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eriks

eriks

Erik is currently an Innovation Coach at the AT&T Foundry. Erik was the CTO of Spot.us, a global platform for community-funded local reporting (winner of the Knight News Challenge). Previously, Erik co-founded Allvoices.com, where he served as the VP of Social Media and User Interface. Allvoices.com is a global community that shares news, videos, images and opinions. At the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University between 2005-2006, he created the website inthefieldONLINE.net, which drew widespread recognition from major global media including PBS, CNN and BBC, and was featured on Discovery International’s Rewind 2006 as one of the 25 highlights of the Year.

Oops, the traditional media did it again… ;)
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It is only about a month ago since a Reuters photographer got revealed tampering pictures when covering the events in Lebanon and Israel. Now it is BBC’s turn to create some bad publicity due to employees’ extremely poor judgments. It just gets worse when these things happen inside big news organizations such as Reuters and BBC. Neither of them is bad, but some of the employees’ seem to think they can to whatever they please to. Incredible.

I discussed this matter when the Mohammed sketches when they were published and I will stick to the same opinion as I said then. I am for freedom of speech and freedom and press and so forth. I am not saying that freedom of speech shouldn’t/couldn’t be applied to jokes, but hey. There is a difference between what you “can” and should joke about. Why do you need to proove your point about freedom of speech by marking and insulting people who are enough harrassed throughout the world? Yes, I know there are people out there falsely doing things in the name of religion that are unforgivable, but the majority are innocent yet today treated as guilty.

Today, it is five years since the tragic events in New York and even though the video was made some time ago they should have known better. This is not the time, nor the place to make such jokes. It just feels so unnecessary.

And about the film…

I think it is a piece of crap. It is not well-done and has some incredible poor singing. I get the feeling that we have a bunch of Monthy Python wannabies with very poor execution skills. Combine that with a very questionable sarcasm and you want to start looking for a dumpster to throw it in.

The story and video can be found at Is this the way to Al Jazeera?

(A bit more national to Sweden. This is a discussion that should be had in Sweden on this topic. I agree with Göran Lambertz that there should be room for some thought on this topic. It is a tough matter and it should be treated as such. Using the new media we can have it all and finally we have a control mechanism to the traditional media. )

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I shouldn't be surprised…
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… but I am. Yesterday I read an interview with of the more well-known authors and journalists. He basically said:

I can never see any important being written inside the blogosphere that would not end up on the news.

Maybe he is right about that part. However is that the purpose of blogs? Definitely not, it never has been. The basic purpose is for “normal” people to connect to their friend via the internet and tell whatever they feel like. Is that good or bad? You might argue that blogs are increasing the total amount of information on the web, but in the era of search engines this is not a major problem. Therefore it is all good.

More on the future of the new improved media, partly blogs then read my other blog entries on the subject.

The only point I will give him is that we have a lack of structure in the web. There is too easy to produce information. Nowadays there is so much information that some help in this ocean is needed. I wrote an entry on that the day before I met the co-founder/president Mena Trott and Executive Vice President of Corporate Development Andrew Anker at SixApart that delivers what I think the best blog platform today.

Finally what we need is for the traditional media to start to get involved. As for the author. He needs to start realise that everything is evolving. We can either use to be part of the evolution and influence where it is going. Standing on the side, remembering the good ol’ days and complaining about change will never change anything. It will however bring in a lot of negative energy, which I think this world has too much of already.

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New design coming up
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I will start to implement a new design. Things might be a bit messy then. Please have some faith with the changes, but the design is going to be really cool. Maybe I will change the platform used to. I am a bit undecided yet…

We’ll see.

EDITED: As you see I have started to change the site slightly. We’ll see what I end up with…

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Interviewed by BBC
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Yesterday I was interviewed by BBC Radio Channel Five. The interviewed briefly covered the blog I put up for Lebanon and Israel. The interview was broadcasted on their radio show PodsAndBlogs? which cover what is going on inside the blogosphere.

I last week spoke to Kevin Anderson at BBC now, but soon elsewhere. He did a podcast for his blog Strange Attractor, which can be found here.

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