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This video just blew me away. I've been getting everyone around me watch it and now its your turn too...

The good folks at X|Media|Lab have posted my Media '08 slide deck online.

| View | Upload your own

Kevin Anderson blogged my session - his commentary will provide some context for some of the more visual slides.

You can also find the other great presentations from Media '08 here.

Inspired by Robin Hammond's Digital News Affair feed of feeds, I've whipped up a quick aggregation of blog posts and Flickr photos from the Media '08 conference.

You can check it out here.

It's based on Technorati tags so if you're not pinging Technorati drop me a note and I'll add your blog feed in directly.

What can we learn from the business experiences of digital/tech companies trying to introduce their product in new markets? Well in China there was a pattern of failure amongst Web Companies (Ebay, Yahoo...). Even Google has gone from being a market leader to having just a fraction of the share of Baidu.com (now has 80%)

What mistakes have these companies made? Largely design issues it seems. Chinese sites have blinking lights, bright colours and lots of navigation and an incredible amount of information. If the page looks bare ("simple") people will think there isn't anything on it and move on. People are happy to click through but not happy to type.

The big problems though are :

• localisation/partnerships
• top executives are entrepreneurs
• Western companies just can't bend the rules like domestic companies can.

Having better technology isn't the only thing since if you come into China someone will figure out how to replicate and even do it better. Jonathon showed a screenshot of a site that looks exactly like Facebook but was in Chinese...

Money quote :"If you're thinking of coming to China, don't. There are much more fun ways to lose money"

Off the bat Kevin wins the award for the largest presentation ever - nearly 6 gigabytes!

He kicks it off saying it's about community, the medium and tools. He says that if you aren't actually playing in this new media space you can't create content for it. Kevin runs a quick pop quiz asking

1. Who owns a game console?
2. Who has a personal profile?
3. Who has a blog?
4. Who subscribes to an RSS feed or Twitters?
5. Created video and uploaded to YouTube?

His point? We all know how to surf the web and get e-mail and given that you're equipped to live in the digital world. If you're not able to create digital content then you're not equipped to be working in this digital world...

Vicky started the session with two videos highlighting user-submitted media that the BBC made use of in an interesting way:

• Burma Crisis: Citizen journalists were writing an "alternative Narrative" to official propaganda in Burma.
• Floods in the UK in 2007 were the biggest story that BBC Interactive Covered. Received thousands of photos and hundreds of video. This was showcased on a Google Map were coverage was embedded.

  Her interactive team consists of 13 journalists who work 24/7 and are dedicated to multiple BBC channels and platforms. They receive pictures/videos and then sift, verify and authenticate them against established journalistic standards. They then decide if these pictures could be used on the BBC platform. To ensure quality you need to invest - this isn't a way to cut costs.

  She refers to interesting research that was done for the BBC on trust and authority regarding user-contributed content. Around 1000 people were asked what they thought of user-generated content. The findings?

  • The public is in favour of it but are in favour of it being vetted first from someone.

  • A large number of people understood user-generated content and participation - but many didn't know how to participate.
  • 1/5 people polled have contributed to a news event in a fairly traditional manner - e-mail or phone in.

  Those are pretty encouraging statistics...

Kevin Anderson kicks it off his presentation discussing how to build a direct connection with the audience and begins with some of the Faux Pax that Mass Media commits when trying to use social media:

• Mass Media is focused on celebrity not engagement
• Mass Media doesn't know the difference between "provocative" and "through provoking"
• Mass Media focuses on building a network of free labour instead of relationships

He uses a some great Jon Stewart clips to finely illustrate the point...

He has a couple great slides on the Guardian's thinking around the user engagement cycle:

Casual (just stopping by) -> Connected (signing up and engage in light interaction -> Committed (signing in for personal benefit) -> Catalyst (blog, e-mail, etc) -->

and what they're doing "beyond social networking" :

Casual (bookmarking, tagging, adding to group, attention data)
Connected (commenting rating, voting, endorsing)
Committed (UGC, tools for content and users, profiles)
Catalyst (networked journalism)

He makes a point that I strongly agree with : you can do a ton with existing tools outside - it is just the creativity and willingness to change.

He illustrates this with a really cool thing where he asked a question about US Elections on Seesmic and asked if people would want to be embedded on the Guardian Blogs. He got a ton of responses saying how great the Guardian was and then from a whole lot of Americans discussing there issues for the elections. This resulted in over 40 video responses...

