Yomiuri : Mainichi closes controversial English-language Web page
Goodbye to WaiWai and Ryann Connell. "Too vulgar" and "inappropriate content", I see. And then what about this ?
Jimmy Wales : Power to the Wikipeople
Setsuko Kamiya's interview with Jimmy Wales at The Japan Times (11.03.2007) :
The English-language version continues to be the largest Wikipedia. Do you see a difference in people's ways of sharing information depending on languages?
It's really hard to say, but one thing is that English is the largest first language of the people on the Internet. But even more importantly, it is by far the largest second language in the world.
As the English Wikipedia is so large, people often think that maybe others translate from English. But it doesn't necessarily work that way. It's really a matter of lots of things getting translated into English.
If you write an article about something in Japan that you think is probably not well known elsewhere, and you think "gosh, it would be great if this was known all around the world" -- well, you wouldn't just leave it in the Japanese Wikipedia. You would think, "maybe I should put it in English, because from there, it can be translated into French and German and Chinese and all the other languages." People think of English that way, as sort of a meeting point.
I don't know if it's true or not, but it is said that in the Japanese Wikipedia, people would go to the discussion page, then discuss and discuss and discuss until they reach a consensus -- and finally someone will go and very cautiously change the entry. Whereas in English, we change the entry and fight about it. I've heard this not just from English speakers but Japanese themselves. I wonder if it might not be some kind of self-humorous image of Japanese that endless discussions for consensus occur before something happens. It could be true, though I don't know. But I'm told that the culture is different. Maybe I'll be able to find out when I hang out with the Wikipedians here.
The Japan Times may require registration. Should I transcribe this interview all?
Žižek : Is this digital democracy, or a new tyranny of cyberspace?
Slavoj Zizek (without accents) criticizes cyberspace, referring to "Person of the Year" (The Time Magazine), at The Guardian (30.12.2006). Concludes :
And therein lies the threat of cyberspace at its most elementary: when a man and a woman interact in it, they may be haunted by the spectre of a frog embracing a bottle of beer. Since neither of them is aware of it, these discrepancies between what "you" really are and what "you" appear to be in digital space can lead to murderous violence.
"A frog embracing a bottle of beer" -- Where does this metaphor come from? Is it just a beer label?
Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse
By Geert Lovink at Eurozine (02.01.2007) :
Media theorist and Internet activist Geert Lovink formulates a theory of weblogs that goes beyond the usual rhetoric of citizens' journalism. Blogs lead to decay, he writes. What's declining is the "Belief in the Message". Instead of presenting blog entries as mere self-promotion, we should interpret them as decadent artefacts that remotely dismantle the broadcast model.
Renverser le Panopticon
Francis Pisani gives a world wide job :
Pour parler de ce nouveau phénomène Jamais (c’est son prénom) Cascio, animateur hors pair de WorldChanging, un site qui s’occupe de technologie et d’environnement, a lancé la formule de “participatory panopticon” ou panopticon participatif en s’inspirant de la formule de Bentham reprise par Foucault. Big brother n’a plus qu’à bien se tenir. On se sent mieux.
The Day the Music Died
By Max Fraser at The Nation (11.12.2006 Issue) :
If you are one of those few remaining souls who still gets music the old-fashioned way, and if you live in one of the twenty states home to at least one of Tower Records's eighty-nine American stores, chances are you've heard the news: Tower, the last and largest of the great "brick-and-mortar" record store chains, is going out of business. After more than four decades as one of the leading music sellers in the country, Tower Records is just weeks away from death, leaving many in the industry--from label executives and independent record store owners to music critics and fans--wondering just what it all means.
Interview with Tim O'Reilly
By Christian Stöcker at Spiegel International (04.12.2006) :
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Your name is closely connected to two of the catchphrases of our times: "Open Source" and "Web 2.0." What's the next buzzword you'll invent?
O'Reilly: The next big thing we're working on is wrapped up in a new magazine we're doing, called "Make." We're really focussing on how computing is starting to interact with the physical world, like with custom manufacturing. What we're all seeing is a huge amount of hacker activity around making things. There's a lot of disposable hardware now. People are now on their 3rd or 4th digital camera, and what do they do with the old one? They can re-use it. We also have all sorts of custom manufacturing devices, like laser cutters and 3D-printers. All this stuff is about the same price point that typesetters were in the beginning of the desktop publishing revolution.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: So the focus is shifting back from software to the real world?
