http://www.cellular-news.com/story/22645.php

"By combining photography with communications, [the camera phone] has the potential to become the most influential kind of camera," writes Baldridge. "It offers innovative functions that let you use images to communicate with others, link up with other devices and bridge the gap between the virtual and physical world. The challenge of integrating a camera into an extremely compact, mobile, multifunction device is driving new developments in optics and imaging technology as well."

You can get it at Amazon for less than $10.

JD Lasica from ourmedia.org is trying to put together a set of easy to use tools to get people up and running with citizen journalism.

His wish includes:

* Out-of-the-box community publishing solution based on an extension of either the base code for Drupal or ArmchairGM (which supports the Openserving.com initiative).

* Set of widgets that are customizable and of particular value to sites publishing community news, political events and related topics.

* Customizable templates (sleek, CSS-ready) with mastheads, themes and graphic icons that can be adapted to different localities, regardless of CMS or platform.

* Multimedia publishing tool (free, cross-platform) for distributing videos, podcasts and photos to multiple hosting destinations.

* Instant feeds: RSS and Media RSS.

* Google Maps configured for use by local communities.

* CMS modules or capabilities: Advancedsearch, navigation controls, social networks and groups, community chat, customized blog posts, comments, forums or message boards.

* Preconfigured online video which allows people to publish to local channels based on tags or a structured ontology. If you're a community publisher in Boise, you may wish to create channels about the city council, crime, recreation, senior living, youth news, etc.

* Resource directory: Public domain and Creative Commons-licensed images and clip art.

* Wiki plug-ins so wikis can be integrated into the local sites to spur community involvement in structuring solutions to local issues.

* Tutorials and screencasts: Detailed guides on how other local sites successfully use Web 2.0 tools and databases in their communities.

The full article can be could found here.

From the BBC News:

Amnesty International has warned that the internet "could change beyond all recognition" unless action is taken against the erosion of online freedoms.

he warning comes ahead of a conference organised by Amnesty, where victims of repression will outline their plights.

The "virus of internet repression" has spread from a handful of countries to dozens of governments, said the group.

Amnesty accused companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo of being complicit in the problem.

Website closures

When challenged on their presence in countries such as China in the past, the companies accused have always maintained that they were simply abiding by local laws.

Amnesty is concerned that censorship is on the increase.

"The Chinese model of an internet that allows economic growth but not free speech or privacy is growing in popularity, from a handful of countries five years ago to dozens of governments today who block sites and arrest bloggers," said Tim Hancock, Amnesty's campaign director.

"Unless we act on this issue, the internet could change beyond all recognition in the years to come.

More and more governments are realising the utility of controlling what people see online and major internet companies, in an attempt to expand their markets, are colluding in these attempts," he said.

According to the latest Open Net Initiative report on internet filtering, at least 25 countries now apply state-mandated net filtering including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

Egyptian blogger

Filtering was only one aspect of internet repression, the group said. It added that increasingly it was seeing "politically motivated" closures of websites and net cafes, as well as threats and imprisonments.

Twenty-two-year-old Egyptian blogger Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman was imprisoned for four years in February for insulting Islam and defaming the President of Egypt.

Fellow Egyptian blogger Amr Gharbeia told the BBC that the internet was allowing people to express themselves: "The web is creating a more open society, it is allowing more people to speak out. It's only natural that upsets some people."

The Amnesty conference - Some People Think the Internet is a Bad Thing: The Struggle for Freedom of Expression in Cyberspace - will have some well-known speakers including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

It marks the first anniversary of Amnesty's website irrepressible.info, which is being relaunched to become an information hub for anyone interested in the future of internet freedom.

Thanks to Tim Bonnemann for giving me his ticket and Alan Rosenblatt for putting in touch with Tim. Part of the deal was that I "blog extensively" which I'll attempt to do here. I'm not much of a live blogger, so hat's off to people like Alison Fine who managed to coherently summarize presentations seemingly before they were even finished!

Since there are lots of sources for information about the PDF, I'll focus on things that relate to WITNESS and the Hub.

