Video comes to the blogging world

This week the focus will be on logs, not the wooden kind but rather the electronic versions - blogs and vlogs. The first is the basic web log (blog) consisting of text and optionally some pictures, while a vlog is the video version of the same thing. In its simplest form a blog is a personal diary that you make available to others. This could be as exciting as a day-to-day description of a climb up the north face of Everest all the way down to what Mary Beth had for breakfast somewhere in the southern parts of the US. If you want to rush right in at this point, or if you had something really interesting for breakfast, jump over to the Home Builder article (page D7) that describes how to get started in the blogging world. Blogging or making comments on web sites and bulletin boards goes back to the Neolithic age of computers. I remember commenting on the local bulletin boards (they were from way back in computing terms), and posting comments on a board. In contrast the blog is a personal item but it can still attract comments from readers, some who will not be so polite. If you do decide to start your blog expect that at least one person will not like what you are doing. There is no way around this. There are people will disagree with just about anything no matter how tame you think your writing is. Just like some people in bars prefer to listen to a tone deaf singer over the trained version, there are people out there who will not share you love of fluffy animals whose picture you want to share with the world. A video blog is the same as a standard blog in all ways except that it comes in the form of a series of video clips. This is still an interactive online diary, just one that moves. Some of these are edited and produced, others are just raw footage taken with a mobile camera or web cam and dumped into the blog. Vlogging started about two years back and at the end of 2004 the online directory Mefeedia listed less than a hundred of them. You can visit this site and after a quick, free sign-up search through over 310,000 vlogs. If you want to learn how to vlog for free then visit freevlog.org for information on how to do it and some of the tools you can use. The biggest difference between a blog and a vlog is the amount of work you may have to put into it. Posting an edited video versus a raw capture requires software tools and possibly some additional hardware. To do it well is an artform and not something everyone can do. There is even a conference on the subject, Vloggercon . The better-known video site You Tube also has vlogs from such names as peanut, samui, plissken and koh. Hard core Vloggers believe that vlogging will one day replace TV since they can get unedited footage rather than the standard talking head slant on every story. One popular blogger, Seth Godin, recently announced that he doesn't like comments in blogs, particularly his. This has created a flood of responses from people that feel they have the right to comment on anything they like. The reasoning is simple: too much time spent clarifying based on comments or, worse, writing based on the anticipation of comments. Another reason is that most comments tend to be insults or rants. These do not encourage any real interactivity and you are usually in a losing battle with some kind of logic-deprived fundamentalist. For the most part the old gentlemanly art of conversation gets lost in the electronic world. One potential problem with blogs of all kinds is one of bandwidth. If the blog is pushed out or pulled in as part of an RSS feed, the volume of bits will add to the already overloaded communications architecture of the globe. Locally people are complaining that they are getting very slow responses, both here and from external networks. Blogs do provide some anonymity, particularly if you use a service like blogger.com, so your blogs can be on things that you may not be able to share from, say, the work blog or even your home country blog. You cannot, for example, criticise the Chinese government on any local local blogging host but you could from an offshore version. Industry news Local foreigners have been complaining about the lack of access to any English versions of the World Cup broadcasts and I know more than one person who has signed up for the Malaysian satellite feed. Sadly the Internet feeds have either been poor or blocked from many of the English speaking countries such as the UK and Australia. This leaves Thailand as one of the few countries in the region that do not provide an English commentary feed for the tournament. Not a very positive indicator for Thailand, again. It will not be surprising to readers that Microsoft is developing its own music and video gadget that it will use to compete with the Apple iPod. If you remember I already told you that the software giant is putting together its own iTunes equivalent service. With its own hardware Microsoft can also control who gets to listen to what using its own built-in security. Despite its own proprietary music format, I will hazard a guess that you will be able to convert to MP3 thanks to some clever program from a 14-year-old, before the MS hardware hits the streets. The unit is already in a demo form and being shown around to RIAA members as you read this. It is interesting that the Microsoft-branded music service appears to be in competition to other services that it has provided the software for, such as the Viacom MTV Networks service that was launched a few months ago. The technology also provides a protection base for other music subscription services, all over the planet. Unlike some other service, Microsoft's will be primarily based around the pay per download model, with some type of subscription service also available - details are sketchy at the time of writing. Some of the early feedback appears to indicate that the new Microsoft service is better than iTunes in the sense that Microsoft is building a community-based system instead of a basic shopping store like iTunes. It will be interesting to see how well Microsoft does in this venture, with giants like Amazon also moving into the field. Final delivery dates are unknown and I suspect somewhat flexible. In other news, Microsoft lost the appeal on a legal case involving Office. It means that Office versions will be changing the way they communicate with Access and this will have the expected effect on existing programs and macros in products like Excel.

How to join the blogging community

You can contribute to the world of blogging in just a few minutes. One way is to join sites like My Space at www.myspace.com or more specialised services like the Digital Divide Network at www.digitaldivide.net. There are many other hosting sites that support blogs, with one of the most popular places to start at Blogger.com. To join Blogger, just follow the following steps: 1. Enter www.blogger.com in your browser. 2. Click on that big orange arrow labelled "Create your Blog Now." At this point you will need to select a username and password that you will be using to access your blogger account. Remember to make the password interesting - include some numbers and mix the case. You will also need to think of a display name that is used to sign all your posts. This name can reflect your blog type, say SoccerMum or ArticExplorer, or something unintelligible like MxplOz4, which is more like a password than a username but you will see a lot like this. You also need to provide a real email address. Some people will create a blogger email account for this. 3. When you have identified everything, check the box that says you accept the terms of service then Continue to go to the next step. This is where you give your blog a name, something as simple as My Blog Report or as heady as My Philosophical Musings on the Nature of the Universe. What you call it is completely up to you. The hard part will be picking the URL address that people will use to access your blog. This can be anything you like as long as it is not already being used by someone. You want to make this concise and easy to remember. Be patient, it may take you a while to find something that has not already been taken, as there are thousands of blogs already in use. At this point you will also need to type in the word you have been shown to confirm your selections and to block automated blog creation. Click Continue to move to the next screen. You are almost finished. All you need to do is select from one of the template styles that Blogger provides. There are 12 of them, click on the radio button and then on the Continue Arrow. There will be a brief pause while your Blog is set up and then you are ready to go. Click on Start Posting and you are shown the posting screen with some other tabs for modifications. The Settings tab will allow you to make some changes ranging from your blog title, some access settings and to the deletion of this blog. You can restrict comments, create teams and lost of other stuff in this section. The Template tab is where you change the colour of your navigation bar or for the more adventurous you can use your HTML and style sheet knowledge to modify every part of your blog's appearance. Unless you are sure, best not to play in this area too much. The View Blog tab only works after you have created your first blog, so back to the Posting tab. Enter your blog title then enter in some text, add in some links and even some pictures if you wish. Then click on Preview to check what the final result will look like than when you are ready, and Publish. Now try the View Blog tab and there it is, your first blog. The really hard part will be to think of something new to post on a regular basis and of course to let everyone know about your blog's URL so that they can go and see it. If your blog becomes popular, be prepared for your first comment. This can range from a poor to well crafted flame from someone called Anonymous to a congratulations from your grandmother on passing your O levels. Welcome to the wonderful world of blogging.

I want to be a Webmaster. Tips and suggestion for new Webmaster.

I want to express my knowledge of Webmaster to everyone. I am just a beginner on webmaster and learning about 1 year but I have studied hard in this field. If you have any suggestion on my writing, please let me know by post your message in article you want to suggest or email to me. My email is satiz2000@hotmail.com . I appreciated for every comment to me.

Do want to be a webmaster? Why? I think the basic of decision you want to be a webmaster because you love it. This job isn’t easy as you think. It’s about learning and doing by yourself. Every beginner webmasters feel really hard to pull their website to be popular and they get too little expected thing from their effort. It’s look like no way for new webmaster to success or satisfied result. Oh, forget about that sad story. I want you put more effort for your success. I have a roadmap for you to be a successful webmaster.