O'Reilly: Yes. We're entering an era of custom manufacturing. There's synthetic biology -- where custom manufacturing will extend down to chemical processes and materials as well as electronics and physical goods. Not to mention we have the ability to mass-produce things more easily in some part of the world where there's relatively cheap labor in relatively small units. People are getting increasingly sophisticated tools for simulation and design. Like when people are building things in "Second Life" or in Sketchup on Google Earth. The tools of design of virtual things that can become physical things are getting much more democratized, much more widely spread. For example, there are a couple of services where you can get your avatar from "Second Life" printed out in 3D. I think that's one of the big frontiers.
Amateur Videos Are Putting Official Abuse in New Light
By Mary Jordan at Washington Post (15.11.2006) :
"Do I really have to do this?" Hemy, who had never been arrested before, pleaded with the female officer standing in front of her in a tiny police station locker room.
She said her head was pounding from the humiliation and she feared what might come next. But what was happening at that moment changed her life: A male officer was secretly holding his cellphone and its tiny camera between the bars on the window, making a video clip that would ultimately expose more than Hemy's nakedness.
The clip began circulating phone to phone, e-mail to e-mail. Eventually it was posted on YouTube and other Internet sites, to be viewed by millions. What started as cheap voyeurism escalated into an unstoppable cyberspace phenomenon, which forced the prime minister to establish an official inquiry that led to changes in police practice. The episode also underscored the growing power of amateur video, shot on cellphones and ever-tinier digital cameras, to hold the powerful to account.
YouTube and the Cultural Studies Classroom
By Christopher Conway at Inside Higher Ed (13.11.2006) :
OK, that’s all nice, but what can YouTube do for professors, apart from giving them something to look at during their lunch breaks? Inside Higher Ed has reported on the ways in which YouTube is causing consternation among academics because it is being used by students to stage moments of guerilla theater in the classroom, record lectures without permission and ridicule their professors. Indeed, a search on YouTube for videos of professors can bring up disquieting clips of faculty behaving strangely in front of their students, like the professor who coolly walks over to a student who answers a ringing cell phone in class, politely asks for the device, and then violently smashes it on the floor before continuing on with his lecture as if nothing had happened. It could be staged (authenticity is more often than not a fiction on YouTube) but it is still disturbing.
But I would like to argue for an altogether different take on YouTube, one centered on the ways in which this medium can enrich the learning experience of college students by providing video realia to accompany their textbooks, in-class documentaries and course lectures. Although I can’t speak to the applicability of YouTube to every discipline, in what follows I make a case for how the service can be harnessed by professors in the humanities and social sciences.
Nationalism under Globalization through the eyes of Google
By Prof. Laksiri Fernando at Asian Tribune (07.11.2006).
"24 heures contre la censure" : 17 000 personnes ont voté contre les ennemis d’Internet
De Reporters sans frontières (08.11.2006) :
Les internautes se sont mobilisés massivement sur le site de Reporters sans frontières pour protester contre la censure d’Internet. L’association avait par ailleurs organisé hier des manifestations symboliques dans les rues de Paris et de New York. La page de mobilisation - http://www.rsf.org/24h, qui a reçu plus de 100 000 visites en 24h - restera accessible encore quelques jours pour que les internautes continuent d’y poster des messages.
"Nous souhaitions démontrer que les blogueurs et les internautes du monde entier se sentent concernés par le problème de la censure sur Internet. L’ampleur de la mobilisation démontre que le sort des cyberdissidents chinois, égyptiens ou cubains ne laisse pas indifférent. Nous avons par ailleurs constaté une nouvelle fois que les compromissions éthiques de Yahoo ! provoquent un véritable élan de réprobation. Il est temps que cette entreprise prenne des mesures concrètes pour respecter la liberté d’expression", a déclaré l’organisation.
Is Google Evil?
By Adam L. Penenberg at Mother Jones (10.10.2006) :
Internet privacy? Google already knows more about you than the National Security Agency ever will. And don’t assume for a minute it can keep a secret. YouTube fans--and everybody else--beware.
