DLTQ.org

Yukos all over again or just some crooked western businessmen abusing their Chinese contractors?

Link: BBC NEWS | Business | US company boss arrested in China.

I noticed this from a norwegian news outlet today, and now The Guardian is also writing about it.

Norwegians are promised by Thai officials that "No, no we will not burn the bodies of norwegian victims". Wtf? As if Norwegians are worthy of special care? As if we have the rights for more ice and freezer space than some Thai or Indonesian victim?

This behaviour is pissing me off!

Link: Guardian Unlimited | Jeremy Seabrook: In death, imperialism lives on.

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about
This is my first attempt of creating a more complex vlog entry. The above is a first draft tho…

Some time during my editing of it, I asked myself: Where does the vlog entry stop, and the "art movie" start? What distinguishes the vlog or the blog entry is - i guess - the spontaneous. The crash test of thoughts against the world. Not something you have spent hours working on. Or? I guess it is not forbidden to prepare a long time for a single entry…

Hmm, so, should I then call "Destruction" a vlog entry at all? What would speak in favor of such a categorization?

I dont think I did the same mistake as with "Night" (that still cannot export With sound, or otherwise cannot be viewed by others - for some reason). If the above QuickTime .mov file does not load correctly, I also uploaded an .avi version of the movie.

What do you think of it? Oh, and the black-white footage was taken from this propaganda movie: Self Preservation In an Atomic Attack You can watch a stream from that movie here. The movie is HILARIOUS. Frigging good entertainment

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about
Relating to an article in the New York Times, the videobloggers had this discussion:

Quote from NYT:

He said that upon reflection he realized that it was difficult to get information out of hard-hit areas and that putting digital video online is still the domain of "deep geeks" with significant resources. "This brought home to me just how far we have to go," he said.

this is the exact point.
videoblogging could be so much more.
we could really connect people around the world…much more than text blogging could.

how does this happen?
we have to actively make it happen.

- the last part is a quote by Jay Dedman

So here is my response to Jay and the others. I am positive that videoblogging is here to stay - video is the logical next step in the evolution.

On a side note: Videoblogging from the cell phone could be Huge. Are the tools for That out there yet?

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about
I am amazed by the fact that the snow is still on the streets here in Bergen.. Normally it would melt away in wooshes of rain a few days ago already.

Anyway, here is a vlog entry of my street, my local pizzaria restaurant, and other things.
Click the image to see the QuickTime movie!

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about
Books - we all have them, or at least we all have a relationship with them.

I used to hoard loads of books. I used to be the guy that entered a book-store just wanting to browse, and ended up buying five of them, when I could afford merely one. I was a bookaholic, and I ended up having no space for myself in my small student dorm. But then, in january 2002, I sold loads of them, and gave them away, and threw them out. I regret that bitterly now, but c’est la vie.

I still have a very passionate relationship with books tho, and this vlog entry is a small dedication to some of them.

heh, does this work?

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Basically it is just me walking around here in Bergen. I host the .mov files off-site - no point in hosting it where I have bandwidth limitations…

Slightly over my level of discussion or comprehension about the nature and possible futures of the blogging world, Ross Mayfield discusses blogging as media outlets for the "powerful people, or people power".

While we should celebrate both forms as participation at scale we haven’t had before, we should recognize that these forms will converge.  They both involve human editing of a sort.  Aggregation is vertical information assembly where the editor codes.  Citizen’s media is horizontal information assembly where the editor, made even more clear in the Wikinews model that appends a more formal editorial process to the end of emergent practice.  The two will work in tandem.

This story just led my thoughts back to Balkan. I was in Serbia and Bosnia last month in connection with a seminar I co-organized on Education and Democracy in the West Balkans. The discussion areas — well, I will make a separate post on that seminar later on. In either case, while in Zajecar in eastern Serbia, I had a discussion with a guy, and that discussion really helped me understand some of the Major problems in the country. One of them is the lack of Real free media. Or, to put it more correctly: The lack of variety in independent media.

I wrote an article on that very point but somehow I cannot find the article in my outbox at the moment. I will edit this post later on, with a link to the article. While in Sarajevo during the seminar proper, I asked Mr. Rusmir Mahmutčehajić about his opinion regarding the independent media in Bosnia, and he basically said that there is none. All the media outlets are advocating some religious, economic or ethnical group. I will research this further and possibly contact Mr. Mahmutčehajić again by e-mail and ask for further comments.

Quote by Rick Klau, who among other things helped the Howard Dean team a few years ago:

The Internet’s ability to turn all of us into not just consumers but contributors takes us back to the original concept of the Founding Fathers, enabling ordinary citizens to play every bit as important a role as the “professionals” in politics and government.

The whole interview is here and makes a good read imo.

<ramble>

No doubt things are changing around here. Life, as we know it, is going bye-bye. With the information and communication technologies, we must re-orientate ourselves. Big time. Old solutions might still work, but before we know it the competition starts using new and better methods, and we are still stuck in our old habits.

Better find new best practices. Fast.

</ramble>

I stopped writing on my TIG updates some time ago. The server was too slow, and I did not feel that I could customize the service enough. I checked out different blogging solutions, including blogger, but I did not feel quite at ease with them. So I guess I ended up here at typepad. If I had my own server, I would go for movabletype. If.

The last weeks have been staggering to me. After I first heard about SocialText, and started testing it out, I felt that I kept on saying a-ha over and over again. I realized so much about my old ways of doing things, and not only me as a person, but we - as an organization.

Yesterday, I had one of my best days in a very long time. Proving my anxieties and fears all wrong, the board of Hordaland Venstre decided to give me green lights for my e-campaign plans. I had spent most of the last 30 hours working on my note, which basically laid out a simple plan for CMS use, the need for focus on internal communications, and more direct communication with the voters through weblogs and the like. They were in fact quite enthusiastic about it - and here I thought that they were all living in the stone age and even cell phones are dangerous… I guess we youth are quite arrogant sometimes

The topics of this journal will change, but I will mainly let it focus on the two topics of ‘technology’ and ‘politics’. I will continue writing a Norwegian weblog, either at blogspot or move it to this site, and I will be rather focused on the parliamentary election we will have on september 12th and which is what we are all preparing for now.

but now, more coffee, and then to get updated on what is going on in the world.

until later,

Raymond M. Kristiansen aka dltq