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Reading the messages behind Afghan election posters

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Worldfocus - By Scott Bohlinger - Aug. 19 (News Analysis) - Scott Bohlinger is a political analyst and writer who has lived in Afghanistan since 2006. He works for a non-governmental organization in Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan and has traveled extensively in the Middle East. In the run-up to this Thursday’s elections in Afghanistan, I've noticed a menagerie of political artwork and iconography. Every surface is increasingly plastered [...]

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Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture and Dissent

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Berkman Center - Jun. 16 (Poll) - We conducted a study of the Arabic language blogosphere using link analysis, term frequency analysis, and human coding of individual blogs. We identified a base network of approximately 35,000 active blogs, created a network map of the 6,000 most connected blogs, and with a team of Arabic speakers hand coded 4,000 blogs. The goal for the study was to produce a baseline assessment of the networked public sphere in the Arab Middle East, and its relationship to a range of emergent issues, including politics, media, religion, culture, and international affairs.

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Free the Kazakhstan Internet

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Media Nation - Apr. 27 (News Report) - During my brief time in Kazakhstan, I got the impression that the government is trying to move beyond its repressive past. The country, a former Soviet republic, also seems to be an island of stability in a volatile part of the world. It would send a strong and encouraging message if the government drops its proposal to censor speech online.

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The Serpent and the Platypus

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

southernfriedscience.com - By Southern Fried Scientist (Andrew) - Apr. 19 (News Report) - Pound for pound, convergence is the most persuasive evidence for the truth of evolution out there; different lineages finding novel paths to the same solution. While I mostly talk about convergences in morphology, genetic convergence is often even more fascinating. Enter the bizarre case of the serpent and the platypus.

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arXiv blog: The evolution of scientific ideas

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By arXiv - Apr. 13 (News Report) - Science is an evolving discipline. . . . how exactly are these fields changing? And what does it tell us about the evolution of ideas and the changing nature of science?

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Bloggers Ponder the Decline of Religion, Economic Prosperity and Newspapers

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Journalism.org - By Tom Rosenstiel - Mar. 20 (News Analysis) - The online conversation last week was strikingly different than the mainstream news agenda. While the traditional press focused on economic villains-such as AIG and Bernard Madoff-bloggers largely eschewed partisan squabbling and parsing of details for a more abstract and far-reaching discussion. As the economy struggled, a major newspaper shut down and a survey highlighted the diminishing appeal of organized religion, bloggers and social media pondered the dramatic social changes that might be taking place and what the implications could be. The top subject was the decline in people claiming an affiliation with organized religion, as documented in a new study. This storyline made up 30% of the most linked to stories by blogs and social media sites for the week of March 9-13 according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The second largest story, at 24% of the links, involved the continuing problems in the U.S. economy. While some of the attention was focused on government actions, many bloggers focused on a prediction by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that the current crisis would change the growth model that has been the basis of the U.S. economy for the past 50 years.

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The Web Guru

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Observer - By John Koblin - Nov. 25 (News Report) - The blogger, professor and media consultant has, through his Web sites, seminars, journalism classes, panel-discussion appearances and the occasional flame-war, preached for some time now the gospel of New Media. These days, it’s taking hold — and not just among the patchwork constituency of media studies majors, technophile utopians and media malcontents left and right.

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The Rightosphere Copes With Defeat

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Pajamas Media - By John Hawkins - Nov. 06 (News Analysis) - And yet, the most common reaction across the right side of the blogosphere was either a congratulations to Obama, a recognition that having the first black president was a historic moment for America, or some combination thereof.

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Burma: Suu Kyi shows no to UN envoy

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Op Ed News - By Ashin Mettacara - Aug. 23 (News Report) - Aung San Suu Kyi shows no to UN envoy

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Filter the Best Stuff to the Front Page

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Jay Rosen - Jun. 16 (News Analysis) - Sites like NewsTrust take it for granted that expansion of the media space is a good thing. But filtering and forwarding systems must keep pace. The better we are at that--finding the good stuff, forwarding it to eager users--the easier it is to relax and accept that anyone can be a producer, or that good contributions can come from anywhere. [Disclosure: This article is about NewsTrust and its recent partnership with Huffington Post's OffTheBus project, which the author is associated with]

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Here's Our New Policy On A.P. stories: They're Banned

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 06:55:02 -0700

TechCrunch - By Michael Arrington - Jun. 16 (News Report) - The stories over the weekend were bad enough - the Associated Press, with a long history of suing over quotations from their articles, went after Drudge Retort for having the audacity to link to their stories along with short quotations via reader submissions.

