Cameraphones and social media expose crimes in Kenya

Kenyans are using their mobile phones and social media to expose social ills in the society, reports Xinhuanet.

In Kenya, we can use our mobile phones to fight social ills like crime, environmental degradation and lawlessness in the public transport sector. These are ills that are pervasive in the Kenyan society and we do not have to wait for the media to expose them because unlike the people, the media's reach is limited," he noted.

Riding on a motorbike on Dec. 30 in Nairobi, Kenya, Reynolds Otiato saw a woman being mugged by two men along Uhuru highway.

Otiato stopped his bike, removed his mobile phone from his pocket and photographed the crime just before the muggers run away.

After consoling the woman and advising her to report to the police, Otiato rode to the city center and posted the photos on his Facebook and Twitter pages, describing the place where the crime had taken place.

Soon, tens of his friends reacted to the photos with wrath asking the police to eliminate crime. "The highway is a crime spot especially around Bunyala roundabout. Criminals rob pedestrians and disappear into the graveyard. We need a police post around that area," wrote one of his Facebook friends last week.

Read full article. Image from Travelpod

Arab spring leads surge in events captured on cameraphones

From Tahrir Square to the scene of John Galliano's racist rants, pictures and videos from the public have been increasingly used in media coverage. The Guardian reports.

In 2011, cameraphones entered the mainstream of photojournalism due to a combination of the Arab uprisings, the Occupy protests and improved technology.

The Guardian, wire agencies and major broadcasters used many more cameraphone and video images. The New York Times said its use has increased a hundredfold.

"That's largely because of the Arab spring", said Michele McNally, assistant managing editor for photography at the New York Times. "Most of the reporters are carrying smartphones because of the image quality of the cameras. They like the style of cellphone filtered imagery and they're less intrusive [to use] in conflict situations."

She said citizen media was an "instant document" of an event rather than a replacement for skilled photojournalism. She said: "Most amateur footage does lack the real smart interpretation of what it's like to be there."

Al-Jazeera's citizen media service Sharek received about 1,000 cameraphone videos during the Egyptian uprising against Hosni Mubarak.

Riyaad Minty, its head of social media, said: "Post Egypt, in places like Libya, Yemen and Syria, citizens posting online have been the primary lens through which people have been able to see what is happening on the ground.

Now our main stories are driven by images captured by citizens on the street, it's no longer just a supporting image. In most cases citizens capture the breaking news moments first. The Arab spring was really the tipping point when it all came together."

Turi Munthe, founder of citizen journalism service Demotix, said there has been a cultural shift in the mainstream media.

Read full article. Gallery: Cameraphone images of the year

Kazakh Police Hunt Citizen Journalist: The Risks Of Bearing Witness

A video showing police firing on fleeing protesters in the western Kazakh town of Zhanaozen was originally uploaded to YouTube on December 20 by a user called saule540. The video challenges the police explanation of the unrest, which left 15 people dead. The authorities had said that they fired into the air and at the ground, and only in self-defense. Radio Free Europe reports.

Now the police are looking for the person (or people) who shot the video, purportedly from an apartment window on Zhanaozen's main square.

... Beyond tracking people down, there are many ways repressive governments -- or nonstate actors -- can attempt to silence witness testimony.

The growth of this shared consciousness (in this case, of state repression grotesquely encapsulated in a short video) is exactly what the Kazakh authorities want to nip in the bud. Even if they're not going from door to door checking people's phones, by holding a press conference saying they're looking for the person who shot the incriminating video they are sending a very strong message to others to think twice before uploading anything.

Read more via @mobileactive.

Vladimir Putin's New Arch Enemy: YouTube

As more details emerge about the very messy, probably corrupt Russian election, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is calling for a full investigation, and believe it or not, YouTube might be the best place to look for evidence. The Atlantic Wire reports.

