The BBC News website won the main award for general excellence in journalism in the Online News Association Awards in Hollywood – this at a time when the broadcaster is due to cut investment in the web and reinvest in other areas (interesting comment on that by the Guardian’s Emily Bell). Other categories included (with links to winners):

There’s some excellent work here from both winners and nominees, giving a good sense of the great potential of the web for reportage. Particularly mindblowing is the Washington Post’s interactive feature on the Israel-Palestine barrier, combining video, animation, an interactive map, panoramas, and sound. More amusing is the Gotham Gazette’s games and quizzes illustrating topical issues and showing how a small news site can compete on creativity. Likewise, JournalNow’s piece on a controversial murder case where the (black) suspect was wrongly imprisoned – including a wealth of original documentation.

At the same time one writer bemoans big media companies eating up the competition in new media, as Dow Jones takes over CBS MarketWatch.

More and more web-based Flash comics are making it onto DVD, as this posting on Slashdot reports Broken Saints’ release on a four-disc set. You can view the original series by going here and clicking on ‘Classic Site’ (top right). Pretty mind-blowing stuff. The same posting mentions a less sophisticated online comic that made it onto DVD, Strong Bad.

Any other examples, stick a comment in.

As the internet advertising industry continues to grow, a set of standards have been agreed “globally” (that’s Europe, US and Asia apparently, in a typically Western piece of geography). This includes simplifying the buying and selling process, a definition for counting an ad impression, and a recommendation that server technology is audited.

Expect this post to be updated as I add more stuff about online advertising.

Sober piece of interactive journalism at the Washington Post website, where you can click through a line up of US fatalities in Iraq, browsing by name, date range, or military branch. Somehow I don’t think you’ll find an equivalent for the estimated 100,000 or so Iraqi civilian fatalities.

It appears if you have a favourite member of Busted or Girls Aloud (personally I laugh out loud every time the ginger one appears) you will soon be able to click on them and – wow – be able to buy t-shirts or gig tickets. This is all thanks to Universal and the features of MPEG4.

Now that may be easy with the slow pouty pans in a Girls Aloud video but you’ll have to time it just right to catch Charlie Busted in between guitar-slashing jumps.

A few months ago I toyed with the idea of giving online journalism students mobile phones with cameras built in, and sending them out to take web-ready images. At the time the idea was rejected because of the poor quality of images taken this way and, of course, cost.

But it seems things may be heading in this direction: the BBC reports that one tabloid newspaper in LA is giving photographers camera phones to catch celebrities, while some picture agencies are already paying for exclusive phone pictures.

The same article lists a number of stories where mobile phone photography featured. This included:

• The daily Amsterdam newspaper De Telegraaf publishing a mobile phone-photo of murdered film maker Mr van Gogh’s body taken moments after he was killed. The BBC quotes the editor as saying, “The picture was the story”.
  

• A flight from Switzerland to the Dominican Republic which turned around after someone took a picture of a piece of metal falling from the plane as it took off from Zurich (reported by the Swiss daily Le Matin).
  

• Two crooks who robbed a bank in Denmark were snapped before they carried out the crime waiting for the doors of the building to be opened (reported by the Danish regional paper Aarhus Stiftstidende).
  

And while I’m lifting wholesale from that BBC article, it also gives some useful links to mobile photography blogs Reiter’s Camera Phone Report and picturephoning.com, and ‘moblogs’ (that’s a blog using mobile photography) BlueHereNow and Buzznet. Like most neologisms, ‘moblog’ is open to different interpretations – it could also include blogs posted remotely (ie. while mobile) via PDAs, email, or mobile phones (see About.com definition).

In a related story, how about this great photographic response to Bush’s election victory at sorryeverybody.com? Here the half of America who voted for something less vague than ‘moral values’ express their sincere apologies to the rest of the world for messing up our lives and environment for another four years. In the true tradition of the Net, it didn’t take long for a response from the unapologetic half. Quite a few images seem to consist of toddlers posed with pro-Bush statements, which I’ll leave you to make your own conclusions about.

UPDATE (16.Nov.04): In a timely move, the Consumer Electronics Association in America has issued a code of conduct regarding use of mobile phone cameras (PDF version here). This includes not using them where cameras are normally not allowed, and using ‘discretion’ when taking images of under-18s. The article that reports this move also mentions the fact that Saudi Arabia banned mobile phone cameras two years ago.

UPDATE 2 (18.Nov.04): Meanwhile, this Slashdot posting mentions a BBC news report that Privacy International is asking that all camera phones incorporate an automatic flash to prevent covert pictures being taken. The same posting mentions “In Korea, the government would like phones to make a loud sound when taking a picture“.

Thanks again to the Guardian Newsblog for pointing out this one. Kofi Annan appeared in 2001 on Sesame Street to resolve a dispute when “Elmo and his friends argued over who would get to sing the alphabet song”. You can find the link to the video (and a little bt of script) here, or the video itself here. Of course, it would have been even better if Kofi had worked with Bert & Ernie.

Thought-provoking speech by George Monbiot to the Enviromedia conference in Johannesburg, where he highlights the compromises that journalists often make in reporting environmental stories, including the cliched ending “clearly what we need is more research” (a more professional twist on the student classic cop-out “only time will tell”), when more than enough research has been done, and the implications pretty clear. Prepare for a rough century.

Miscellaneous interesting/useful blogs/resources include:

• Guardian Newsblog: Has useful links to different blogs every day.
• David Neiwert, winner of the National Press Club Award for Distinguished Online Journalism in 2000.
• Photoblogs.org – visual diaries, often a picture a day.
• Technorati: “a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the world of weblogs”. Has a nice feature where it lists the top 100 sites, books and news items of the moment (based on blog links). “Technorati tracks over three million weblogs, up from 100,000 two years ago. The Pew Internet study estimates that about 11%, or about 50 million, of Internet users are regular blog readers. A new weblog is created every 5.8 seconds, which means there are about 15,000 new blogs a day. Bloggers — people who write weblogs — update their weblogs regularly; there are about 275,000 posts daily, or about 10,800 blog updates an hour.” So now you know.
  

Worrying shenanigans going on at Indymedia, whose servers were seized by the FBI with no reason given. They’ve now been returned, although it’s a worrying indication of the power of governments to suppress media, apparently across international borders. More information here.