I know it’s not cat blogging Friday, but I was playing around with my new digital camera’s video feature, and I managed to capture my crazy kitten Mole Negro climbing up and forcing his way into my cheap coat closet. He’s quite the climber, and totally obsessed with getting at all my gloves, hats and…
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The Internet as Supermarket or Freeway?
The March 20th issue of the New Yorker has a nice "Talk of the Town" piece on the net neutrality debate called "Net Losses." In it they contrast competing visions of what the Internet is to become: Ultimately, Internet providers hope to manage the Internet the way a supermarket owner manages his store, charging companies…
Fair Use explained in comic book form
Here’s an awesome use of a visual medium to convey a complex subject. Bound by Law is a comic book created by the Duke Law School Center for the Study of the Public Domain to teach folks in an entertaining fashion about the principles and pitfalls of the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. The…
Learning about grassroots media activism
I’m at a media reform activist event at the New America Foundation in Washington DC. This series of panels is sponsored by the Media and Democracy coalition, which is being facilitated by Consumer’s Union. The first panel this afternoon is on “Telecommunications and Media Around the World.” The star-studded array of panelists included Jonathan Lawson…
General Assembly Creates New Human Rights Council
The UN General Assembly adopted by a vote today the proposal to replace the much-maligned Commission on Human Rights with the more streamlined and possibly more effective Human Rights Council. The only countries that voted against were the United States (which originally proposed the Council, ironically), Israel, the Marshall Islands and Palau. Given how ineffective…
Network-centric views on policy change
I attended an interesting briefing at the Ford Foundation yesterday that featured a couple of researchers who take a network / systems perspective to advocacy and policy change. The first was Richard Rogers, who teaches New Media at the University of Amsterdam. Richard spoke about "issue networks," which he defined as a set of actors…
UNESCO launches online consultation on WSIS implementation
UNESCO has just launched an online space for various actors to post recommendations and proposals on how to implement the various action lines of the WSIS Plan of Action. Basically it’s a discussion board, which I suppose I should be excited about. What’s interesting is see what areas of the WSIS agenda UNESCO sees itself…
Human Rights Madness: US holds up agreement on new Human Rights Council
US Ambassador John Bolton has been holding up agreement on the proposed Human Rights Council, despite the endorsement of the EU, several prominent human rights groups, and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. As a result, yesterday the the Commission on Human Rights decided to suspend their final session by a week to give the negotiators…
Off to media reform event on Thursday in DC
I’m attending a media reform activist event this Thursday March 16 at the New America Foundation in DC. They are hosting a series of discussions in the afternoon on domestic and international media policy issues, with several of the key leaders in media reform including Jonathan Lawson of Reclaim the Media, Jamie Love from the…
Signs that you are no longer cutting edge – SNL spoofs video podcasting
Saturday Night Lame, I mean, Live, did a skit spoofing video podcasting last night, hearkening back to the Dana Carvey and Mike Meyers parodies of cable access television programming. The main difference being that "Wayne’s World" was actually funny, while this barely passed as comedy. For those who didn’t suffer enough, you can view the…