Thanks to a coordinated effort by both amateur and professional election monitors, the site is packed with clips that appear to catch officials in the act of everything from changing votes after they've been submitted to stuffing ballot boxes, literally.

President Dmitry Medvedev denies the videos actually show voter fraud. But the clips have gone viral, and they're not exactly calming down the thousands of angry Russians who've taken to the streets to protest government corruption.

It's difficult to tell whether the YouTube voter fraud videos come from coordinated election monitoring efforts or simply concerned citizens with smartphones. With view counts now peaking in the millions, though, it also doesn't really matter.

Read full article.

Cameraphones used to check animal welfare at cattle sales

Animal activists are turning up at livestock sales in Australia with mobile phones, to try to film any abuse. ABC.net.au reports.

The Australian Livestock and Property Agents Association says the welfare of stock is now a public issue and the change is noticeable at saleyards.

"Everybody's got a phone these days that can take footage or a photo and we're getting those forwarded to us.

"But it's not only in saleyards, it's at loading ports for live export, it's just on general farms, it's everywhere where there are animals."

Read more.

Cameraphone video shows Gadhafi being sodomized after capture

Thanks to an abundance of cell phones and videocameras, there’s no shortage of images of the capture and death of Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi. But now a particularly gruesome one has surfaced that indicates the dictator may have been sodomized before being killed.

The Global Post has an extremely graphic video on its site that appears to show someone ramming a stick between Gadhafi’s buttocks through his pants.

The revelation comes as Libya’s new leaders say they will investigate how Gadhafi died.

[via The San Francisco Chronicle]

How digital cameras and smartphones might reduce corruption in Afghanistan and elsewhere

A study just released by Michael Callen and James Long, a pair of ambitious doctoral students at the University of California-San Diego evaluate whether low-end digital cameras could be a cheap and easy technological fix for election fraud in Afghanistan’s 2010 parliamentary elections. Their results are promising. Slate via @mobileactive.org.

At polling stations where locally reported vote counts were digitally photographed, reports of electoral fraud were as much as 60 percent lower, and the vote counts of politically connected candidates—the ones most likely to have rigged elections—were reduced by about one-quarter.

Read full article in Slate.

Working Paper (pdf): Institutional Corruption and Election Fraud: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan

Gadhafi's death a violent record caught on phone video

The image of Gadhafi’s dramatic final chapter is actually a photograph of a cell phone video that was filmed by a revolutionary fighter and shown to the AFP photographer. The Globe and Mail reports.

And this is the story of the Arab Spring ever since its start: ordinary people using their cell phones and smart phones to capture and share key moments in their struggle - whether it is police brutality, the ‘martyrdom’ of fellow protesters, or victory and freedom.

For decades, state media has shaped and controlled the narratives in Arab countries. The emergence of Arab satellite news, and specifically Al Jazeera, has chipped away at that control.

The very people who once watched the Arab satellite news networks and admired the way journalists challenged Arab regimes are now leading those networks with their videos capturing the drama of the Arab spring.

Read full article.

BBC to launch citizen journalism mobile app

The BBC is planning a ’news gatherer’ app that will let ’citizen journalists’ file stories directly from their phones, which can be on the air within minutes. NewMediaAge reports via @DMcDonald01.

Theoretically, the ”news gatherer app” will be able to feed user-generated content into the BBC’s content-management system, which is then edited by editorial staff and aired within minutes of submission.

Read full article.

@mobileactive.org: Libyans being trained as citizen journalists

Small World News is on the ground in Benghazi training Libyans to capture and tell video stories of events in this volatile region. Along the way, the team has also captured footage that no other main stream media outlet has been able to get.

Small World News is a documentary and new media company that provides tools to journalists and citizens around the world to tell stories about their lives.

s part of its work in Libya, Small World News captures audio reports from individuals on the ground to broadcast to a larger international audience. It does this via Speak2Tweet, a collaborative project from Google, Twitter, and SayNow, which allows a caller to Tweet by calling a phone number and leaving a voicemail.

