Arab Social Media

Queen launches YouTube channel

2007-12-25T09:41:00.000-08:00

Queen launches YouTube channel

Old and new clips can be viewed on the site

The Queen has launched her own channel on the video-sharing website YouTube.

The Royal Channel will feature her Christmas Day message, and has recent and historical footage of the monarch and other members of the Royal Family.

The launch marks the 50th anniversary of the Queen's first televised festive address in 1957.

The palace said it hoped the site would make the 81-year-old monarch's annual speech "more accessible to younger people and those in other countries".

Changing times

The opening page of the channel, which went live just after midnight, bears the title "The Royal Channel - The Official Channel of the British Monarchy" and features a photograph of Buckingham Palace and the Queen's Guards.

This year's festive address will appear on the site at about 1500 GMT on Christmas Day.

She has always been aware of reaching more people and adapting the communication to suit

Buckingham Palace spokeswoman

Back in 1957, when the Queen delivered her first television message, she acknowledged the need to adapt to changing times.

"I very much hope that this new medium will make my Christmas message more personal and direct," she said from her Sandringham estate in Norfolk.

"That it is possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us."

Clips from garden parties, state visits, prime ministers, investitures and a day in the life of the Prince of Wales will all be available to watch on the channel.

Newsreel

Among the older clips is footage from a film by Lord Wakehurst called Long to Reign Over Us, which has never been released to the public.

The former Tory MP, who died in 1970, was a keen amateur film maker and charted many key royal events, including the death of King George VI, the Queen's accession and her coronation.

The site also has footage of Queen Alexandra's West End tour among the rose-sellers in 1917, and silent newsreel of the 1923 wedding of the Duke of York and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon - the Queen's parents.

Announcing the launch of the channel, a spokeswoman for Buckingham Palace said the Queen "always keeps abreast with new ways of communicating with people".

"She has always been aware of reaching more people and adapting the communication to suit," she said.

"This will make the Christmas message more accessible to younger people and those in other countries."

Poor education

Dr John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, said that the Queen's reign was a "continuing rebuff and rebuttal" to those calling for a republic.

"The Queen represents one of the things that is best about Britain," he wrote in the Sunday Mirror.

But historian David Starkey, who has been promoting his new TV programme on the monarchy, said the Queen "runs a mile from anything called culture".

"She is poorly educated. It's not her fault. It's the fault of her late mother. She had a wretched education, from not terribly well-qualified teachers," he told BBC Radio 5live.

The Royal Channel can be viewed at www.youtube.com/theroyalchannel, and the Queen's Christmas message can also be downloaded as a podcast from www.royal.gov.

Teens and Social Media

2007-12-23T21:16:00.000-08:00

Teens and Social Media

The use of social media gains a greater foothold in teen life as they embrace the conversational nature of interactive online media.

IBM Union’s Protest in Second Life Could Be a Trend Setting Event

2007-09-30T10:38:00.000-07:00

IBM Union’s Protest in Second Life Could Be a Trend Setting Event

CIA 'launches Facebook for spies'

2007-08-22T14:24:00.001-07:00

CIA 'launches Facebook for spies'

The CIA is to open a communications tool for its staff, modelled on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, the Financial Times reports.

The project, known as A-Space, aims to improve the way that intelligence agents communicate, it said.

Officials believe that the online workplace will allow staff to better analyse information together.

However to ease fears of undercover workers having their cover blown, participation will be voluntary.

Reticent users

A-Space, due to launch in December, will feature web-based email and software recommending issues of interest to the user said Mike Wertheimer, a senior official at the Department for National Intelligence (DNI).

We are willing to experiment in ways that we have never experimented before

Mike Wertheimer
Department of National Intelligence

He told the FT that the new infrastructures would help break down some of the physical communications problems in the intelligence community.

"I am unable to send email, and even make secure phone calls, to a good portion of the community from my desktop because of firewalls," he said.

He added that while it was understandable that some operatives were reticent about sharing information which could pose a risk, the 9/11 attacks had showed that not pooling data could also cost lives.

"We are willing to experiment in ways that we have never experimented before," he said.

Mr Wertheimer added that while it had looked for collaboration from overseas, foreign intelligence agencies had been "the folks most virulently against" sharing information through an "intelligence library".

The DNI already operates a collaborative online encyclopaedia - or wiki - for members of the US intelligence community.

And earlier this year the CIA used Facebook to advertise job opportunities within the organisation.

YouTube introduces video adverts

2007-08-22T04:55:00.001-07:00

YouTube introduces video adverts

Video advertising has started on the YouTube website, its owner - internet giant Google - has confirmed.

Google said it had designed the way the adverts work on the video-sharing website to be as unobtrusive and undisruptive as possible.

The adverts will begin 15 seconds after a user has started to watch a video, but only on 20% of the screen window.

Google said the advert would then disappear within 10 seconds if the user had not clicked to watch it.

'Providing value'

While YouTube already carries advertising banners, the introduction of video adverts is Google's first big push to increase revenues on the video-sharing website, which it bought for $1.65bn (£831m) last November.

"The philosophy at YouTube is pretty much core to what we at Google do generally, which is that all the ads we serve need to provide value to the end user," said Eileen Naughton, Google's director of media platforms.

