“To help its readers save time, The New York Times Co. is implementing new technology that enables its Web site users to control the news and information they view. To boost its communication channels with the outside world, Sun Microsystems Inc. lets its employees maintain Web journals, called blogs, that are open to public view on the company’s Web site. Both companies are at the forefront of what some experts say is an emerging technology field that all businesses will need to understand in coming years.” July 16, 2004 article from the East Bay Business Times

Universal McCann’s latest research (i.e., March 2008) on the impact of social media shows a few clear trends. Some are obvious and all are interesting:

1. Individual users are producing content (with an ongoing shift towards participation)
2. Video clips and podcasts are leading the next charge of on-demand media (with video clips the fastest growing platform)
3. A majority of participants in the study joined a social network (17,000 users in 19 countries were surveyed)
4. “The widget economy is real.” (Dive on in!)
5. Collectively blogs rival traditional media (thus making the blogosphere part of the mainstream media)
6. Surprise: China has the largest blogging community in the world (more than the US and Western Europe combined)

The report also offers a definition of social media:

“Social media is an important shift, as it summarizes the importance of interaction, the consumer, and the community. The term emphasizes the idea that as a collective it can have as much impact as any traditional media platform. In truth, to claim social media as ‘new’ is slightly misleading. From the beginning, the internet was founded on message boards, chat rooms, and peer to peer communication. What has changed is the mass involvement that modern social platforms inspire” (emphasis added).

The blogosphere is alive with posts about this report. ReadWriteWeb stated “…with China having 42m bloggers compared to the US’s 26m, there is large scope for social media to flourish there – even despite China’s political issues with social media,” and Digital Information added “despite the popularity of Facebook and MySpace, other countries dwarf the U.S. in joining social networks.”

You can view the full report here, but be warned, it is a 26MB PDF file and while we always encourage our users to check primary source material, you may be better off browsing McCann’s site for the basic facts and figures, or simply trying the Daylife search “Universial McCann” AND social media. Size and content aside, the report itself is a beautifully designed document.

“We think the government is not happy with a story The Independent published in a recent issue exposing atrocities committed by government forces during the war.” — Bob Kasango, legal counsel for The Independent

From Reuters:

“Ugandan security forces on Saturday raided the offices of a magazine seen as critical of President Yoweri Museveni’s government, arresting three journalists [including managing editor Andrew Mwenda] and taking computers.”

From Mwenda himself, as reported in the Independent:

“There were not witnesses around…I realised the state wanted me to disappear without a trace, so I opened the car window and shouted at people along the road that ‘I was Andrew Mwenda being kidnapped by CMI.’ At this point, the security operatives pulled me back and this time handcuffed me so that I did not cause more trouble….As we drove towards [an] airstrip, I saw a waiting military helicopter which had just landed there and I was thinking whether [President Yoweri] Museveni himself had ordered to see me but wanted me to arrive to him with intimidation. There were many PGB soldiers guarding the place. The other alternative I thought the helicopter was maybe intended to take me to Gulu and kill me from there.”

Three weeks ago Andrew Mwenda, his office, and colleagues were subjected to a similar raid. We can keep an eye on the Andrew Mwenda page to see how this unfolds. Also check out our “Press Freedom” tag for similar posts, including one which argues, in small part, freedom of the press is not always a good thing.

In a related story, today the New York Times chronicled the ordeal of Barry Bearak, a reporter in Zimbabwe. The report is written by Bearak himself and includes many gems, such as:

“I was being charged with the crime of ‘committing journalism.’ One of my captors, Detective Inspector Dani Rangwani, described the offense to me as something despicable, almost hissing the words: ‘You’ve been gathering, processing and disseminating the news.’” — Bearak

Alisa Miller is the president of Public Radio International. She recently gave a presentation at TED2008 saying “we get less and less information about the world around us through the media.”

Miller wrote a blog post (which includes a video of her TED Talk) with the same theme:

“Our society is becoming more globally interconnected each day. In our increasingly interdependent world, events taking place in distant countries can be of vital significance to Americans; in turn, the choices and actions we take here at home can reverberate around the globe. Yet, Americans seem to know less and less about the world around them, their many connections to it, and the complexities and interrelationships between major issues such as peace and security, energy, sustainability and the environment, economic development, health, and the arts and culture.”

Miller makes her point more eloquently and more elaborately than I do here, and her graphical representation of news coverage is simply stunning, but her main idea is:

People want to know about global issues, but global issues decline in news coverage because it is cheaper to write about Britney Spears than to staff a News Bureau in Africa.

What do you think?

From time to time, we post a call to bloggers, journalists, students, readers, visitors, viewers, politicians, and anyone who cares. Today’s call is this:

You tell us. What’s the difference between communication and information?

As always when we pose such a call, we encourage open interpretation: go broad, go narrow, be metaphorical, be specific, be literal, be equivocal or unequivocal. Be metonymical, precise, whatever. The idea here is discussion. Is there a fine line between communication and information or a broad line? Are they the same? Are the different? Why? Why not?