Peace Activists Beware: Homeland Security May Be Reading Your E-Mail, and Passing it on to the Pentagon
By Matthew Rothschild at The Progressive (13.10.2006).
"We paid a fair price"
Interview with Philipp Schindler at Spiegel International (11.10.2006) :
SPIEGEL ONLINE: What do you have in mind as far as that is concerned? Is YouTube not expected to bring in any money?
Schindler: I can't yet concretely say, but of course, as I said earlier, we have a revenue model. One idea, for example, is sponsoring specific content. Another possibility is that certain content might be offered for a fee, just as we already do with Google Video. Another one would be to show an ad before the video. Right now we can't say, "This will be our strategy." We need to work on it so our targeting system, which works well for text-based content, also carries over into the audio-visual world.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Several videos on YouTube consist of pieced-together stolen material. How will you prevent copyright infringement?
Schindler: For us protecting content providers' copyright is of highest priority. For one thing, we advise our users that no copyright-protected material may be posted on our platform. For another, both Google Video and YouTube have a system that enables copyright holders to inform us if their copyright has been breached, and we react as quickly as possible.
China Unblocks Wikipedia
From E&P (11.10.2006) :
The online interactive reference site Wikipedia announced Tuesday that the site had apparently been made accessible in China, after being blocked for just over a year by the country's government
The Human Blog
By Emily Nussbaum at New York Magazine (09.10.2006). — Serial charmer and conservative turncoat Arianna Huffington reinvents herself yet again—as self-help guru and queen of connectedness.
Is this the future of advertising?
By Drake Bennet at The Boston Globe (24.09.2006) :
TWO WEEKS AGO, a bright, pretty 16-year-old girl named ``Bree," who under the screen name ``lonelygirl15" had posted a series of wildly popular video diary entries on the website YouTube, was revealed to be an actress, her online confessions written and directed by three aspiring filmmakers. In a note on a lonelygirl15 fansite, her creators wrote that, far from a mere hoax, lonelygirl15 marked ``the birth of a new art form....A story that is interactive and constantly evolving with the audience."
Chine : les blogs de la colère
Par Brice Pedroletti au Monde (19.09.2006) :
La campagne pour "ne plus acheter de logement", lancée en mai par Zou Tao, un jeune blogueur installé à Shenzhen, a fait mouche. Les internautes s'échangent à tout-va les logos simples et percutants du mouvement : un panneau d'interdiction avec le dessin d'une maison, le mot "HOUSE" en lettres géantes, barré d'une croix rouge. Ils disséminent l'information sur les forums de discussion et se rallient en ligne par des cris de guerre éloquents.
Zou Tao propose de boycotter pendant trois ans l'achat d'un logement - le temps que les prix baissent. Il fustige les promoteurs qui manipulent le marché. Le coup de gueule de ce "Ralph Nader chinois", qui n'en est pas à ses premiers faits d'armes, n'a rien d'anecdotique : il touche une corde très sensible en Chine, où la toute nouvelle classe moyenne urbaine est en train de s'apercevoir qu'au jeu de la redistribution discrétionnaire des terrains publics elle s'est fait berner.
Gov't to OK Internet access via power lines
By Kyodo at Yahoo! News (13.09.2006) :
The government plans to enable high-speed Internet access via existing power lines instead of telephone or cable TV lines, government officials said Wednesday.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications will revise a ministry regulation and start accepting applications for the Internet access known as power line communications within this year, the officials said.
Japan Too, YouTube?
By Akiko Kashiwagi at The Newsweek (04.09.2006 Issue) :
Youtube, the booming American Web site where surfers share short videos, is taking off in Japan, too. The number of Japanese visitors per month has more than quadrupled to 6.4 million since February, an unprecedented success for an English-language Web site. Recently, clips of television shows on a celebrity scandal received 3 million hits in just a matter of days. "It just shows how much people want to see certain videos," and how utterly others have failed to find the content Japan really wants, says Yoshikazu Tanaka, president of GREE, a social networking Web service.
Internet revives ancient skills of the geisha girls
By Richard Lloyd Parry at Times Online (24.08.2006).
