United Nations on YouTube: Challenges of web video

 

UN on YouTube

Whereas agencies such as UNICEF had YouTube channels for a while, the UN did not. News of the new United Nations YouTube channel is exciting for this reason, even though at the time of writing there are just 17 videos online. These will surely grow and the historical footage alone will make this an invaluable resource for scholars of international politics and relations. 

My only concern is about the non-archival footage and productions that are featured on the site. I’ve watched UN TV a lot in the US and the programmes follow a staid documentary format, that simply will not engage and maintain the interest of a YouTube generation used to more rapid fire bursts of information. The meandering nature of some of the productions were tedious to watch on TV and putting them online on YouTube won’t make them magically more interesting.

It’s here that most organisations fail to fully leverage YouTube and new media, thinking as they do that productions for mainstream media can with no modifications or edits be put online in their entirety. While this may work to an extent with live radio broadcasts put online as podcasts, it rarely works with television productions. Longer productions require more bandwidth and result in larger downloads. They also run against the viewing patterns of those who frequent the likes of Vimeo, YouTube and NetCafe, where the average length of a video is 2.8 minutes (as noted by ComScore) and where viewers have more than one video (window) open at once. 

The longer documentaries simply don’t work with a primary audience that doesn’t have the patience to view them in full. Certainly, having these video online is better than not. What I’d really like to see however is the United Nations Department of Public Information (DPI) adapting its production values for the web to make the UN more meaningful and relevant to a new generation whose first and sustained interactions with it will be through the Internet and web.

Blogs: State of play in 2008

Technorati released its State of the Blogosphere in 2008 report which makes for some interesting reading. 

TV over the Internet: LiveStation for the Mac

 

 

LiveStation

 

This morning, I watched the first US Presidential debate live on my Mac, on BBC, using LiveStation. As Russell Merryman, Head of New Media, Al Jazeera English notes here,

“Livestation has given us another option to reach a growing broadband audience which is increasingly accessing live TV online.”

Although I still believe the sound and video quality of Joost (the old version based on the P2P client) to be superior, my experience of IP TV on it was coloured by the banality of the content on it. I like LiveStation because it gives decent quality on the channels I (need to) watch – BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN International, France24. There are also dozens of other user generated channels.

Who needs cable TV when I have all the content I want on my desktop?

Sarah Palin and the veracity of information on the web

The Huffington Post runs an article on the recent Photoshop altered pictures of Sarah Palin, the Republican Vice Presidential nominee and running mate of presidential hopeful McCain. Thanks to Deane for this heads-up.

It’s not the first time altered images made headlines – first for being taken seriously as the truth and then once again when they were discovered to be false. AFP’s image of the Iranian missile test earlier this year was one of the most notable. 

As news spread across the world of Iran’s provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo was used on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.

In the four-missile version of the image released Wednesday by Sepah News, the media arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, two major sections (encircled in red) appear to closely replicate other sections (encircled in orange). (Illustration by The New York Times; photo via Agence France-Presse)

The first and perhaps best known example in the same vein was the doctored photo showing the aftermath of an Israeli air attack in Beirut in 2006 circulated by Reuters. 

 

This two-photo combination made available Monday, Aug. 7, 2006 by the Reuters news agency, shows an Aug. 5, 2006 photograph of smoke rising from burning buildings after an Israeli air strike on the suburbs of Beirut by Beirut-based Reuters freelance photographer Adnan Hajj. Reuters on Sunday, Aug.6 withdrew the image after evidence emerged that it was manipulated to show more smoke. The manipulated image is shown on the left. The unaltered image, shown on the right, has since run. Reuters has told the photographer, freelance Adnan Hajj, that the agency will not use any more of his pictures. (AP Photo/Adnan Hajj, Reuters)

Though I’ve limited myself to photo manipulation in this post, examples from Wikipedia and other websites suggest that the business of altering personal, professional, organisational and processual is growing apace. And with increasing sophistication to boot, making it difficult to judge the veracity of news and information on the web. 

I would be remiss in this post if I didn’t link up to the original photo of Sarah Palin, which is posted on Flickr with excellent commentary by the photographer, Addison Godel aka Doctor Casino. As he notes,

We deserve better from this election than deception and worn-out old narratives. It’s deception to keep forwarding along a fake photo as a real one. It’s a worn-out old narrative to imply that a female candidate (for any position, political or not) is unqualified because she has a body and sometimes puts a bathing suit on it (the “bimbo” frame-up). 