[via mobileactive.org]

Unlocked and downloaded: Cell phone videos are a powerful weapon in Libya

The images and videos of bloody fighting in Libya can be hard to watch, but they are easy to come by, reports VentureBeat.

Everyone has stuff like this,” a rebel fighter said to a Reuters reporter in Misrata, as he showed cell phone video of government tanks entering the city and video of what he says was an unarmed doctor shot by Gaddafi troops, bleeding to death in the street.

Cell phones have become a valuable weapon in Libya’s uprising. Mummar Gaddafi’s attempts to shut down rebel forces’ ability to communicate were repeatedly thwarted by cell phones. Not only that, but the phones were capturing evidence of war crimes. Government soldiers and rebels alike took videos and pictures of fighting.

These will be digital recordings of evidence used in future trials.

Read full article.

The New Hama Rules

The Wall Street Journal writes that this time in Syria cellphone cameras are exposing Assad's brutality.

Bashar Assad's regime has mostly barred foreign media, and there is no independent local press to speak of. Yet since the Syrian uprising began in mid-March there has been a constant stream of images and video clips from nearly every city in Syria, vividly depicting the scope, intensity and frequency of protests—as well as the brutality of the regime's crackdown.

The cellphone cameras and other democratized forms of electronic media have cut through the regime's information embargoes and propaganda. Nobody believes Bashar. Nobody is allowing him to change the subject by provoking confrontations with Israel, and for a change nobody is forgetting the kind of regime he runs. Even the Obama Administration, which invested such hope in engaging Damascus for the sake of the Arab-Israeli peace process and its other Middle East illusions, has soured on the man it once believed was a reformer.

Read full article.

Sri Lanka's Killing Fields - Video Evidence

Produced by the Channel 4 in Britain, the program forensically investigates allegations that up to 40,000 Tamil civilians were killed as Sri Lankan Government forces moved in to destroy the Tamil Tiger army. ABCNet reports.

The program contains disturbing descriptions and footage of executions, atrocities and the shelling of civilians. It includes devastating new video evidence of war crimes. Some of this material was shot on video cameras; other scenes are taken from mobile phones used by Sri Lankan soldiers as trophy vision. Put together it creates one of the most confronting stories of war and conflict ever seen on Australian television.

Read more.

Presented by Kerry O'Brien, "Sri Lanka's Killing Fields" goes to air on Monday 4th July at 8.30pm on ABC1. It is repeated on Tuesday 5th July at 11.35pm. It can also be seen at 8.00pm on Saturdays on ABC News 24. It is also available on ABC iview.

Social media influences documentary-makers

With built-in video cameras now the norm for mobile phones, anyone can be a film-maker – a fact proven by the role social content played in TV news coverage of the recent uprisings in the Middle East. As the dust settles, however, social media is influencing documentary-makers, too. The Guardian reports.

Social media is an enabler – allowing people to communicate in states where repressive regimes have restricted them from doing so," says David Alamouti, a film-maker and development director of inSight Education, a not-for-profit organisation championing diversity in production. "Now, however, it is also re-writing the conventions of documentary – fuelling the development of a new style as surely as the advent of TV re-shaped the documentary film-making that existed before."

Read full article.

Egyptian Filmmaker Uses Twitter to Gather 300 GB of Revolution Video

Amr Salama, an Egyptian filmmaker and a central figure in creating the alternative media universe during the revolution in Egypt, is finishing a documentary about the historic events. Beet TV reports.

Through an appeal on his Twitter account, he received 300 GB of camcorder and camera phone footage, he says in this interview with Beet.TV.

His film is one of a trilogy of documentaries about the revolution. He says the film has wrapped.

... In a related project, citizen video of the Egyptian revolution is being assembled by a team leaded by Knight Fellow Jigar Mehta at Stanford.

