RConversation

HK Digital Copyright Update...and Peter Yu's Google juice!

Last week I wrote about the excellent position paper on digital copyright in Hong Kong written by Peter Yu in response to the Hong Kong government's proposed copyright reforms - many of which are ill-advised, could harm freedom of expression in Hong Kong, and don't take the interests of all Hong Kong people  into full consideration.

Peter has followed up with an Op-Ed in the South China Morning Post.

He asks: "Should we turn into criminals the future pillars of our society? Should we slow development of internet services to protect creators of digital content? Should we sacrifice privacy, free speech and a free press in the name of copyright protection?"

Then he answers: "While the copyright holders' concerns are understandable, some of the medicine prescribed in the paper is, unfortunately, worse than the diseases it claims exist." (emphasis mine)

The SCMP puts their articles behind a paid firewall, but we have reproduced the whole thing for your reading pleasure here. (Peter holds the copyright for the piece, in case you were wondering.)

I was tickled pink to discover today that when I went to Google and typed in: hong kong digital copyright, Peter's position paper is the first result, followed by my blog posts on the subject - all ahead of the government consultation document! That means Peter and I are getting more incoming links than the government document. (Screenshot below for posterity.)

This is why I keep telling people: if you want to get attention on a policy issue you care about, you need to put your position papers on the web, you need to make them blogger-friendly and get bloggers linking to them, and ideally you need to be blogging about them yourself. Getting media coverage and putting articles in the newspaper is not enough, especially if those media organizations don't make their content freely available on the web.

Hong Kong Stories: Check out my students!

I have several good excuses for not blogging much lately, but my favorite excuse is the work I've been doing with my New Media Workshop students.   Web reporting projects by my 60 undergraduate and masters' students are now rolling out at Hong Kong Stories.   Check them out!

The stories examine different ways that Hong Kong has changed over the past ten years since the handover from British to Chinese rule.

The site is fully Web2.0-enabled so you can subscribe to the rss feed, post comments, leave trackback and bookmark things that you find interesting.

My students are roughly one third Hong Kong Chinese, one third mainland Chinese, and one third from various other countries. I think the site paints a fascinating picture of how this group of people views Hong Kong.

Here's what Hong Kong Stories can teach you:

• You think everybody in Hong Kong is rich? Think again.
• Mainland Chinese culture in Hong Kong is growing stronger,  with more Mandarin everywhere - let us know your views whether that's good or bad here.
• The influx of mainlanders into Hong Kong is also impacting tourism, education, the arts, marriage and childbirth patterns, and medical practices.
• Hong Kong is also changing the growing numbers of mainland Chinese people who come here to study and work.
• Not all Hong Kongers are ethnic Chinese. There's a large and long-standing South Asian community.
• Buddhism isn't just thriving, it's growing in Hong Kong.
• Did you know there are refugees living in Chunking Mansions?

(Photo by Nick Westra)

...and more to come later this week and into the beginning of next week. We've got some very interesting stories coming up over the next several days in the Politics and Environment sections, many more stories for the Social Issues section, as well as explorations of Education and Hong Kong's Identity.

So please subscribe to the RSS feed and keep checking back. The pieces are peer edited by fellow students and have not undergone professional editing. We'd love to have your feedback about what you found interesting, what you agree with or disagree with, whether you'd like to suggest corrections, and whether you have any further information to add.

This was a required course. For many students at the JMSC it is the one class they're getting that deals with the intersection of Internet and journalism. So I packed a lot of stuff in. We learned the basics of how to tell journalistic stories online, how best to use the web in the newsgathering process (and when you have to go offline, go real places and talk to real people), how to blog, how to work with RSS, tagging, wikis, and other Web2.0 tools.

We talked a lot about how the web enables journalists to conduct a conversation with the public rather than lecture them. We covered copyright and Creative Commons in the context of online journalism. It also goes without saying that we examined the Hong Kong and Chinese context for all of these things.

Nobody who knows me will be surprised to hear I've worked them all pretty hard and challenged them to think in new ways.  Hopefully they'll find what they learned worthwhile as they embark into a profession that is changing so fast, it's giving many veteran journalists whiplash.

Joi visits my class

My Friday morning New Media Workshop class got a real treat this week when my friend Joi Ito came and spoke. As I mentioned in class, Joi was one of the people I met when I was working in Tokyo who influenced me to move away from my "mainstream" journalism career and to start taking the web's new opportunities serioiusly.

A lot of media innovation on the web has been coming from people like him, and not from news companies. Why is that? Watch and listen.

A few of the sites that he showed were: his blog, his company Neoteny, and Creative Commons. He showed several specific blog posts, including this one about a nuclear power whistleblower and this one about Chinese-Japanese dialogue.

Naturally Joi has posted a camphone photo from the class to Flickr. It's also worth noting that today Joi has a post speaking out against rampant racism in Japan, going where many Japanese journalists dare not tread.

Thanks to Du Ting for shooting the video!