cowbite.org

Jon Stewart and John Oliver on #NOTW

They say it better than I ever could.

(Although it's a drag that the video isn't embeddable.)

Philip Schofield is on twitter

Haven't we come a long way from the broom cupboard.

Via Ben Ayers

Ofcom/MTM London study into availability of public service content online

• Ofcom study finds media splashes out to reach online audience
  "MTM London estimated that 10 per cent of newspaper spending on print journalists should be allocated to online"
  (tags: publicservice news newspaper ofcom)
• MTM London's full study (as an annexe of Ofcom's PSB review) is here and Nick Reynolds discusses it here.

Jon Snow joins web meme

It's not rickrolling, it's snowballing (boom tish)

Bloody brilliant

5th Anniversary of war in Iraq :: Google map

There's a huge amount of coverage of this anniversary, both broadcast and print media. C4's "Happy Birthday Iraq" season starts today - a week long look at the past five years of the conflict. It's been very difficult to try and manage the scale of all of this. It's a subject that expands beyond your reach the moment you start thinking about it. Online we've got tons of content, both written and video, news footage, personal accounts and film clips.

One of the things I was keen to do was give some kind of geographical context, and to try to promote C4 as an editor of choice - point to where the interesting content elsewhere on the web is. I wanted to help people find content beyond the usual news sites they might visit. So we've put a considered selection of C4 and non-C4 content into a google map. You can start with Baghdad and zoom in/out, and we've chosen the satellite view deliberately - I don't know about you but being able to see the streets of places I only associate with news footage somehow brings it home.

See what you think. I don't think it will change the world, but as a way of navigating content I think it's interesting.

Media literacy = communication skills. (half bakery alert)

I'm sitting at my my desk while in the belly of the C4 building the Digital Media Literacy Summit is in full swing. I've been keeping half an eye on the blogs, particularly Robin Hamman and Kevin Anderson at the Guardian, and the half baked blinding-flash-of-the-obvious thought has just struck me that media literacy is really synonymous with communication skills.

This from Kevin:

• How can people be empowered with the skills, competencies and confidence to get the most out of Web 2.0 media in the ways they relate, interact, work and create today?
• How can 'critical thinking' and awareness about media - sources, editing and ownership - best be 'taught' or encouraged? And by whom?
• Is the Charter for Media Literacy still fit for purpose?
• What collaborations between government, the media industries, education and cultural organisations - as well as with parents and users - are needed to develop a media literate UK?
• What new opportunities for creativity and participation do Web 2.0 capabilities offer people as citizens or as consumers, and in their various communities?

Isn't this at its most basic form a way of thinking about our comms skills now? We used to define "good communication skills" (in CVs and elsewhere) as "being quite good at talking to people in person and on the phone, and generally ok at writing stuff down in a way other people can understand". And media literacy was about understanding how things got on telly, and trying to spot bias in newspaper articles.

Given our wired/wifi, socially networked, interactive world, where users are broadcasting as much as they're consuming. These two threads are intertwining. If we think about web natives (usually, but not exclusively, young folks), they need to know what they're broadcasting on the web when they construct their blog/facebook/myspace/a.n.other profiles. It's basically outward facing communication - how you project yourself and communicate yourself to others. They also want to be adept at translating the messages they receive from the wider media world, filtering for relevence, bias etc. So, inward bound comms - are you listening closely?

As the more and more organisations harness digital media as a mechanism for holding conversations with their audiences/consumers, in the same way that individuals harness it to converse with each other (facebook groups, blogs etc), digital media literacy is surely about helping people decode those conversations well.

links for 2007-10-01

• Channel 4 reality show row over baby caring
  Bringing Up Baby is causing quite a storm. We're trying to reflect this in a small way here. Balancing audience comment without promoting complaints to ofcom is a
  (tags: channel4 babies tv complaints)
• Apple's latest iphone software update is disabling phones hacked so that users can use them with the network of their choice.
  Pretty piss poor if you ask me.
  (tags: iphone apple mobile)

James Purnell in fakery shocker

The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, the man who told broadcasters to "get [their] houses in order" over premium rate phonelines and fakery in shows, has been faked into a photo op.

It's not even a good fake, ffs. My photoshop skills are better than this (and that's really not saying much).