OhmyNews readies for National Assembly elections.
I don’t think a day goes by in which I’m not bombarded by stories about the role of the Internet in our Presidential elections. Joe Trippi this. Joe Trippi that. The Web certainly has changed the way politics are being done here, but the real story is in South Korea, where a David and Goliath battle has been raging since before the surprise election of Roh Moo-hyun in the fall of 2002.
His election was due to the efforts of the “citizen’s reporter” online newspaper, OhmyNews, who took on the three traditional newspaper powers in the country. It produced raised eyebrows all across the global political landscape, because Roh’s election was from the ground up.
Fast forward to 2004. Roh has proven to have a few blindspots in his leadership abilities and has ruled a country deeply divided politically. He was impeached by his political foes on March 12, a month before the National Assembly elections on April 15th. It’s unlikely the impeachment will be upheld by the courts, but Roh’s ability to lead has been damaged. What’s happened since has been fascinating, because the public has viewed the impeachment as overhwelmingly negative. Consequently, look for a lot of that anger to be expressed during the legislative elections, as Roh’s Uri (Our Open Party) Party gains favor.
Meanwhile, OhmyNews is promising to have its citizen reporters throughout the country next month keeping track of things and feeding back information to OhmyNews servers via camera phones.
Contrary to popular belief here, the U.S. isn’t the be-all and end-all when it comes to technology applications. The cyber generation in South Korea is a culture unto itself, and it’s more than willing to use technology to sidestep entrenched, institutional life. Here’s a wonderful comparison between the cultures of Japan and Korea, as reported by OhmyNews’ Jean K. Min:
The World Cup 2002 Korea-Japan, the first World Cup ever co-hosted by two countries gave socio-cultural analysts in both countries an unusual opportunity to compare the behavior by peoples of the two historic rivals. Dr. Ha Yong Chul, a Korean sociologist at Seoul National University, watched the whole televised games and noted an interesting difference.
When Japanese national team scored a goal, the soccer stadium in Japan was instantly filled with thousands of flash lights bursting out of ubiquitous Nikons and Canons. Korean team equally electrified whole Korea as they beat European power houses game after game until they were finally qualified for the semi-final. Scenes in the Korean Soccer stadiums couldn’t be different more.
Whenever their beloved team scored a goal, unlike their Japanese counterparts, Koreans opened their shiny clam-shell phones and furiously hit keypads to share ultimate joy with their family and friends sending SMS or voice mails. Far more important to Korean cyber generation rather than simply recording the events as Japanese did, it seemed, was to share their bursting emotion with others and network with them.
This is a place that Joe Trippi would love to find himself — with a subculture energized for change and armed with SMS and camera phones. The South Korean National Assembly elections next month should be viewed seriously by those who believe the Internet can influence politics. I know I’ll be watching.
(full disclosure: I’ve been asked to publish my essays in the International version of OhmyNews)
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Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004
Newspaper Web design flaws highlighted.
Poynter’s Steve Outing has an excellent column in Editor and Publisher that I highly recommend for anybody in the online news biz. He raises an issue that’s constant with me — the design of news Websites.
The home pages of most news Web sites are too cluttered and suffer from link and content overload. Nearly all handle photography poorly. Page designs are the same day after day. There’s not enough hierarchy in story placement. Home page links are repetitive. Online classifieds design is often awful, making it difficult for consumers to find what they want. Advertising is handled so poorly that it’s not effective.
Way to go, Steve! I couldn’t agree more. He goes on to examine the thoughts of Norfolk designer,
Alan Jacobson, a guy who knows his stuff.
In Jacobson’s ideal world, home-page designers would craft a new layout every day, tailored to the news of the moment. Of course, Web-publishing reality gets in the way. Content management systems often dictate a more structured approach; they accept a basic home-page template that can be tweaked only modestly from day to day. Rare is the CMS that can support the kind of daily changes that a print-edition front-page designer can make.