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Lost Media, Found Media

Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Alissa Quart - May. 21 (Special Report) - To be a Found Media journalist or pundit, one need not be elite, expert, or trained; one must simply produce punchy intellectual property that is in conversation with groups of other citizens. Found Media-ites don't tend to go to editors for approval, but rather to their readers and to their blog community. In many cases, they disdain the old models, particularly newspapers, which they see as having calcified over the decades, and, according to generally youthful Found Media logic, in deep need of a re-think, using all of youth's advantages: time and the ability to instantly summon a crowd. For Found Media's young journalists and bloggers, the attitude toward our craft tends not to be one of mourning for the ashram gone. Rather, it is of not needing a guru at all.

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Your blog of blogs

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Commonwealth Magazine - By Dan Kennedy - Apr. 19 (Special Report) - Here's what Adam Gaffin finds frustrating. He's in his car, heading for a meeting in Framingham, Mass., where he works in tech publishing. He's got the radio tuned to WBZ. And news is breaking -- a fire, a shooting, a derailment on the MBTA, whatever. What he'd like to do is park himself in front of his computer and start searching for posts from the hundreds of local blogs he tracks. Is there an eyewitness account? A few photos? A video that someone uploaded to YouTube? If so, he'll round them up and link to them on Universal Hub, the website he launched in 2004. Instant citizen journalism, all gathered in one place.

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The (Josh) Marshall Plan

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 09:40:04 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By David Glenn - Sep. 06 (Special Report) - Joshua Micah Marshall, the thirty-eight-year-old founder and editor of TPM, who has grown the operation from a tiny center-left political blog that he began at the end of 2000. (Back then, referring to himself as the "founder" or "editor" of anything would have been an act of self-deprecating bloggy humor.) Today, Marshall presides over a staff of four reporters--one of whom also serves as deputy editor--three associate editors, and a small army of unpaid interns. Their work is posted on a quartet of interconnected sites: Talking Points Memo, as Marshall's original blog is known; TPM Café, a two-year-old site devoted to policy and culture debates; TPM Muckraker, a year-and-a-half-old project that trawls for political scandal; and TPM Election Central. In total, the sites draw roughly 400,000 page views on an average weekday.

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At YearlyKos, Netroots Come of Age

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 12:53:33 -0700

The Nation - By Ari Melber - Aug. 06 (News Analysis) - Clinton strained to mold her meeting back into a controlled event. She was the only candidate to use her staff as a buffer, tapping her Internet director, Peter Daou, to pick questions and bringing three other senior aides onstage, though none of them spoke. She filibustered most of the time, taking more than eleven minutes to answer the first question alone--a simple query about fixing the unpopular No Child Left Behind Act. That softball came from an official with the National Education Association, who either didn't know or didn't care that this scarce time was carved out for bloggers and activists without insider access, not for interest-group sponsors.

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Private Peter Pan

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 07:30:02 -0700

Digby's Hullabaloo - By Digby - Jul. 27 (News Report) - The other day I posted about a pseudonymously written story published in the New Republic by a soldier in the field describing some rather despicable behavior by himself and some of his buddies. It seemed to me that it was plausible, although of course, I have no way of really knowing.

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Suing A Blogger

Sat, 14 Apr 2007 23:40:02 -0700

Bill Hobbs - By Bill Hobbs - Apr. 14 (News Report) - The controversy over JL Kirk Associates threatening to sue Coble for writing critically of the company on her blog has surfaced other bloggers with similar experiences and first-hand criticisms of the company.

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How TalkingPointsMemo Beat the Big Boys on the U.S. Attorney Story

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 09:59:26 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Paul McLeary - Mar. 15 (Special Report) - It's almost too perfect. A mainstream reporter mocks a story a blogger has been working to break, asserting that "it all makes perfect conspiratorial sense!", and that the blogger is "seeing broad partisan conspiracies where none likely exist," only to backtrack a few weeks later when the story explodes across the front pages of the major dailies.

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Why I had to quit the John Edwards campaign

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:09:35 -0800

Salon - By Amanda Marcotte - Feb. 16 (Special Report) - I announced that I was taking the job on Jan. 30, and the same week, I noticed a small flare-up of oddly aggressive and misogynistic comments in my moderation queue over a short, irritated post I wrote about the coverage of the Duke lacrosse rape case on CNN. I assumed that some anti-feminist blogger had linked me and so, in frustration, I went and rewrote my by-then week-old post to mock the commenters by spelling out my views in childish, easy-to-understand language. This may have been the first indication that the right-wing noise machine had noticed me and was looking for something with which to hurt me and my new employers.

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Apple Bullies Bloggers, Again

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 05:05:00 -0800

TechCrunch - Jan. 13 (News Report) - Today Apple is engaging in similar tactics against a number of bloggers who simply reported on the fact that someone created a skin for Windows Mobile phones that looks exactly like the new iPhone user interface.

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