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More from Highway Africa

I have now presentend my talk at the Highway Africa conferance.
I will link to the other speakers presentationa as they become available.

At HighwayAfrica

The Highway Africa conferance has now started. After the traditional praise song and introductions and thanks and acknowlegements, the first session on african identity has just finished.
There were a number of interesting points raised:
Is there a specific african journalism? If so, what constitutes it and what are, or more to the point should be, its aims?
Good quetions, but they were not answered, just discussed.
One of the points was that there is not a single unseperated and undifferentiated journalism or media.
Journalism changes. [Larry Strelitz]
This is one of the points I will be raising in my own presentation tomorrow.

på resa

Imorgon bär det av till Sydafrika. Jag talar på Highway Africa, en årlig mediakonferans for journalister från hela kontinenten.
Jag kommer att både podcasta och blogga därifrån så gott det går (jag tror att det kommer att finnas wifi på konferansen).
Konferansen hålls på Rhodes University i Grahamstown.
Som ni ser från kartan är Grahamstown en ganska liten ställe mitt i ingenting. Men de har en av de mest välrenomerade journalistikprogrammen i Sydafrika.

WIFI - Public utility or private commodity

Jonas (ersatz) på promemorian kommenterade nyligan en debatartikel av Waldermar Ingdahl från tankesmedjan Eudoxa i SvD där han argumenterar för utbyggandet av ett offentligt trådlöst nätverk.
I mitt förre blogg hade jag ett inlägg om hur företaget Verizon stämde staden Philadelphia för just denn tiltag. Och jag är säker på att svenska och europieska telebolag kommer att göra samma sak. Under EU:s konkurensreglar finns all anledning till att tro att de skulle lyckas.
Jag återpublicera inlägget ty den äger en aktuallitet.

Se också Rasmus på Copyriot om samma sak.

I was talking to one of the students here at the university about blogging as a community media. He had written a posting to his (always interesting) blog about (a)synchronicity . He had noted that as the competition stiffened between broadband providers, the delivery pipes were getting fatter, but only in one direction.

Companies are interested in delivering telephony, cable TV, entertainment etc. but not in distributing information. As he pointed out, the downstream (delivery) rate of an ADSL-line (by far the most common way for consumers to get broadband) can be as high as 28 Mbps while the upstream (distributary) can be as low as 0,8 Mbps.
So what? Well, it means that the much touted journalistic prosumer aspect of the web decreases and the pacification aspect increases. If you are the owner of a broadband delivery company and also the owner of the content that is being delivered, will you help people compete with you? Give them the chance to broadcast their home-made chat shows? Allow community media using broadband-publishing to discuss local issues that might cut into your newspaper sales, or you TV-stations ad revenue?
The proponents of liberalism (in the Swedish context) and capitalism say that the free and fierce competition of the de-regulated marketplace gives the best possible service. Which leads me on to the headline of this post.
I was reading about a bill just passed by Pennsylvania's House and Senate in which there is a provision to kill "Philadelphia Wireless" -- an ambitious plan to build a Wi-Fi network to serve the city's working-class communities - on the grounds that as the state would be subsidizing access it would skew competition and pose a threat to the major player  Verizon Communications (whose lobbyists were active in drawing up the wording of the clause). If Verizon win this one it will be seen as a precedent and other projects to bring broadband connectivity to parts of the populace who cant afford the rates charged by (often monopoly) companies will be atacked.
This is the logic used by de-regulators in the EU. All state subventions are intrinsically bad as they skew competition. Hospitals, transport systems, schools, media - all need to be privatized. It gives consumers a choice is a recurring mantra. But time and again we see the same pattern. If you can not afford the service then do without. Need an ambulance? Show me the money! Starving? Forget food-stamp programs - find a charity!  [more on faith-based dismantling of the residual welfare state]

But there are compelling reasons to see Wi-fi access as a public utility. In Wired 12.11 we can read of the 311 service in New York. I wont go into detail, you can read the article. However one of the possibilities in a (free) Wi-Fi covered city is the possibility to:

Connect 311's database to a city full of Treos or Wi-Fi laptops, and it's easy to imagine the extended urban organism growing more adaptive: subway riders tapping in up-to-the-minute reports on passenger loads and parents giving high marks to a new hire at a school.

