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Sunday Morning Coffee
Another Flickr video upload and Canon PowerShot G9 test.
If Flickr had launched its video upload service back in January 2008 might really have been the year of video after all (apologies to Semanal, by the way).
links for 2008-05-03
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Great roundup of Global Voices’ coverage of the global food crisis.
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The Caribbean Review of Books’ blog begins a book of the month series
links for 2008-04-24
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Trinidad and Tobago soap opera “Westwood Park” is now available for download (rental or purchase) at movie download site Jaman.com
Aimé Césaire at the end of dawn
I remembered only this morning that the late, great Martiniquan poet and statesman, Aimé Césaire, who passed away on April 17, was once featured on a Caribbean Free Radio podcast.
On CFR #7 (released on March 27, 2005!), I played “Acid”, a track by the Martinquan jazz group Matébis featuring Césaire on “vocals”. Or, more accurately, Césaire intoning, in his impeccably enunciated French, against a musical background, the first few verses of his epic “Notebook of a Return to My Native Land”, beginning with the famously ambiguous opening line “au bout du petit matin” (”at the end of dawn”)–a line widely used in the titles of Césaire documentaries (including the one by Sarah Maldoror) and in press tributes this week.
For those who wish to listen to the podcast, my intro to the track begins around 4:00. At the end of it I offer a short outro then segue into a moment of nostalgia for my Martinique days and some musings on multilingualism. Others may click on the player below to hear “Acid” by itself:
I’ve already highlighted Global Voices’ lovely compilation of tributes to Césaire from bloggers throughout the world, but Antilles has been keeping tabs (one, two, three) on the tributes pouring forth from the world’s presses. France24 posts a report and video to coincide with today’s burial ceremonies in Fort-de-France, Martinique, and Radio France d’Outre Mer (RFO) dusts off an interesting 2001 documentary (in French) showing Césaire in his role as “homme politique” along with interviews with friends, colleagues and ordinary citizens whose lives he touched in various ways.
And now would be as good a time as any to take a look at Euzhan Palcy’s three-part documentary on Césaire’s life and work, which is available from California Newsreel.
links for 2008-04-18
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Bloggers pay tribute to the great Martiniquan poet on the occasion of his passing.
Night sky, Trinidad
The power went about an hour ago, so here in the depths of the Diego Martin valley we’re experiencing a rare moment of utter darkness. A fellow Twitter user asked me the other day how much of the southern sky we were able to see from Trinidad. The answer is quite a lot of it, though it occurred me then that, for some odd reason, I rarely look south.
Tonight I did, though. The image below is the view looking south. The one above is looking north-west.
links for 2008-04-09
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The Telecommunications Authority of Trinidad & Tobago has posted the presentations from last week’s seminar online. The seminar outline suggested that “airwaves” included the internet, so definitely one to check out. (via TTCS blog)
links for 2008-04-06
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Nikipedia rounds up the commentary on the buzz surrounding the publication of Patrick French’s long-awaited Naipaul bio.
Austin, Day Two
It’s Day Two of the International Online Journalism Symposium at the University of Texas at Austin, and having given my presentation on Global Voices yesterday, I have no further obligations besides networking and business card distribution.
Prof. Rosental Alves, who created the symposium nine years ago, has put on a solid show. The meeting is very well organised, the auditorium we’re occupying is the perfect size (it was just about filled to capacity yesterday), comfortable, well outfitted with power outlets for each seat and glitch-free wifi and the room temperature has been tolerable (these may seem like trivial things, but it’s astonishing how often conference organisers don’t get it right).
This morning’s “News Games” panel — fascinating stuff
Rosental’s students, who appear to be in charge of much of the organisation, are also doing a fine job covering the event on the conference blog, posting well-captioned images on Flickr and videos of the sessions on YouTube, and it’s been delightful to see them not only making use of these tools but using them well.
A less successful feature of the blog is the inclusion of personal Twitter feeds from a few of the students: setting up a dedicated Twitter feed for the conference or using hashtags would probably have been a better idea. I’ve also been checking in on the CoverItLive liveblog that was in effect yesterday but which seems to have crashed and burned this morning. A conference tag (onlinejournalismutexas?) published beforehand on the conference web site would have been useful as well in aggregating the online commentary and media being uploaded by conference attendees.