1) Find the correct keyword – In the past, I have build my website by random thinks. I love playing game so I build a game website and then no one come to visit my website. “Why?” I thought. This is a example of ordinary webmaster mistake. I had didn’t know that I jumped to very competitive market. It’s almost impossible for the beginner to win this fight. So, the first thing for new webmaster to do is researching keyword. You should find the keyword that few competitors that will make you have more chance to success promote your site. You should stick and focus only this keyword.
2) Choose the correct tools – This part is about planning your website to what it look like. After you select a keyword then you should design your website that which components should have such contents section, forums section, etc. , roughly design and search for appropriate tools (you can ask me or in webmaster forum such as digitalpoint.com).
3) Compose your website – This step is gathering everything to build website. Building website can be very easy to extremely hard from choosing tools in the previous step. If you can’t build website as you want, you should consider changing tools or programs.
4) Promotion – In my opinion, this is the biggest and hardest part of webmaster works. Website can be compare as “Goods”. The promotion is very important factor to success or failure. Promoting can be do by various method such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), buying Traffic from Search Engine, Email Marketing, etc. The factors you should concern are traffics (number of visitors) and ROI (return of investment).
5) Monitor result – It’s very important to check progression because website require improve and maintenance carefully. Try the various monitor tools , gather data , analysis data and use information to optimize your website.

Webmaster is quite a new job, much knowledge wait for you to discover. Try it and do it you will find it’s very fun.

Vista a yawn, not a 'wow' - bloggers

While Microsoft trumpeted Vista worldwide on Tuesday, the Internet abounded with postings with postings from people who people who were unimpressed or down-right disappointed with the new operating system.

As Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates headed a multi-million dollar "The Wow Starts Now" ad campaign for Vista, computer aficionados online countered "Yawn, not wow,"

Headlines on weblogs and news websites included "Think whisper, not bang" and "Why you don't need Vista now."

Critiques mocked Vista's grand promotion campaign, contending the system that Microsoft spent five years and $6 billion to create had little to offer that hadn't been available in Apple's Macintosh computers for years.

"Not that I have a hate-on for Microsoft or anything...but I think this Vista was just a joke," wrote a blogger at Microsoft or anything ... but I think this Vista was just a joke," wrote a blogger at Microsoft-operated Windows Live Spaces website .

"Just like (Windows) XP it's going to take like two years to work out all the kinks. And by the way, I'm still finding problems with XP!"

Numerous patches, fixes, and updates have been released for the Windows XP operating system that Vista is replacing since its release in 2001.

Unlike the releases of Nintendo's Will and Sony's PlayStation 3 video game consoles in November, throngs did not queue up at stores to buy Vista when it went on sale after the stroke of midnight on Monday, bloggers observed.

"In fact, it was kind of the opposite," a Tech Blog author identified only as Josh wrote. "No one really cared."

Bloggers complained that Vista was expensive and slowed computers that lacked upgraded memory and graphics components.

"Your software won't work," Chris Pirillo wrote while providing "tips" on Vista in a Windows Fanatics weblog. "Consider that a huge tip."

"Assume that if something works in Windows XP, there's a good chance it will not work the same way in Windows Vista."

Vista also scanned computers to insure film or music files there were legally copied, bloggers complained.

"They can search your computer via the Internet and delete any illegal files including music downloads," Josh wrote. "My privacy has been breached."

Microsoft has proclaimed Vista its most secure and thoroughly-tested operating system release.

Webloggers advised readers to put off buying Vista until flaws had a chance to be discovered and fixed.

Online complaints included needing to upgrade most old software along with hardware to work with Vista.

WildTangent, a major computer game publisher, has accused Vista of "breaking" many popular computer games.

Some bloggers praised Vista features such as photo handling, speech recognition and desktop search but contended that Vista offered nothing revolutionary.

"Much of the new goodness has been available on the Macintosh for years," Adam Hertz wrote in an online posting.

"But, for those who wouldn't consider crossing that particular chasm, Vista seems like a good thing."

SUNDAY BRUNCHTales and sales

Besides helping bloggers get started, Katika Saisenee has advice for them on making money through online businesses

Katika Saisenee, 32, nicknamed Keng, has lately emerged as one of Thailand's most popular coaches for those who want to join the world of bloggers.

"I've focused on this topic for the past two years, as writing personal diaries on the Web on a regular basis is still quite new in Thailand," says Keng, the owner of Keng.com and also the IT director for Mode 2 (Thailand) Co, a Japanese-owned marketing and ad agency.

Keng started his blog in 1999 and currently updates his site about four times a week, attracting 500-600 daily visitors who are keen to start their own blogs to share their world view with others via this new mode of communication.

"Blogging is now quite easy for virtually anyone. With tailor-made software, you can start your own site with just a few clicks. At my site, we also provide all the back-up and related services," says Keng, a graduate of Assumption University.

Many youngsters start writing blogs simply to share their stories with friends and relatives. In Keng's case, he started by posting light-hearted pieces on his site, coupled with lots of photos and, later, video clips.

Besides topical issues, stories about a nice holiday or newly-discovered destinations are among the favourites.

"In fact, it could be any topic but, in the long run, you need to find your niche. For me, it's blog coaching. I'm also compiling my content in a pocket book, which should come out in the middle of this year," Keng says.

"Another example is Vinegargirl.com, started by one of my friends. She focuses on fashion, beauty and other women's stuff. This one-year-old blog attracts 700-800 visitors per day. It has the potential to compete with magazines or women's sections of daily newspapers.

"In other words, blogs allow you to publish at a very low cost, with little set-up or lead time. Yet blogs can reach a very large and diverse audience, local or international, especially the younger generation," says Keng, who has also been pushing for more e-commerce in Thailand.

In mid-2006, Keng sold off his earlier Web-design business, Hostify Co, to Japan-based Mode 2, as the latter wanted to expand its international marketing and ad agency into Thailand to especially serve Japanese clients.

"Now, marketing communications is about websites, SMS, the so-called viral marketing in which e-mail forwarding can be a powerful tool to advertise. It's already here in Thailand, thanks to video clips posted on YouTube," he says.

"The cost of viral marketing is very competitive and in some cases it could be free, but it's effective.

"This method was adopted for the marketing campaign of a major Japanese auto firm here, which recently launched a new model. You can visit the site, load your personal video clip and then write a short story about the product and your experience.

"In short, viral marketing is video clips plus YouTube plus e-mail forwarding. A popular message could effectively reach tens of thousands of people within a very short time, as happened recently here.

"The growth of e-commerce is unstoppable. The marketing and distribution of music CDs, for instance, has shifted to the Web. A Japanese cosmetics firm is also planning to start catalogue sales on the Web here shortly.

"Soon, we could have synthetic scents on an Internet device. Small guys can also tap the potential of e-commerce. In fact, there are abundant opportunities to make money by selling niche products," Keng says.

"For instance, a guy I know makes money from selling skate shoes on the Web to kids online in the provinces. It's a sideline, as the guy also has a full-time job. When he's free, he checks to see if there are orders for the products advertised on the Web.

"Usually, he'll get quite a few. Then he goes to the wholesaler and places those orders, so there is no need for inventory. The products will be delivered to customers by mail.

"There're many people making money from e-commerce this way. The trick is that you need to focus on niche items for which traditional suppliers cannot yet tap the demand or for which the demand may be too small for big suppliers," Keng advises.

To blog or not to blog?

First there were plain websites showing information on companies. Then they got more complicated with fast digital technology, allowing viewers to download millions of pages and ask questions and give responses with text and simple photos.

But today, a new development in the cyberworld - blogs - is getting strong and catching the attention of marketers.

"Blogs emerged over the past few years and became big because of YouTube's popularity among Thais, which was about last year," Mahithorn Pongsarat, CEO of Digithais Network Co Ltd, the digital media agency arm of Carat Media Group, said last week. Surfing the Internet, anyone can find weblogs from both blog operators and brand-owners.

Some top weblogs today are xteen.com, BlogGang from Pantip.com, Storythai, GotoKnow and www.oknation.net from Nation Multimedia Group.

Adisak Limprungpatanakij, president of Nation Broadcasting Corp, calculates that oknation.com has already signed up over 10,000 bloggers with almost 60,000 entries.

It gets 3,000 new bloggers each month. Each blog records 17,000-20,000 visitors, based on unique IPs, and 130,000-150,000 page views per day.

With these numbers, blogs have inevitability surfaced on the radar screens of both media consulting companies and marketers. They are now salivating over the thousands of people who remember a weblog's name and keep visiting it to share common topics.