This perfectly illustrates the power of some creativity and the use of consumer focused internet tools - he thought this up on the way to work and it was executed a couple of hours later.

The biggest challenge isn't technological but social and cultural.

Note to self : Playing Daily Show Clips is always a winner with the audience!

David Kirk, the CEO of the Fairfax Media group is up and it wouldn't be a stretch to describe him as a bit of an overachiever.He captained an All Black Rugby World Cup victory, Rhodes Scholar, Medical Doctor and now CEO of one of Australia's largest media group.

Fairfax runs some of the biggest daily broadsheets in Australia and are sponsoring Media '08.

His approach from a "metro publisher to leading multi-media company" seems like a fairly standard online distribution play. The core elements is focused around content :

• Unrivaled capability in Digital content origination and aggregation
• Powerful multimedia brands extending audience reach
• Distributing and promoting content across multiple platforms
• Proven new media revenue models

Interesting he hasn't spoken about the "former audience" and changing engagement models. The good news is that they are chasing the audience down the "rabbit warrens" into whatever platforms they choose. It remains to be seen what sort of engagement models they'll choose. One of the bullet points is ensuring effective "audience" connection and management.

Strongly focused on display, classified and transaction markets. Subscription is another model that they're keen on and David Kirk mentions that he's relieved that the Wall Street Journal has stuck to the subscription model and that they will too.

Earlier I blogged about our latest on air promo promoting the audience feedback project we've launched. We're now waiting for your video response...!

I've been bouncing around the office all day - we've just kicked off a project at Al Jazeera where you can now send us video feedback via our YouTube Channel. This is our first on air promo:

The Arab Information Ministers recent decree to "regulate" the content on satellite TV broadcasters has been the subject of much debate.

Yesterday Ahmed Mansour hosted Moroccan comedian Ahmed Senoussi on Al Jazeera's "Bila Hudud" to discuss the proposed regulations. Skip to about 8 minutes in where you'll find Senoussi "gagged and bound". This is followed by Mansour bringing out tools that are often associated with "making people speak"...

While the program is hilarious, this is of course no laughing matter - how can a discussion on why security police paint wooden poles red be funny? (it's to mask any blood in case you were wondering...)

One can't but wonder how serious people can even propose such regulations in 2008. Maybe if this was 1996 it would have stood a fighting chance but when the interweb and satellite TV has become so ubiquitous? Of course, the regulation is more about intent and intimidation rather than actual law. The chilling effect of shutting down the first station would be disastrous...

I've loved Firefox since the day I installed it. I was an early member of spreadfirefox.com and have been evangelising it prior to version 1. I even had my name into the New York Times as part of an advert for Firefox 1.0.

Sadly, almost four years later I've just switched. It was a tough decision -- four years is a long time to be committed to one browser. Once in a while I'd pop open Safari, Opera or Flock but I'd always go back to Firefox a few days later.

Recently Firefox has been grinding to a halt on my machine. I'm used to waiting for my loved ones to get ready -- it's part of any normal relationship (just ask anyone who is married). It bothers, even irritates you but the wait is usually worth it. You know that there is always something exciting just beyond the next tab. So you make excuses -- maybe it's OS X 10.5. Maybe it's some nasty plugin (I've removed most of them). Maybe it's just because someone cut up five undersea cables in the region. Whatever it is, it would take seconds to switch between tabs. I spend a large chunk of my day on the interweb so those seconds add up. I knew I had to change but was putting it off in the hope that Firefox would suddenly become more responsive to my needs.

When I saw Haroon's post on Webkit I knew that things would have to change. Haroon is probably the only person I know who is online more than me so his is serious recommendation. I downloaded the nightly dev build and was blown away with the speed and stability.

And thus my love affair with Firefox ended, sadly on the 14 February.

Updated : Of course, I may sneak back for a little love when Firefox 3.0 is released...

I was flicking through my mail this evening and noticed that my mobile "phone" bill was split up almost equally between voice, mobile internet and SMS charges. Well, not quite equally - I spend the most on SMS texts (140 messages sent...damn Twitter) and then slightly less on 4.6mb of data. Two hours plus of voice charges made up the rest of the bill.

Two questions:

1. Is this thing still a phone if I spend most of my money on non-voice services? If you add the hours spent using the iPod then the actual "phone" usage probably approaches zero.
2. When are the operators going to start realising this and start pricing data at remotely reasonable rates? Let's be serious - 5mb is just a couple of page loads a day but it costs me more than 2 hours worth of calls.

