The recent revelation by the blogger Quarrygirl that the Vegetarian magazine, VegNews, has been using stock photography of meat-filled food and passing it off as vegan has caused what the tabloids would call something of a furore in the online vegan community.
Quarrygirl illustrates numerous examples of this on her blog. Including photoshopping out the bones from a rack of ribs and using a picture of a beefburger.
The magnitude of the 8.9 earthquake that hit Japan today (and subsequent tsunami) not only hit the rolling news fare of BBC, CNN etc but also google.com which added the following Tsuanmi alert:
Tsunami Alert for New Zealand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Hawaii, and others. Waves expected over the next few hours, caused by 8.9 earthquake in Japan.
Hitler, as Downfall producer orders a DMCA takedown from Brad Templeton on Vimeo.
Earlier this week, YouTube celebrated its fifth anniversary. Coincidentally, a couple of days earlier it emerged that Constantin Films – the movie company behind the Oscar-nominated movie about Hitler’s final days, Downfall – was actively working with YouTube to remove the vast number of video clips from the film from Google’s video-sharing website (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/apr/21/downfall-hitler)
“We’re taking a simple approach: take them all down,” Martin Moszkowicz, head of Constantin Films has said. “The important thing is to protect our copyright. We are very proud of the film.”
The end of the internet as we know it (and I feel fine)
Internet buzzwords tend to sneak up on me in the middle of the night like a pod-alien in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. From then onwards, I begin liberally using the new phrase to friends, work colleagues and associates as though it has always been part of my vocabulary.
Most recently, I was overwhelmed by a serious case of ‘digital media’ (often just digital for short), which has now seemlessly deposed the previous incumbent buzzwords (Online, New Media) as catch-alls to describe the broad sweep of internet-related activities.
This passenger seat doesn't pamper life's complexities
We’re embarking on a big social media push at work at the moment, reaching out to a number of social networking websites in the hope of being more web 2.0. However, all the talk of Facebook, blogs and Twitter has got me thinking: am I a web 1.0 has-been?
Online, I’m passive more than I’m active: I don’t create YouTube videos, I’m reticicent about putting comments on websites, I don’t update my Twitter or Facebook pages regularly, and I’ve left a number of half-dead blogs lying in my wake over the years.
The two most popular blogs: Blogger and WordPress blogs
After smashing the bottle of champagne onto this blog and seeing it sail into harbour, I started to wonder how big the crowd was I have joined: just how many blogs are there?
Technorati’s 2008 ‘State of the Blogosphere’ report said there were about 133 million blogs. What do all these millions of personalised and corporate web journals represent? If the internet liberated publishing from the print model which allowed only a limited number of journalists (representing an even smaller number of owners/publishers) to have their views read, then blogs have taken this further, ensuring that the web was no longer the sole domain of geeks and programmers. Blogs allowed non-techie, non-journalists to pontificate on anything.
Clarence, probably hearing an angel getting their wings. Or last orders.
Another blog is born. I think somewhere I hear a bell ringing. Or maybe that’s just titinitus. What’s my unique selling point, you may ask? I’m not a big one for confessionals. I don’t have any insider gossip on ANYTHING. And I don’t have a cat whose pictures I can parade in amusing poses.
Maybe it would be best to think of me as one of the crazies in Hyde Park on a Sunday morning, ranting about the end of the world. Only in this case, it would be about what would happen after the end of the world.