Sarah Palin is in my view unqualified to be President, and being qualified to be President is really the only qualification to be Vice President. But she’s not unqualified because she’s a woman, or because of what’s going on in her family, or because some Internet person put her face on the photo of some other Internet person. Her lack of qualification broadcasts itself right off of her resume, and is indeed the driving force behind her narrative as “hockey mom”; if she were qualified, she would lose the glow of the Everyperson. 

A photographer who can write well to boot. Now there’s a rarity.

Never Again in Sri Lanka: Videos commemorating the anti-Tamil riots in July 1983

 

Never Again in Sri Lanka

The Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) commissioned a set of 22 videos in Tamil, Sinhala and English to commemorate 25 years after the anti-Tamil riots of July 1983. The videos were broadcast on MTV / Sirasa and Shakthi terrestrial TV channels from 23 – 30 July 1983.

Recognizing the enduring value of these short clips for advocacy, I created Never Again in Sri Lanka to give these videos a life after broadcast and serve as a focal point for discussion and reflection on the events of July 1983.

I used the TV Elements theme for WordPress, and selected Vimeo over YouTube (even though the videos can be found on both sites) because it’s a cleaner player that fits in nicely with the theme. The TV Elements theme also makes it very easy to navigate the videos and share / embed them online. 

Never Again in Sri Lanka complements content on the Vikalpa YouTube Channel on the reactions of citizens today to the events of July 1983, the Special Edition of Groundviews on 1983 and the race riots of 1958 and other initiatives such as PACT’s featured event on 24 July 1983. 

This is also the latest website I’ve created to explore the potential of digitally archiving terrestrial mainstream media productions. The first venture was Voices of Reconciliation Radio, where the greatest challenge has been to convince NGOs that even with a website that offers for free unlimited storage space and traffic that it’s a good thing to digitally archive content. Most media productions commissioned by civil society, especially on issues like HIV / AIDS, reconciliation, peacebuilding, gender and human rights, are sadly shelved to gather dust once they are broadcast. There is little or no support for or interest in digitising the content and putting it up on the web for posterity.

Hopefully, by example, I can change some thinking in this regard.

Net neutrality and Internet QoS in Sri Lanka redux

Lirneasia’s post on Net Neutrality by Chanuka Wattegama stimulated a lot of debate on the pros and cons of net neutrality from a Sri Lankan perspective. In Net Neutrality: Economics and implications for ICT4Peace and ODR I fleshed out some of the implications of Net Neutrality, and Chanuka’s stance on it, for web and internet traffic related to peacebuilding and Online Dispute Resolution. In it I also critiqued Chanuka’s assertion that “ that heavy users should pay for the additional bandwidth they use” would in any way help address Quality of Service (QoS) issues stemming from the lack of international bandwidth (or more accurately, the high cost associated with better bandwidth) in Sri Lanka.

My post prompted the head honcho of Lirneasia to suggest that it really had no position on Net Neutrality. My response to that assertion was followed by another post by Chanuka on Lirneasia’s site, suggesting the debate on net neutrality was of enduring interest in Sri Lanka.

Like Plusnet in the UK, Comcast (in response to the FCC’s ruling) has now come out with what seems to be a sensible, protocol agnostic, traffic management plan. Though different to Vint Cerf’s model of managing traffic on the internet, the Comcast plan looks very interesting on paper. As Ars Technica notes,

Comcast’s new technique is based on a simple premise: during periods of congestion, heavy users of bandwidth on a local node ought to see speed reductions before light users. To make that happen, the system tracks each customer’s uploads and downloads separately using software from Sandvine that runs on Linux servers (Comcast stresses to us that this is not deep packet inspection software, but basic “shallow inspection” code that simply counts packets.)

When any port (think neighborhood node) on the Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) in the local cable company office enters a “near congestion” state, the system looks up the heaviest users of bandwidth during the preceding few minutes. Those users then have their traffic tagged as “Best Effort” rather than the default “Priority Best Effort.” At this point, nothing happens to anyone’s traffic.

