On her blog, Quarrygirl has clearly shown that Vegnews has been using photography from iStock’s back catalogue for many of its photos (see http://www.quarrygirl.com/2011/04/13/rant-veg-news-is-putting-the-meat-into-vegan-issues).

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.

This story has been doing the rounds for the past couple of days and even though Vegnews has effectively been found out with its trousers around its ankles, it didn’t go on a public relations blitz but instead issued a half-hearted response where it cited financial imperatives rather than actually apologising (http://vegnews.com/web/uploads/asset/3169/file/FromVegNews.pdf). Not surprisingly, this didn’t satiate the angry vegans on the web and just seemed to make the situation worse.

In addition, it will be very difficult for VegNews to regain the trust of its readership. Not only will customers aware of this controversy now always have the nagging doubt not only that its photos are not of vegan food but more importantly, if the publication was prepared to have pretty unethical journalistic practices such as this (aside from it being unethical from a vegan perspective), the concern will be that it would have been prepared to decieve its audience elsewhere too.

The internet not only makes it very difficult to dupe the public but it also allows stories to break from non-mainstream sources and then spread quickly. It also raises questions for organisations as to the best way to cope with public relations issues. VegNews should probably have sought advice from a PR professional before publishing it’s ill-advised response, which has probably made the situation worse.

With this story starting to spread out from blogs and social media, it’s probably a matter of time before the mainstream press pick it up (the media loves it when people or companies fall from grace and get found out). In the meantime, VegNews will almost certainly start losing subscribers and for a small independent publisher this could be very dangerous indeed.

Google Tsunami Alert

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.

In addition, Google has also launched a Person Finder tool for those affected by the earthquake – particularly useful as Japanese mobile networks have been affected, limiting communications. It did the same thing after the Chritschurch and Haiti earthquakes.

Interesting to see Google reacting quickly to events and using the most visited webpage in the world to put out public service information in this way. Apart from from changing the graphics on its Google Doodles, it’s rare to see anything other than navigation on the Google homepage.

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.”

However, unlike most copyrighted clips on YouTube that are uploaded and then removed, these videos are one of the most endearing and creative memes of recent years. They take a pivotal scene from the movie and  then change the subtitles, so instead of Hitler raging at his generals about their failure to stop the oncoming Allies, he is depicted ranting about the cancellation of his Xbox Live subscription, the relegation of a football team or that Oasis have split.

The genius of these parodies is that by venting apocalyptic fury on trivialities, Hitler’s inappropriate anger renders him infantile and ridiculous. Significantly, these are the minor frustrations of everyday life: the videos are not only parodying Hitler, they are parodying contemporary society. It is too easy to see ourselves (or people we know) as this angry little man who is upset because Twitter is unavailable.

Popular Culture

To most people, ‘popular culture’ is the latest edition of X-Factor, Big Brother or American Idol. However, while there is a popular element to these shows, they are arguably more about mass culture imposed by the elites onto the masses. Despite the reality show traditions of telephone voting, public auditions and ordinary people taking centre stage, they are produced and created by media companies. While they are certainly ‘popular’ in terms of their appeal, they are not ‘popular’ in terms of their origin and some academics have argued that ‘popular culture’ is actually a form of subversion against dominant forms of authority.

However, it isYouTube where contemporary popular culture is perhaps most explicitly realised. Significantly, this is not only through the Downfall parodies, their cousins the ‘literal music videos’ (where song lyrics are replaced by lyrics describing the visuals of the video), or even Rickrolling, but also through the very concept of YouTube which undermines the traditional audio/video mediums of television and film.

Traditional tv and movies have very real economic and distribution barriers to creating videos for mass audiences. YouTube in effect allows anyone with a camcorder or web camera to broadcast themselves to the world. This is no better illustrated than in the most popular video on the site is currently ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ which is little more than a minute long clip of a baby biting his brother’s finger, recorded by his father. Critically, as the third most visited website on the internet, YouTube allows ordinary people to reach huge audiences.

This video has been removed due to terms of use violation

The long shadow of copyright hangs heavy over YouTube. ‘This video has been removed due to terms of use’ is cropping up on embedded videos all over the web, as copyright holders actively seek to protect their interests. However, the decision to remove the Downfall parodies from YouTube illustrates that this is not just a commercial matter, but is the latest incarnation of a long power struggle between establishment forces and the masses over popular culture.

For much of the 20^th century, mass popular culture was produced by large media organisations and expressed through television, music and movies. Other forms of popular culture existed, but these were produced and consumed on a small scale. In contrast, the internet allows ordinary people to create, publish and distribute to a mass audience. This enables an autonomous popular culture to exist outside of and counter to, the mass culture produced by huge media corporations.

As copyrighted material is removed from YouTube, so are corporations muscling in on the website: music videos and tv shows are being legitimately uploaded by music companies and broadcasters. This double edged process of uploading ‘official’ content while also removing unofficial videos, arguably reflects an attempt to maintain control over what defines contemporary popular culture.

However, this battle between ordinary users and big bad media groups is something of a misnomer. YouTube itself is owned by one of the largest corporations in the world: Google and while people can upload videos on its network, YouTube ultimately has control over their distribution and has the power to remove videos from the web. That they are liable for lawsuits for copyright infringement will ensure they will have a cautious attitude to protecting the rights of copyright holders.