This is assuming that conference attendees are actually posting their impressions online. Apart from Alf Hermida’s concise and eloquent reports on Reportr.net, there’s very little commentary online, which is perhaps unsurpising considering that the room is full of journalists and media people, as opposed to bloggers. Alf and I chatted during this morning’s coffee break about the recurring theme of hyperlocality in the symposium presentations. Alf didn’t seem as disheartened as a few other conference attendees at Dallas Morning News publisher’s Jim Moroney III’s championing of the hyperlocal during yesterday’s keynote, but we both agreed that most people attending journalism school today (Alf’s students at the University of British Columbia, for example) probably had their sights set on something slightly more exotic than the local beat. Alf pointed out that the hyperlocal emphasis doesn’t bode well, either, for Global Voices’ efforts to get our content used by mainstream media sites. But as I noted in my presentation, diaspora communities in American cities might well have a different idea of what “local” means.
An interesting counterpoint to the emphasis on hyperlocality has been the relatively cosmopolitan roster of invitees. There’s a strong Latin American component to the event, with a number of attendees from Brazil and a few from Argentina and Colombia. There have been presentations so far from Spain, Norway, Colombia, and Neil Thurman from City University, London, whom I met in Vilanova last November, just presented a paper on UK media companies’ embrace of multimedia along with Ben Lupton. Chris Kabwato is also here pushing Highway Africa, the annual ICT conference in Grahamstown, South Africa, whose focus this year will be citizen media.
Off to lunch now.
International Symposium on Online Journalism
I’m in Austin, Texas for the next couple of days, attending the International Symposium on Online Journalism. For a live webcast of the event, visit http://livewebcast.theacesbuilding.com/.
UPDATE: Forgot to mention the symposium blog being maintained by Rosental Alves’s students. And photos.
links for 2008-04-02
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Database of samples of English accents from around the world, though none from the Caribbean. (via John Kennedy)
links for 2008-03-29
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If you understand French and have access to Joost, you might enjoy watching this TV series from Burkina Faso.
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Join others around the world TODAY in observing Earth Hour by turning off your lights and all unnecessary appliances at 8pm local time.
Poll: Most surprising aspect of Panday laptop incident?
The suspension from Parliament yesterday of Basdeo Panday, Trinidad and Tobago’s leader of the Opposition, for unauthorised laptop use, has left me feeling me terribly confused. Please help me resolve some of the issues surrounding the matter by taking this poll:
*in June 2006, US Senator Stevens famously referred to the internet as “a series of tubes“
UPDATE: The Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society blog has a listing of news articles about the incident.
Pipe dreams: thoughts on (the day after) World Water Day
First it was just the hot water, when my water heater sprung a leak which the technicians took three days to come and repair. Then it was running water period, when the electric pump that drives water from the storage tanks into the house (a necessity in these parts when your house is on a hill) was taken away for servicing for a 24-hour period that morphed into five days.
As desperate as the situation felt at the time, I always knew I’d eventually get my running water back, so it would be churlish of me to compare myself with the thousands in this country who don’t ever have running water in their homes, not to mention the 1.1 billion across the world who lack access to water that’s even clean. I also had a number of options, including borrowing showers at friends’ homes and forgoing personal hygiene altogether (which, for the record, I did not do).
But filling buckets from a storage tank is tedious work, and a bucket full of water is heavy, especially for a weakling like me. In many parts of the world, of course, it’s women and girls who ensure that their families and communities are supplied with water, often walking great distances to and from water sources carrying vessels filled with the precious commodity (which is why developments that improve the water supply in communities–for example, the roundabout play-pump–often improve the lives of women and girls as well).
The reason I have water on the brain today is that yesterday was World Water Day. No doubt netizens throughout the world would have been quoting World Bank VP Ismail Serageldin’s famous statement that the wars “of the next century [meaning this century, of course] will be over water”, linking to websites like 1h2o.org and wishing films like Sanjeev Chatterjee’s “One Water” and Shalini Kantayya’s “A Drop of Life” were available for viewing at their local cineplex (Sanjeev’s film will be in a few weeks, if you happen to live in Miami or New York City). Or maybe even that other great film about water-related conflict, “Chinatown“.
links for 2008-03-22
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Guardian video showcasing a processing operation for the world’s finest coffee — good old Jamaican Blue Mountain
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That people should be stigmatised by past membership in a college a cappella groups seems to me one of several things wrong with America.
links for 2008-03-17
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The ‘08 report is out: “The state of the American news media in 2008 is more troubled than a year ago. And the problems, increasingly, appear to be different than many experts have predicted.”