April 18, 2009

Whgere did the jobs go?

Slate did a great interactive map that shows job loss and gain.

This is a wonderful example of how a news organization can use interactive material to tell a story with drama and flair.


April 9, 2009

Wait a minute. What do you mean we have to sue ourselves?

From Techcrunch:

A.P. Exec Doesn’t Know It Has A YouTube Channel: Threatens Affiliate For Embedding Videos

Here is another great moment in A.P. history. In its quest to become the RIAA of the newspaper industry, the A.P.’s executives and lawyers are beginning to match their counterparts in the music industry for cluelessness.

...rest of article...

Frank Strovel, an employee at the radio station who tried to talk some sense into the A.P. executive Twittered yesterday:

I was on the phone arguing w/ AP today. We were embedding their YouTube vids on our station’s site. We’re an AP affiliate.

And then added:

They asked us to taken them down. I asked, “Why do you have a YouTube page w/ embed codes for websites?” Still… they said NO.



April 1, 2009

Global Internet freedom measured

A friend of mine in Hong Kong, Tom Crampton, did an interview with Jonathan Zittrain at Harvard.

Zittrain put together a real-time method of tracking censorship on the Internet.

His site is Herdict (Herd Verdict). It really shows what governments are serious about keeping information away from their people.

The downside is that a site might get labeled as "blocked" if the local ISP is slow in loading the site or if the site no longer exists. So you can end up with the United States showing 1,621 reports of blocked sites in the past 30 days. China gets a whopping 2,057 reports in the same time. With YouTube leading the pack in China with 471 reports of blockage compared to 115 accessible reports.

The site offers a plug in for Firefox to allow people to actively participate in the program as well as see results from around the world.

For j-students, this can be an interesting look at how the rest of the world sees the delivery of news and information.