Assignment#4->13.10.08
Facebook founder: Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been talking to the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones about how he started the social networking site.
He created Facebook four years ago while he was a college student at Harvard. More than one hundred million people now use the site worldwide.
It was valued at around 7 billion pounds last year but Mr Zuckerberg says he has no intention of selling up.
Assignment#3->08.10.08
Please read this article and comment on it.
Please post your 100 words entry on your
own blog.
Sarkozy plans to shake up France’s ailing newspapers
Nicolas Sarkozy will launch crisis talks today to save France’s ailing newspaper industry, amid union concerns that he could loosen ownership laws, allowing his television baron friends to buy into the national press.
Sarkozy, who is nicknamed the “télé-président” for his media obsession and controversial influence over key parts of the TV and press, recently warned that “democracy cannot function with a press permanently on the edge of an economic precipice”. He has ordered two months of industry consultations led by one of his former Elysée advisers.
The French press, among the least profitable in Europe, is lurching from crisis to crisis. The daily circulation of all French national papers totals 8m – half that of the UK and one third of Germany. The biggest daily seller in France is the sports paper L’Equipe. French newspapers’ combined turnover plummeted from €1.145bn (£905m) in 2000 to €848m last year, and crises have hit dailies such as Le Monde, Libération and Le Figaro.
It costs more to print a national paper in France than its European neighbours because printworks are tightly controlled by the communist union, Le Livre, which has rigid hours and protections. Labyrinthine state controls of newspaper kiosks mean it is hard to find French papers on sale, especially beyond Paris.
The French state gives €1.5bn in direct and indirect state aid to the press each year. Keen to cut that budget, Sarkozy has ordered discussions on distribution, the role of journalists in society, and competition with free papers and the internet.
Le Monde’s editor, Eric Fottorino, said Sarkozy must make it easier for the public to “find” a copy of a newspaper to buy. Libération’s editor, Laurent Joffrin, said the consultation should be open to the public and “newsrooms’ independence” should be protected.
French newspapers, where it is routine for politicians’ offices to change copy and write their own question-and-answer interviews for publication, are suffering from their perceived lack of editorial freedom. In one recent poll, 57% of French people felt journalists were not independent in the face of political parties.
The president has come under fire for his media baron friendships, influence over TV and radio appointments, and scandals over censorship and airbrushing in publications owned by his friends. Most recently, Paris Match accidentally ran a photo of Sarkozy with three legs after an attempt to airbrush a bodyguard out of shot went wrong.
Sarkozy’s favoured solutions to the press crisis include loosening a French law that bans any media organisation from simultaneously owning a major TV station, a major radio network and a major daily newspaper. But his political opponents and journalist unions fear newspapers risk being swallowed by industrial giants such as the construction group Bouygues, which controls France’s biggest private TV channel, TF1, and whose chief executive is one of Sarkozy’s best friends.
Assignment#2->18.09.08
Please watch the video and comment on it.
Please post your 100 words entry on your
own blog.
Please browse this link: End of the book?
What’s the difference between an electronic book and a real book? Sony’s Reader is the latest gadget to offer a library of books in the palm of your hand.
Peter Crawshaw, book-worm and founder of Lovereading.co.uk, compares the experience of reading from a screen, with a good old paper book.
Assignment#1->11.09.08
Please read this article Old newspapers get online launch and comment on it. Please post your 100 words entry on your own blog.
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By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, San Francisco |
Google said it aims to bring history online, one newspaper at a time
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A new initiative to bring old newspapers that pre-date the digital age to the web has been launched by the search giant Google.
The company has partnered with around 100 newspapers to digitize them and make scanned copies available online.
This means users will see entire pages of the original paper as they were printed at the time.
“This is huge,” said Google’s Marissa Mayer. “We’re branching into a new form of content.”
The company’s vice president of search products announced the new feature at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco, a forum for start-up businesses pitching to venture capitalists and the technology industry.
In one part of the demonstration, Ms Mayer showed pages from the Rome News Tribune and called up a story covering an American moonwalk.
It showed the relevant story and other headlines, adverts and promotions of the day giving a sense of the times.
“The compelling part of the product for me is to get a sense of context and the importance of what else happened that day,” said Ms Mayer.
‘Turning point’
The company created a new algorithm for the archives that will jump right to a specific article in the paper with related articles from other papers displayed on the right hand side of the page.
Making old newspapers accessible and searchable online
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The technology for scanning the archives is similar to that used for Google Books. It expands on a two year old effort by the firm to work with two major American newspapers, the New York Times and Washington Post, to index old papers in Google News Archive.
“This effort will enable us to help you find an even greater range of material from newspapers large and small,” wrote Google product manager Punit Soni on the company blog.
“This effort is just the beginning. As we work with more and more publishers, we’ll move closer towards our goal of making those billions of pages of newsprint from around the world searchable, discoverable and accessible online.”
Google will run its AdSense advertising service as part of the programme with revenue being shared with publishers.
“We think this is really good for newspapers because we will bring online generations of contributions from different journalists as well as widen readership,” said Ms Mayer.
The publisher of North America’s oldest newspaper, with editions dating back to 1764, was in agreement.
Pierre Little of the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph told the Associated Press: “I believe this could be a turning point for the industry. This helps us unlock a bit of an asset that had just been sitting within the organisation.”
