Looking back on this week's news,
I can't help but contrast a couple of deceptions that we've reported on.
One was relatively harmless. On Wednesday the 16-year-old American daughter of fundamentalist parents who shared her daily thoughts in a popular video blog was revealed to be
a 19-year-old New Zealand actress
. There had been quite a bit of speculation in the blogosphere that
LonelyGirl15
wasn't genuine, but I'm pretty sure most of us had never heard of her.
The other is quite disturbing. On Sunday and Monday evenings, TVNZ screened
a pseudo-documentary
from US network ABC about events that preceded the Sept 11 attacks. The programme contained events that did not happen, and had actors protraying US politicians and officials saying things they did not say. Even if we had been adequately warned that this was drama, not documentary (and that's debatable, given that the programme claimed to have been based on the 9/11 Commission's report) what possible purpose could be served by spreading mis-information on anything - and particularly something as important as global terrorism? Pollsters have told us that many people mistakenly believe Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks. That should be a good reminder of the dangers of mixing up our fact and our fiction.
- - - posted 11.07am by Neil Sanderson
Viral video.
Which online videos are generating the most conversation? Now you can find out every day thanks to the creators of the
Viral Video Chart
. What Technorati has done for blogging stats, Viral Video does for video uploading. As explained on the site:
"We scan several million blogs a day to see which online videos people are talking about the most. We count the number of times each video is linked to and the number of times each video is embedded. Every morning, after we've had a cup of coffee, we publish a list of the 25 videos that generated the most buzz over the previous day. We reckon this is a pretty good yardstick of what's hot and what's not.
"At the moment we only look for references to videos on the three most influential video sharing sites: YouTube, Google Video and MySpace. We tried looking for references to videos on some other sites for a while, but nothing ever made the top 25 so we stopped."
The system isn't perfect. The same video is currently shown as number 1 and number 3 (due to appearing at least twice in YouTube). But the concept is great.
- - - posted 9.25am by Neil Sanderson [Hat tip:
Jeff Jarvis
]
Thursday September 14
More than 150 nzherald readers
voiced their opinions yesterday on the Government's proposal to build a
stadium on the Auckland waterfront
in time for the 2011 Rugby World Cup. Roughly two-thirds of those who commented online or sent letters to our print edition were in favour of the idea (although there were reservations about using prime waterfront for such a structure) with others feeling that Eden Park should be upgraded instead. Thanks to everyone who took the time to comment. You can track this story at
nzherald.co.nz/edenpark
.
And if you'd like to see more comments - on a whole range of topics - check out our
Readers' Views index
.
- - - posted 10.46am by Neil Sanderson
Wednesday September 13
Reader question:
Not a complaint guys, but a suggestion. Your online news is my first lookup of the morning to get headset ready for the day. One feature which you don't seem to have that some other online newspapers have is this. Links from a current story back to related historical articles. For example,
review of the film Out of the Blue
about Aramoana, where David Gray killed 13 people in a 22-hour rampage. It would have been nice to easily track back to previous articles about this event, about director, Robert Sarkies and so on. I'm sure if I took the time to use the search function, I'd find something. But not as easy as going to the end of the article and clicking on related links etc etc. Thanks again for a fine service,
- - - posted 8.59am by Steve
Response:
Hi Steve. Such a facilty already exists on nzherald - at least in part:
