Media - Internet

HAMBURG: A few days before he planted his head into the chest of the Italian defender Marco Materazzi in the World Cup final, ensuring an inglorious exit to an otherwise stellar soccer career, Zinédine Zidane stepped out onto the balcony of his Berlin hotel and had a smoke. From an office building nearby, someone whipped out a camera phone and took a shot. A couple of days later, the photo, in all...

(SEAPA/IFEX) - Vietnam filtering, monitoring Internet more, says study The Open Net Initiative (ONI), in a recently released study on Vietnam, is reporting an increase in Internet censorship in the country. The research finds that Vietnamese officials are particularly bent on filtering content that questions the country's one-party system. ONI also says that, apparently paying close attention to...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has condemned the decision of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on 26 July 2006 to add 34 new web addresses to the list of sites to which it blocks access. For the most part they were Baluch nationalist sites, online radio stations and sites relating to the Sindhi minority. "We deplore these latest filtering measures and we insist, yet again...

SAN DIEGO – When he's not playing guitar, a ponytailed musician named Charles Johnson likes to sit in his Los Angeles home office, listen to jazz, and make mincemeat of the mainstream media. He's tangled with CBS over the authenticity of documents about President Bush's National Guard service. This time around, he's uncovered doctored war photos distributed by Reuters, forcing the news service to...

YAHOO IS DELIVERING A DRUBBING to its main competitors in the general news arena, according to a study released Monday by comScore Media Metrix. Yahoo News was the undisputed leader in absolute terms--attracting almost 31.2 million unique visitors in June--and also in growth, showing 13 percent growth on a year-over-year basis. The next-biggest general news site, MSNBC, slid 14 percent from 27.33...

According to recent statistics from blog-tracking site Technorati, the blogosphere has doubled every six months for the last three years. That's 175,000 new blogs per day worldwide. Technorati added its 50 millionth blog on July 31, 2006. The site's State of the Blogosphere report is released every three months by Technorati CEO Dave Sifry. Sifry has been tracking the blogosphere since 2002, and...

When Nokia Corp. released its camera smartphone last fall, the marketing campaign cut back on news releases and flashy ads. Instead, the company sent sample products to 50 tech-savvy amateur bloggers with a passion for mobile phones. The tactic paid off, as word spread online about the N-series phone, driving up sales and contributing to a 43 percent profit boost for Nokia last quarter. "So many...

Google has agreed to pay the Associated Press for use of its news stories and pictures, according to a statement released by the two companies on Wednesday. The deal settles a dispute between Google and the AP and has implications for a lawsuit Google is facing from the Paris-based Agence France Presse news agency, which sued the search powerhouse last year for allegedly infringing its copyrights...

The government is considering expanding media law to regulate Internet companies publishing news stories on their Web sites, officials at the Ministry of Culture and Tourism said. There has been a lengthy debate among Internet companies and print media over the boundaries of Web-based journalism, with the offline news outlets demanding their online rivals should be bound by the same legal...

The Internet is becoming a cesspool of plagiarism. Steve McKee, a partner at Albuquerque advertising agency McKee Wallwork Cleveland, found that out in June after he wrote his monthly column for BusinessWeek.com. The column, entitled "Five Words Never to Use in an Ad," was one of his more popular pieces. A search revealed that 36 blogs had picked it up and posted it to their sites, something that...