reminding us about the TV conference, and all those who suggested stories for us to cover. I've a stack of dentistry podcasts to check-out too thanks to a listener email - do keep letting us know about your blogs/podcasts/vodcasts if you think it might interest a radio audience.

Please do subscribe to the podcast, many of your are listening, but mostly via the blog - having it appear on your mp3 player in time for the morning commute is surely the better option.
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We didn't do anything on the fires in Greece last night, we should have, I hope we can speak to some members of the Greek blogosphere for next week's programme. However, I'm finding language a considerable barrier, so I'm going asking our blog readers to see if we can put together a sampling of citizen coverage of the .

We did make some progress, before going to air - thanks to Clark Boyd for some links he forwarded:

One that I'm adding to my RSS Reader is written by a leading foreign policy expert. Let me quote part of his blog:

I did cry a lot this past weekend watching the human suffering as my country was ablaze. It feels like we are under attack from either ruthless profit-makers that put fire to forest lands late at night in the hope that these might soon be converted to plots for future homes or from ideologically-motivated individuals aiming to weaken the country's democratic institutions or at least to bring about the government鈥檚 downfall in the general election slated for 16 September.
As a result, in this fantastic yet real world, one feels both terror and rage. The terror comes about due to the magnitude of the catastrophe which has stretched to its limits the state鈥檚 ability to cope (thank God for the help for allies from the EU and elsewhere). 鈥淢y God, can things get any worse than this?鈥�, one wonders.

It is, I think, still unclear who is behind the fires, but the post is a moving account by an powerful writer. Clark also pointed to commentary among the firefighting blogging community. , but there must be European firefighting blogs with something to add from closer to events?

As you would expect, though sadly to late for us, Global Voices, today published with links to some excellent websites including

To reiterate out plea though. I'm sure there is a very healthy blogging community writing in the Greek language and alphabet which I'm missing because the Greek blogs, are alas, unintelligible to me. As a result of my oh so deplorably English ignorance of other languages, I fear I'm only scratching the surface of

If you can read those blogs, consider this an open invitation to point us to the best writing about the fires and what is being said in the Greek blogosphere. If you are a Greek speaker and able to talk us through the Greek blogs covering the fires, we'll feature it in next weeks show

We'll be speaking with tonight about the Gonzales resignation. Well many of the blows he had to fend off came from the investigations of . It's the perfect illustration of Jay Rosen's point () - I'll be speaking to him for a pre-record in a short while.

If you've a question for Paul do drop an email. We'll be taping it at 11pm UK time (6pm EST) so your emails need to reach me by then podsandblogs-at-bbc.co.uk

A little bit of self-promotion with a purpose though. and are two excellent listings of British Podcasts - both heavily populated with really good - non-big-media independent podcasts
We're listed on both so do visit, it will open up a new world of really excellent UK Podcasts: Britcaster , Podcast Nation

And while we're talking about UK podcasts.. PodCampUK is just around the corner -

A man makes a Faustian pact with Facebook and ends up with ...

Well not really - :

This group, and all you wonderful people, was the result of a practical joke at about 9am on a normal monday morning in sunny Adelaide, Australia. I am web developer with a web company (Good Dog Design), and as usual we were kicking around the idea of how to leverage Facebook for our clients. I had just seen the "If 100,000 people join I'll name my kid Spider-man" group, so we figured it would be fun to see what could happen with a similar, yet more ridiculous group. You know the rest. Yes. This is a parody.

Must be the season...

P.S. We'll try and speak to Oli (the man behind this) tonight. And I don't mean to seem smug about all this fakery - his hoax/parody had me fooled until I read his confession!