The first video advertisers keen to tap into YouTube's more-than-130 million unique monthly visitors include Warner Music, News Corporation, 20th Century Fox and New Line Cinema.

The adverts will be connected to music videos and other selecting postings.

According to market expectations, the value of video advertisements on websites will soar to $4.3bn a year in the US alone by 2011.

POLITICS AND SECOND LIFE

2007-08-21T06:30:00.001-07:00

Kan Suzuki

David Miliband

Social media and politics in Morocco

2007-08-06T03:50:00.001-07:00

The role of social media in Morocco is growing.

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8RgWRmRtUc

The Tech Lab: Lesley Gavin

2007-08-06T02:24:00.000-07:00

Social networking sites are essentially communication spaces where you can see and talk to friends, but in a slightly different way than you would face to face, or by email or text.

Games industry enters a new level

2007-06-23T18:35:00.001-07:00

The CNN/YouTube debates

2007-06-23T18:27:00.000-07:00

Google Zeitgeist and WEB 2.0

2007-06-23T13:23:00.000-07:00

social media

2007-06-21T23:02:00.001-07:00

GAMES

2007-04-12T09:06:00.001-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6523565.stm

Tim Berners-Lee moves toward social research on the Internet

2007-01-16T03:53:00.000-08:00

Last Updated: Thursday, 2 November 2006, 09:39 GMT

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Printable version

Web inventor fears for the future

By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is concerned about the future of the web

Berners-Lee interview

The British developer of the world wide web says he is worried about the way it could be used to spread misinformation and "undemocratic forces".

The web has transformed the way many people work, play and do business.

But Sir Tim Berners-Lee told BBC News he feared that, if the way the internet is used is left to develop unchecked, "bad things" could happen.

He wants to set up a web science research project to study the social implications of the web's development.

If we don't have the ability to understand the web as it's now emerging, we will end up with things that are very bad

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Q&A: Web Science

The changes experienced to date because of the web are just the start of a more radical transformation of society, he said.

But Sir Tim is concerned about the way it could end up being used.

He told the BBC: "If we don't have the ability to understand the web as it's now emerging, we will end up with things that are very bad.

"Certain undemocratic things could emerge and misinformation will start spreading over the web.

"Studying these forces and the way they're affected by the underlying technology is one of the things that we think is really important," he said.

Social phenomenon

He insisted his new web science research initiative would be more than just computer science.

When you look at university courses, web science isn't there - it seems to fall through the cracks

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

He said he wanted to attract researchers from a range of disciplines to study it as a social as well as technological phenomenon.

Sir Tim added that he hoped it would create a new science for studying the web, which he believes would lead to newer and more exciting systems.

"All kinds of disciplines are going to have to converge. People with all kinds of skills are going to have to work together to build a new web which is going to be even better," he said.

He also said employers were now beginning to complain that there were not enough people who fully understood the web.

"There aren't any courses at the moment and it hasn't really been brought together.

"We're hearing complaints from companies when they need people that really understand the medium from both the technological and social side.

"When you look at university courses, web science isn't there - it seems to fall through the cracks.

"So we'd like to put it on the curriculum so that there are a lot more people who understand this."

Social challenges

The US-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton, UK, will launch the long-term research collaboration that will have a direct influence on the future development of the world wide web.

Because the internet is such a free medium people tend to have a horror of controlling the information flows

Gail, Seoul

Our readers' panel

The Web Science Research Initiative will chart out a research agenda aimed at understanding the scientific, technical and social challenges underlying the growth of the web.

Of particular interest is the growing volume of information on the web that documents more and more aspects of human activity and knowledge.

The project will examine how we access this information and assess its reliability.

definition of social software.

2006-06-22T13:30:00.000-07:00

Tom Coates's working definition of social software...

Social software is a particular sub-class of software-prosthesis that concerns itself with the augmentation of human social and / or collaborative abilities through structured mediation (this mediation may be distributed or centalised, top-down or bottom-up/emergent). Social software augments these abilities by:
Removing the real-world limitations placed on social and / or collaborative behaviour by factors such as language, geography, background, financial status, etc;
[This can also be seen as the basic aspiration of first-generation online discussion software as well as the gist of the world-changing hyperbolae of the press during the dot com years]
Compensating for human inadequacies in processing, maintaining or developing social and / or collaborative mechanisms - in terms of information overload, generating appropriate filtering mechanisms, building in solutions to compensate for reptile-brain activity, developing structures that are immune to blame-culture, recrimination etc. This in particular can be seen as the replacement of the inherent limitations of geography (1 above) with mechanisms that generate parallel senses of 'similar, different', 'near, far' etc. This also includes feedback loops and the like;
[Some of the more interesting work that people have been talking about already sits in this area - particularly Clay's work on groups when he's quoting Bion.]
Creating environments or distributed tool-sets that pull useful end results out of human social and / or collaborative behaviour - for example, generating software that facilitates human creative processes in groups, structuring the process (or having the process emerge through apparently unrelated interactions) so as to have a distinct and productive end result;

That's probably as close as I've got as of yet... Any thoughts?

http://james.seng.sg/about/ppp.html