TOP TEN REASONS WHY VIDEO PLATFORMS FAIL:

1. Insubstantial library of content
2. Poor bit rates
3. Lack of innovation (clone platform)
4. No share in content ownership rights
5. No exclusivity of content distribution
6. Lack of spark/spirit for a centralized community
7. Need for users to d/l proprietary software
8. Awkward interface design
9. Overly excessive emphasis on rights protection
10. Lack of technological foresight & audience expectations

The rest of the article is worth reading too.

A Web 2.0 site doesn’t really take off until the public anoints a de facto “main” one in a category, at which it becomes self-fulfilling. For example, there are other auction sites, but most people still go to eBay; there are other video sites, but YouTube is the big kahuna. And how that anointing happens is a mysterious thing, having to do with buzz, timing and software design.

But the bottom line is that Web 2.0 is still in its infancy. There are so many other ways that we could save time, money, hassle — if only we had the right information from other people like us.

Get started, entrepreneurs. You’re living in an exciting time.

A 16 digit number used as a key to decrypt HD-DVDs became the center of an online revolt against internet censorship yesterday, when it was posted on several blogs, and attempts to stop its proliferation only led to increased popularity.

My interest in the situation has less to do with DVD hacking and more to do with the question of how sensitive information can spread on the Internet. The spread of the number is something of a perfect storm. Many of the techno-libertarians who populate sites like Digg have no great sympathy for digital rights management or the DMCA. The clandestine information - a 16 digit number - is really small, and can be spread through numerous different methods. (As cryptographers have observed, it’s much easier to stop the spread of the video files, which are gigabytes in size, that targeting less that a kilobyte of information…)

Guess video will still be a problem for the foreseeable future.

Oh well, so much for the Hub in Iran....

Iran's Telecommunications Ministry will start filtering "immoral" video and audio messages sent via mobile phones, state television reported on Saturday.

Read the rest of the eWeek article here.

I like it whenever I come upon contrarian points of view. And newassignment.net has a doozy. Steve Fox writes about Virginia Tech student Jamal Albarghouti’s cellphone video of the shooting at Virginia Tech. Here are some of his thoughts:

As everyone steps up to applaud the “citizen journalism” that occurred yesterday, with kudos upon kudos give to the cellphone video made infamous by CNN… Consider this: the video had no inherent news value and told no story. It did have sounds of bullets being fired and screams. Those were bullets that killed, maimed and injured students and faculty members. This wasn’t a video game. Is such video responsible journalism? Are these the types of Citizen Journalists that people want to see? Are we doomed to create “citizen journalists” to play the I-patsies for cable television?

A poster in Fox’s piece also points us to Paul McCleary’s thoughts from CJRDaily called “What Happens When an I-Reporter Gets Hurt?”:

Arguably the most stunning thing about Albarghouti’s footage is not what he was filming — it took repeated viewings to figure out exactly what it was that he captured — but the fact that he seemed to run toward the gunshots. We applaud — scratch that — we expect any cameraman worth his salt to move toward the action, but a grad student with no experience in these situations?

I will respectfully disagree with Fox’s take on this. There is plenty of news value in a firsthand, eyewitness account of a major news story. Just because Albarghouti wasn’t in the classroom doesn’t mean what he captured wasn’t news. He had sound and he had pictures of police moving in. We show pointless exteriors of buildings hours after a crime has taken place there. This was news video. McCleary’s point is more provocative. There will come a time when someone rushes to he scene of a tragedy to capture it on video and gets hurt. Does that mean we stop asking people to send in pictures? No. It means we - as you already hear - tell people to use common sense and not take risks. Mind you - If he were my kid, I’d scream at him. (And take away his cellphone…)

"A fifteen year old from Perth, Australia, posed as an employee of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, demanding that YouTube remove hundreds of video clips of 'The Chasers War on Everything.' The amusing part is that The Chaser is a comedy company well known to perpetrate exactly this sort of prank."

Interesting to see how little it takes to get something pulled off YouTube.

[Editor’s note: One of our correspondents, Yazmín Nuñez was injured by police in Mexico City on Tuesday, the 27th of March, while covering a demonstration concerning the ISSSTE (Instituto al Servico de la Seguridad Social de los Trabajadores del Estado) for more information read about the demonstrations here.. English is coming as soon as possible, if you would like to offer translation skills, please be in touch.]

