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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.)

Alternative Olympic medals table

Channel 4 News has published a different way of looking at the results in Beijing. The interactive medals table allows you to compare how different countries have done relative to their population, human rights record and GDP. Team GB is still up there on the human rights record, but top of the table when you take GDP into account is North Korea, Zimbabwe and Mongolia. Blimey.

Blogging 42 day detention debate

Channel 4 News are live blogging today's debate in the Commons using coveritlive.com.

I'm really enjoying the mix of reporting, asides and video clips.

"Channel4News - GOSSIP: The smart money sees the government winning this one with the support of the Democratic Unionist Party. But apparently the Tories are expecting to lose this too. We've been told that David Cameron is at a private function from 6:30 onwards. That means that if the government loses the first vote, he would miss the second vote, which we're expecting at 6:40.
Clearly the Tories' aren't preparing for victory..."

Channel 4 News video

It's taken a while to get there, but at last you can now catch up on (almost) all C4 News online. So that means almost all of the 1hr long 7pm  broadcast (we can't put it all on the web due to rights issues, unfortunately), and clips of key news items embedded into pages. And of course it's embeddable for full distributability (yes that's a real word).

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.

US Campaign Donations

In a lovely bit of democratic/election transparency the Huffington Post have launched Fundrace 2008 - a database/googlemaps mashup which allows you to search the register of donations by location, city name and/or occupation. They're going for the celeb angle - are those A-listers putting their money where their mouths are?  Fun and compelling to play with.

I wonder if these guys will ever open up their API...

V cool videos about urban gang life

AJ Nakasila is a very talented guy. He's made some films (with True Vision's help) about his and his friends' experiences of gang life in London. The results are stunning, and feel really authentic. There is so much debate on young people, gangs and violent crime flying around in the public domain, often driven by feral beasts, politicians, police, educators etc. They're experts in their field, but come at it from their particular perspective. They're outside, or on the edge of it, and looking in and they're often talking to other adults. What I love about these films is the feel of authenticity, and the sense that these guys are talking to us in their own language. I don't pretend they're going change the world, but they're a brilliant (and sometimes bleak) view of a small and troubling section of it.

I'm also massively impressed with AJ! The music is also by him and Jamie Perera. Stills from the shoots are on flickr and the videos are available to download on the Channel 4 Dispatches site.

Alex Thompson is blogging from Afghanistan

I really like his style:

Every now and then the Marines, it seems, move into their territory and they all have a big fight, or a small fight, or just a fight fight. Then it stops for a while. Then it starts up all over again.

In the interludes the Taliban have taken to calling up. As one Marine remarked to me today, it's a bit like the British and Germans on the Western Front in the First World War.

One of them was this morning. Lots of banter about why don't you come up here and attack us properly and what's wrong with you lot of infidels - that kind of thing.

Full piece here, with more here and here.

(I'm not going to go into the lack of blogging infrastructure here. Or that I'm wrong to call it a blog because technically that's not how blogs work blah blah blah. What can I say... we're working on it. In the meantime lets just enjoy some great writing, shall we?)