"Having their own weblogs is like owning a specific wide area on the Internet where bloggers can write everything they want, show pictures and broadcast video clips. Then others see them and share their views. And if they grow frustrated with the contents, they can clean up the entire thing and create a new one," Mahithorn said.

"About 40 per cent of our corporate clients show strong interest in the channel and want to keep their own weblogs," he said.

The challenge is that they have to spend big bucks to set up a separate department to oversee all contents to ensure nothing improper is posted and viewer interest can be maintained. Weblog operators can't control bloggers unless they start with an environment that invites cooperation.

"We have created a culture of sharing views on many topics without posting improper words, and all bloggers automatically take care of that. If improper bloggers really exist, they face social sanctions, and I have witnessed cases in oknation.net," Adisak said.

Digithais recommends corporate clients join a weblog that has already earned a good reputation rather than try to create their own, as it can save a lot of money and guarantee a wide audience. Companies have to be very clear in their objectives for owning weblogs. If it's worth it, do it; if not, join others.

However, they have to be very good at disguising themselves as normal bloggers and not use a hard-sell approach.

Successful cases abroad that come to Mahithorn's mind are Nokia and Adidas, which run blogs in MySpace.

Another choice for marketers is to be a part of weblogs.

They can choose popular weblogs and negotiate for space, mainly for banners, to advertise their products or brands.

NMG's oknation.net has already experienced that. Both Nation Group and Digithais confirm that blogging is not just a fashion. The trend will continue for as long as we are in the "user-generated-content era".

Life and times of a 95-year-old blogger

She Is Billed as the world's oldest blogger. At 95 years old and with a worldwide following that has seen more than 340,000 hits on her blog, Spaniard Maria Amelia Lopez has achieved the kind of status that millions of younger Internet chroniclers can only dream of.

Lopez, who was introduced to the world of blogging by one of her grand children just eight months ago, has become such a global hit that she receives posts in languages as strange and impossible for her to understand as Russian, Japanese and Arabic.

"My name is Amelia and I was born in Muxia [A Coruna - Spain] on December the 23rd of1911," she wrote as her first post on amis95.blogspot.com. "Today it's my birthday and my grandson, who is very stingy, gave me a blog."

With a mix of humour, warmth optimism, nostalgia and feisty out bursts of left-wing polemic, she has won a regular readership of people keen to find out just what this Spanish great-grandmother is going to say or do next.

"You have to live life," the silver haired blogger said in her most recent post. "Not sit around in an armchair waiting for death."

Her blog tracks not just a nonage narian's day-to-day battles against aches, but offers musings on everything from politics and religion to broadband and death.

Among her chief hates are old people's homes, which she criticises for drugging their clients so they spend their final days snoozing quietly in front of the television.

"I blame the children, who don't want to help them," she said yesterday from the house beside the Atlantic Ocean in Muxia, in the rugged northwestern corner of Spain, where she stays during the summer. "Internet has given me a new lease of life, but I don't see any old people's homes offering their residents Internet," she said.

Lopez, as the recent pictures of her shaking maracas in a Brazilian hotel prove, lives as far as you can get from the "do-nothing and wait-to-die" culture that she regularly lambasts.

Her grandson Daniel, with whom she lives, taught her to navigate the Internet after she pestered him to download biographies of poets and politicians. The blog was a gift from Daniel, who had no idea what he was unleashing into cyberspace. He has become her chief assistant: Lopez navigates with the mouse while he types in the words she dictates.

"Now so many people write to me that I can't hope to reply to them all, though I want to," she explained. "My grandson complains that he has to work as well, he can't spend all his time typing."

Much of her traffic comes from Spain and Latin America, but newspaper and television interviews, with YouTube links given on her blog, have spread her name beyond the Spanish speaking world. Lopez tells stories of her childhood and youth in Galicais. She recalls, too, the terrors of the Spanish civil war, and how her brother was sent to the front aged just 16 and came back with one leg shot off.

She was fined for refusing to show support for General Francisco Franco's National Movement."I must be the oldest socialist activisit in Spain," she said. "I've been socialist since I was 16, but my father would never let me actually join the party."

Her dislikes include daytime pillpopping, crude language and telephone companies that are slow to install broadband. Her main loves are poetry, politics, childhood memories, her native region of Galicia, a Jesus Christ who dislikes wealth and, she says, "the workers".

She has acquired readers in such far-flung places as Alaska, Australia, China and Nigeria.

Some people have suggested that she cash in on her popularity by getting paid-for advertisements placed on her blog, something she rejects. "I did this to amuse myself, not to start competing with people or making money," she said.

Net bloggers break through government censorship

Savvy young bloggers in Burma are breaking through the military junta's tight Internet controls to past photos and videos of swelling anti-government protests, experts said yesterday.

The government blocks almost every website that carries news or information about the Southeast Asian country, and even bars access to web-based email.

But an army of young techies in Rangoon works around the clock to circumvent the censors, posting pictures and videos on blogs almost as soon as the protests happen.

Many of these images have been picked up by mainstream news organisations, because bloggers have managed to capture images that no one else can get. When Burma's detained democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi stepped outside her home in Rangoon to greet marching monks and supporters on Saturday, the only pictures of the landmark moment were posted on blogs.

Mizzima News, an India-based news group run by exiled dissidents, picked up one of the photos of Aung San Suu Kyi and said more than 50,000 people accessed their website that day.

"People were saying they wanted to see more pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi," said Sein Win, Mizzima's managing editor. These bloggers are mainly young university students in Rangoon who have made it their mission to post messages and pictures since the anti-junta rallies broke out there on Aug 19, he said.

"We have many volunteers in Rangoon. They are mostly university students and they keep sending us messages, pictures and video clips about the demonstrations," he said.

Messages on blog have applauded Buddhist monks, who have led the protest movement. The movement has grown into the biggest challenge to the junta since a 1988 uprising that was crushed by the military, killing at least 3,000.

"Many people were thanking monks for their courage, and were rallying support behind monks," Sein Win said from Chiang Mai.

"The censorship is very tough, but many people want the world to know what is happening in Burma," he said.

The California-based Mandalay Gazette also said young people in Rangoon were supplying pictures on the protests.

"It's encouraging to see message of support coming as far as from Russia, and some message said monks were correcting the junta's 'wrongdoing,'" said a US-based editor, who declined to be named. A Thai-based Burmese reporter from the Democratic Voice of Burma, a Norway-based broadcaster, said it had received video clips and photos from "many volunteers" in Rangoon since the protests began last month.

"The quality of pictures from Yangon [Rangoon] is very good. Many young people were helping us, and the junta cannot control our freedom of information," said the reporter, who operates anonymously for safety reasons.

The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders has called Burma a "paradise for censors" and listed the military-ruled nation as one of the world's most restrictive for press freedoms.

Since the protests, the regime has cut off the mobile phones of prominent pro-democracy supporters and of some journalists representing foreign media.

State media yesterday accused the foreign press of stirring unrest.

No foreign journalist has obtained a visa to enter Burma, under military rule since the start of the anti-junta rallies, rights groups said.

blogspot with Windows Live

Windows Live emerges from beta

After a trickle of updates and beta versions bearing the Windows Live moniker, Microsoft is ready to start promoting its official package of free desktop programs for e-mail, instant messaging, blogging and sharing photos.

"The programs are essentially a free upgrade for Windows," said Brian hall, general manager of Windows Live at Microsoft.

The package includes Windows Live Mail, which can grab messages from multiple free Web-based e-mail accounts, including Microsoft's Hotmail, Google's Gmail and AOL e-mail, The new package allows PC users to read and respond to mail even when they're not online, just as Outlook Express, which Microsoft has phased out, did.

Its Windows Live Photo Gallery lets users manipulate and organise digital photos and upload them to Flickr, a photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo, and to Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft's own blogging and social networking site.

The package also includes Live Writer, for writing blog posts, the Live Messenger instantmessaging program and Live Family Safety, parental controls for Web access at home.

The applications aren't much different from test versions previously available.

What's new is the spotlight Microsoft plans to shine on the programs.

Hall said the company has planned "one of the largest online advertising campaigns at Microsoft", with plans for 10 billion Web advertising impressions on Microsoft's MSN sites and third-party sites, including the social networking site Facebook, in which Microsoft bought a 1.6-per-cent stake last month.

Microsoft's Windows group will be marketing Windows Live alongside its latest Vista operating system during the crucial holiday shopping season.

