Minic Rivera, the former Editor of The Blogging Times (and 901am contributor) has announced the launch of The Short Movement, a monthly online video festival based on themes.

Video entries are limited to 10 minutes, with voting undertaken by site users, with a “theme prize” being awarded to each monthly winner.

The site launches with theme of “Who Am I?” for March.

“We would like to start a movement of people who love sharing short videos and at the same time provide incentive through the festival,” Rivera said.

Definitely one to watch.

Disclosure: Minic is a contributor @ 901am however I was not asked to write this post.

Originally posted on March 13, 2007 @ 6:07 pm

The winners for the Seventh Annual Weblog Awards, also known as The Bloggies have been announced at the SXSW festival. The awards are the most prestigious in the blogosphere, having been established in 2001.

Leading the awards list was Gawker Media with 4 awards, 2 for Gizmodo: best computers or technology weblog and perhaps rather surprisingly best-designed weblog. The ever popular Lifehacker (which I’ll admit has become one of my favorite reads) picked up the best group weblog award, beating out uber blog Boing Boing and left wing news portal The Huffington Post and Wonkette picked up the best weblog about politics award.

PostSecret, the postcard secrets phenomena was the bigger winner of the night, winning weblog of the year, best topical weblog and best community weblog.

Other notable winners include YouTube, beating WordPress and Flickr to win best web application for weblogs, The Breakfast Blog winning best Australian or New Zealand Weblog and knocking off Lobbylu who has won that award for nearly every single year the Bloggies has been running, GoFugYourself for best entertainment weblog, beating Perez Hilton who picked up best GLBT weblog.

Slashdot picked up the lifetime achievement award, which itself is due to cause considerable debate at Slashdot given many Slashdot users refuse to accept the site in indeed a blog.

Disclaimer: I am a previous sponsor of these awards, and although I’m not sure how they did voting this year (previous years it was by selected panel) I also was a voter this year.

Originally posted on March 12, 2007 @ 6:36 pm

The director of China’s General Administration of Press and Publication, Long Xinmin, announced Tuesday that the Chinese Administration was formulating new rules to further regulate internet publishing, including blogs.

The SMH reporting on a Beijing Morning Post article quoted Long saying “We must recognize that in an era when the internet is developing at a breakneck pace, government oversight and control measures and means are facing new tests” to China’s National Parliament, going on to single out blogs as a particular challenges.

Remarkably, Long went on to say that despite the new regulations, “citizens’ freedom of expression would be fully protected”.

The Chinese Government already goes to great lengths in censoring what their bloggers publish, with bloggers currently subject to three layers of censorship according to a recent Asia Media report, initial software generated/ imposed censorship based on prohibited words, a second layer performed by a special team of censorship editors who read all blogs posts and delete offensive content that the software missed, and a third layer which in controlled by internet police officers (ed note: seriously!), officials from the Central Publicity Department, the State Council Information Office, the Ministry of Information Technology, or local communications administrations who also have the power to delete entire blogs, not just offending articles.

Originally posted on March 12, 2007 @ 11:34 pm

Cybersquatting via automatic mass harvesting of expired domain names presents the possibility of havoc, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a agency of the United Nations.

According to a Reuters report, WIPO stated that the havoc could turn the domain marketplace into a “free-for-all market” that would undermine WIPO dispute resolution procedures that protect multi-national organizations.

The problem of course is that they’re too late in highlighting the issue, expired domains are already dominated by a largish firms auto harvesting them, but what is wrong with a free market? Why should registrations be limited only to those who can afford trade marks and other legal protections? dot com names work so well because they are free, and one only has to look at the lack of .com.au domain names to see how restrictive trade practices stifle domain innovation. As much as I don’t like the fact that a few big companies are snapping up domain names, the market will always get it right in the end, and the last thing we need is more regulation.

Originally posted on March 12, 2007 @ 7:25 pm