Vidize Blog

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 [...]

ITV has started blogging recently. You can find the individual blogs here.
Here’s a sample of the video blogging from Afghanistan:

With the deal between News Corp and Dow Jones finally over, Rupert Murdoch is focusing on the Wall Street Journal. To this end, he has already “outsourced” the European and Asian operations to his son and heir.
In addition to all the changes to the Journal’s print edition, Murdoch plans to make the online edition free. [...]

If you’ve expected ANY bad news from Paris, you can relax for at least a day. The Paris bureau of Reuters voted yesterday in favor of a 24-hour strike.
The strike is in protest at a ‘deliberate policy’ of staff reductions (see also BBC staff reduction).
‘The decision (to strike) demonstrates the concern of the [...]

When the BBC announced they’ll cut their 1,800 of their workforce, they probably expected the unions to strike back. They did – as Guardian reports – with a threat for a strike unless BBC talk to them first.
As a result, BBC will delay the lay offs with two weeks (i.e. till November 5) while they [...]

“The killer of dissident reporter Anna Politkovskaya is known to Russian authorities but has not yet been charged…”. That’s the statement of the chief investigator on the case that appeared in an interview on Monday. Here’s a bit more from Reuters:
“We have so far not charged the killer but we know who he is,” [...]