Matt Rosoff, an analyst at the independent research group Directions on Microsoft, said this marketing push is indicative of divisions within Microsoft, between the old guard running the MSN online business and the Windows Live group.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sony plans to launch lighter Play Station 2

Sony announced plans to start selling a new, lighter version of its PlayStation 2 video game console just in time for the crucial end-of-year shopping season.

The newly designed PlayStation 2 will hit stores in Japan on November 22 with a recommended price tag of 16,000 yen (Bt4,830 dollars), Sony Computer Entertainment Japan said in a statement.

"While inheriting the functions of the current PlayStation 2, the internal design architecture of the new system has been completely overhauled, resulting in a console that is lighter in weight," it said.

The launch comes as the PlayStation 3, the successor to the PS2, battles fierce competition from Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's Xbox 360.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Nintendo's Famicom faces end of road

It could soon be game over for the Famicom, the vintage family computer that two decades ago set Japan's Nintendo on a path to become a global video game icon.

Nintendo has decided to stop repairing the Famicom, the console that wowed the world with "Super Mario Brothers" and "Dragon Quest", because stocks of spare parts are running out, company spokesman Ken Toyoda said.

The family computer, which was sold as the Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States and Europe, made its world debut in Japan in 1983.

Boasting far superior graphics to any other home video game console on the market at that time, it went on to sell almost 62 million units worldwide, and was followed by the Super Famicom, repairs of which will also be halted. "Some say it's sad Famicom is leaving and players are nostalgic, but Nintendo's saga has not ended. We want people to enjoy the Wii now," said the spokesman for the Kyoto-based firm, which began in 1889 making playing cards.

A WEB of opinions

ABOARD THE crowded D train, rumbling into Brooklyn on the Manhattan Bridge, the inevitable rant explodes. A rant courtesy of Faye Anderson, whom we'll call Ms CJ, aka Citizen Jourrnalist. A rant directed at us, Mr MSM, aka Mainstream Meida, for all our perceived faults.

"It's not you, the journalist, it's the institutin," Ms CJ tells Mr MSM. "You're not telling the whole story...You've lost your creditbility..."

We listen, take notes, check if the tape recorder's working. No telling what Anderson might do if she's misquoted.

She's saying anyone can be a jornalist, at least anyone with an Internet connection. Start a blog, she says, tht's easy.

Citizen journalism is giving voice to those who, in the pre-Internet era, may have felt voiceless. But some challenge the value of all this citizen involvement. Is it really " journalism" ? Are "they" really "journalists"? What's the difference between citien journalists and bloggers who write about politics?

"The term 'citizen journalist' has an Orwellian ring to it," says Andrew Keen, author of "The Cult of the Amateur', who's criticised the Web 2.0 - Wikipedia world, where everyone can become their own editors.

"People are becoming Big Brother, either with a camcorder or a keyboard, and following the candidates around. It's ridiculous. You can't just be a great journlist, the same way you can't be a great chef or a great soccer player."

Journalists, he continues," "follow a set of standards, a code of ethics. Obejectivity rules. That's not the case with citizen journalists.Anything goes in that world."

And sometimes the facts go out the window.

Others argue that journalism is enriched through everyday Joes and Janes, ho offer more voices, more texture to pulic debate.

Michell Stphens, who teaches media history at New York University, says citizen journlism harks back to the days of spoken news, when communities gathered in open-air markets and twon squares. It can be traced to Thomas Paine and the pamphleteers of the 18th century, and to the antiwar, counter-culture alternative press that prospered in teh 1960s.

A citizen journalist, Stephemns notes, is not the same as a political blogger. The former can, and sometimes does, original reporting: the latter, for the most part, is a political junkie armed with opinion. But these definitions don't always fit.

"There really is no simple definition for waht a citizen journalist is, just lots and lots of examples," says Dan Gillmor, former technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and author of "we the Media: Grassorots Journlism by the People, for the People".

"It ranges from people who do journalism all teh time to people who do what you might call a random act of journalism to people who don't consider themselves journalists but are in fact practisig j ournalism.

"The publishing tools - digigal cameras, blogging software-are at the people's disosal," Gillmor continues. "And for a lot of them, the underlying motivation is frrustration with teh traditional media."

Take Anderson.

Now off the D Train, Ms CJ continues with her rant as she steps onto the streets of Brooklyn. She's railing against ilegal immigration - "What part of illegal," she snaps, "don't you get?" - and wonders where the MSMers aer in coverig this "big, big" story.

Tall and strking, anderson was raised in Brooklyn's rough Beddford - Stuyvesant neighbourhood and first set foot on an aeroplane on her way to California to attend Stanforf Law School. She looks like a cross between Meryl Streepk, Chita Rivera and Pam Grier, with physical features as hard as to pin down as her politics. She grew up a Democrat, swithed to the Republican Party in teh Reagan years and bolte out of teh GOP in 2000, following the election debacle. Now an independent, she supports none of the candidates.

Politics is, Ms CJ says, all about the horse rece, the money haul, teh strategists, the pollsters, all about ensuring that official Washington and its political class stay employed.

Citizen journalism, she says, is her enty into teh political process, a way for "an outsider like me to play some sort of role" - curious statement since she herself is a former Washington player, a policy wonk who once served as the face of the Republican Party to African Americans, a regular on C-SPAN's Washington Journal". But those days are over.

"Washington was physically making me sick," Anderson explains.

So she collected a list of clients for ther policy consulting business and returned to Brooklyn. For almost three years, nderson's been a full-time policy consultant and citizen journalist.

Anderson at large is nowhere near as widely read orr heavily linked as RedState or Daily Kos, America's popular conservative and liberal blogs. Technorati, which tracks a site's number of links, says Anderson's blog has received 236 blog mentions, while RedState and Daily Kos have received 21,000 and 107,000, respectively.

But Anderson points to other successes. She's the first blogger to beling to the Trotter Group, a 15-year -old association of well-known black journalists. And last summer, she was credentialed to cover the CDemocratic debate at Howard University.

Says Anderson: "Look, everyone's trying to analyse what citizen journalism is, what its impact will be in this election. We, the citizen journalists, ae figuring it out. You mainstream media folks are figuring it out. But whatever it is, there's no going back. We're here. Get used to it."

Cultivating green habits

It's good to see that schools are now aggressively promoting awareness about the environment and global warming among their students. The earlier you start building green habits, the better chance you have of behavioural change that will eventually help save our planet. Kerry Dyke, environment coordinator of the International School Bangkok, has been extremely active in organising environmental awareness programmes for the past two years. Part of his success is introducing an environmental elective for students where they have to make an environmental change as a part of their grade.

Spearheading the school's activities is a group called the ISB Green Panthers, which is made up of environmentally conscious teachers, parents and board members. According to their blog (isb-green-panthers.blogspot.com/), the group's aim is ''to increase environmental awareness at ISB and more importantly, start making positive environmental changes to reduce the school's eco [carbon] footprint. Green Panther goals are to improve ISB's environmental performance by: Activating environmental awareness, learning and action; analysing consumption patterns and habits at ISB; modelling responsible citizenship; providing venues for meaningful social action and reducing our impact on the environment.''

The school also offers an ISB Earth Award to individuals or collective projects, which raise awareness on environmental issues and inspire students to fight for change.

The school's canteen now offers organic dairy products from Dairy Home where animals receive an organic diet and the farm follows free range practices.

Some of the eco changes at ISB from 2004-2006:

FChanged paper to a new brand that has an eco-friendly record and makes paper from fast growing plants; not trees.

FSet up a reuse paper tray.

FEco-class room checklist. Each classroom had a contract and they chose what they would accomplish on that contract, e.g., to use only one air-con instead of three.

FBan on styrofoam.

FOrganised Earth Week.

FNo disposable dishes for bake sales.

Eco changes from 2006-2007, since the forming of

the Green Panthers:

FAn improved recycling centre that collects batteries, tabs from cans, juice boxes, printer cartridges and mobile phone batteries.

FBlue box for each class for paper recycling.

F Reduced the plastic bag use in the cafeteria from 300-plus a day to zero!

FStopped the use of paper cups for sports teams and helped encourage teams to use reusable water bottles.

FWeekly eco tips in the student bulletin.

FWeekend trip with 25 students to Khao Yai to work with Wildaid and learn about conservation.

FEnsure new building and campus design has the environment in mind.

