I’m no fan of the Snap craze going on. It’s a service that, whenever you hover over a link, displays a thumbnail version of the link’s target. I can see its advantages, but they’re not something you just should add. Like the WP.com crew is doing to hosted blogs right now.

After the overwhelming response to our last entry about Snap, we’ve decided to make it available for everyone.

Luckily, you can turn it off, and I hope most of the WP.com bloggers do (Dashboard people). There’s enough junk on blogs already, adding another widget just for fun doesn’t appeal to me at all.

Originally posted on January 15, 2007 @ 6:25 am

Yesterday, US senator Barack Obama announced his presidential bid via video at upstart provider Brightcove. This morning, on the heels of that bit of viral publicity, Brightcove announced that they have received $59.5 million in private funding for their Internet TV service.

Just when you thought the video vertical was saturated, too, right?

[Read more…]

Originally posted on January 17, 2007 @ 9:27 am

Kim Gjerstad is from Canada, formerly a UN Aid Worker now an entrepreneur. He’s got a lot of great incite into a country I’ve only dreamed of visiting.

One of favorites is some of his coverage of the youth violence. I’ve spent the last few hours digging into more local coverage of bloggers in the Congo. Quite amazing actually. It’s an amazing world we live in.

Life without street kids is awesome. Last week, my flat mate, Tim, and I discovered the joy of walking free. Kinshasa’s main throughway, the infamous Boulevard 30 Juin, was peaceful. “The city feels like a normal city!” cried out Tim. So fine it was, we went for pleasure stroll, the first in three years.

With the current tense political events and shootings last month, they city’s mood is very shifty. This new change was strange indeed. Suddenly, some 20 000 street souls left the other 8 million alone.

Read more of his story.

There is a lot more. It’s quite interesting to get people’s perspective on a nation in crisis. Especially since we have no coverage on the great mainstream front like CNN, or Fox.

Originally posted on January 15, 2007 @ 1:04 am

Old Media has huge budgets from which they leverage to cover news in regions of the world where New media has no access.
So we get spoon fed news that sometimes isn’t relevant and is worth a pile of horse dodooh. Here’s one supreme example.

Iraq.
I really don’t have much of an opinion on how the media has tackled Iraq. I want more coverage, better coverage. I want video. I want interviews. I want reality. Instead I have to listen to the crap that the Old Media wants me to hear. Here’s what I know.
Iraq isn’t as important as we think. We lost the war. We are getting ready to piss of Iran. But even that isn’t important. Getting ourselves weaned of the nipple of crude oil would really go a long way to stopping the bloodshed. But the American people don’t really want that do we? We need our cheap gas. And so do our corporations and the stockholders. So let’s forget about it. Let the blood flow read down the streets until it begins to spill into the gutters of America.

Let’s talk about another conflict that is far more important, far more bloody. And even more misreported.

Democratic Republic of Congo
When was the last time you heard about this war on your nightly news?

The war in the Democratic Republic of Congo is deemed by many as the Third World War, and the biggest war since WW2. Already the death toll is the largest since World War 2 for any conflict. Yet we have no media coverage. No US Intervention. No global outcry from mainstream media.

Old Media holds us hostage because I can’t afford to send people to cover this conflict. This war has largely been fought by Innocent Children.

A brutal civil war has been raging in The Democratic Republic of Congo since 1996. No fewer than seven African countries have been involved since it started. So far, 3.8 million people – men, women and children – have died as a result of the bloody conflict either as a direct result of fighting or because of disease and famine.

This is a war that continues to claim thousands of lives every month. It is a war about territory, ethnicity and resources, with its roots in, but not limited to, the genocide in Rwanda in 1995. It is a war that frequently descends to inhuman levels, the likes of which are uneasy reminders of the atrocities seen in Rwanda, and also in Bosnia in the early 1990s.

‘Armed militia groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo kidnapped hundreds of rival tribe members, tortured, mutilated, raped and decapitated their victims, and even boiled alive and ate two girls in front of their mother.’

While I don’t recommend jumping into the DRC and beginning coverage of this war. I believe we need to ask some of the mainstream big media outlets why they aren’t covering this story. And what can be done to stop this. And why are bombing Somalia in the name of terror when the true African terror has ascended on the Congo.

Source: War Child Music

Originally posted on January 15, 2007 @ 12:45 am

One of the things that is missed in the blogosphere circles that I notice so much is blogging for profit, vs blogging for change. In the United States largely blogging and new media is about making money. And while this is something I’ve spent the last few years doing, my passion is really on ‘blogging for change’, and freedom of expression. I’m touched by heartwarming stories of Nepalese bloggers who share, and use blogging as a tool and a medium to bring about positive change in the world. The following story made my day, and made me realize how important blogging is to and to the world in which we live.

Dinesh Wagle, 29, a writer at the popular Nepali-language Kantipur newspaper started blogging in October 2004. Aided by his writer-friend, Ujwal Acharya, 28, he registered the website www.blog.com.np.

During the 15-month-long autocratic rule of King Gyanendra that ended last April, the site was considered a “huge hit” among Nepalese worldwide and their friends to get fresh news and information on Nepal. Then, they put down the “fresh and the latest” about the happenings for “news and information” hungry Nepalese.

Today, with peace and democracy together in place, Wagle maintains his diaries on the site. “We are Nepal’s first bloggers,” Wagle proudly asserts as he browses the net in his small cubicle. “Last week, I wrote about a concert I attended. Tonight, I might write about blogging culture.”

Source: DNA India

Originally posted on January 12, 2007 @ 12:26 am