I forget how often I get asked by fellow journalists, "but can you really trust blogs?". It's a bit like asking if you can trust the middle classes - the only fair answer is, "depends which one". A good sign that a blog is less than trustworthy might be that it's a) called News Groper b) it quotes a famous civil-rights activists talking about dolphins attacking each other with spears

Unfortunately those clues eluded one journalist at MSNBC. Adam Varga of writes:

"Last night MSNBC.com quoted our fake Al Sharpton blog on News Groper as being a real source. [see screen grab] The Sharpton post was . A quote from the original article (which MSNBC since redacted once they realized we're a parody site):

But at the same time, Sharpton argued that the prosecution of Vick was overkill. "If the police caught Brett Favre (a white quarterback for the Green Bay Packers) running a dolphin-fighting ring out of his pool, where dolphins with spears attached to their foreheads fought each other, would they bust him? Of course not," Sharpton wrote Tuesday on his personal blog. "They would get his autograph, commend him on his tightly spiraled forward passes, then bet on one of his dolphins."

Kind of funny how this blog-o-sphere thing works."

Well, as that Ed Murrow of celluloid it's, "funny when it happens to them." I'm sure more than one overworked and overstressed journalist will read this and think, there but for the grace of God go I. Sharpton's fake personal blog post was a , "Don鈥檛 let this guilty plea fool you, Vick is innocent (like OJ)" Yet even the most obvious hints that something isn't right sometimes go unnoticed - remember ? And we've had . MSNBC have, btw, issued a

Monday we'll talk to an intriguing new Web2.0 start-up:

recently announced the closing of their first round of funding from a private equity source for $2 million. With the overwhelming interest in user generated content, Slikstr has taken a more integrative approach to the 鈥渨isdom of crowds鈥� and created a company where the users themselves will be involved in the day to day operation of the business from the outset.

Slikstr COO Michael Golan has agreed to join Pods and Blogs on Monday to explain how the company plans to leaverage folksonomic modes of granular interaction to secure second round VC funding. The company, which clearly understands the value of transparency in the new media ecology, has been posting videos explaining the concept:

We'll be interviewing them about their business plans Web 2.0 corporate satire on Monday. It should be a good learn.
(thanks Dean!)

Blogs risk crowding out careful journalism opined :

One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more. The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt. Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect judgment and to put oneself in the background -- these would not seem to be a blogger's trademarks..

That piece prompted a call from journalism professor and blogger . That hasn't happened but Rosen has now written an article in response that's . As well as a rebuttle of Skube's argument it's an extensive overview of some of the achievements of bloggers and citizen journalists in recent years. Well worth a read.

Rosen's terms of reference are still those of traditional journalism, most of the examples are of bloggers that made headlines and broke news. While it's important to enumerate examples of news making by bloggers given the way the debate had been framed by Skube, it thereby understates the contribution of blogs in simply exposing us to different viewpoints. Blogs by serving soldiers, ambulance drivers or game wardens in the Congo are of value because they are first hand accounts of the often extraordinary nature of ordinary life. They're not polemical op-eds, nor are they likely to grab the front page, but they are of great human interest - as testified by the numbers scooped up by book publishers. Newspapers do human interest too, and the best blogs could happily supply a features section with years of content, but somehow in the blogs v journalism debate it's the colour supplement that always seems to get left on the tube.

P.M. Gleiser of the in Argentina, has taken a look at the Social Networks of (the full paper available ). Among his conclusions the female companions of evil villains are the least sociable of all (that's funny I'm sure I've found one or two on Facebook) but happily, as in all good stories,

However, as was already noted, the strongest link in the MU [Marvel Universe] is the relation between Spider Man and Mary Jane Watson Parker, a fact that shows that although the MU deals mainly with superheroes and villains the most popular plot is a love story.

Via

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This week's Pods and Blogs is available for download or as a feed here. On the podcast we featured:

• Griffith the chap behind Wiki Scanner spoke about the controversy it's caused and his plans for future disruptive technologies


• Hurricane Dean with the and the


• Salam Adil and on serious


• We talked about . More on this on Up All Nights games segment I'm sure. The disease first struck in but the new study looks at what lessons can be learnt from the outbreak.


• The Bri. Also take a look at the


• >The New Orleans Musicians Relief Fund, producers of some excellent podcasts about the city, told us about . The process of reconstruction and recovery from Katrina continues 2 years later.


• spoke to us about his hit performance poetry video that's a hit on YouTube


• Stuart, Nick and Dave from Jodrell Bank's podcast, joined us. !