When congestion actually occurs, the Priority Best Effort users should see no slowdown in their connections; all traffic will go through ahead of the Best Effort traffic. Best Effort folks may not notice any slowdown, either. They are not speed-limited, but they do go to the back of the quality of service (QoS) line. At this point, if traffic does in fact fill the pipe, users in the Best Effort category will experience delays in their connections, though their traffic will still be sent on whenever possible.

Emphasis mine. 

Deep packet inspection based traffic management is a route that spells disaster for freedom of expression on the web, particularly under repressive regimes that under the guise of say protecting citizenry from pornography can institute a strict regime of over-broad web filtering that censors inconvenient truths. 

Deane’s assertion on Lirneasia’s blog, that the market will look after itself without any regulation and that net neutrality is “American-progressive worry about the free market”, is ignorant of Lirneasia’s significant research on Internet QoS and how (Sri Lankan) telecoms companies will act against the interests of consumers, as noted by Janaka Beneragama and the comment here (though Janaka’s conflation of international bandwidth and unlimited downloads is just wrong).

Further, Lirneasia’s own field-testing of 3G “broadband” points to a glaring divide between marketing hype and reality.

In this context, Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) on 12th September 2008, under a misleading PR titled SLTnet goes 3G, stated that, 

SLTnet, the internet arm of SLT which is the largest internet service provider (ISP) in Sri Lanka today offers up to 3 Giga bits per second (Gbps) international internet bandwidth, adding even more capacity to be of better serve to the nation… With this initiative, SLT provides internet users in Sri Lanka super fast access to online web applications such as web search, web mail, calendar, images, VoIP calling applications, audio, video and maps amongst a host of other most popular features on the internet…  SLT is happy to invite and facilitate the hosting of mirror sites of all popular international sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Facebook, Youtube etc., to improve the quality of services to Sri Lankan internet users and to help avoid the bottlenecks found in the international internet backbone.

I wonder what the policy analysts at Lirneasia would make of this announcement? On face value, it seems to respond to some of the key findings of the Ashoka-Tissa QoS survey. As noted by Chanuka, “What we saw from our research that limits in international bandwidth is the key reason for the poor broadband experiences in India and Sri Lanka.”  But the PR also has gems like this,

Also SLT is now in the process of further upgrading and improving the direct connectivity with social networking, web application and video service providers as and when the need for broader bandwidth arises.

which is utter nonsense. Let’s also not forget that two years ago, SLT promised us VDSL with speeds of 52Mbps.

In Patriotism and broadband in Sri Lanka I explored a similar announcement by Lanka Bell to strengthen its internet backbone. So in sum Lanka Bell has a 1.2 Terabit cable backbone and SLT now has a 3 Gigabits per second backbone. Dialog I believe has its own backbone.

This sounds like an awful lot of capacity. Yet, to date, my ADSL Office Express connection from SLT, however, shows absolutely no signs of improvement. Today, as on most Sundays, I got a maximum sustained download rate of 224.5kbps and a peak upload rate of 103kbps on a connection that promises much more and for which, may I add, I pay a premium. Tomorrow, after 8am and especially around 5pm, I know my transfer rates will be no better than my erstwhile dial-up modem. So where’s the real benefit to the consumer beyond the marketing spiel?

The issue of net neutrality for Sri Lanka is quite simply this. Sri Lankan telcos will, before investing on local infrastructure and international bandwidth, always default to traffic management to make do with what they already have across their customer base. Improvements to QoS will be infrequent. Being a small market (our entire broadband market is is dwarfed by broadband consumers in large Indian cities alone) yet one that increasingly creates, disseminates and accesses audio-visual content on and for the web, the demands placed on local ISPs to guarantee minimum data transfer rates will continue to grow. However, ISPs will continue to only guarantee maximum data transfer rates, capping and managing as they see fit our use of their pipes. Verbose FUPs will attempt to convince us that network management works in our favour, when the reality will be quite different. And whatever promises SLT, Dialog Telekom and Lanka Bell make on enhanced access to the web, we know that we’ll never be able to access Tamilnet through their pipes. 

While I look forward to mirror sites and the benefits they will bring to long-suffering consumers, I also wonder if, in the absence of progressive regulation, telcos that obey every arbitrary diktat of the Ministry of Defence and under a TRC more interested in appeasing the Rajapakse regime’s lunacy, these seemingly progressive measures will be used to control and curtail our behaviour on and access to the web. 