"The flower and willow world" — Does it mean "Karyukai"?
"Moe" and "infatuation"
Ken-san translates "Moe" into "infatuation", introducing Goo emoticon ranking, at What Japan Thinks (14.08.2006). "Moe" connotes pathetic, it seems.
Web 'enemy' China forces Wikipedia clone to close
By AFP at Taiwan Times (11.08.2006) :
A Chinese online encyclopedia has closed down due to government pressure as China continues to crack down on Internet information it sees as dangerous, an international rights group said.
e-Wiki, a collaborative Internet encyclopedia modeled on the hugely successful Wikipedia, closed itself down late last month, Reporters Without Borders said in a statement received yesterday.
"Une encyclopédie libre chinoise s’autocensure sous la pression des autorités" at RSF (07.08.2006).
Can Blogging Derail Your Career?
"7 Bloggers Discuss the Case of Juan Cole" at Chronicle.com (28.07.2006 Issue).
日本にいても、この特集は読んでおいたほうがいいかも。
Internet con artists turn to 'vishing'
By Brian Bergstein (AP) at USA Today (12.07.2006) :
Phishing e-mails generally instruct recipients to click a link in the e-mail to confirm their personal information; the link actually connects to a bogus site where the data are stolen.
But with Internet users wiser about phishing, the new fake PayPal e-mail included no such link. Instead it told users to call a number, where an automated answering service asked for account information.
Security experts tracking this scam and other instances of "vishing" — short for "voice phishing" — say the frauds are particularly nefarious because they mimic the legitimate ways people interact with financial institutions.
"Voice" + "phishing" = "vishing" — メールに記載してある電話番号に電話をかけさせて、ユーザーの登録情報を聞きだす新手の詐欺。気をつけよう、ね。
Via Digg.
Contre la censure : Qui veut la mort d'Internet ?
Yannick Chatelain's new book (L'Harmattan) introduced at Bellaciao (03.07.2006).
Say Hello to voice phishing
By John Leyden at The Register (26.06.2006).
またもや新手のフィッシング。気をつけようね。
ところで、あいかわらずココログが重い。「反映中」のままフリーズ、またはプロキシ・エラー。更新はされているけど、意気阻喪。ユーザーを減らそうとする魂胆かい、と勘ぐりたくなる。
Free culture and the internet: a new semiotic democracy
By Elizabeth Stark at Open Democracy (20.06.2006).
Google is voicing some doubt over China
By Thomas Crampton at International Herald Tribune (08.06.2006).
File-sharing crackdown and backlash in Sweden
By Ivar Ekman at International Herald Tribune (04.06.2006).
When the police raided 10 locations across central Sweden last week, shutting down a popular file-sharing site called The Pirate Bay, it seemed that online piracy in this highly wired country had been dealt a major blow.
Hollywood appeared delighted that a threat against the economic underpinnings of the movie business had been removed, even gleeful that the openly provocative founders of the site had been taken into custody.
In digital pricing wars, music's value open to debate
By Brian Garrity at Reuters/Billboard (03.06.2006).
Gates and MTV versus the mighty iPod
By Harry Mount at Telegraph (17.05.2006) :
Today Bill Gates's Microsoft company, in conjunction with MTV, which is owned by Viacom, are launching the first serious rival to the iPod.
The service, called Urge, will use Microsoft's Media Player technology and MTV's marketing power to target owners of non-iPod digital music players.
Telus cuts subscriber access to pro-union website
At CBC News (24.04.2006), via Majikthise :
The B.C.-based communications company that's in a bitter fight with unionized employees has blocked its internet subscribers from accessing a website supporting striking union members.
Telus subscribers can't get into Voices for Change, which says it's "a community website run by and for Telecommunications Workers Union (TWU) members. "
The site calls the company's move censorship, and TWU president Bruce Bell questioned its legality.
他人事とは思えないなぁ。日本だって、知れたものではないよ。
Neil Young's protest album heads to Internet first
At Reuters (22.04.2006) via Living With War :
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Neil Young's newly recorded protest album "Living With War," including a song calling for the impeachment of U.S. President George W. Bush, will be posted for free Internet streaming next week, his label said on Friday.