[beet TV and Fast Company via PSFK]

Related: - Social media influences documentary-makers

This Is The Police: Put Down Your Camera

With more than 280 million cellphone subscribers in the U.S., and many of those phones can record video, clashes between police and would-be videographers may be inevitable. npr reports on the rights of ciitizens to film an arrest, and the officers' rights to privacy.

Related:

-- The Rules And Your Rights For Recording Arrests

-- Woman Who Photographed Cops Got Beatdown, Files $24 Million Lawsuit

-- New Haven policy: Ok for citizens to film police making arrests

-- Recording a Police Officer Could Get You 15 Years in Jail in Illinois

-- The Huffington Post looks back on several case between police officers and civilians who record them.

Crowdsourcing is good -- but not enough

An insightful piece from The Christian Science Monitor, on the rise of citizen journalism around the world but how journalism is still crucial to derive meaning. Photos and videos taken on the fly are not always in context - what happened before? What happened next?

Woman Who Photographed Cops Got Beatdown, Files $24 Million Lawsuit

Gothamist reports that a Harlem woman recently filed a lawsuit against the city of New York for $24 million regarding events occurring in October of 2009 in which she was allegedly beat up and arrested by police officers after they realized she was photographing an arrest with her camera-phone.

[via PopPhoto]

Related and contradictory:

-- Citizens should no longer get arrested for using their cameras to record police actions in public - at least in New Haven, according to a new policy.

-- Recording a Police Officer Could Get You 15 Years in Jail in Illinois.

-- The Huffington Post looks back on several case between police officers and civilians who record them.

Japan Captures Tsunami, Quake Footage with Camera Phones

TIME's Techland has rounded up Photo sharing websites where pictures of the earthquake and tsunami are being uploaded.

Photo sharing service Flickr has images pouring in. You can use the "Japan" tag to see the most recent photos that have been uploaded.

Popular Twitter photo sharing service TwitPic has been experiencing an influx of images as well, though the site's stability has been a bit shaky.

Google's Picasa has over 200,000 Japan-related images which, if ordered by most recent, contain some images of the recent events.

You can follow trending topics #japan and #tsunami directly on Twitter for a mix of text, images and videos.

Read more. Image from Rasjomanny Puntorg on PicasaWeb: Women wait on the street after evacuating a building following an earthquake in Tokyo March 11, 2011.

Cops Roll Out Citizen Video Order

Citizens should no longer get arrested for using their cameras to record police actions in public according to a new official New Haven policy released Thursday. New Haven Independent reports.

“It is the policy of the New Haven Department of Police Service to permit video recording of police activity as long as such recording does not interfere with ongoing police activity or jeopardize the safety of the general public or the police,” the order reads.

“The video recording of police activity in and of itself does not constitute a crime, offense, or violation. If a person video recording police activity is arrested, the officer must articulate clearly the factual basis for any arrest in his or her case and arrest reports.

Read full article.

How citizen journalism has changed since George Holliday’s Rodney King video

From Poynter.org

Twenty years ago tonight, George Holliday was awakened in his LA-area apartment by sirens and a police helicopter. He saw the commotion between police officers and a motorist on the street below, grabbed his brand-new Sony Handycam, and captured a scene that put a city in flames.

A lot has changed, and a lot remains the same, since Holliday committed that act of citizen journalism by chronicling Rodney King’s beating. Here are some thoughts on the tools, the distribution and the economics of citizen journalism, then and now.

Read full article.

Related: Rodney King and the Rise of the Citizen by Dan Gillmore.

Citizen captures police act of racism on camera phone - The first "Rodney King", or blatant act of racism, filmed by a citizen reporter with a camera phone, in November 2003.

US Lawmaker seeks ban on cell phone photos of accidents - while driving

Pantagraph reports that a Belleville lawmaker wants to prevent people from taking cell phone photographs or videos of accidents while driving.

State Rep. Thomas Holbrook, a Democrat, is sponsoring legislation that would prohibit people from using cell phones to snap photos or shoot video within 500 feet of emergency scenes.