• Finally, for the podcast only, we mentioned the , well we finally spoke to their songwriter, and early internet pioneer,Silvanno De Gennaro

And just a note to say we're in the market for Pods and Blogs intro's - it's a good way to get us to plug your podcast. The info on how to do it is here.

Suscribe via iTunes: MyYahoo: Googlereader

By putting off a blog post one risks being overtaken by events - just so with - the website that lets you see who has been editing wikipedia entries. Earlier the 大象传媒 Reported that the "", and then it turns out, oh the irony, that 大象传媒 people had been editing Wikipedia entries too.. As Pete Clifton put it in The Editor's Blog

Words like glass, house and stones spring to mind, because we weren鈥檛 exactly sharp about the other obvious question that springs to mind... What about people inside the 大象传媒?

Well it may have been obvious but the assembled brains of the national press failed to spot it either, credit for that goes to . They certainly got the attention of 大象传媒 top-brass. From The Editors blog again:

You are hardly the brightest button if you choose to make unpalatable updates to Wikipedia when you are sitting at a 大象传媒 computer, but policing every keystroke of more than 20,000 staff is impossible. One thing is clear 鈥� when 大象传媒 staff choose to get involved, they should behave well and not in a way that flies in the face of 大象传媒 values or risks bringing the 大象传媒 into disrepute.

Ok so enough of us being "Busted!" as a friend exclaimed on learning of the story, what of the earlier and now horribly outdated blog-post?

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As mentioned on last week's show we're in the market for podcast intros (idents as we call them). We've had some great listener contributions from Dean and Linda and we'd like more. All you have to do is record yourself saying "This is a download from the 大象传媒 for more information visit our blog at bbc.co.uk - slash -blogs - slash - pods and blogs" and send it in.

We've previously fought shy of letting people use music in the intros for legal reasons, but we're going to take some baby steps and say music is OK if you own the exclusive rights to it (i.e. you made the music yourself, it isn't a cover of another song or filled with copyright samples) and you give us written permission to use it royalty free. We will of course give full credit to any work we use.

If you are interested, send in your intro to podsandblogs@bbc.co.uk as an mp3 with a note granting us permission to use it and a phone number where we can reach you at. Please keep it to under 30 seconds. Naturally we can't promise to use everything sent in.

Reality won't fit into a three minute news bulletin. We edit, we select and consequently we discard. We are left with the stubborn gristle of numbers, places and the machinations of politicians.

Today I was lucky enough to speak with the blogger behind . He writes about everyday life in Baghdad:

I took my handy cam and drove my taking amazing videos starting from the clinic I work in , I had taken a video of a police pick-up truck loaded with dead bodies and driving insanely fast with the policemen shooting at the air , and many other destructed sites in my way . I went through many neighborhoods , but I wanted to go to Al-Mansour neighborhood which was one of the most beautiful and classy neighborhoods in Baghdad which I heard that it's a wreck now , as I reached there I saw a mini bus in the middle of the street , there was glass around it , it was clear that this mini-bus was exposed to drive-by shooting so I concentrated my vision on it and pointed my handy cam.as I reached near the bus I heard gun shots!!!it was extremely close to me!!! I turned my head and I saw a police man pointing the AK-47 at me and shouting :"YOU , Stop right now , I swear by Ali I will kill you"

He risks his life daily, just trying to live. And blogging adds to those risks, but he does so because he has a story to tell about the lives that make up the numbers you hear on the 10'o'clock news.

Another distinctive voice, this time from the American military, comes in the form of the video below by a US Marine. And while you may not agree with him, there's no doubting the power of the language he uses. Soldiers as performance poets or , is a another part of reality often edited out of TV soundbites (via ).

In a landmark ruling The Press Complaints Commission has the faces of children featured in an online video, shot by a pupil on a mobile phone, and posted on the newspaper's website.

" The PCC agreed that the story was a matter of public interest - but said the paper should have taken steps to obscure the pupils' identities."

