This post is the second of a five part series on ‘using the web for documentaries‘, addressing the following points: the embeddedness of society in the internet, the political in the web, the politics of engines, the politics of tools, and the web as an anticipatory medium.

Let us go on by applying traditional controversy research to the web. One of the media digitalized and put onto the web are newspapers. Google News aggregates and ranks stories from thousands of international newspapers. The ranking is very traditional: by date, as well as by number of readers. Via Google as an interface, access to newspapers has changed: they are searchable, faster to consult, they contain more than in your local news outlet, national and language editions may be compared, etcetera.
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Inspired by Wilbert Baan’s Interactive Story Telling Experiment and a spare hour to code, I made another system using Flickr to generate image to a story. This time the system scrapes headlines from Google News, gets significant terms from Yahoo, and then queries those as tags in Flickr. This way Flickr provides random, though clarifying, pictures to the headlines – the photo editorial is generative but often illuminating (for example, getting this picture to the Rick Renzi story). I’ve made the page scroll down automatically and reload when all headlines have been flickrified so I can have my spare screen act as an always up-to-date, but augmented, rss-reader / issue-ticker. You can try it yourself at flickrNews US or flickrNews NL or flickrNews FR. The US version works best as the Yahoo Term Extraction Service is optimalized for English.

Wikipedia is good for a general overview. To get an idea take a look at this photo gallery from Phuket, Thailand.

Boing Boing has got a good overview of how bloggers are covering the disaster in South East Asia:

1. BB post 1
2. BB post 2
3. BB post 3
4. BB post 4
5. BB post 5
6. BB post 6
7. BB post 7
8. BB post 8
9. BB post 9

An excerpt from post 2:

Rohit Gupta says, “One of my media friends is a TV show host in Sri Lanka, and is writing live accounts of the frenzy on our community blog while rushing around in search of loved ones. Morquendi writes…”

A part of me wants to say fuck you to being a journalist and go out there and get involved in the aid work. Carry bags of food to the people who need it. But another part keeps saying my work is here. Making calls and making sure people stay informed. Seen things today I never thought I’d see. Seen things I don’t ever want to see. How do you ask a question from a father who saw his 4 year old child being dragged off into the sea and be sensitive about it? Do you say sorry? Does that cut it? 2 friends dead. They were on a romantic beach holiday. I like to believe they died holding each other’s hands. 2 more missing. Presumed dead. Find a vehicle in about an hour and head off down South to look for them, or identify their bodies. If anyone had told me the day was going to be like this maybe I’d have stayed in bed.

Alex Steffen points us to another first hand report on the worldchanging.com blog: Link. In Mumbai, blogger Dina Mehta is also covering the disaster: Link. Dina is also participating in the collaborative tsunamihelp.blogspot.com, which is shaping up to be something of a central clearinghouse for blog updates on the aftermath and relief efforts.

us newspapers with rss feeds
Just what i needed!

udpate: cnn newsfeeds

uit de Bits Of Freedom nieuwsbrief Nr. 2.15 – 21 juli 2004:

4. Brein gaat P2P gebruikers vervolgen

#Erik: we zullen dus bv mute-net of konspire2b moeten gebruiken#

De stichting Brein begint dit najaar waarschijnlijk al met het aanpakken van Nederlandse gebruikers van peer-to-peer diensten op internet. Dat heeft bestuurslid Theo Roos op 12 juli 2004 aangekondigd in een vraaggesprek met
NRC Handelsblad. Brein heeft wel vaker acties aangekondigd tegen individuele internetters, maar niet eerder een datum genoemd. Directeur
Kuik heeft regelmatig de samenhang met een legaal download-aanbod benadrukt. Met de komst van iTunes naar Nederland (verwacht in oktober) acht Brein de tijd kennelijk rijp voor handhaving, door adresgegevens op te vragen bij internetproviders en rechtszaken te voeren waarin schadevergoeding wordt geëist.

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from: Buergerwelle.de – one of the biggest information sources concerning mobile phones, mobile radiocommunictions and electrosmog.

Omega-News – Possible Deleterious Effects of Physiologically Significant Radiation Pressure Exposures: Portable communication devices that have become globally utilized during the past decade are principally electromagnetic field emitters: that is, photon emitters. Although commonly neglected for consideration, due to its inconsequential magnitude for most circumstances, the radiation pressure associated with some of these portable communication devices provides forces on the order of magnitude of piconewtons, which is identically the magnitude of force that has been demonstrated to deform and initiate dissociation (melting) of the DNA molecule. No similar comparison of radiation pressure experienced from our sun may be made due to the spectral content of solar radiation which reaches a maximum in the visible light region of the electromagnetic spectrum and diminishes rapidly with increasing wavelength. However, portable hand-held radiating devices, virtually unknown prior to the 1990s, motivate us to make a calculated scrutiny of a force, radiation pressure, previously held to be of no consequence to life on earth. (…)

other articles:
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In Nederland leest tweederde van de bedrijven de e-mail van werknemers. Daarmee behoren Nederlandse werkgevers tot de top van Europa.

Statewatch News online: EU: Security research programme to look at creating “smart” biometric documents which will “locate,identify and follow the movement of persons” through “automatic chips with positioning”

EU: Security research programme to look at creating “smart” biometric documents which will “locate, identify and follow the movement of persons” through “automatic chips with positioning”
A Communication from the European Commission (COM 2004/72) sets out very new roles for the European Union to bring about “comprehensive security”:

1) intrusive internal security which will track the movements and purchases of every person
2) external security which will seek to complete the closure of land and sea borders to “illegal” migrants
3) intervention in “failed states” and “regional conflicts” either “on its own or in international alliances”
4) to build a “security culture” with the “security industry and the research community”
5) in a world of “global threats, markets and media, security and prosperity” to create an “international order based on effective multilaterialism” – or put another way in a world based on globalisation, media monopoly, insecurity and poverty in order to maintain the dominance of the USA and the EU
6) to create a military-industrial-research consensus on the desired direction including “federating industrial effort” (see: the “Group of Personalities” below)
7) to introduce “internationally interoperable systems, in particular between defence and other security organisations”
prepare the EU for the “management of a declared crisis” (an EU “state of emergency”)

and finally

9) the “adaptation of governance structures to effectively deal with these matters”

U.S. President Bush has asked the Senate to ratify the Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention, “a global agreement apparently created to help police worldwide cooperate to fight Internet crimes.” The treaty — which would override existing U.S. law — provides broad investigatory and surveillance powers to law enforcement authorities. It apparently also requires a high degree of cooperation between police of different nations. And it requires signatory nations to criminalize copyright infringement with a computer.

Articles on the subject are found at Alternet and CommonDreams.org.

You can read full text (in English or French) of the Convention on Cybercrime.

The U.S. Department of Justice has a FAQ on the Convention.

Privacy International has a detailed critique of the Convention (.pdf format).

Viruses turn to peer-to-peer nets

Custom created peer-to-peer networks are finding favour with some computer virus writers.