If popular culture is indeed subversive and oppositional to dominant power structures, then it is significant that one of the largest expressions of popular culture on the internet is tightly controlled and policed. That there is so much focus on commercial interests rather than censoring messages that upset political or moral sensibilities (as in the past) reflects the relative importance (and power) of commerce in contemporary society.

However, no matter how big YouTube is, it isn’t the only way to upload video. As quick as the Downfall videos are being taken down, they are being uploaded elsewhere. The audience may not be as big but genuine popular culture will always finds a way to express itself.

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.

‘Digital Media’ is a great umbrella term to describe marketing/commercial strategies that aren’t just web-based, but also integrate with Video, Twitter, Facebook, iPhone et al. The brilliance of the buzzword is that it’s vague enough to imply dynamism and innovation, while at the same time not actually meaning anything,

No more New Media

Of course we’ve been here before. Since the internet exploded into the commercial sector in the mid 90s, a succession of buzzwords to describe itself have been rapidly deployed, adopted and then discarded.

It is a sign of a very young industry still trying to find its feet amid constantly changing priorities, technologies and expectations that its accompanying lexicon has likewise been malleable and unstable.

The industry rarely describes itself as ‘new media’ anymore: from a cultural perspective, it’s not considered ‘new’, even though one of the oldest of the clan – the world wide web – is still only a teenager. How can it be ‘new’ media when it is so ingrained in the cultural landscape and there is a generation who have grown-up not knowing a world before the internet?

Elsewhere, other buzzwords have fallen by the wayside: Multimedia and Interactive Media became passé when it became obvious that everything online was interactive and multimedia and describing it as such was redundant. Indeed, ‘online’ will probably join them soon: the torturous process of accessing the internet via dial-up modems has long gone. Thanks to 3G phones and broadband, that there is no real ‘offline’.

A Digital Future?

As useful as the terminology ‘Digital Media’ is right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is usurped by some other shiny jargon in the near future. Part of the issue is that ‘digital’ has become ubiquitous: as illustrated in Digital TV, Digital Radio and Digital Rights Management, even ‘Digital Media’ has a dual meaning (CDs/DVDs are effectively audio/video mediums consisting of digitised data).

While all the above are all linked through the transformation of content from analogue to digital, the repetitive use of the word by marketers and advertisers means there a danger that the phrase could become over-used: ‘Digital’ may seem cutting-edge now but wait a few years and it’ll be very dated.

Maybe its better to go with the geeks and leave the buzzwords to marketers and advertisers, and instead just use retro-ironic labels like ‘Interweb’. By appropriating a phrase associated with people who confused ‘Internet’ with ‘Web’, not only does it serve as a broad equivalent of ‘digital media’ but also has a lingering aftertaste of smug satisfaction.

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.

Years ago I was at the cutting edge of the web. In the mid to late 90s my life was online: I developed webpages, was a regular contributor on numerous alt.whatever messageboards and chatted online with IRC. Many of my friends hailed from the internet community and I was at one with the web life.

And yet now I feel as though I’m on the sidelines, quietly observing this giant dialogue. Rather than being involved in web 2.0, I’ve been isolated by it.

Of course, it isn’t too late to catch up. The problem isn’t that I’m a techno-phobe late-adopter. It’s more that I don’t have this overwhelming urge to reach out to other people on the net.

Maybe there needs to be a push towards anti-social networking. I recently joined Snubster and Introvertster but even these post-modern attempts at shunning social media are actually embracing it. How can you have a anti-social networking website that is actually a social networking website in disguise?

I suspect that the problem lies in the fact that at heart I’m a consumer not a producer. If I read an article and disagree with it my first reaction is not to post my thoughts in the comments section but to curse to myself and whoever is in my local vicinity and then turn to the next page.

I was brought up in an age where the elite stood god-like above mere peons like myself: only journalists, broadcasters, writers, politicians, film-makers etc could pontificate and everyone else had to listen. The current online generation doesn’t have the social conditioning that inhibits me from interacting. They genuinely believe it is their right to flood the net with their thoughts and opinons (inane or otherwise).

Being anti-social in the age of social networking is a problem. And I’m trying to overcome it, one blog at a time.

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.

More importantly, they allowed anyone to comment on these pontifications right there and then in the public domain. The published word became a genuine dialogue of ideas rather than one-way communciation.

Blog readers were no longer faceless IP addresses registered in web visitor stats, but were often as equally vocal in their opinions as the bloggers themselves, whether that be agreeing, disagreeing or claiming ‘first’.

Arguably, the comments at the bottom of the post are just as important as the blog entry itself: a blog without comments is a lonely and rather pathetic creature, akin to the tree falling down in the forest, unheard, unloved and invisible.

Maybe this is at the heart of blogs. They rage against one of the primal anxieties of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries expressed in countless books and movies from ‘Organisation Man’ to ‘The Matrix’, namely the fear of being a nobody/invisible/zombie/automaton/faceless member of the crowd. Whether as blogger or commenter, they give us a tiny bubble of celebrity amid the humdrum of mediocre modernity.

Of course, if there are millions of people all shouting at the same time, does it mean these voices are then drowned out?

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.

I would stand on a soap box but I haven’t actually ever seen a soap box and don’t think they exist outside of tabloid newspaper-speak any more.

Be warned, I have a public forum to express my opinions and I’m not afraid to use it.