Play it again, Sam : How journalists cashed in on Youtube's favourite koala

The world was captivated when footage of a badly burnt koala drinking water from a Victorian firefighter's bottle was uploaded to You Tube in February 2009. When the story of "Sam the Koala" was adopted by the mainstream media, recombinant themes were used to construct her story - from heroism and patriotism to villain vs victim and romance. While scholars have examined the changing role of the journalist in a converged world and the rise of "soft" news, this paper focuses on the way journalists create disjointed narratives around You Tube footage to extend a story s lifespan. We call these new narrative forms "fractured fairy tale news" to describe this emerging phenomenon of convergence culture. Further, we suggest that news media exploit the YouTube community for their own commercial gain and conclude that the fractured fairy tale style is a poor vehicle for the future of news.

Blockbusters for the youtube generation : a new product of convergence culture

While scholars have paid much attention to YouTube in a Web 2.0 environment, the YouTube blockbuster is yet to be discussed as part of this convergence culture. It differs from transmedia storytelling in that no single company owns or controls the characters or concepts. Once users have elevated videos with rich narrative qualities to the heights of fame within YouTube and other virtual social networks, they are taken from the YouTube archive by global commercial media and given new exchange values in traditional media forms such as books, films, television shows and ancillary products, using fragmented classical narrative techniques to do so. This paper traces the history of the blockbuster as a way of large commercial media adapting to social and technological change after World War II, to its refinements in the 1970s to cater for younger audiences and changes in the media landscape, to its most recent incarnation in YouTube. We argue that the economic and cultural values of the blockbuster are being transformed and refigured by the new form it has begun to take within convergence culture.

‘Neojihadism’ and YouTube : Patani militant propaganda dissemination and radicalization

This article examines the use of YouTube by the new generation of Patani 2. Muslim militants in their dissemination of propaganda and radical identity formation. These fighters have now brought their neojihadist war to the ‘Virtual’. Videos of Patani shuhada and Buddhist beheadings are regularly posted on YouTube, with the aim of legitimizing their ‘defensive jihad’. While most of the efforts in countering virtual terrorist radicalization have focused on jihadist websites, forums and blogs, very little attention has been paid to the relationship between the ‘YouTube effect’ and neojihadist violence. This article offers an analysis of the use of YouTube by the Patani Muslim insurgency in order to extract the ideological themes which enable us to understand the process of glocal neojihadist radicalization in southern Thailand.

The janus face of new media propaganda: The case of Patani neojihadist YouTube warfare and its Islamophobic effect on cyber-actors

Surfing on the Internet 2.0 revolution, Patani 2.0 has allowed Patani neojihadist militants to access new competitive spaces and create their own imagined online community by penetrating new realms of the Internet. This article discusses the use of new media militant propaganda by Patani militants and how it is Janus faced. It further examines how the Patani 2.0 social interaction enabled by social media such as YouTube leads to group cohesion among certain actors and the formation of a collective identity that is clustered around the notions of Muslim victimization and defensive jihad; and how, at the same time, it reinforces antithetical identities and fosters group identity competition, where one religious group is often pitted against another. As a result, the Janus effect of Patani neojihadist YouTube online propaganda, while it primarily seeks to radicalize, also generates a reactionary, often virulent, anti-Muslim response from the movement's critics.

Neojihadist visual politics: comparing YouTube videos of North Caucasus and Uyghur militants

YouTube videos offer a rare opportunity to gain an insight into the sequestered world of neojihadism. This study examines and compares the lines of the visual narrative associated with two Asian insurgencies that help to form the global Islamic social movement: the insurgency in Chechnya (North Caucasus) and that in Xinjiang (China). The purpose of the article is to describe the narratives used by the Islamic militants addressing the conflict and to identify similarities and differences in the use of visual rhetorical techniques by neojihadist groups to propagate their worldview. The study of the visual narratives promoted in the videos will help to provide a better understanding of the impact of the neojihadist narratives on the creation of collective identities. Our findings suggest that these narratives have similar features, which can be identified in a set of sub-narratives. Within the common pattern, however, significant differences can be found, especially in the interpretation of the videos by the audiences.