Holbrook said this behavior interferes with emergency personnel.

The House Transportation Committee approved the measure without opposition Wednesday, and now it will go to the House floor.

The legislation is House Bill 1984:

Amends the Illinois Vehicle Code. Provides that no person may use a wireless telephone while operating a motor vehicle within 500 feet of an emergency scene except for specified purposes. Adds digital photographs and video to the definition of "electronic message" in provisions prohibiting the use of electronic communication devices while operating a motor vehicle. Effective immediately.

Cell Phone Photo Class Is Not Just For Taking Pics

A new cell phone photography class at a Immaculata, suburban Philadelphia university, focuses on both the quality of the images and the ethical responsibilities that come with taking and publishing them. Issues such as voyeurism, citizen journalism and the difference between public and private spaces are part of the curriculum.

[via the npr]

Preserving the Online Legacy of the Egyptian Revolution

An interesting read from The Atlantic on how the Egyptian revolution is being digitally preserved.

Regardless of how much you think social media aided the revolution in Egypt, one thing we know for sure is that Egyptians uploaded videos, posted pictures, and tweeted hundreds of thousands of times during the 18 days between the January 25 protests that invigorated the movement and the the day Hosni Mubarak stepped down.

Somewhere in all that real-time information sharing, there are deep and important stories about how the revolution played out in the streets and hearts of Egypt.

But the problem is, there's no single place where one could find all of that information, particularly with any kind of metadata attached about where it came from and who made it. Worse, Twitter's search function only works for a limited amount of time, which means that searches for #Jan25 or other popular hashtags will soon come up empty. Facebook shares will melt down timelines.

The online life of the revolution is in danger of slipping away from easy retrieval. It's being buried under the avalanche of always-new events. But a few people are trying to preserve what happened.

Read full article.

Social media, cellphone video fuel Arab protests

Social media, cellphone cameras, satellite television, restive youth and years of pent-up anger are proving to be a toxic mix for authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. The AFP reports.

In clip after clip of footage from the street protests that have been sweeping the region, demonstrators -- mostly young men -- can be seen among the crowds holding mobile phone cameras aloft to document the scenes.

The shaky footage of peaceful protests -- and images of horrific carnage -- have been uploaded to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and other sites and aired on pan-Arab satellite television stations like Al-Jazeera.

Read full article. Image from YouTube.

Police pay photographer thousands in deleted images row

A man has won $40,000 in damages after police in the United States confiscated his camera phone and deleted images he had taken of them in a public place. Amateur Photographer reports.

Marlon Kautz from Atlanta had been filming officers as they arrested someone last April when he was told he had no right to record them.

Kautz belongs to a group that films police activity using cameras and mobile phones. The aim of 'Copwatch' is that officers can be held accountable for any wrongdoing.

He claimed that one officer snatched the phone from his hand. 'Kautz said that when asked to get his phone back, another officer said he'd return it only after Kautz gave him the password… so he could delete the footage,' reports The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Kautz refused but when police returned his phone the images had been 'deleted, altered or damaged'.

Read more.

Why you don’t need to take my picture when I make a driving faux pas

Should we all start whipping out our smartphone cameras in defense of perceived slights or rudeness? Does the fear of getting your picture snapped in a weak moment really change behaviour? Or does this shutterbug-spy trend run the risk of making us a society of intolerant Big Brothers? The Globe and Mail reports.

Last week, after several TTC drivers were caught texting by passengers with a cell phone camera - while steering the bus (infractions that cost them their jobs) the union accused the media of encouraging passengers to “phone stalk” drivers for bad behaviour – and not encouraging the same surveillance for passengers who abuse the driver.

In Britain, the Sussex police have introduced “Operation Crackdown,” in which motorists could go online and report incidents of anti-social driving, including speeding, talking on your phone and tailgating. In three years, authorities received nearly 20,500 reports – and identified most of the drivers.

