For a year BBC World was the laggard. Al Jazeera took off very early in 2007. France 24 picked up more slowly, but it increased clips at YouTube faster than BBC. Then in a single month — roughly the last half of April and the first half of May — BBC shot up to 200+ [...]
YouTube launched in February 2005. By the summer of 2006 it was delivering 2 to 2.5 billion views a month. That made it a very big deal. In October Google purchased it for $1.65 billion. With the Google imprimatur and that volume of delivery the media world began to take it seriously. The silly video [...]
The standard view: YouTube is for 14 to 24 year olds whose primary interest is in silly or gross video clips. Why should one take YouTube seriously as a delivery of global news? Because video broadcasting is remaking itself one more time.
Once upon a time there were three networks. If you wanted to watch TV [...]
I thought I was back a year ago, but I did not make it. I was not too busy, though I am always too busy, but I discovered I was repeating myself. I was not seeing anything new, and I did not want to do that. There is no point in repetition. So I went [...]
by Bob Boynton
It has been a long hiatus, and the results are in.
If you do not write people stop coming by to read. The spike on the left was the ‘last gasp’ after I stopped writing. I have no idea what produced the spike on the right. All of those days in the middle are [...]
by Bob Boynton
The thing was the crazy colonists wouldn’t fight like real men. They hid behind trees. They refused to form a line and duke it out.
Okay, that was then. We — the militaries of the world — have learned better in 200 years. Right?
An Isaf spokeswoman told the BBC there had been no [...]
March 29, 2007 – 12:06 am
by Bob Boynton
The Arab League met in summit at Riyadh. The business was re-invigorating the peace process. US Secretary of State Rice seems determined to get some motion — going to the Saudis to encourage them to become active produced the meeting and King Abdullah re-tabled the 2000 Arab initiative that Israel has summarily dismissed [...]
by Bob Boynton
They did it again!
First it was the UN secretary-general ducking under a table. Now it is
Now it is someone not quite sure he wants to shake the hand extended to him. Shall I? Shall I not? What would happen? It is a bemused expression, but it seems an expression of carefully considering what [...]
March 22, 2007 – 11:54 pm
by Bob Boynton
The United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon went to Iraq — unannounced, of course. Unannounced is the way all foreign dignitaries visit Iraq these days.
This is what he was told by prime minister Maliki
“We consider it [the visit] a positive message to world in which you [Ban] confirm that Baghdad has returned to [...]
March 16, 2007 – 12:22 am
by Bob Boynton
Aljazeera [Arabic] did it again. They gave us photos of the president and the prime minister of Palestine on back to back days.
I wrote about the photos on March 5 and 6 because I was interested in the way the background figured in the ‘texture’ of the photographs. Now they have done it [...]
