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

Minic Rivera, an editor and blogger, today announced the launch of Short Movement.

Short Movement is a monthly online video festival based on themes. A new theme is open at the start of each month. Entries not longer than 1O minutes may be submitted and will be up for rating from website visitors. The video with the highest rating at the end of every month gets the theme prize. The site also recommends online videos under a section called Staff Picks. [Read more…]

Originally posted on March 13, 2007 @ 1:20 am

Wireless Digital Photography
Online digital photojournalism is bound to become a lot easier and faster in the near future with UWB (ultra wideband) wireless technology. Wireless digital photography includes being able to transfer content from camera to phone, camera to printer, camera to camera, and more importantly, camera to PC.

The latter transfer means that a journalist in the field could take pictures, transfer them via UWB to a laptop, then get to the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot. The laptop could have software that publishes pics to a blog or website, formatted as necessary. [Being able to essentially publish from the field might help prevent censorship situations that take place in certain countries.]

Now, to complete the package, all we’d need is the ability to record voice memos for a batch of photos. Memos could either be published in audio, or auto-converted to text and published that way.

The Lost Girls Win The Travvies
The Lost Girls, three young women from New York, are taking a long-term holiday of one to three years each, learning about the world and blogging all of their travel, including how they went about quitting their jobs and preparing. The brilliant writing from the trio rcently won them this year’s Travvies, for travel blogs, in the “group” category. And they even have it hosted on Blogspot. (Anti-Blogspot snobs are probably shaking their heads.) Now that would be a sweet gig.

Mark Cuban Subpoenas Google
Motormouth Mark Cuban sent a subpoena to Google to find out who has been uploading copies of “their” movies to YouTube. He’s specifically referring to The Host, which was reviewed relatively favorably last night on Ebert & Roper. Since when did Cuban transition from Dallas Mavericks owner into film producer? [Note: I noticed after the fact that Muhammad Saleem already covered this story.]

Originally posted on March 12, 2007 @ 2:27 am

According to the New York Post, coffee slinger chain Starbucks might be getting ready to launch a record label. Selling CDs with the $5 coffee isn’t anything new though, Starbucks have been partnering with various labels in the past.

But now they want to do it all the way, according to the article, and they want to launch it with Sir Paul McCartney. Not a small name to wield, I’m sure it would be a good deal.

The article speculates if it’s an iTunes style model that Starbucks Records will go for, or just traditional CDs on the counter. Pop over for more.

Originally posted on March 12, 2007 @ 1:05 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