Read more.

YouTube Trends Catches Moscow Airport Bombing Aftermath

YouTube's new Trends channel has posted video of the immediate aftermath of the bombing at Moscow's Domodedovo airport yesterday morning, which officials are calling a terror attack. The death toll as of the time of this post was more than 30 people. The New York Times, Drudge Report, and other promiment media are already linking to the video below. Could Trends be turning into a hub for breaking news video?

[via FastCompany]

Recording a Police Officer Could Get You 15 Years in Jail

Citizens recording their public interactions with police sure seems like the kind of thing that would prevent corruption, harassment and bad behavior by cops. Just don't do it in Illinois, where it's punishable by up to 15 years in prison, according to The New York Times.

[via Gizmodo]

The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks

A very interesting article from The Atlantic on the role played by Facebook in Tunisa.

There has been a lot of debate about whether Twitter helped unleash the massive changes that led Ben Ali to leave office on January 14, but Facebook appears to have played a more important role in spreading dissent.

One early sign that Tunisians felt Facebook could be useful: Back in July, bloggers hotoshopped a picture of Mark Zuckerberg to show him holding up a sign that read, "Sayeb Sala7, ya 3ammar," the slogan for a freedom of expression campaign late in 2010.

According to Tunisian bloggers and activists, the ability to upload video to Facebook drove its usage because many other video-sharing sites had been blocked by the government.

The videos -- shot shakily with cameraphones -- created a link between what was happening on the streets in the poor areas of the country and the broader Tunisian population.

But it wasn't just videos that people were sharing. All kinds of information passed between Tunisians. For activists as well as everyday people, Facebook became an indispensable resource for tracking the minute-by-minute development of the situation. By January 8, Facebook says that it had several hundred thousand more users than it had ever had before in Tunisia, a country with a few more people than Michigan. Scaled up to the size to the U.S., the burst of activity was like adding 10 million users in a week. And the average time spent on the site more than doubled what it had been before.

Read full article.

Video That Triggered Tunisia’s Uprising

Tunisia’s uprising began in the impoverished town of Sidi Bouzid, where a street vendor whose wares were confiscated by the police set himself on fire outside of a government building in December. The Lede reports.

The desperate act of the vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who later died of his injuries, led to immediate protests in Sidi Bouzid. Video clips of those first protests, recorded on mobile phones and posted on the Internet, spread across Tunisia and the Arab world when they were shared on Facebook and eventually broadcast by satellite news channels like Al Jazeera.

Read full article.

Battle Heats Up Between Police Officers And Civilians Who Record Them

Should ordinary people be arrested for filming on-duty police abusing their power? If a string of recent cases is any indication, judicial systems throughout the country think so. The Huffington Post looks back on several cases.

North Korea attacks South Korea, as witnessed via mobile phone

Yesterday's artillery shells fired by North Korea at South Korea was captured by a citizen's cell phone.

[via boingboing]

How digital technology gets the news out of North Korea

The girl in the video looks like she's about 12 years old. Thin, dirty and with a vacant look on her face, she tells the cameraman that she's actually 23 and she survives by foraging for grass to sell to wealthier families for their rabbits. IT World reports.

The sobering footage was shot in June this year in the province of South Pyongan, North Korea, and provides a glimpse into the life of one person who lives far from the military parades and fireworks last month marking the 65th anniversary of the Workers' Party of Korea.

It was shot on a cheap camera by a man who goes by the pseudonym Kim Dong-cheol, a North Korean with a double life. In addition to his job as a driver for a company, Kim also works as a clandestine reporter for AsiaPress, a Japanese news agency that's taken advantage of the digital electronics revolution to get reports from inside North Korea.

AsiaPress works with six North Koreans they've trained as journalists. They're given instruction in operating cameras, using PCs and how to use cell phones so they don't attract the attention of authorities. Then, every few months, they meet with AsiaPress representatives just over the border in China to hand over their images.