For me net neutrality is more than serious concerns about deep packet inspection. It is about the commitment to an open web, where regulation is more transparent and progressive than partisan, stentorian and limiting, where government promotes access to the web and Internet as a right of all citizens, where everyone is guaranteed a minimum QoS and where select content isn’t discriminated against. 

I guess given a choice between slow access to an unrestricted internet over blazing fast access to a restricted internet, I’d gladly choose the former.

But is asking for both really that unfair?

UPDATE – 27 September 2008

Lirneasia’s head honcho the good Prof. Samarajiva and I have an interesting debate on the issue of net neutrality starting with his response to this post here.

Capturing violent conflict in Kashmir with mobile phones

For many people, recording events on mobile phones has become a hobby (c) BBC

The BBC runs a fascinating story today on how young people (who in the story are mostly male) are capturing violent events and processes in Kashmir using their mobile phones. 

The example of Kashmir suggests that the prevalence of mobile phones leads to a situation on the ground that mainstream news agencies could not have imagined even a few years ago. The BBC’s story ends by noting that the Kashmiri conflict has become fully digitalised. War today, as Estonia and Georgia demonstrate, is more than the destruction of bricks and mortar structures or military gains on the geo-physical battlefield. It’s also conducted online – either through outright cyberwar – or a more long drawn out propaganda war on the web. 

Kashmir’s mobile phone totting citizens are the new producers of this propaganda. Bearing witness to the violence of the every day, which is so normalised that it doesn’t even register on the radar of international wire agencies (what bleeds daily does not lead!), the content created by youth and young adults with mobile phone is as the story suggests capturing history in the making.

Of the hundreds of videos on YouTube, I am positive that one won’t get any context, a sense of history or impartiality. That’s still the realm of professional journalism and the more committed citizen journalist. What one does get are snapshots of a polity and society mired in conflict, where ordinary people, with no training whatsoever in journalism, are capturing vital moments, people, events, places and processes that define their lives and in doing so, are collectively producing an oral and visual history.

“This is a new trend in Kashmir. There are a lot of young people moving around the city with such mobile phone recordings,” says Amjad Mir of Sen TV, a local news and current affairs channel. In the restive Batamaloo area in Srinagar, a 29-year-old man, who owns a small mobile phone shop in the city, says he goes out every other day with his phone in search of “interesting footage”. This is the first time ordinary people like us are coming out with our phones and shooting. This is the only way we can show to the world what is happening here,” says the young man, who prefers to be unnamed.

This is bearing witness and what I have for the past two years worked hard to engender in Sri Lanka, where once again, information on the on-going war is limited to the bias of either the government or the LTTE. No one today knows what citizens in Vavuniya, less than 8 hours by road from Colombo, are going through because NGOs and INGOs still have not fully leveraged digital media in general and mobile phones in particular to raise awareness of the human rights and humanitarian conditions on the ground. 

There’s another dimension to this story. Telcos and big business, wherever they are and invest in, want political stability and ROI guarantees. The socio-political architecture that animates both is largely immaterial. This often leads to a resistence of telcos to support, or be seen to be supportive of efforts to augment democratic governance and human rights using their networks, devices, bandwidth and technology. The result of this is that telcos are often more conservative and closed than most repressive regimes. 

Yet, Kashmir is an interesting case where authorities didn’t ban mobile phone usage despite fears they aided attacks by armed militants, unlike in Sri Lanka where all major telcos routinely follow the overt and covert edicts of the Ministry of Defence to restrict and ban mobile phone usage. As a result, Kashmiris may already have more content on its conflict produced that Sri Lankans have produced on theirs, esp. from the front-lines of violence. This content is invaluable in any peace process or process of reconciliation as they capture aspects of violence that could possibly, if unaddressed, sow the seeds of future violence. 

In general, its damn exciting to see mobile phone based journalism kicking off in South Asia. There’s even now a word for these mobile phone totting citizens – camjos. 

Long may they live and capture!

Quick take – Google launches audio indexing

Google announced the launch of its new audio indexing technology – terribly called Gaudi – through a dedicated website. Available only in English and vaunt to crash Safari on my Mac, the site nevertheless shows some early promise.

