jill/txt

I have ten more days till my book on blogging for Polity Press has to be finished. Scott suggested I might be interested in the ways Burmese bloggers are spreading news of the current protests, despite the Burmese regime having shut off access to the Internet. Scott showed me this CNN story tells us about Ko Htike, a Burmese student in London who is posting images and messages sent from mobile phones in Burma. There are really disturbing photographs and stories there. Tama Leaver, who’s been giving me really useful feedback on my drafts while I’ve been in Perth, just posted a roundup of various ways citizen media is dealing with the Burmese crisis, from YouTube, Facebook and the Wikipedia through blogs and other arenas. A very useful overview.

And I think my citizen media chapter will indeed include a couple of examples from Burma.

Espen Skoland, a Norwegian who recently completed his MA on the impact of blogs on political campaigns, notes that while the political parties don’t seem to have done much with the internet in the recent campaign for the local elections, voters have visted political parties’ websites ten times as much as at the last elections, two years ago.

Kristine Lowe also points to Dag P. Svendsen, who on the blog Kommunevalget 2007 has been analysing “blog buzz” to predict the outcome of the elections - and do you know, he was right. Or the blogosphere was right.

ABC Nyheter has an article about how an employee of the Norwegian embassy in Saudi Arabia has written a couple of slightly indiscreet posts that she perhaps shouldn’t have written. Following the links I discovered I quite enjoy her blogs: In Transit - Insh’Allah, and her English blog, Orientia in Saudi. Her transgressions are rather minor - it’s a personal blog, written in a language only about sixteen million people can read, and really, you’ve got to read for quite a while before you even figure out she’s working for the embassy.

One of her “indiscretions” - well, it’s a brief ode to Emanuels, by which she means the drivers and local employees Norwegian embassies always have, and she notes how wonderful they are - and that the Norwegian embassy employs these local people on contracts that would never be acceptable in Norway. Shouldn’t a citizen of a democratic country, working for that country’s embassy be allowed to say something like that?

Of course, ABC Nyheter probably just wants to scare up a good story.

Once this book manuscript is done (deadline October 10, and it looks like I’m on track) I’m going to explore all manner of online narratives, and Kate Modern will have to be one of them. This is a spin-off from the Lonelygirl15 series of videos that was a hit on YouTube last year, but set in London, and sponsored by and integrated with the British social networking site Bebo. Here’s Kate’s Bebo profile, and an edited “catch up” sequence for those of us who haven’t been following the story since July.

Watch More Videos       Uploaded by bebo.com/MyKateModern
Apparently there’s a new show planned in the same style for later this autumn, also to run on Bebo: Sophia’s Diary. Given that Bebo’s a social networking site for real friends to connect on, I wonder whether they’ll get upset users reacting to this introduction of a fictional character on the site, as Friendster users objected to the Friendster-sanctioned fakesters from TV-series? This question from a user suggests Bebo’s pushing Kate Modern without necessarily explaining that she’s fictional.

And though I haven’t really explored Kate Modern too much yet, it does look as though the several-years-old Online Caroline (which I wrote about back in 2002) is still more advanced narratively and technically than the new web video serials.

I’ve been in Australia a week without blogging. It took a few days to get set up with internet access and library access and a parking permit and so on here at UWA, but I’m now happily ensconced in the Scholars’ Centre in the Reid Library, with everything I need. I’m editing the many words written for my book on blogging, mostly, and somehow the blogging urge hasn’t appeared. Until now.

See, one of the things I love about Australia is the sense of humour. Since I arrived, the news has been filled with little but the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) meetings in Sydney, and the extreme security around it all. Apparently Sydney is a pretty unpleasant place for non-world-leaders right now, full of security fences and checkpoints and with freeways and bridges inaccessible because Bush or Putin is using them. But yesterday a bunch of comedians from the ABC show The Chaser’s War on Everything managed to inadvertently breach two checkpoints. Look at their security badges - not too convincing, eh? They drove a motorcade, complete with “security guards” running along side it and Australian and Canadian flags adorning it, and were waved through two checkpoints, ending up deep in the restricted zone. When they were practically at Bush’s hotel, and by their own reckoning approaching the restricted zone, they turned the car around, and one of them jumped out, dressed as Bin Laden, and said something like “I’m an important world leader why don’t I have a seat at the APEC table?” That was Sydney police’s first hint that something might be amiss.

All eleven of the Chaser team was arrested under the special temporary laws for APEC that allow police to stop and search civilians in Sydney without a warrant, and detain them without charges for 48 hours. They’ve been released on bail. And while the authorities are talking about how inappropriate it was to pull a prank like this during a serious security event, an overwhelming majority of the people on the talk show I listened to driving to uni this morning reckoned the joke was on the police and fully supported the Chaser. Plus, well, you know, it’s funny!