It never ceases to amaze me at the time it takes before a machine gets port scanned and attacked when put onto the internet. A couple of days ago I enabled anonymous ftp on my server so a friend could give me a couple of large files. I opened it up and only checked to see if the files were there today. Lo and behold, site was full of 5 levels of directories in leetspeak - I had been scanned and tagged by someone.

My friend David Sasaki (the venerable Outreach Director of GVO) has not only documented my shmoozing of the Santa Monica Apple Store staff, but has also brought up something I'm trying desperately to forget.

Mohamed was in the process of buying about four or five iPhones for his buddies back in Qatar. At the time, however, the limit was 2 iPhones per customer so Mohamed had to resort to his charming wink and million-dollar smile in order to walk out with more.

Oh the irony! David using my purchases as an example of making a quick $2000.

It all started when I was invited to speak at the Meridian Centre in Washington DC. As soon as friends heard I was going to the US, I started getting requests to get them iPhones. Being an Apple fanboy and having had to do all sorts of crazy things to get Apple to ship me an iPhone, I was deeply sympathetic and agreed.

In Qatar they go for at least QR2800. I've seen them in Dubai Airport Duty Free for AED3500. So the $400 plus tax I would get them for was a bargain. So I found a sympathetic salesmen and he agreed to let me help me around the 2 iPhone per customer rule Apple had imposed. That evening I sent word people back to Qatar and South Africa saying that I'd got the phones and received replies of joy.

And then I landed at Doha International Airport and my bag came off the carousel - as soon as I spotted it my heart sank. The lock from my bag was gone. I opened the bag in the airport in a panic and all 5 iPhones were gone. Obviously a couple of family members of the Newark Airport staff were going to be getting some great Christmas gifts. I on the other hand was now down by over $2000 and had to find a way to break the news to a Syrian, Qatari, Algerian and 2 South Africans...

I still haven't had the heart to tell them that Qatar Airways showed me the small print on the ticket that said that the $2500 max claim on stolen property does not apply to "valuable items" (right, so who the heck has $2500 worth of non-valuable items in a bag?).

Maybe I'm going to have to turn on that charm David talked about and break the news...

Today is a sad day for online journalism in Qatar. Nigel Gourlay, the founder and editor of Qatar Journal has just announced that he would no longer be publishing news. This was announced on the site today:

I'm sorry to say that Qatar Journal will no longer be publishing news. I'd like to thank everyone for their support over the last year, especially those who supplied me with stories. If you would like to make an archive of news stories, do it now, because in a few weeks the site will disappear. I'd like to offer encouragement to anyone who plans to set up a similar venture in the future. Perhaps Qatar's next online newspaper might be more successful. Many thanks again for reading.

As a digital news project, Qatar Journal proved that a successful online news site could be run by just one dedicated news hacker who could swim through RSS feeds, Google the deepest depths of the web and write compelling copy.

I'm sure many of the residents of Doha will be sad to see it go. Without it, all we are really left with are the local papers where we can look forward to reports on what new toy McDonald's is distributing with it's Happy Meal this month....

My friend David Sasaki has published "An Introduction to Citizen Media" as part of the Rising Voices project. It's a fantastic guide that is aimed at a non-technical audience - it's packed with great advice, tips and inspiration which should get anyone slightly interested in citizen media up to speed on starting their own micro-media empire.

You can grab the guide here (pdf).

The Blackberry (more affectionately known as the "Crackberry" due to the urgings that users have to keep checking it) has just been launched in mobile phone crazy Qatar.

I don't often have good things to say about Q-Tel but this is a really smart move on their side - they will be able to lock corporate clients into using Q-Tel to providing e-mail services before Vodaphone launches Qatar's second mobile operator. This is the sort of infrastructure that you really don't want to have to migrate to a new operate once it is launched.

Even though the pricing is probably going to be ridiculous, most corporate IT departments are going to be rushing to sign up for the service to placate senior managers (I mean, can you really be taken seriously in Qatar if you're seen at a coffee shop in Qatar with only last months $1000 phone on the table).

My colleague Abdurahman just blogged that our report on the Benazir Bhutto assassination has received over 500,000 views on YouTube.

The clip has also solicited over 3,500 comments and 55 video responses. This makes it the third most popular video after the two Ghida Fakhri clips which collectively gained over 1.5 million views.

For more online video from Al Jazeera, visit our YouTube pages (Arabic|English).

A short movie by Adam Curtis (who made the excellent documentary The Power of Nightmares).

Hat-tip : Adrian Monck