Along with Caltex job losses and concerns over whether Our Leisel has thunder thighs, I woke this morning to news that Kristen cheated on R-Patz. Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson – for those not yet…
Does Western media jump on Chinese “censorship” stories with a little too much zeal?
Thomas Hawk
Last week, Chinese internet users noticed the two Mandarin characters for “truth” could not be searched on Sina Weibo, the most popular microblogging platform in China. On July 12,Tom Philips, Shanghai…
It’s time for Australian broadcasters to get smart about how they show live sport. If they don’t, we’ll go elsewhere.
Tim McFarlane
The Olympic Games are a fascinating yardstick for how much things have changed in the preceding four years. As Beijing’s fake fireworks beamed across our TV screens, Kevin Rudd was still Prime Minister…
Within hours of launching, the New York Times Sina Weibo account was suspended.
cn.nytimes.com
The New York Times’ (NYT) entry into the Chinese media market is off to a seemingly rocky start. Two days ago, the company launched its Chinese website – cn.nytimes.com – and a corresponding Sina Weibo…
Nearly a third of Australians use social media sites such as Facebook at work and aren’t concerned about being caught by…
Thanks to digital medium such as email and Facebook, privacy is being eroded in the workplace - yet Australians appear to show a worrying lack of concern about this.
Flickr/Nathan O'Nions
The development of digital monitoring and surveillance has increased dramatically over the past decade and pervades all aspects of everyday life, to the extent that most people don’t even notice it. In…
China’s citizens are catching up to the government-monitored web.
Mike Licht
In part four of our multi-disciplinary Millennium Project series, John Keane takes a look at the Chinese regime’s troubled relationship with the cyber world. Global challenge 4: How can genuine democracy…
While the photos currently coming out of Houla look like scenes of an apocalypse, anyone with Syrian friends or connections has seen equally horrifying videos and photos circulating on Facebook or Youtube…
Syria crisis: the violence mapped by the UN.
FreedomHouse
Web 2.0 tools and mobile technologies have lowered the barriers not just for people to access the internet but to create and share content. Through open-source, collaborative programs such as wikis, the…
The Convergence Review came close to understanding the nature of user-generated content but not quite.
Flickr/Bruce Clay, Inc
The Australian Federal Government’s Convergence Review, released yesterday, had a mammoth task. It was trying to establish just how to regulate the future standards, conduct, and technical aspects of today’s…
The latest instalment of the saga of the Kony 2012 movement, “Cover the Night”, launches this evening. Comedian Aamer Rahman summed up the rise and implosion of the Kony2012 campaign when he said people…
Trending on Twitter this week has been Gen Y shock and awe that Titanic isn’t just the name of a film. Apparently someone has accidentally stumbled onto the fact that the Titanic story was a tad more than…
Censorship has now caught up with new social media and technology in China.
Flickr/bfishadow
This week’s temporary suspension of comments on China’s two largest micro-blogging services Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo highlight the ruling party’s discomfort with social media’s growing popularity…
People have always sent each other letters, but now they can be worth “triple words”.
Brandice Schnabel
They are everywhere: people in cafés or supermarket queues, staring at their smartphones with determined concentration, occasionally shuffling yellow tiles of letters to use all of them in a killer move…
Sydneysiders are spotting - and “status updating” - urban cockatoos.
chris jd/Flickr
Loud, large and lovable, the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo has become a well known inhabitant of Sydney. It has always been present around the fringes of Sydney and west of the Great Dividing Range, but over…
The Kony campaign is not as accessible as it makes out.
BellaSalsaa
Much has been said about Invisible Children’s video campaign to rally awareness towards the atrocities of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. But more important is what Kony 2012 means in our ongoing relationship…
Newman and Bligh face off in real life, but how do they fare online?
AAP/Dave Hunt
With every recent election, in Australia as well as elsewhere, parties and politicians are adding further to their arsenal of digital campaigning tools. In the 2010 federal election campaign, my colleagues…