Internet

Citizen Journalism Flourishes in Dark Corners

A global study into 60 citizen journalism projects in 33 countries found citizen journalism flourished under governments which could be characterized as "soft authoritarianism" regimes such as in Malaysia and South Korea.

Lifestyle Lift Forced to Drop Astroturf

In what may be the first case against online astroturfing, New York's attorney general has reached a settlement with a cosmetic surgery company.

An Inescapable Web of Advertisements

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) "may soon require online media to comply with disclosure rules under its truth-in-advertising guidelines." FTC assistant director Richard Cleland said, "Consumers have a right to know when they're being pitched a product." But the "hypercommercialism of the Web" may be "changing too quickly for consumers and regulators to keep up," reports the New York Times.

Spinning Israeli Settlements

The Israel Project, "the organization spearheading Israel's public relations efforts in the United States," recently released its 2009 Global Language Dictionary, authored by Republican pollster Frank Luntz.

Tech Upstarts Avoid Scrutiny on the Web

The "new world of promoting start-ups in Silicon Valley," California, is "where the lines between journalists and everyone else are blurring and the number of followers a pundit has on Twitter is sometimes viewed as more important than old metrics like the circulation of a newspaper," observes the New York Times. Instead of angling for "mentions in print and on television," publicists for new tech companies "court influential voices on the social Web." This means that "P.R.

Another Kind of Payola Pundit

"Telecommunications analyst Scott Cleland, whose work is bankrolled by companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, also signed on as a hired gun for Microsoft earlier this year," reports National Journal.

General Mills Recruits "Mommy Bloggers"

"We don't tell them not to write" about bad experiences, "but most want to only write positive things," said Stacy Becker of Coyne Public Relations.

Beyond MoveOn: Using the Internet for Real Change

Recently the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice asked me to write an article for them with my ideas of how grassroots activists could better use the Internet for real change. As a member of the group, I was happy to tackle that assignment, and here are my thoughts.

Barack Obama owes his election in no small part to his brilliant use of social networking websites, email, cell phone texting and blogs, all utilized in unprecedented ways by his campaign staff to promote, organize and fund his unlikely victory. He employed techniques pioneered by online groups such as MoveOn and took them to an entirely new level. Thanks to Obama's use of the Internet, politics in America will never be the same. It's crucial that peace and social justice activists at the state and local levels understand and harness these new technologies in organizing for fundamental social change.

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