It is however still woefully inaccurate, the challenge of having to create algorithms that can ‘understand’ the accents of those who appear in the limited selection of videos Gaudi currently indexes.  

 

Obama on sex education

Given the sheer volume of (English) content on Google Video and YouTube, the evolution of this tool will surely make it easier to navigate Google’s video sites and discover content hidden in videos. I can also see great potential in a custom video search engine helping viewers quickly go to sections in a video without having to watch it from beginning to end. 

Of course, the downside of going directly to keywords in a video is that you lose context. I read somewhere that the average attention span per video of those who visit YouTube is less than 3 minutes. Google’s technology will probably reduce this even more. 

We will end up watching more videos, but will we understand the issues any better?

Towards an open web

 

Web Foundation

 

 

I’m a passionate advocate of open standards and, if its based on open standards, open source. The two are often erroneously conflated. The problems associated with closed standards and often, the resulting lack of interoperability, product lock-in and technical impediments severely vitiates ICTs in disaster relief management and peacebuilding. 

It’s heartening to see Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet, spearheads a new Foundation that aims to promote a more open web.

 

Almost twenty years after he invented the Web, Tim Berners-Lee is leading the effort to create the World Wide Web Foundation (“Web Foundation”) as the next phase of fulfilling his original vision: the Web as humanity connected by technology.

The mission of the Foundation is:

• to advance One Web that is free and open,
• to expand the Web’s capability and robustness,
• and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet.

The Web Foundation will bring together business leaders, technology innovators, academia, government, NGOs, and experts in many fields to tackle challenges that, like the Web, are global in scale. The Web Foundation is in the unique position of being able to learn from the results of projects to accelerate the evolution of the Web. Through collaboration and a better grasp of people’s needs — in particular in underserved areas of the world — the Foundation seeks to improve the Web as a universal communications medium.

Read more about the raison d’etre, vision and mission of the Web Foundation here.

Waiting for the Guards – Amnesty International’s video on torture

Unsubscribe is Amnesty International’s new campaign against human rights abuses (by Western Governments including the US and UK) under the guise of the war against terror. 

The following video, featuring Jiva Parthipan as the prisoner, is shocking and one of the most compelling videos against HR abuses I have seen on the web. As the AI website notes,

Waiting for the Guards is not a normal film. What you are watching is a real person going through the excruciating pain of Stress Positions over a period of 6 hours. We decided that the only way to show the horror of this “enhanced interrogation procedure” used by the CIA and others was to show you the reality of it. There is no acting from the prisoner. He is in pain. Real pain. 

The video on YouTube alone has been viewed over 44,000 times. You should also not miss the story behind the production of the film.

I think AI, in depicting the sheer brutality of torture through this video, creates outrage against torture. This is no mean feat. Grabbing the attention of those who in a media rich world are bombarded with information on HR abuses is tremendously difficult. We normalise violence, and egregious HR abuses such as Abu Graib and Guatanamo are media stories for consumption in the morning en route to office, an RSS feed on our desktops or at night on evening news. 

AI’s video and the larger unsubscribe web campaign creates that sense of outrage that is necessary and vital to take actions against government’s that aid and abet torture. 

What I’m interested in is whether, over time, AI and other HR organisations have be more and more visceral in their depiction of torture to combat the inevitable erosion of interest and commitment to stop torture by those moved to action by this campaign. Put another way, over 44,000 people have watched Waiting for the Guards, but how many of them have signed up for AI’s campaign, participated in virally marketing it and raising awareness against torture? And while web campaigns have long tails, it’s also the case that they have a very limited active life – people move on, life goes on, attention is scattered, competing initiatives steal participants, social networks evolve and move on. 

To this end I wonder if AI has any statistics on just what impact unsubscribe has made in the policies of the governments to which the campaign is aimed at and those most at risk of torture the campaign intends to protect. Further down the line, it would be interesting to hear AI’s take on web media and HR campaigns conducted on the web. Far as I can gather, this film is not one that AI will show widely in terrestrial / cable TV networks around the world. In using the web as the primary source of information dissemination and activism, this campaign is accessible by those in the West, but not as easily by those without broadband access in other parts of the world.