There would be huge gains to cities, in better governance, early warnings systems, democratic participation, adhoc discussions locally, crime prevention and more.
It would cut into private companies profits (I can hear them howl, growl and cry foul as I write) but would increase the quality of life, the good governance and the value of the tax kroner for the majority of the citizenry.

chefsdommare Rehnquist död

Högstadomstolens (US) chefsdommare Rehnquist, dog i natt.
Detta kommer att leda till en av de mest infekterade tillsättningsprocessorna i modern tid tror jag.
Bush valde taktiskt när han utnämde John Roberts (tidigare Rehnquists assistant  -law clerk- fö) men nu har ett gyllene läge att väjla ideologist (ja, jag vet - Roberts var en idiologisk utnämning men inte en extrem sådan).
Kanske Gonzales?

när bli en rewrite stöld?

Update:
I dagens Expressen ser jag att Robert Börjesson har skrivit (av) en artikel från "The Sun".
Wendy vann - köpte sex och knark för 13 miljoner

- Någon sa till mig att jag aldrig skulle kunna spendera
13 miljoner kronor. Men utmana aldrig en dåre, säger Wendy Graham i Sun.
“The money has been a curse. Someone said to me I’d never spend it all – well you should never dare a fool.”

Här har man åtminstone get en antydan till att materialet kommer nån annanstans ifrån - märket ni säger Wendy Graham i Sun?

Men det är fortfarande så att man sätter sitt namn på artiklar nån annan har skrivit.

Och läs gärna Kjell Häglunds krönika i Journalisten

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För drygt ett år sedan dök det upp en diskussion om den svenska journalistikens stöldbenägenhet .
Då skrev DN:s Lars Linder: Unfortunately violations of this rule are quite commonplace in the press;

Detta bekräftas en en gång av Aftonbladet.
Under rubriken: Sjuk av ’ofarlig’ tatuering kan vi läsa följande;

 För bara några timmar efter att tatueringen var klar började Polly må illa och ryggen svullnade upp

[Just hours after she got the tattoo, Polly felt sick and her back began to burn.]

Specialister tror att reaktionen kommer från en kemikalie kallad ppd. Ämnet blandas i hennan för att ge en mörkare färg.
 Ppd finns även i olika varianter av hårfärgmedel.

[Specialists believe the reaction is not the result of the henna but of chemicals — also used in hair dye — which are mixed with the natural substance to make it black.]

– Jag vill varna andra föräldrar och deras barn för den här typen av tatueringar. De är inte säkra. Polly kommer att få ärr som sitter kvar i flera år.

[Martin said: “I want to warn other parents. These tattoos are not safe. Polly will be left scarred for years.”]

Det röda engelska texten kommer från gårdagens "The Sun" från en story "Teenage girl's henna hell" signerat John Coles, den svenska texten "författat" av Christoffer Bjäreborn.

Frågan är: när bli en rewrite stöld? Eftersom jag har dessutom hittat "hennahelvetet" som en osignerat artikel i "The Mirror" antar jag att det är byråmaterial. Men det finns inga som helst indikationer på att så är fallet. Den godtrogna läsare (om det nu finns några  som överhuvudtaget har något förtroende kvar för journalistiken) kan förledas att tro att journalisten har faktiskt besvärade sig med att själv göra jobbet.

(Thanks for bringing this to my attention Jan)

significant victory for open source

The open source movement has had some mesure of sucess in the developing world but has met with resistance in corperate structures of the developed world.
This may be changing.
According to an article in todays Financial Times, the state of Massachusetts plans to switch all its workers away from Microsoft's Word, Excel and other desktop software applications, and to have them use open source based software instead.
According to the article;

the state also specified only two document types that could be used in the future - OpenDocument, which is used in open source applications like Open Office, and PDF, a widely used standard for electronic documents.

The switch to open formats like these was needed to ensure that the state could guarantee that citizens could open and read electronic documents in the future, according to the state - something that was not possible using closed formats.

The Commonwealths statement and some background documents are available.