FIntroduced dishes to use at events instead of disposable materials.

FImplemented a no idling policy in the parking lot.

F An Inconvenient Truth shown in middle and high school.

FHosted Earth Week and Earth Fair.

Changes in 2007/2008:

FLooking into organic rice and other products. Fair trade is also considered.

FStarted the Green Panthers blog, isb-green-panther.blogspot.org

FPlanted over 50 trees around campus with the students.

FCollecting newspapers and plastic bags and donate to Thaicraft Fair Trade organisation to make crafts to sell and help poor communities.

FEco weekend trip with WWF.

FStarted a tree nursery at school, with plant-a-tree-today to help ISB reduce and offset its carbon footprint.

Among the many plans for the future is a project to set up a biogas converter, which will convert food waste into biogas for use in the kitchen. And once again this year ISB will be holding its Earth Week from April 21 to 25 with several activities and special events related to the environment each day. The week rounds up on April 25 with the 2nd annual Earth Fair joined by other ''green'' corporations.

How are you helping to reduce your carbon footprint? Share your eco-friendly activities with us by emailing usnisas

Why Facebook has the right blend of privacy and features

While most of Thailand may be addicted to the heavily translated and localised Hi5 social networking site, I prefer Facebook. If anything, my attraction to the social networking platform is verging on addiction. Why? For me, Facebook offers just the right blend of privacy and control while at the same time being a platform for third party applications long before Google spoke of Open Social.

Long before the days of social networking, mankind came up with a rather curious way of keeping in touch with people without actually having to actively keep in touch: People forwarded (occasionally) interesting email messages to each other.

This social act was not so much about the message being forwarded in itself, but rather it is about implicitly saying "Hi there, I'm still here as your friend but since we are so busy with life in Bangkok, I'm forwarding you this little bit of nothing instead." An analogy in the animal kingdom would be the way monkeys in a troupe groom one another and search for fleas even when there are none.

However, the problem of these early social networks, or rather social trees, is that repeatedly pressing forward left a rather curious trail for all those downstream to see with email addresses being exposed in a free-for-all.

Then came business networks like LinkedIn and Plaxo. Useful to some they may be, but it was sort of boring and became a chore. Salesmen may like it but I for one did not have the time to keep my LinkedIn profile anywhere close to up to date.

At the same time, the social networking platform-cum-blogs and picture sharing sites aimed at teenagers such as MySpace, Hi5, Orkut (I think - I've never figured that one out) came into being. Rather than forwarding a series of pictures to a hundred people and have 30 bounce back because it filled up their in-box, posting pictures and sharing them for all to see became a viable option. Only problem is that all too often, it really was for all to see.

And then there was Facebook and the world seemed to coalesce around the Facebook model. The sites aimed at teenagers stepped up their privacy controls and the business oriented networks added some fun and some blog-like and photo sharing features.

Why does Facebook work for me? Top of the list is privacy. I only add people I meet and want to be friends with, ignoring for the most past some people who seem to want to have thousands of friends or sources I have met for interviews only in passing.

Most of my list consists of journalists from the region and probably 90 per cent of the Singaporean public relations community (bad mistake, I know, but it is a bit too late to start afresh now). Facebook allows one allow friends access to a full or limited profile, so most of the people I want to be friends with can feed my fish, plant things in my garden or play Scrabulous with me, while those I prefer to keep at arm's length see somewhat less.

What I like most is being able to keep up to date with what is happening with friends without having to actively email them junk or IM them. It is always nice to see the messages, wall posts and ice cream roll in from friends when I set my status to show my frustration at my day job, often when half a dozen companies want me on the same couple of days and refuse to take no for an answer rather than frustration at the job per se.

Then there is the platform nature of Facebook. While Facebook has some built-in applications such as the picture sharing albums and notes (blogs), I seem to spend most of my time playing Scrabulous, a Scrabble-like game. Journalists all over the region seem to think that they are good at the English language but getting to play games against one another really sorts the men from the boys. Cheating is all too easy given the asynchronous nature of the game (some games can take days to finish especially if players are busy or out of the office) so it boils down to an honour system, often with taunts for allowable but impossibly obscure words.

Then there is the factoid like finding out that one particular PR manager has played nearly 200 Scrabulous games while her office staff think she is beavering away at work rather than maintain "media relations" through a friendly game.

Yes, I spent too much time each day popping into Facebook, but more often than not my interaction is not with a Facebook developed application.

One interesting social quirk I find is that people from the same organisation are often not friends with each other even though all of them seem to be happy with being friends with a third party journalist (which is probably much more dangerous). Perhaps it is about not wanting one's boss to see how much flirting messages are on one's wall or not wanting colleagues to see you in a suggestive bikini by the beach.

Recently, I created an event on Facebook inviting people to my mini-birthday party in Singapore and had a rather varied cross section of the Singaporean IT community turn up. A tad unorthodox, but it goes to show that the virtual social networking world and real world do intertwine.

And then there is the politics. Groups exist where people who are not direct friends can congregate and post messages and share media, much like on a good BBS system. One group set up by Democrat Party interns has a grand total of, wait for it, 218 members. Not that the group seems to have much going on in it.

Bangkok senator Rosana Tositrakul's Facebook group probably did not make much of a difference, with the 63 members' votes hardly making a blip in her 740,000 supporters.

More telling is the comparison of a pair of pro- and anti-Thaksin groups, with members of the "I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who dislike Thaksin Shinawatra" group outnumbering the "Thaksin Shinawatra appreciation society" by 2,314 to 205, or more than 10 to one. But still, 2,300 is still a long way off one million. Early days perhaps, and it will be interesting to see how these groups fare come the next general election and whether we will one day elect a blogger to parliament as has been the case in Malaysia.

Social networking sites offer everything that is offered in real life, but in a way that cares not about geographical distance or time zone. My best scrabulous buddy is a journalist in Malaysia, while the one who seems to always come up with words of encouragement when I am down works for Sun Microsystems in Singapore. Some might argue that computers take away from life and real-world social interactions, but could I build and maintain close friendships like this with friends in so many countries in the real world? I think not.

MICROBLOGS on Mobile phone TAKE ON NET BLOGOSPHERE

Mobile Internet devices and online communities are merging to a new kind of Web diary: "microblogging", where people fire off terse missives about what they are doing or thinking at any given moment.

The postings are barebones, on-the-go versions of online journals in which people share their lives and dreams, hence the name microblogging.

"Blogging has evolved and become more formalised," Christian Crumlish, Yahoo Design Pattern Library curator and author of social networking book "The Tower of Many", said.

"A beautiful blog entry is an art form and it takes time. So, microblogging fits into your life where you take a minute or two to see what's going on and go back to work".

Hot website Twitter has attracted a large following since its launch more than two years ago as a way to share Haiku-like text message updates with unlimited numbers of friends instantly through mobile telephones.

The service entices users with its signature line, "What are you doing?"

Start-up Utterz, publicly unveiled last year, goes a step further by allowing users to post text, video, photos or audio from mobile phones to the Internet with a simple call.

"We want to use the technology that you have in your pocket," Utterz president Randy Corke said.

"We want to make blogging as easy as talking," he said.

Training helps bloggers hone professionalism

Miami real estate agent Lucas Lechuga began blogging to share his knowledge of the local market. He didn't bargain for a $25 million defamation lawsuit when he wrote that a Miami developer had gone bankrupt decades ago.

In Lake Geneva, Wis., commodities trader Gary Millitte registered the Internet domain name LakeGenevaNews.com eight years ago, but is so worried about the legal boundaries of writing online that he still hasn't started the ultra-local news site.

Non-journalists entering the world of blogs, online feedback forums, online videos and news Web sites provide information that newspapers and other media can't or don't. But many are now turning to professional journalists for help with dilemmas they're facing: When is something libelous? What's the difference between opinion and news? And how do you find public documents?

About a dozen would-be reporters navigated the basics of journalism at a recent training offered by the Society of Professional Journalists in Chicago. The group plans similar seminars this month in Greensboro, N.C., and Los Angeles.

Lechuga, who didn't attend the training, said it would have been a good idea. Having jumped into the world of online publishing with a finance degree, he said the claims against him -- which are still pending -- arose from a question of semantics, and he would have chose his words differently if he had a second chance.

"It would definitely have been something that would be worthwhile and I'd (have) been able to prevent this," said Lechuga.

Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., which supports working journalists, praised the effort to offer training to so-called citizen journalists.

"I think that what we're moving toward is some king of positioning between amateur and professional," Clark said.

Amateurs have long contributed to professional news reports, including the film of John F. Kennedy's assassination and photos from the Virginia Tech massacre last year, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004, Clark said.

Now, many distribute their content on their own, and some have gotten into trouble, said Clint Brewer, the national president of SPJ.

Geoff Dougherty, editor of the Web site ChiTownDailyNews.org and a presenter at the SPJ program, is trying to prevent that by offering his reporters online training.

With a $340,000 Knight News Challenge, he's creating a team of 77 to report on the smallest of meetings in every city neighborhood -- gatherings that mainstream news organizations don't cover.

"I see us in five years as the go-to source for Chicago news," said Dougherty. "It's a big goal."

Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, said more than 100 judgments valued at $17 million have been handed down against bloggers over the last three years -- about 60 percent for defamation, 25 percent for copyright infringement and 10 percent involving privacy.

"It's the tip of the iceberg," Cox said. "Bloggers are being asked to write checks. The threats against bloggers are very real. The costs are very real."

Other groups offer help, including NowPublic.com -- a site that gathers photos, video and news tips from the public and distributes them to news organizations, including The Associated Press. NowPublic, funded with venture capital, offers resources for contributors and helps them learn to police themselves, said co-founder Michael Tippett.

"A lot of our members are aspiring journalists," Tippett said. "They'll get half of it right. We'll push them to getting all of it right."

MJ Tam, who has blogged about motherhood for eight years and attended the Chicago workshop, said she worried about how far she could go in rating baby products.

"I just want to make sure I'm doing the right thing," said Tam. "How far can I take criticism? What's considered libel? I need those basics."

Horribly good internet plot to kill off TV

The creator of Buffy has broken Hollywood's grip by launching a superhero show on a blogIn the case of Joss Whedon, it was boredom, not necessity, that proved the mother of invention.

While he was on strike with fellow Hollywood screenwriters earlier this year, the creator of TV dramas such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer decided there had to be 'something more effective than walking up and down in a line with a placard'. So Whedon rounded up a few friends and set about making something quite unlike anything the world has seen before.

The result is Doctor Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog - found at doctorhorrible.net - and it has been an instant summer success that is uniquely difficult to categorise. It is a TV show that has never been shown on TV, an internet video that looks nothing like an internet video. It was made for the fun of it, not for ratings or profit, and put on the web in the hope that someone would notice. The fact that they did, in their millions, has delivered a shock to the Hollywood system, raising the spectre of writers, directors and actors bypassing major producers and selling directly to audiences online.

'I was told several times that it's impossible,' said Whedon, speaking from Los Angeles. 'But you can to an extent write your own rules. I realised there was nothing I wanted to do more, and the only person going to finance something as strange as this was me.'

Funny and fantastical, the musical adventure features aspiring super-villain Dr Horrible, who is hoping to defeat his nemesis, the arrogant Captain Hammer, win his dream girl and join the Evil League of Evil. Bad at being bad, his ray guns misfire and he inadvertently blows his cover by blogging his dastardly plots. The show, which first aired just over a fortnight ago, consists of three parts, runs for about 40 minutes and is neither a YouTube clip nor a movie. As Whedon noted: 'It's not "your cat falls off a TV set" or Ben-Hur - there is something in the middle.'

Dr Horrible owes its existence to the strike which paralysed Hollywood from last November to February this year, a dispute that partly concerned how much writers of TV series should earn when the studios put their content online. With other work on hold, Whedon's creative response to the issue was to sidestep the studios and come up with a show of his own. He got help from his brothers, Jed and Zack, and friends in the industry.

Whedon, 44, recalled: 'The show was written by our id. It came partly out of love and "We are the goofiest people about and say it loud". That joy gave us a sense of freedom. We had no restrictions on length or budget except what I was willing to spend - how much can I throw at this midlife crisis?'

The immediate cult hit status of the finished product appears to have exploded some myths about online viewing habits. 'Everyone has their theory about how long something can be on the internet. I know that if it's good enough to hold people's interest, it doesn't matter how long it is.' When the show was made freely available last month the site generated 200,000 hits per hour and soon crashed. Whedon added: 'First, part of this was just making an internet event. Second, if you can make money from this, you really have a business model.'

But that has not happened yet. Whedon, who will only say that he invested a sum 'below six figures' in the production, 'significantly less than one hour of a TV show', has not yet recouped the money, but believes he will if he can secure a DVD release.

He also intends to make more web-only productions like Dr Horrible, and foresees a new form of artistic community. 'It's a way to tell stories unencumbered. I want to work for a model where the internet could be the whole thing. We could do a feature, we could do a play, we could do whatever we want to do. There is no way this medium can be ignored, especially by me, after years of trying and failing to get TV shows made. The opportunity to put something pure straight out there is too good to miss.'

Although Whedon has the head start of a huge online fan base from his earlier work, other writers and directors may now be tempted to follow his example.

Cynthia Littleton, a TV writer at Variety magazine, said: 'It's proved you can make a big splash, get a lot of attention and be creative and inventive in a somewhat new medium. Put it online and people will come and check you out. There's no question that, going out on a limb like this, Joss has got other producers with the ability to write cheques watching very carefully.'

Attack of the killer zombies

Somewhere out in cyberspace, a hacker gathered the zombie computers he had been arranging with email worms, viruses and Trojans; he used them to launch a big hack attack on Akamai, the web distribution company, and knocked Yahoo, Google, and some Microsoft and Apple Computer sites offline by bringing the domain name server (DNS) system to its knees. Playful scientists wrote the first viral worm for smart phones; now the hackers know how to do it.

Technology came of age; the US government turned down an application by United Airlines for a loan to get out of bankruptcy; hours later, the House of Representatives passed a sweet tax bill custom written for the technology industry, right down to reduced foreign revenue taxes, tax credits for research and development, protection for stock offers to employees, and support for outsourcing to foreign companies.

That grumbling you heard late each night last weekend was the sound of yuppiephone fans as they were told to check their phones at the gate or go home from the US Open golf tournament, which banned them totally, no exceptions.

Apple Computer generously allowed British, French and German people to use its iTunes online music store but our kind of Asian person remains barred from the service.

Independent artists and labels got together to accuse Apple Computer, iTunes and Steve "President for Life" Jobs of trying to extort them into horrible contracts; Apple promised less money than artists from major labels in return for a three-year exclusive contract and implied, "Nice little band you've got here, be a shame if something happened to it."

Munich, Germany, declared after a one-year trial that Linux works; it began a 14,000-computer migration to open source from Windows; the Oktoberfesters will use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office and the Mozilla browser instead of anything else.

The Boston Consulting Group was struck off the cocktail party invitations and New Year's card lists of US companies after it said: "Go East, young companies"; BCG says outsourcing is not the bane of US workers but the hope of the US economy, and the first companies who outsource will be in at the beginning of the next mini-trend of globalisation. The US Bureau of Labour Statistics said maybe 2.5% of lost US jobs went overseas _ 4,000 jobs maximum.

If you are getting a lot of spam these days and need a 100MB email box to store it, Yahoo will give it to you for free; for 400 baht a year (down from 600 baht) Yahoo will give you two gigabytes for your spam plus all virus attachments plus legitimate email _ and a POP3 link to boot; this is only because Yahoo loves you and has nothing to do with Google's Gmail, which will give you one gig of spam storage for free as soon as Google clears the vapour from its offer.

"This was our D-day," bragged an organiser; guns drawn, hundreds of German police fanned out across the country, kicked down doors in coordinated 5am raids and arrested 12 of the country's most dangerous criminals _ film pirates.

Spam is all right if your politics demand it; the leftish anti-Bush Moveon.org spammed 2.2 million innocent people to demand they see the anti-Bush movie Fahrenheit 9/11; this information is just in case you wondered why governments won't ban spam.

Microsoft released yet another test version of its Service Pack 2 security upgrade and bug fix for Windows XP; the company won't even answer questions about whether the update will be ready for the latest final, unshakeable deadline of next month.

