AL-JAZEERA GOES ENGLISH

According to The Guardian, Arabic cable news network Al-Jazeera has started recruiting talent for a new English-language network.

From the article:

"The brief is emphatically not to do an English translation of the Arabic channel," said Nigel Parsons, the project manager. "It will have international appeal and fill a lot of gaps in existing output."

...and...

One big question is how many viewers and potential advertisers - especially in the US - will be put off by the complaints heaped on al-Jazeera by the Bush administration. "One of the aims of the English channel will be to try and bring better understanding of each other's positions," Mr Parsons said. "We're not going to be a strident, one-sided channel. We'll aim for balance."

This will get interesting. No matter what you think of Al-Jazeera, it undoubtedly is one of the best-known news "brands" in the world. An English-language version has the possibility to present news and documentaries from points of view we are not used to seeing.

SOURCE: I Want Media.

UPDATE: This reminds me: CBC will air The Control Room, the excellent documentary on Al-Jazeera's coverage of the war on Iraq, as part of the documentary series, The Passionate Eye. The Control Room will be aired Sunday Sept. 26 at 10 p.m. and again on Friday Oct. 3, again at 10 p.m.

8:47:39 PM    

THE POWER OF LINKS

The single thing that sets the Web apart as a publishing platform like no other before is the ability to connect information, idea and people &mdash links. I knew that. Today, I have a new appreciation of how powerful that is.

Last week, I followed a link from J.D. Lasica's New Media Musings to photographer Derek Powazek's Web site ephemera.org, in order to found out about Powazek's "widgets" &mdash a little bit of coding that allows him to control how his images are used on the Internet. (Original post.)

Today, I noticed a substantial spike in traffic at this site. When I dug into the stats, I discovered that more than half of today's visitors have come from ephemera.org, where there was a link to this blog, along with several others, as being one of "a few brave souls who have given it [the Ephemera Photo Widget] a try."

UPDATE: That spike really is substantial: the number of visitors to my site today is about six times larger than average. About three-quarters of the traffic was referred to my site from ephemera.org.

Thanks to Derek (I'm hoping I can call him by his first name, given what he's done for my stats), more people have seen Notes from a Teacher. (They've come to it from all over North America, as well as from Germany and Sweden.) If they like what I'm doing, they'll be back and there'll be new voices for this ongoing (thought often silent) conversation.

That inter-connectedness is at the heart of what makes the Web different: links that grow from links that grow from links.... Information is dispersed, potential paths numerous, the chance of discovery high. Synthesis possible at every step. Serendipity around every corner. The idea of the Internet being a library that hasn't been indexed is incomplete: consider it a network continually creating and recreating it's own connections.

That may be a long bow to draw from the fact a simple link has boosted my traffic, but there's power in simple things.

1:11:39 PM    

WEEDING OUT NEWS

Big news over the last couple of days is the story about Commercial Drive's Da Kine and the fact the store has been openly selling pot for several months. That a store can sell an illegal product for several months without it becoming news suggests two possibilities:

1. Reporters are so out of touch with the communities they supposedly cover that they had no idea this was happening.

2. Reporters knew and decided that it wasn't news.

Either possibility is a little scary.

8:47:21 AM