Read full article via @mobileactive.

Related:

-- North Koreans are receiving information about the outside world via cell phones

-- In a country where nearly every facet of society is controlled, North Korean authorities are encountering a new foe: the cellphone.

Dramatic cell phone footage of emergency landing

Cell phone cameras capture the scene on video aboard Delta Flight 4951 as passengers are told to "brace for impact " for an emergency landing at New York's JFK International Airport.

[via Yahoo News]

Though the following is irrelevant to the incident mentioned above, because the video was taken safely from a passenger seat, this blog post from 2005 raises interesting issues:

The rise of the citizen-journalist is a global phenomenon - witness the Toronto plane crash this week, in which escaping passengers took the time to photograph the scene. It does raise issues of concern: About safety - Are victims putting themselves and others at risk by pausing to snap pictures? About privacy - if you're a victim do you want your picture plastered over the front pages?

Related:

-- Disaster Photos: Newsworthy or irresponsible?

-- Mobile video shot by Thai air crash victim

Camphone citizens reports on animal road kills

Projects in California and Maine ask people to photograph and locate dead animals to understand the impact of roads on the environment. The New York Times reports.

Begun a year ago, the Web site — www.wildlifecrossing.net/california — is the first statewide effort to map roadkill using citizen observers. Volunteers comb the state’s highways and country roads for dead animals, collecting GPS coordinates, photographs and species information and uploading it to a database and Google map populated with dots representing the kills.

Read full article.

Caught on Video: Fans Supplement Action on Court

Hooliganism is rare in tennis, on the courts or in the stands. So when a heated argument turned into a brief melee Thursday night in the upper reaches of Arthur Ashe Stadium — and two men tumbled down a few rows of $45 seats — it was captured by fans with camera phones, not ESPN. The New York Times reports.

The rapid spread of the United States Open brawl video is another example of the power of citizen-shot footage, regardless of its quality. Network cameras do not routinely cut to fans fighting or trespassing on the field of play unless they disturb the action or do something newsworthy.

But thanks to mobile devices, fans can record the action from a separate universe of violent and embarrassing behavior that does not make it on network broadcasts.

“The technology of the video cellphone gives you maybe 30,000 deputized people at a sporting event covering what’s going on in the stands,” said Robert J. Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

Read full article.

Radiohead Releases Concert Film Recorded Solely On Camera Phones

Radiohead has released a concert film, recorded in Prague… solely by fans’ cell phone videos.

According to BeatCrave:

The audio for the concert film is taken directly from the soundboard (so it’s pristine), the video has been painstakingly edited and cleaned over a period of months, and –this might help—it’s totally free and available for download on Radiohead’s website.

Read more.

Puppy-throwing girl and the Internet's Power to Track and Shame

An interesting read from Chris Matyszczyk for CNet about the video of a girl in a red hoodie throwing live puppies into a river, and the video of apology (now removed) purporting to be from the same girl - following a man hunt online to identify the girl.

What's most disturbing writes Chris Matyszczyk and I agree:

People online have so much power in threatening the lives of those who might be guilty--or just might not be. The Web makes it so easy to accuse and so hard to retract. And the definition of a crime becomes "anything of which I don't approve."

This post on Reddit (NSFW), for example, asks people to think about that power. It offers that "Internet lynch mob s***" can harness an extreme negative force, one that might be entirely misplaced.

What's the chance now of Puschnik (who is reported to live in Germany) or--if it isn't, in fact, her--the real perpetrator, suffering physical harm because a resourceful group on the Web has tracked her down?

The parallel with the lady who threw a cat in the bin happened just recently, but this reminds of the story in 2005 of a young woman who refused to clean up the mess after her dog pooped on the floor of a subway in South Korea. Someone on the train took a video on their camera phone and posted it on the Internet which started a nationwide witchhunt.