To the general public:
On March 27, 2007, the reporter and camerawoman Yazmin Nuñez H. was beaten by the riot police of the Mexico City police department as she was covering the demonstration against changes in the Social Security law. Lacerations on her waist, neck, left ear and other parts of her body were caused by the kicks and blows of uniformed police. They show a total lack of respect for the journalism practiced by our compañera and for the news media that she serves as a correspondent, including aliveinmexico.org internet television for the United States, the independent newspaper Machetearte, and the media coop libertasanticorpTV.

After the attack, other reporters and photographers came to her rescue and were able to pull her out of the police encirclement, where her press credentials and 800 pesos were taken from her.

Our work is based on freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of thought, and the right of the society to communicate and stay informed. We demand respect for our work as journalists and are hereby publishing this denunciation to register our opposition to the dreadful treatment of the press and innocent citizens. We cannot allow violence against reporters to be a constant, appalling custom in the country.

From Slashdot:

"One factor driving the move of political statements to YouTube, and away from old-style street protest, is that on the Internet the chances of being personally associated with a protest are lower. Mounting your political message online is also safer in countries where taking part in a protest can result in your death or injury at the hands of your country's army. We've seen how street protests and online polls alike are being shunted aside and ignored. What is the future for the common person who yearns to be heard?"

I’m just back from the New Organizing Institute’s training for progressive non profits “Online Organizing and Technology for Nonprofits”.

Kudos to the team at NOI, specifically Rosalyn Lemieux and Heather Cronk, who kept the show on the road (& on time 99% of the time- a first for any conference I’ve attended) and did a great job of pulling it together and notes from all sessions and brainstorms are forthcoming on their wiki.

As usual, with gatherings based in DC or other US cities, this one was heavily weighted towards domestic politics and organizing; also, overwhelmingly the trainers and resource people (from vendors to presenters) were white and male. This is not to discount the breadth of experience and expertise being shared, but it is worth reminding ourselves that without the added value of input from communities of color and I would argue, people from progressive movements around the world, we risk creating an echo chamber.

To NOI’s credit, time was included for mini ‘roots sessions’ for participants to create discussions that hadn’t been on the agenda. Folks from Colorofchange.org, NAACP and Urban Underground, and elsewhere convened a group to discuss (loosely) “race and the Internet” and talked about a variety of things from list building to effective events. Thanks to Clarissa and Gabriel from Colorofchange.org who led and took notes that will be available soon.

Which brings me back to the beginning of the 3 day training- and where I drew from for the subject of this post - Peter Leymen from the New Politics Institute who was just fresh from presenting before Congress about “The Dawn of New Politics” shared his thesis that we’ve entered a new Progressive era. He's defining like this:

1) the massive transformation in communication tools, both the speed of technology development and how it is being harnessed by new media;
2) the massive population transition in the US – las proyecciones dicen que por 2050 los EEUU serán 40% de hispano- if you don’t know what that says, its time to start learning some Spanish!
3) the challenges of the 21st century (i.e. global climate change) which require new strategies.

Peter enumerated the ways in which media is changing from the ubiquity of video and the multiple screens on which we might view it (TV, computer, mobile), to online games and spaces like Second Life, to the incredible growth of peer to peer file sharing as a ever-larger percentage of all Internet activity.

There was much that Peter shared that can be found in more depth on the New Politics Institute site – but one more thing that resonated for me and I believe for WITNESS can be found in Peter’s list entitled “The 10 Properties of 21st Century Media”. It is:

1) Internet enabled
2) Targeted
3) Efficient
4) Consumer controlled
5) Time shifted – people will get it when they want it
6) Prodigious – media makers will create a lot more content – (I’m pretty sure they already are- cat blogs anyone?)
7) Bottom up
8) Collaborative
9) Global
10) Emergent – we can no longer predict what will happen in 6 months time

WITNESS embodies at least 2 of those 10 already but I was particularly encouraged to find that our forthcoming Hub embodies at least 7 of those. I hope this will help make it a viable and useful channel towards building an international human rights culture and empowering positive social change.