How do we get past this? The industry needs to demand that CMS developers build better flexibility into the systems used by the news industry, for one thing.
A shorter term solution is one Jacobson uses with some of his newspaper Web clients. He provides them with at least a half dozen basic templates for different situations — one with a single story and piece of art for the big-news days, and various forms for other situations, varying headline and photo counts.
There’s much more and the article is worthwhile reading. It’s gratifying to hear other people singing this song. When I left TV News and got into the Internet, I overcame the fear of the unknown and the blizzard of unfamiliar terms used by Web people in the 90s. Once on the inside, I could see that this is a whole lot easier than people realize, and I have to agree with Mr. Jacobson. There simply isn’t any reason news Websites can’t be more aesthetically appealing and user-friendly.
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Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004
Nielsen to postpone (some) people meters.
Broadcasters can breathe a temporary sigh of relief as Nielsen announces they’re postponing the introduction of people meters in L.A. and Chicago. They’re going ahead with the New York market, despite complaints from local television stations that the meters grossly underreport television viewing. A MediaDailyNews article on the announcement quotes NewsCorp complaints that the meters “undercount viewing by as much as 25 percent, particularly among young and minority viewers.”
“Until Nielsen can prove the accuracy of its numbers, particularly in counting young and African-American viewers, we risk implementing a seriously flawed system,” Lachlan Murdoch, deputy COO of News Corp. and chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group, said late Monday in a statement following Nielsen’s announcement.
Citing issues that led to the delay of Nielsen’s rollout of people meters in the other major markets, Murdoch noted, “If the meter isn’t good enough for Los Angeles and Chicago yet, it certainly isn’t good enough for the nation’s largest market.”
Nielsen executives said the issues that led them to delay Los Angeles and Chicago were unique to those markets, and that they were confident the New York people meter sample is integral and would be ready for deployment on April 8, 2004, it’s originally scheduled date.
According to the report, Nielsen says Los Angeles has been especially difficult due to its ethnic mix, and that stations there are heavily resisting the meters.
Meanwhile, advertisers continue to press for more and better attention to the advertising pods within programming. It’s going to be a rough year ahead for the numbers counters at Nielsen.
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Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004
Study finds 3G indifference in Europe.
I’ve written a lot about how other parts of the world are ahead of the U.S. in the development of third-generation (3G) wireless phones. Now comes a report that suggests it might be a rough road ahead for 3G in Europe. The study was done by Harris Interactive, and frankly, I don’t believe the analysis. It’s an issue I’ll be watching, because billions of dollars are at stake, and as Europe goes with 3G, so will the U.S. some day.
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Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004
Powell to keep “hands off” VoIP industry.
I’m not surprised that FCC Chairman Michael Powell told wireless industry professionals today that the FCC will take a hands-off approach to regulation with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). After all, Chairman Powell touts Vonage, the Internet phone company, as the clearest example of how business applications can “ride the infrastructure” of existing platforms.
VoIP is the most disruptive technology to come along in a while, Powell said.
But he said the technology’s full potential is best realized when it is seen as an Internet application, not merely as a voice application.
Powell’s right in this matter, but I think there’s going to be a lot of noise made about it downstream. The phone companies don’t like it, and I fully expect their voice to be heard as the FCC conducts a year-long set of hearings on the matter.
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Monday, March 22nd, 2004
New Technorati is up and running.
The latest version of the blog search engine, Technorati, has launched. Dave Sifry outlines what’s new.
For the uneducated, Technorati is THE search tool for blogs. As such, it’s a business to watch. When you do a search on a URL or keyword, Technorati lists all the people linking to that URL and what they are saying about it. Bloggers use it to determine who’s linking to them, but anybody interested in news events would find it extremely useful as well.
What I like most about Technorati is the openness with which it has been developed. The Web is a conversation, and the folks at Technorati get that. Their engine was built on feedback. What a concept, eh?
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