Within hours, she was labeled gae-ttong-nyue (dog-shit-girl) and her pictures and parodies were everywhere. Humiliated in public and indelibly marked, the woman reportedly quit her university.

According to The Washington Post which reported on the subject at the time: the case was “a remarkable show of Internet force and a peek into an unsettling corner of the future.”

Phone footage exposes teacher caning children

Secretly recorded mobile phone footage has exposed a teacher at a Catholic boarding school in north-eastern Thailand who whacked dozens of students on the buttocks with a cane wrapped with electrical wire. The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

An Art teacher was fired after he was exposed hitting at least 40 students, according to Nongkran Prathumtri, an administrator at St Mary's School in the north-eastern province of Nakhon Ratchasima.

The footage of last week's canings was aired on Monday on Thai television.

Read full article.

Camera Phones Fuel Kashmir’s ‘Intifada’

As was the case in Iran, short video clips of protests by Kashmir’s mainly Muslim population and clashes with Indian security forces, often shot on cellphones and passed from device to device or posted on the Web, have been used by activists to document their own struggle and to inspire more resistance. The Lede reports.

In a documentary for the BBC World Service last year on the role of new media in Kashmir’s revolt, Suvojit Bagchi explained that in 2008 Kashmiris were galvanized by video showing the final agony of a cellphone salesman named Shaheed Tanveer who was shot and killed during a protest that summer, a year before Neda Agha Soltan became an icon of Iran’s protests.

This graphic footage of Mr. Tanveer’s last moments — and the wounding of another man who survived — was shot by a 15-year-old boy on his phone and uploaded to YouTube.

Read full article.

Getty taps into Flickr snappers

For two years, Getty Images has tapped into more than 100,000 photos taken by professional and semi-pro photographers who post on Flickr. Now the doors are being opened to all Flickr users as Getty takes advantage of a library of four billion pictures. The BBC reports.

"Flickr users are the eyes of the world," Douglas Alexander, Flickr's general manager, told BBC news.

"We have contributors from over 100 countries and images are coming in from every corner of the globe. This deal broadens the horizons and the global marketplace for commercial photography and gives our users the chance to make some money." Neither Getty nor Flickr were forthcoming about actual rates saying they vary from job to job but are industry standard. It is generally thought the average rate for an image is between $150-$240 (£100-£160).

Read full article.

Previously: Flickr teams up up with Getty Images to let users sell their pictures (2009)

Make money with your camera phone

Fizwoz offers a video tutoria for improving the quality of your camera phone photos:

Fizwoz is an online auction site for mobile phone captured photo and video, matching consumer content with potential buyers from television networks to social networking sites.

On ABC/View from The Bay

Videos Carry On the Fight Over Sea Raid

When Israeli commandos attacked the so-called Freedom Flotilla, both sides were well armed — with video cameras — and both sides have released a blizzard of video clips as evidence that the other side was the aggressor in the conflict on Monday, which left nine activists dead. The New York Times reports.

Once again, the political power of the moving picture is on display, as it was last year when a video showing the death of a young protester in Iran, Neda Agha-Soltan, became a symbol of resistance in that country.

The flotilla videos have proved a popular draw online, with one from the Israel Defense Forces attracting more than 600,000 views on YouTube. Scenes from both perspectives have been shown in a continuous loop on television news programs all over the world, stirring public outrage.

But what is missing so far from the flotilla clips on both sides is context: it is difficult to establish the sequence of events or, more simply, to determine who attacked first. The videos have made it all the more murky.

Read full article.

UCLA Wants Your Help for Transit Photo Project

UCLA researchers at their Institute of Transportation Studies are looking for volunteers to help with one of their research projects by creating a photo essay of their travels on transit. The thought is that by analyzing what people choose to highlight in their photographs, they will get a better idea of how the people who ride transit view transit.

Full article in LA Streets Blog. Photo: Lincoln Heights for Now/Flickr.