The ruling against the Hamilton Advertiser is significant, because it is the first ruling affecting the use of online video by print publications; new territory for the PCC :

The rise of media-rich websites and the heavy promotion of citizen-generated content in a bid to engage falling newspaper readerships has forced the PCC to respond, which it did with new guidelines issued in February that extended its remit include audiovisual material.

In the view of the 大象传媒's media correspondent Torin Douglas this puts newspaper editors under tighter regulatory scrutiny than their broadcast counterparts

"Ironically, the extension of the PCC's remit means that in some ways videos on newspaper websites are more tightly controlled than those put online by the broadcasters. The media regulator Ofcom - which regulates TV and radio - doesn't have any control over their websites"

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This week's Pods and Blogs is available for download or as a feed here. On the podcast we featured:

• India and Pakistan celebrate 60 years since independence this week. We spoke to Kamla Bhatt of the and Adil Najam of


• NASA revises it's view of America's hottest year - . Differening opinions as to the significance of this and . We asked Up All Night's resident weatherman and a vice president of the Royal Meteorological Society to tell us what it all meant


• tells us about his (thanks to CJ for the idea)


• Bloggers take the lead in a campaign to grant asylum to Iraqi translators and others who work with British forces. It's an issue that affects the US too. We spoke to former translator Mohammed of about his experiences and then to blogger the campaign


• The Britblog Roundup 130 with


• The Cernettes were the first band with a webpage way back in 1992,


• Later today there'll be protests outside the 大象传媒 against the DRM in the iPlayer. As an exlusive podcast offering you can hear who came up with the idea for the iPlayer - though he's no longer with the 大象传媒 - talked to Peter Brown of the Free Software Foundation UPDATE The 大象传媒 Backstage

Thanks also to for the great and very husky ident. We need more. Please do send them in. The info on how to do it is here.

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Matthew Cashmore of has posted this photo of a major fire in Hatfield. Just spoken to Herts Fire and Rescue they say 12 engines are in attendance, but it sounds as though nobody has been injured. More pictures over at ..

Matthew's also put up this video of the fire (see below). The Catherine he refers to is his wife who is also a journalist at Five Live and elsewhere!. 14 nearby homes have been evacuated because of the fire. The firebrigade say the fire is now undercontrol and at the damping down stage.

As well as being available on iTunes, and I've added the podcast to the , it means, among other things you can embed it in a page using a player like this:

It's important to note there are lots of . You can subscribe to the podcast in any of them using

We reported the RAF's experiment with video diaries on YouTube on the last programme. But now the Guardian reports that MOD has issued new restrictions on According to the article:

Soldiers, sailors and airforce personnel will not be able to blog, take part in surveys, speak in public, post on bulletin boards, play in multi-player computer games or send text messages or photographs without the permission of a superior if the information they use concerns matters of defence.

The Ministry of Defence have responded to the Guardian's report saying the restrictions are not new, merely a clarification of existing guidance, they also say they are not trying to restrict free speech merely ensure there are no breaches of operational security. The MOD's director general of media communications, Simon McDowell :

"It is nonsense to suggest that the MOD is attempting to "gag" personnel. A routine instruction has merely been refreshed and reissued. Its very first line reads "we want our people to communicate the roles and achievements of the MOD and Armed Forces." This document just sets out the approval procedures to be followed before people speak publicly about work related issues, broadly in line with the standard procedures of every major organisation."

Earlier the paper quoted McDowell as saying the MOD was looking at ""legitimate outlets for people to express themselves"." mentioning experimental moves to enable service personnel to blog ( links to)

As mentioned we featured one RAF sponsored YouTube diary on Tuesday. Hear that interview here. In that interview it was clear that the officer in charge was uncomfortable with some political subjects being dealt with in an RAF supported video diary. The military will have a difficult task being hands off enough to maintain the blogs authenticity while at the same time trying keeping an eye on what is said in them.

Unlike the US few UK soldiers do blog (compare the numbers ), but those that do make fascinating reading. One of the most interesting www.soldieringon.co.uk doesn't appear to be available any more, the diary of a soldier James Berry recovering from serious injury sustained in conflict. It contained moving first hand accounts of his recovery and experiences in hospital, material like this:

I was very cross that they had only just thought to put me on the waiting list, and then felt a little disappointed that having lost an eye in the course of my duty I was waiting along with people who had got drunk and had car accidents, or been in fights.