Now that it has solved the spam problem and has a search engine on the way, Microsoft will offer an anti-virus program; actually, Microsoft had an anti-virus program a decade ago but it was atrocious. The scare-monger Eric Drexler admitted that he was totally wrong with his 1986 forecast that nanotechnology's self-replicating machines would turn the world into a grey goo; men can't even make such machines.

Northwest Airlines turned over all data on all passengers to the US government because of all that terrorism that is going on; passengers sued the airline for breach of its stated privacy policy; US District Court Judge Paul Magnuson explained the company did not have to follow its privacy policy because there was no proof customers actually read it; in other words, privacy policies are just big business laughing at you, and totally unenforceable.

The US Federal Trade Commission said a "do-not-spam list" would merely give spammers another list of good email addresses to spam, so they won't have one.

Dave "Mr Blog" Winer abruptly turned off 3,000 web logs he was supporting for free, saying he simply could not afford the bandwidth; the sudden move brought mixed reactions, including praise for everything Mr Winer did to promote RSS blogging, to criticism of turning off so many people without notice.

Web's convention plans call for blanket coverage

CBS, ABC and America Online announced plans to extensively cover the summer's presidential nominating conventions in unconventional fashion. AOL's broadband subscribers can get live gavel-to-gavel coverage and express opinions on convention issues via online InstaPolls, the unit of Time Warner said . ABC-TV's Peter Jennings will anchor convention sessions on abcnewslive.com, the 24/7 streaming news channel operated by the Walt Disney Co. subsidiary, available through America Online and the RealNetworks content subscription service. CBS plans free coverage of the sessions on CBSNews.com, plus on-demand clips and news reports. (Viacom , the parent of CBS, is an investor in MarketWatch, the publisher of this report.) By contrast, the ABC, NBC and CBS television networks have announced plans to broadcast only three hours coverage of each party's convention. A highlight of the ABC Web channel's coverage of will be a one-hour, live interactive program conducted at 7 p.m. each night of the conventions. Guests will discuss issues, answer e-mailed questions from AOL subscribers, and comment on live online surveys. "During a period of heightened interest in politics and news, we're able to engage voters in the political process like never before," said Bernie Gershon, senior vice president and general manager of ABC News Digital Media Group. America Online's plans for convention coverage include a simulcast of the nightly ABC program, called "Press Pass," along with instant polls, online chat/debates and message boards. Broadband subscribers will have access to coverage of speeches and convention proceedings and news from ABC and from Time Warner's CNN. Dial-up users will get an audio stream of the ABC-provided programming. "This is built on communication," said Lewis Dvorkin, editor-in-chief of AOL News. "There's not much coverage (planned) on television. But the larger thing is that politics is turning into a public scrimmage, and if you want to you can participate right on the (PC) screen." Hear Dvorkin talk about AOL's convention plans. (Portions of AOL's convention coverage will also be available to non-subscribers via the Web at www. electionguide04.com.) BBC to Webcast Athens games live The British Broadcasting Corp. is planning live Web coverage of the Summer Olympics from Athens beginning Aug. 13. "We will be maximizing our rights deal to provide video coverage for U.K. broadband users," Aashish Chandarana, broadband project manager for BBC Sports Interactive, told Wired news. In particular, the BBC's sports Web site will feature a live video simulcast from the Beeb's broadcasts. Chandarana realizes his largest potential audience will be at work. "When people go home, they're not going to watch the Olympics on the Internet. They're going to watch it on TV," he said, according to Wired. In the U.S., the Olympics rights holder NBC will not stream the games live but will offer video highlights on NBCOlympics.com. Evan Silverman, executive producer for the Web site, said the General Electric subsidiary is "taking a huge step forward in showing competitive footage online for the first time. " He said no video will be available until after NBC has completed its telecast of the event. It's becoming a broadband world Nearly 63 million active Internet users employed a high-speed connection to access the Web in May, according to researchers at Nielsen/NetRatings . That compares to 66.5 million who used dial-up. Four years ago, high-speed connections accounted for 9 percent of active users. "Broadband growth (has) shot up 40 percentage points, while dial-up users continued a steady decline," the researchers reported. Nielsen/NetRatings also said broadband surfers access the Web almost twice as much. High-speed users spent an av+

erage of 17 hours online in May, compared to narrowband surfers who were on slightly less than 10 hours. Short bytes Google said it acquired Picasa, a software company focused on helping people manage their libraries of digital photographs. The Pasadena, Calif.-based company also operates a peer-to-peer network to allow people to share photos and chat about them. In May, Picasa announced a deal with Google-owned Blogger to make it easy for Web loggers to include photos in their blogs. Financial terms of Google's purchase of Picasa weren't disclosed. Tune in You can also hear Internet Daily.

Did Bill Gates shake the blogosphere?

Bill Gates told Warren Buffett about blogging on Thursday. Buffett, the legendary investor and moving force behind Berkshire Hathaway , was in attendance at the eighth annual CEO summit put on by Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. Also on hand were Barry Diller of InteractiveCorp , Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard , Jeff Bezos of Amazon. com and Dell Inc.'s own Michael Dell. They all heard Gates describe blogs and RSS feeds as tools that "make it very easy to communicate" with customers, suppliers and employees. The result, according to New York public-relations executive Steve Rubel, is likely to be a number of meetings of executives and their PR people and IT managers to explore this "blogging thing Bill Gates talked about." Rubel, of CooperKatz & Co., also wrote Friday morning, "The blogosphere changed. It feels very much like 1995 all over again." Gates' endorsement of blogging, Rubel said, is likely to lead to more businesses using it: "Bottom-up business communication will only gain steam here." But there's more to the story. Gates' comments were also "a veiled declaration of war on Six Apart, Userland, Google and anyone else who makes blogging tools." Microsoft has indeed been a booster of blogs. More than 700 employees publish the online diaries, often discussing projects and software in development. One of the more ambitious is Channel9, the work of five company employees who "want a new level of communication between Microsoft and developers." It includes descriptions of new technology, video interviews of Microsoft program managers and developers, and some gossip. FBI plans fall piracy offensive An official of the Federal Bureau of Investigation said the agency hopes to prosecute 50 "significant spammers" later this year. Jana Monroe, assistant director of the FBI's cyber division, told a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Thursday there are 100 possible targets. "Such cases may be investigated and prosecuted as computer intrusion matters or as online cyberfrauds," she said. The CAN-SPAM Act's provisions may also be considered and applied. Short bytes SportsLine.com, a money-losing provider of sports media on the Internet, said it hired an investment bank to explore strategic alternatives. SportsLine , which has been seeing increased competition in the business of providing online fantasy sports, said Thursday that it hired Perseus Group, an independent investment bank. Terra.com , a portal for Hispanic Web sites, will distribute 30 Internet radio stations featuring Spanish-language music and content. The stations are programmed by U.S. and international DJs using Live365.com's broadcasting service. "This relationship underscores how Live365 can readily leverage its consumer-driven programming model to provide relevant content for specific audiences," said David Porter, director of business development for Live365. The stations are available on Terra.com's music channel. America Online is reworking its software for older PCs. On the heels of beginning a test of software catering to broadband users, the Time Warner unit is also developing a slimmed-down client for computers with less than 120 megabytes of memory, according to BetaNews.com. The software will be available for dial-up users only. Tune in You can also hear Internet Daily. Call your local CBS Radio station for broadcast times. Internet Daily can be heard on your Pocket PC PDA, too! .

Battle looming over standard for web forms

Just because you are the committee responsible for a standard doesn't mean that everyone will agree with you. Consider the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the new Web Forms 2.0 specification, which has been put out for final comment.

There is a splinter group of browser makers with some heavyweight names like Apple Computer, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software called WHAT-WG, or the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. They have their own ideas on what should be in the specification.

Now you must be thinking that Microsoft has to be in this mix somewhere _ and you are correct. Essentially there is the W3C, which is saying the answer is XForms, Microsoft, which says it's XAML, Macromedia opting for Flash MX, and Mozilla is saying that it's XUL.

Let's look at what is at stake here. Forms based on current web standards are used all over the place on the web. When you order something from Amazon, or surf with Yahoo, create you new blog entry or log in to a system somewhere, you are using forms.

The new XForms specification has advances on current technology but it not compatible with current browsers, so everyone is going to need a plug-in to use the technology. By contrast, Web Forms 2.0 is compatible with your browser but relies on scripting, which some people say is not good enough for corporate applications.

