Journalism, the World and the Future
Discussion of the future of journalism from GMU
Google and other online services regularly gets requests to provide information about users or to take items off their servers. Google, however, has decided to release information about where these requests are coming from.
This month Google has started to publicize what countries have asked to have material taken down.
The number one country with requests? No, it’s not China. (I’ll get back to that in a bit.) It’s Brazil with 291 removal requests and 3,663 requests for data.
Of the removal requests, 155 were because of court orders. Google says it complied — fully or partially — with 82.5 percent of the total requests.
FYI, number 2 in data requests is the United States with 3,580. Requests to take down material puts the States at number four with 123 requests.
Germany (188) and India (142) fill in the numbers two and three slots for requests to remove material from the Google system.
As I said, we’ll get back to China.
Here is the Google note about China:
Chinese officials consider censorship demands as state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time.”
A lot of the requests in India and Brazil are to remove material from Orkut. It seems that 51 percent of all Orkut users are from Brazil. India accounts for 20 percent of all Orkut users. The united States is third at just about 18 percent.
Orkut is Google’s response to Facebook and MySpace. It has about 100 million active members as of Februaryy 2010 and ranks 61st in social network usage.
The large Brazilian user base prompted Google to move its Orkut operation from California to Belo Horizonte in Brazil about a year and a half ago.
No one really knows why Orkut took off in Brazil but it did. And, in response to the slow Internet connections in the country, Google developed a lite version. (Hello, Facebook. You listening?)
And now it seems Orkut is number one in Estonia as well.
So, if you want to know more about Brazil, India and Estonia from social network denizens, get an Orkut account.
Some extra reading:
- Google releases list of government censorship requests – Telegraph of London
- Google will provide more data about government requests for user data – Boing Boing
- Brazil tops world asking Google to remove content – Reuters
- US, Brazil lead Google’s Top 10 censorship list; China off the chart – Christian Science Monitor
First posted at Journalism, Journalists and the World
Several years ago I wrote a piece for my students to remind them that they should not blindly trust spell check.
A publishing house in Australia is learning that lesson the hard way.
Hot water over spell check
PENGUIN Group Australia turns over $120 million a year from printing words but a one-word misprint has cost it dearly.
The publishing company was forced to pulp and reprint 7000 copies of Pasta Bible last week after a recipe called for “salt and freshly ground black people” — instead of pepper — to be added to the spelt tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto.
The exercise will cost Penguin $20,000, the head of publishing, Bob Sessions, said. At $3300 a letter, it’s a pricey typo.
And here is my little contribution…
Don’t Depend on Spell Check
When ewe right, ewe should remember two double Czech you’re spelling. Spell check will knot catch awl miss takes.
As eye sit hear in my office reeding articles, eye one dear how many thymes I have scene speeling errors that should have been avoided.
Spell check a loan does knot prevent mistakes.
Sum times using the grammar Czech helps too identify some miss takes.
Butt knot awl of them.
There is nothing like reeding a story out loud. When ewe reed sum thing and here it, ewe can often sea wear the mistakes are.
Media affairs intern for the Iraqi embassy in Washington, DC.
Click here for details.
The Beeb has a great program — Over to You — that is about the state of media around the world.
This weekend they had a story about the changes in Zimbabwe.
In Zimbabwe there is only state-run broadcasting. This year the government created the Zimbabwe Media Commission with the declared intention to promote and protect the media.
The guest this week was Gerry Jackson, a Zimbabwe exile who runs a radio station aimed at Zimbabwe from England, says the only difference between the policies of the Mugabe government before and after the unity government came to power and the new media commission is that the overt violence against free media has subsided.
Private news outlets are still banned. It is still against the law to call the 86-year-old Mugabe “an old man.”
Other discussions included the use of labels such as “left wing” and “right wing” to groups.
This is a good radio program that is available live and on podcasts from the BBC web site.
So far the most I have seen on the reporting about how the volcanic ash cloud is affecting European travel has focused on just European travel. There have been a few comments about how the airline groundings have affected flights to/from the States but I have yet to see any stories about what the groundings really mean.
The cancellation of so many flights has to have a social and economic impact on not only Europe but also on individual communities in the United States.
For example, a couple of friends are stuck in Sweden because of the ash cloud. He teaches journalism classes at a Washington, DC-area university. He made arrangements for other profs to cover his classes last week but now he has to make arrangements for this week because he cannot get out of Europe.
How many other business men and women are stranded in Europe? And what kind of impact does that have on getting business done?
Yes, I know with smart phones and high-speed Internet connections, a lot of what once had to be done face to face can now be done in virtual meetings. But I still figure there has to be an economic impact on having key corporate people stuck on the other side of the pond. (Europeans stuck in the US and Americans stuck in Europe.)
I wonder: Are the State Dept. and Department of Homeland Security allowing European visitors to overstay their visas because of this situation?
Are local businesses, churches, charities, etc. being affected because people cannot get in or out of Europe?
CNN just reported the industry figures it is losing $200 million a day. What do the losses the aviation industry mean to the average person? Will the rest of the industry follow Spirit Air and charge for carry on bags or follow Ryan Air and charge for use of the toilet? How about imposing a new “disaster recovery” fee per ticket?
What about other industries? Have the travel restrictions affected more than just the aviation industry? How about UPS or FedEx? How about companies that depend on air cargo? (Can Americans get their brie? Has the cost of real brie gone up?)
I would bet anyone looking at his/her own community could come up with a local, local, local story that show the local, local, local connection to this incident. It just takes a little looking and asking.