Starting April 28, fans can log onto Young's Web site, www.neilyoung.com, and listen to the 10-track collection in its entirety, free of charge, said Bill Bentley, a spokesman for Warner Music Group's Reprise Records.
ニール・ヤング御大は、気合が入ってる。病気から回復して、ものすごく元気みたい。
A CNN interview with Neil Young on April 18th at YouTube via HffPo.
US government wants PayPal records
At RTE (13.04.2006) :
The US Internal Revenue Service wants the company to reveal the details of accounts linked to banks or credit cards in 35 countries. A summons issued by US District Court Judge James Ware in San Jose ordered PayPal to hand over records dating back to 1999, when the Internet money-transfer service was launched.
PayPal said it was evaluating its options, and added that it takes the privacy of its customers' information very seriously. Tax collectors wanted records of transactions connected to countries where local laws could protect specious tax shelters from scrutiny by US officials, it said.
Blog registration up 83 percent to 8.68 million
The Internal Affairs Ministry said Thursday that the number of registered Web logs, or blogs, in Japan totaled 8.68 million at the end of March, up 83 percent from six months before.
Teanotwar RSS Reader
イラクのブログを収集した teanotwar RSS リーダー (at はてな) が、公開されている。いけださんの記事を参照のこと。イラクの情報収集に、とても便利。快挙ですよ、これは。
Bloggers at the Gate
By Ali Melber at The Nation (13.02.2006 Issue) :
By now, most people are weary of hearing how blogs are changing American politics. The search engine Technorati estimates 70,000 new blogs are created every day, but most are obscure and will remain so forever. Only a few bloggers have the audience and credibility to effectively break stories, pressure the traditional media, incubate new ideas or raise real money. These influential bloggers are usually sharp, opinionated and focused on the world "offline." They refuse to view events through the solipsistic blinders of their own websites.
Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the founding writers of MyDD and Daily Kos, are two such influential bloggers. They've written a provocative new book that offers a perceptive analysis of progressive politics and proposes to revolutionize the Democratic Party through a "bloodless coup."
Contre Spams
スパム・メールが増えすぎたので、一昨日、アドレスを変更した。あちらこちらのサイトの登録情報を変更するのに、二日がかり。くたびれた、肩が痛いぜ。
雨が降って、寒かったから、今夜は飲みに出かけなかった。宙ぶらりんの時間。こんな夜は、ヴァン・モリソンでも聴きまくるか。
Google purgera l'Internet chinois
Philippe Grangereau, "Google purgera l'Internet chinois," at Libération (25.01.2006) :
Le géant des moteurs de recherche Google Inc s'était donné un an de réflexion avant de décider s'il allait lui aussi, à l'instar de Yahoo et Microsoft, céder à la censure imposée par le gouvernement chinois. La décision vient de tomber : Google se pliera aux exigences de Pékin, en échange de l'ouverture du marché chinois de l'Internet, le deuxième au monde par le nombre de ses internautes (111 millions). « En vue d'opérer en Chine, s'est justifié mardi un responsable de Google, Andrew Mclaughlin, nous avons retiré une partie du contenu des recherches disponibles sur notre banque de données disponible sur Google.cn, en conformité avec les lois, règles et politiques locales ».
北京はいつまでこんなことを続けるつもりかな。
Microsoft censors Chinese blogger
Andrew Donoghue, "Microsoft censors Chinese blogger" at Cnet News (04.01.2006) :
The blog, written by Zhao Jing, also known as Michael Anti, was removed from MSN servers on Dec. 31, according to investigative journalist and former CNN reporter Rebecca Mackinnon. She claimed that the blog was actively removed by MSN staff rather than being blocked by Chinese authorities.
A Microsoft representative told ZDNet UK on Wednesday that it blocked Anti's MSN Space blog to help ensure that the service complied with local laws in China.
ひどいなぁ。
そう言えば、規模は違うけど、私の好きなブログ「反米嫌日戦線「狼」(美ハ乱調ニ在リ)」 (23.12.2005) が、ちょっとした諍いで北国ＴＶから追放されたのは、先月のこと。間もなく SeeSaa で息を吹き返した。Zhao Jing もめげるな、アレイズ！
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