Whistle-blowing is a powerful check on corruption, and it is why moves in Iceland to make it an international center for investigative journalism publishing, by passing the strongest combination of source protection, freedom of speech, and libel-tourism prevention laws in the world are so fundamentally important for everyone interested in the freedom of expression. Called [...]
Archive | March, 2010
Citizens Net: Crowd-sourcing human rights violations?
The Sunday Leader recently reported on a new, unique initiative by the Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies (CHA) in Sri Lanka to gather information on human rights violations. Called Citizens Net, the news report notes that it is open to logging “issues regarding gender-based violence, the rights of children, the elderly and the disabled.” However, there [...]
Google and China: An end, and a new beginning
An article and podcast published on the Guardian with Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin suggests that the search giant has not just completely revised its standard operating procedures in China, but is encouraging the US administration to take action to safeguard the freedom of expression. Brin, talking to the Guardian about Google’s decision yesterday to lift [...]
Australia and pornography: Google says filtering goes too far
I recently wrote on how even robust democracies can censor the Internet. When even democracies go awry with online dissent looked at the examples from France, Australia, the United Kingdom and even the US where new media use, including citizen journalism, and other content have been banned or blocked. Whenever I have decried censorship in Sri [...]
Learning from failure: FAILfare
Katrin Verclas from Mobileactive.org writes on what I have for years strongly advocated in Sri Lanka – openly discussing failures so that we may learn from them. As the email promoting the event, called FAILfare, notes, While we often focus on highlighting successes and gains in our industry, it’s no secret that many projects just [...]
Mobile phone security redux: Tigertext
Days after I had blogged about FlexiSHIELD, a mobile phone security product created after the infamous incident with professional golfer Tiger Woods, comes news of Tigertext, another application touting to keep SMS communications private. As Time magazine notes, Called, coincidentally enough, TigerText, it allows users to set a time limit for a sent text to [...]
New media: The pros and cons
Texts Without Context on the NY Times is an excellent round up and review of books on the qualitative nature, reach and growth of new media, and its implications for the way we produce, consume and understand news. From the infidelity of Tiger Woods to the death of Michael Jackson, the highest peaks of traffic [...]
New media and health reporting
As part of my lecture series for mid-career journalists at the Sri Lanka College of Journalism (SLCJ), I held a class today on leveraging new and social media for journalists specialising in health reporting. For other lectures to SLCJ dealing with new media, click here. In the course of my research for the lecture, I [...]
Opinion Space: A compelling new initiative from US State Department
In a stunning new demonstration of how the web combined with visualisation can contribute to the involvement of citizens in governance, the US State Department along with University of California at Berkeley’s Center for New Media (BCNM) has launched Opinion Space. You wouldn’t have found this in either one of the two Bush administrations. The [...]
Mobile phone security
Photo by Milica Sekulic on Flickr A company called FlexiSHIELD shows us how crass marketing profits from the plight of others. Using the infidelity of Tiger Woods as an example, FlexiSHIELD promotes its new FlexiSHIELD, a mobile security product that it touts can, “… automatically hide any incoming or outgoing SMS, MMS, EMAIL, Phone Logs [...]