Image-encounters with the techno-mediated other: Regarding post-election Iran on Youtube

In June 2009 large-scale public demonstrations on the streets of Tehran followed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s controversial claiming of victory in the Republic’s most recent election. As the scale of the unrest rapidly escalated, foreign journalists were expelled from the country and unprecedented numbers of Iranian journalists were imprisoned (Sreberny and Khiabany 176). Observers outside of Iran learned of the events as Iranians on the streets embraced image production and distribution as a central component of their protest. Evading the attempts of the regime to control media coverage of the post-election violence, Iranians uploaded rough footage, still images, and blog entries, seeking to make real their experiences for the international community. A stream of citizen-produced footage of mass demonstrations, beatings and deaths was relayed to the world at large via Internet-based social networking channels and mobile phones. This paper takes a series of images from the mediated turmoil in Iran as a prism through which to consider the problem of what it is that such images make real for distant observers.

Production of solidarities in YouTube: a visual study of Uyghur nationalism

The uprising in Tibet, which gained the attention of the global media during the preparation for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and the ethnic riots in Xinjiang in 2009 showed Western audiences the extent of the ethnic conflict between China’s Han ethnic majority and its ethnic minority groups, the Uyghurs being one of them. In the late twentieth century, Uyghur diaspora communities formed their own cultural and political associations in Central Asia, Russia, Turkey, Europe, and North America, while Uyghur political activists have been increasingly using the Internet for spreading political messages promoting Uyghur national ideas. Among their efforts, different Uyghur organizations and individuals have created YouTube channels in order to generate interest in the Uyghur question, to internationalize Xinjiang issues, and to seek support from a variety of audiences. The aim of this research is to examine the structure of political communication about the Han–Uyghur conflict on YouTube, taking into consideration the contents of the videos and available information about authors and audiences. This study combines quantitative and qualitative methods of data analysis and offers insights into how the Internet is used by dispersed political actors within a framework of a single nationalist movement. It also provides a unique window into ethnic relations in Xinjiang and elucidates on how ethnic minority and transnational activist networks search for discourses that could serve as the basis for ethnic mobilization.

Using Web 2.0 applications to deliver innovative services on the internet

The emergence of Web 2.0 has brought about new Web applications being developed. Represented chiefly by Web applications such as YouTube, MySpace, blogs and Google applications, these community-based technologies are changing the way we use the Internet. One interesting result of these innovations is the extensibility of these applications. For example, YouTubepsilas content can be displayed on other Websites and hence, are popularly dasiaextendedpsila to be displayed on individual blogs and other organization Websites. In this paper, we discussed two applications that were a result of extending Google Earth and Google Maps. These two applications illustrate how new solutions can be quickly built from these extensible applications thus suggesting the future of application development, one that is built upon applications rather than object-oriented components.

Business 2.0 : a novel model for delivery of business services

Web 2.0, regardless of the exact definition, has proven to bring about significant changes to the way the Internet was used. Evident by key innovations such as Wikipedia, FaceBook, YouTube, and Blog sites, these community-based Website in which contents are generated and consumed by the same group of users are changing the way businesses operate. Advertisements are no longer dasiaforcedpsila upon the viewers but are instead dasiaintelligentlypsila targeted based on the contents of interest. In this paper, we investigate the concept of Web 2.0 in the context of business entities. We asked if Web 2.0 concepts could potentially lead to a change of paradigm or the way businesses operate today. We conclude with a discussion of a Web 2.0 application we recently developed that we think is an indication that businesses will ultimately be affected by these community-based technologies; thus bringing about Business 2.0 - a paradigm for businesses to cooperate with one another to deliver improved products and services to their own customers.

Byron Bay hysteria

"This time lapse video work of De Bruyn's evidences the bold rythmic structures found in his nahd-painted 16 mm film work. A prolific fimmaler, de Bruyn is a master of his craft and shows in this work that that mastery knows no bounds in this format."  Fractured Light exhibition catalogue