Posts Tagged ‘online’
Within Europe, we are fortunate to have a relatively good penetration of Internet access, admittedly some countries are better off than others; for example in Finland, the Internet is a human right and broadband access is a legal requirement for the entire country.
What is more interesting: the world economic downturn, or its immediate effect on your neighbourhood?
We at Media140 do not presume to preempt your news consumption choices, but based on our own – perhaps base – preferences, we are betting on the latter.
After a boom in global Internet news which has lasted the best part of a decade, it seems local perspectives have gained a kind of drawing power of which newspapers can only dream.
Nevertheless, magnificent Media140 blogger Peter Bouvier had never heard of hyper-local news until we asked him to look into the rise and rise of borough- and even block-based micro-sites.
Peter discovered that while they represent geographically small districts, hyper-local sites are taking over large tracts of the online news industry.
Peter works as the social media editor for Britain’s National Health Service, has delusions of grandeur and is currently working on a trilogy of epic children’s poems called the Tales of Tikulo.
We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a newsflash.
The monoliths of global and national news organisations are crumbling! Well, okay, that is admittedly not much of a newsflash, since it has been occurring for quite some time. However, it does beg the question; what is replacing them?
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Are you out and about, reading this post on a smartphone?
If so, you are part of a growing number of consumers – one in four in the United Kingdom – whom businesses can no longer afford to ignore. However, playing the mobile marketing game carries some risks – other retailers are now in the position to whisk your customers away with a single push-notification, writes Gareth Harmer.
Gareth is a passionate early-adopter of all things techie and cool who designs products for a British mobile telecommunications company. For more of his musings on how businesses and media outlets could be using the real-time web to greater advantage, check out his geekblog.
If you are a business-person who is real-time-web-savvy enough to be reading Media140, chances are you have your social media strategy pretty well sorted, with staples like Twitter and Facebook and perhaps even a corporate blog as well.
Good for you!
However, there is a whole other audience who may be slipping silently out of your reach, should they simply leave the chair in front of their home or work computer.
Image courtesy of Twitter.com
The Tall Man with Glasses, aka Stuart Witts, began his career in digital marketing back when the term social media referred to the act of writing one’s name on the side of the railway lines. This was a time before Dreamweaver, when the humble Notepad was the only HTML editor of choice.
What better perspective from which to write about Twitter’s dizzyingly speedy rise to its current status as an indispensable tool?
Stuart looks at the way news consumers and gatherers, and those who simply love a great conversation have come to rely on Twitter, and examines whether or not they would benefit if the service had competition.
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Every time the dreaded fail whale appears, doom mongers surface and spread alarmist tales. During the recent earthquake in Haiti, there were no exceptions to that rule.
After one of the aftershocks, Twitter crashed for 90 minutes and concerns over its weaknesses as a single point of contact were raised.
In a sense, the fact that concerns were raised at all bears testimony to Twitter’s meteoric rise as a communications medium. For it to be considered so important during events of this magnitude is frankly astounding, but as Uncle Ben advised the young Spiderman; ‘With great power comes great responsibility’.
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Image courtesy of the US Navy via Wikimedia Commons
It is now more than a fortnight since Haiti’s devastating earthquake. Billions of dollars in donations have poured in to relief operations, as stories of devastation and miraculous survival have gushed out of Port-Au-Prince.
Digital strategist Jonathan Waddingham and his team at online fundraising website JustGiving.com have not had much time to breathe since horror struck the Caribbean island nation on January 12. However, as the chaos gives way to rebuilding efforts, Jonathan takes a moment to reflect on how response to this disaster reflects changes in the way in which charities are now making full use of the real-time web.
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As news broke on January 12 of a massive earthquake in Haiti, some of the first details to emerge were from charities on the ground. In the past, this may have occurred via press release, a day or so after the event; this time the first information came in, via Tweets. Later, it came via blogs, phone blogs, photos and videos – all of them, online channels.
The 2005 Asian Tsunami was a milestone, in terms of the adoption of the internet by charities as a way of raising money. It was the first time that the total of online donations amounted to more than the total raised via traditional cash giving. Haiti’s terrible tragedy may prove a similar landmark in how charities use the real-time web.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Digital strategist Dean Economou takes a personal look at the origins of democracy and compares the principles and systems upon which it was originally built with the equivalent technologies available today.
Dean, with his own Greek ancestry, is well-qualified to consider the earliest origins of the democratic system. Additionally, anyone who loves an acronym will be amused by his proposals for a “National Online Democracy” – or even better, a global one.
Dean is an innovator with a keen interest in the interplay of technology and people. He has held a senior role at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, and also founded a major telecoms vendor. He currently works at National ICT Australia.
Democracy, in its most widely accepted definition, means the people having power over how they are ruled. That is fundamentally how the ancient Greeks, early Sumerian cities and forward-thinking contemporary communities in the Bihar region of India conceived democracy – apart, of course, from their exclusion of the women and the poor people.
In these small ancient cities, with relatively few citizens, it was then still feasible for nearly everyone to meet and make decisions on anything that mattered. These citizens had direct power.
As populations grew and cities expanded, direct representation became increasingly impractical. In response, a new system gradually emerged over the centuries. It was a compromise which allowed representation, but necessarily within the limitations of the existing communications, transport and information technologies of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Via physical ballot, citizens would elect a local representative who would then participate in government on their behalf. Representatives were charged with acting in the interests of their electorate, but not necessarily according to their wishes. We still use this system and we call it representative democracy.
Those compromises are no longer needed with our vastly more powerful technology which allows a significant number of people in the developed world to communicate instantly and to find out almost any information they want within seconds.
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