Posts like that, as indeed with the great majority of milblogs, make it much easier to sympathise with the soldier's situation. And as at least one user of the pointed out, soldiers have also used online spaces to campaign for positive changes, such as the provision of more accomodation

Most large organisations have blogging policies and many are uncomfortable with the idea of employees blogging about their work. One survery suggested 1 in 10 companies had fired someone for . But the negative PR risks have to be weighed against the positive. Speaking on last week's show Group Captain Russ Laforte said of the RAF's YouTube experiment.

"These things are not risk free but then again we've nothing to hide and we want the British public to see what were up to."

Indeed, letting the public see the good work an organisation does in way that they will trust probably does mean letting them see some of the bad from time to time too. You might say it was a case of "Who Dares Wins"

Some links for Thursday:

• . The row sparks a discussion of Milblogging over
• over a YouTube take down notice. Sometimes the best thing you can do is say sorry.
• DARPA, the US military's "way-out" research arm's annual conference. If you like tales of unlikely military hardware this is for you..
• following the story of his popularity on YouTube now the Economist piles in.

After two years Pods and Blogs has a podcast! You can download or subscribe here or via the fancy widget on the sidebar. The podcast is a little different from the on-air transmission, a bit of tidying up and a couple of minutes extra on tapes here and there - oh and there's no news and sport, which is a shame because Tom and Andy are very pleasant radio company in the wee small hours. On the podcast we featured:

• In the wake of the foot and mouth outbreak the had a very interesting post, pointing out the limits on lab safety in general


• Our the man outed as being behind blog


• An NBC reporter gets hounded out of the hacker convention Defcon. gave us the story


• A brief mention of the decision to look into allowing athletes to blog, and an


• The Britblog Round-up thanks to the Natalie, the


• Beijing based on a video game that fights corruption allegedly


• Per Ardua, Ad YouTube? The RAF takes a bold first step onto YouTube with an illuminating series of videoblogs from a talented young


• Lastly a look at what's happening with Search.Wikia in the company of

Thanks also to . We need more. Please do send them in. The info on how to do it is here.

Download (52mins), suscribe via iTunes: MyYahoo: Googlereader

Just recorded an interview with the RAF's own Afghanistan based YouTube correspondent about his video diary. There's more background on what he's doing here.

That interview will air on the next segment, but we're still in the market for a few other stories. Tuesday will be our inaugural podcast episode. Any ideas, comments, twitter direct message, or email podsandblogs@bbc.co.uk are your best options.

In the meantime here's one of "Goody's" videos..

Paul is quite open about one of the aims of his videos, which the RAF encourage and support, being to attract recruits but equally he says he's not told what to say and he hopes to present an authentic picture of life on the base. The US military has had a love-hate relationship with blogging, and indeed with YouTube. I think it's fair to say the UK military is more cautious in what it allows service personnel to post, which makes Paul's video channel a particularly interesting development. We'll talk about the bigger issues with a senior figure from the RAF on Monday.

Fancy trying your hand at cutting a podcast ident? Pods and Blogs will be podcasting from Tuesday and in the spirit of collaboration I'd like to invite any podcasters who listen to the show to make an ident for the download.

The script is simple: it must say, "This is a podcast from 大象传媒 Radio Five Live. For more information please visit our blog at www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/podsandblogs". You can hear how other 大象传媒 podcasts have done it at /podcasts

It shouldn't be more than 20 seconds long and it shouldn't contain any audio you don't own the rights to. Because of the legal complexities it shouldn't contain music, though that's something we may review later. We'll also have to ask you to waive your rights to the content. I'm afraid the only reward is plenty of kudos but we will of course credit any idents we use (as long as it doesn't involve plugging a business, politcal party etc)

The more imaginative the better. Send the audio as an mp3, ogg or .wav to podsandblogs@bbc.co.uk and be sure to include a phone number where we can reach you at short notice. Obviously we can't promise to use everything sent in.