Vidize Blog

Murdoch’s empire is under pressure more than ever. His attempt to start clean by closing News of the World, the 100+ year old newspaper doesn’t seem to appease angry lawmakers.
Britain’s deputy prime minister urged Rupert Murdoch Thursday to face questioning by lawmakers over the phone hacking scandal, as pressure grew on his media empire in [...]

12.36pm: The press conference to hand over the Swiss banking data – containing the offshore account details of 2,000 prominent people and companies – is now over, but here is a summary of some of Assange’s later answers.
Latest update on the latest from Wikileaks on the issue of 2000 Swiss bank accounts of wealthy individuals [...]

Riftstalker writes about Activision’s PR tactics. It seems they’re successful every time in attracting media coverage.

It begs the question if the guys in CNN (and other media) are journalists or just hacks.

Nassim Taleb, a professor at New York University and author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,” talks with Bloomberg’s Erik Schatzker about the May 6 stock market selloff and his investment strategy.

An interesting article appears on BBC – End of the news romantics.

Says Andrew Marr:
I am on the edge of replacing paper newspapers with electronic versions for my iPad and phone; of accepting that I hardly ever wait for a conventional news bulletin; and of actually reading full-length books, with pleasure, as downloads.

The black statistics from Russia continue:
The AP quotes Oleg Orlov, head of the Memorial rights group where Natalya Estermirova worked, as saying that witnesses saw four men force her into a car in the Chechen capital of Grozny on Wednesday. She was later found lying on a road with two bullet wounds in her head, [...]

Russia remains in the spotlight as one of the most dangerous places for journalists.
Anastasiya Baburova (only 25) was shot on January 19 – minutes after a press conference at the Independent Press Center. She was walking towards the Metro station with a laywer, Stanislav Markelov.
Baburova apparently tried to stop the killer, who [...]

Now that the Vidize is in beta, I plan to go over the list of recommended equipment.
I start with the absolute must-have – a Web camera.
A while back, there was a discussion about USB 1.1 vs USB 2.0 web cams. This discussion is mostly obsolete now as the majority of new web cameras are all [...]

Nicolas Kayser-Bril has done a review of the Vidize beta (in French).
You can read it here although if French isn’t your first language, you can read a loose translation from Google.

I just stumbled upon an article marking the 75th anniversary of the BBC. About one third of it is based on Jeffrey Sachs’ Reith Lectures.
Here’s a few important points:
A terrorist shot in Sarajevo provided the pretext for German aggression which started World War I. 9/11 was used by the Bush Administration to launch the Iraq [...]