WHAT-WG will submit its proposal to the W3C for consideration, which may mean two new standards instead of one. Worse, we could end up with different people using any one of the four available technologies, removing the concept of an open, easy to use forms system for Internet users.

Microsoft has been against XForms since the beginning _ why support an open standard when you can push your own? It will be included in their next browser releases.

The industry _ that is, your company and mine _ just wants better forms processing that allows better communication and connectivity with the back end processes like the database system.

The last update was with the HTML 4.0 spec we saw in 1999, and in Internet terms that is a couple of generations old already. As far as the person filling out the form is concerned, they don't really care as long as their information is collected, their order processed or their bill paid.

For developers and those who have to do something with the information it does become an issue, especially if the user needs a special browser to access the system. If you are Amazon you don't want to have to tell people they can only order from Amazon if they have Brand X browser installed.

Any selection by W3C that requires the above restriction means that W3C has not done its job, which is to produce a standard for all web users and browser writers. At the same time, if Microsoft's browser will not support what W3C comes out with, then that will be a lot of people unable to access the new forms.

There are a lot of concerned glances in Microsoft's direction these days. There is real concern about Microsoft's grand vision for Windows Longhorn applications built in the XML-based XAML markup language using Longhorn's Avalon graphics system. Browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Apple's Safari will be useless to access these Internet-based Windows applications.

So we have a battle looming over how forms will be rendered and supported. It may mean losing an open standard provided under HTML now and it may mean everyone with a browser needing an upgrade or an add-in. Worse we could be locked into a fully proprietary model.

It does show that cracks exist in the web technology groups and that there are potential consequences for you and me in the near future. It also could show that we are facing a problem going forward with any type of open standards for Internet development.

People are already doing development work with XForms, a standard first proposed in 2000, but as usual the W3C was too slow and other technologies have grown up in the gap. Bottom line: how your forms development is going to be handled in a year's time will depend on how W3C tackles this issue.

Blog - the 'on-demand' culture

Richard Sambrook, CEO of the BBC's World Service, shares his insight on the importance of the Internet, blogging and the development of journalism from the advent of the printing press 300 years ago to today's uncharted waters of news-on-demand through mobile devices.

"In the early 1990s, the BBC recognised the importance of the Internet and invested heavily in it. We set up the BBC News web site, which led on to other forms of digital service such as broadband and mobile services.

"Today we are only beginning to fully understand the "on-demand" culture for news. On-demand and particularly wireless services are going to have a particularly important future. Electronic news will be crucial. We are looking at how we can develop our services to take advantage of video on demand, broadband and the latest mobile handsets and networks."

It has been suggested that the number of news viewers is in decline with the new generation, that only the older generation are interested in the news. "I don't think this is true," Sambrook explained. "What is changing is the way people absorb their news. The younger generation, the younger demographics, are very interested in news if they can control how and when they receive it. This is why on-demand will become increasingly important. This level of control started with the Internet but it is clear we are now on a curve with much to learn. Technology continues to move rapidly and we have to try to keep up with that.

"There is a fundamental shift going on between broadcasters telling the world what we think they want to know and the audience being able to pull, on demand, what they want to know. The fundamental relationship between broadcasters and their audience in general is changing."

So what does he think of the latest trend of Internet blogging?

"Blogging is simply a means of publication, but one in which the barriers of entry to public debate and public discourse have fallen to zero. You can set up a blog for no financial outlay whatsoever and if you understand the Internet and get your site linked to, you can build up a readership quite easily. Yet, you get an awful number of sites which are very opinionated and unrestrained. You do not really know what you're getting when you read a blog.

"On the other hand, for the exact same reasons, it is one of the most exciting developments in this field I have seen in almost 30 years as a journalist because so many people are now taking part in public debate. It's like the bringing in of the printing press 300 years ago when suddenly all these pamphlets appeared which were all very opinionated. In the end it all shakes down. People learn which ones to trust and which ones not to trust, and a degree of regulation will be bought to bear. I'm sure something similar will happen to blogging. Some of the wilder ones will die off as people will understand that they are not to be trusted. There will be fewer groups of blogs which are trusted and become more part of the media which we all today recognise. But I think the opening up of the public debate is a really interesting initiative and in the end it will be very helpful.

"I don't think that just because you write a blog you can automatically call yourself a journalist and therefore you do not get the same kinds of protection. Rights _ as in the right to address the public and take part in public debate _ also come with responsibility. What we've seen to date is that bloggers are keen to assert their rights to take part in the public discourse but haven't taken a lot of care in their responsibility towards public debate and to ensure that they act responsibility, that they are accurate and fair and all of those other journalistic principles. Until that is understood and better established I do not think they can necessarily expect _ though I don't want to rule anything out _ to attract the same kind of protection as journalists have."

Sambrook said that the BBC viewed Asia as an incredibly interesting region which will only grow in importance. The vibrancy and confidence of Bangkok is clear to see and though nothing specific has been decided it is highly likely the BBC will be investing more in Thailand in the future.

"Asia is going to be an important inspiration for the rest of the world, a source of innovation and trends in fashion and culture. A global broadcaster like the BBC will have to report on that but hopefully we will benefit from that as well as we learn from Asia."

Blogging more evolution than revolution

And they say that the technology sector is full of hype _ well, it's nothing compared to what's coming out of the new-ish phenomenon known as blogging. As if there wasn't enough self-importance going around in the so-called blogosphere (last time I'll use that expression, I promise), media outlets in the entire media-sphere fueled the egos out there by suggesting 2004 was the year of the blogger.

So now everyone's getting a blog and it will increasingly eat up our bandwidth _ and will continue to do so as bloggers track back and link back to other bloggers ad nauseam like a dog chasing its tail. And yes, I have been ranting about this since before they suggested that bloggers would see the extinction of the species we now know as journalists.

My biggest beef is this: Don't they know we've been through this in the media and on the Internet countless times before? Surely one media organisation or commentator could have pointed to the fact that this is not that different to the Usenet service of the early Internet days. Okay, so it's not exactly the same, but there are enough similarities to make a connection.

Usenet's newsgroups also provided a forum for like-minded people to discuss single subjects, whether it was technology or tapestry or anything else. There were also star posters _ people who gave their views on a daily basis and whose views were sought out by a large-ish audience. They were also a good source of non-mainstream news on a particular topic, good for publicising an event or two, and a useful place for forward-thinking journalists to go to for leads. All of the above pretty well sums up the attraction of web logs, I would have thought.

But it's not just Usenet that was a precursor to today's blogging outbreak. People or groups have been doing something similar with web sites since the beginning, with Matt Drudge's Drudge Report an obvious example. But an even simpler _ and longer-standing _ medium for someone or an organisation to create a news source is through the humble email list.

Dave Farber, one of the pioneers of the Internet and a former chief technologist of the FCC, runs an email list called IP (which actually stands for Interesting People rather than the protocol). It's probably one of the most active forums I've encountered and certainly has some of the best insights into telecoms and Internet technology and policy you're likely to find anywhere. Certainly there's no blog equivalent and Farber himself doesn't seem to have felt the need to create one.

So that gets rid of myth number one _ blogs aren't really new, rather they're a continuation of a long-standing tradition of using the Internet as a form of one-to-many communications. Myth number two is that suddenly everyone will become a journalist and the media as we know it will not exist.

Of course, the fact that the earlier forms of Internet communications didn't wipe out dominant media already accounts for myth number two. But I think it's also worth looking at who these bloggers are that are going to change the face of reporting. The fact is, any technology blog worth visiting is either written by a technology luminary _ Tom Evslin, the founder and former CEO of ITXC is a recent new addition to the world of blogging and a good example _ or an existing technology writer who also reports for the mainstream media, such as Silicon Valley reporters Om Malik and Dan Gillmore (who recently wound up his Silicon Valley eJournal).

In the case of people like Tom Evslin, they're read because of their industry knowledge, not their reporting skills, besides which they're never going to accept the meager wages that journalism has to offer in any case. Of course, there will also be some that slip through the cracks _ an outsider who's neither luminary nor hack _ who creates a web log and finds a loyal following. And any mainstream media firm that's thinking smartly is probably going to offer that person a job (which they'll no doubt take, because running a blog has even less pecuniary rewards than writing for a company).

Don't get me wrong _ I'm an avid follower of most of the worthwhile tech blogs out there. But they really are just one of many additional sources of information that have always existed.