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 [...]

According to BBC’s Trust, the company has overspent its new media budget by an impressive margin. It looks like Ashley Highfield got carried away with his task to move BBC beyond traditional media.
According to Guardian.co.uk: A review of bbc.co.uk published today by the trust shows that the actual spend in the 12 months to the [...]

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.

Adobe has scheduled the beta test of the new Flash player 10 (codename Astro) for today.
There doesn’t seem to be any substantial improvements in the video department but here’s the feature list:
3D Effects – Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity. Fast, lightweight, and native 3D effects [...]

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 writers’ strike over, a real question emerges – how much did the strike cost?
According to an article on E!, the strike cost an amazing 2.5 billion USD.
A report released Wednesday by Jack Kyser, the chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., has revealed that the three-month walkout by film and [...]

Another special delivery from Ask a Ninja: