Reuters CEO Shares His Views On the Phenomenon of ‘Citizen Journalism’

If the devil is invited to speak his mind how would he turn out? How would he try to make his point? Would he would turn up the way he really is and say to everyone’s faces what he really thinks of them or would he arrive very presentable, dressed in a Business suit and would say very nice things upfront while muttering something else under his breath.

The Reuters CEO Tom Glocer gave a speech in Tel-Aviv recently titled ‘Trust in the Age of Citizen Journalism’ and this is what he thinks of the people who to his chagrin have now obtained a ‘two-way pipe’ to communicate and bypass his industry’s ‘chokehold’ on the flow of information.

News organizations must realize everyone is both a potential partner and competitor. A 19-year-old sitting in a dorm room cranking out gossip, a well-established journalist blogging for her news organization, or a respected academic all have equal right to have a voice. Whether they have an equal voice is another matter.

Don’t miss the dig in that statement.According to him a blogger by default is a gossip. A journalist by default is trustworthy and an academic, most probably of the leftist, pseudo-secular, self loathing variety by default has a more equal voice.

‘Communal Socialist’ PM Welcomes “Enlightened Dictator’s” Proposals on the “Kashmir Issue”

PM Manmohan Singh newly dubbed as the ‘Communal Socialist PM’ has welcomed the ‘Four point proposals’ of the neighbourhood “Enlightened dictator” to “solve” the “Kashmir issue”.

Sunday, December 17, 2006 (New Delhi):

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has welcomed Pakistan President General Musharraf’s four-point offer on resolving the Kashmir dispute.Musharraf made this offer in an exclusive interview with NDTV’s Prannoy Roy.

The PM said that India is ready to discuss all outstanding issues with Pakistan including J&K.

“I give high priority to normalising our relations with Pakistan by solving all outstanding issues between our two countries. That also includes the issue of Jammu and Kashmir. If anytime new ideas come, we welcome them and I would like to say that in the last two and half years we have had very intensive dialogue with Pakistan,” said Singh.

The “Enlightened dictator” had made this offer to Senior Pakistani propogandist Indian Journalist Prannoy Roy during a meeting interview on PTV India NDTV Channel.

Rajeev Srinivasan, a Rediff Columnist on his blog had called this proposal of the “Enlightened dictator” as nothing new but the same old Pakistani negotiating ploy of ‘What we have is ours, what you have is up for talks’.

Yossarin of Offstumped termed the four point proposals as a “nonstarter”.

Musharraf’s Kashmir proposals are a non-starter not because they are unacceptable to India but because they amount to nothing. They are all about media headliners and soundbites while meaning precious little to in concrete terms.

If You are Considering Moving to Windows Vista

Make sure to know what you might be getting into.

In a CRN article titled 25 shortcomings of Vista Frank J Olhorst lists 25 things to watch out for while moving to Vista.

At this point, solution providers have heard plenty from Microsoft and others about all the benefits that the Windows Vista Operating system will bring businesses and other users.

But what are some things to watch out for with the new OS? The CRN Test Center compiled a list of 25 items that VARs should bear in mind when using and deploying Vista.

And the TIME Person of the Year Is…

You!

Yes, You heard it right. It’s You(and me too, ahem!).

The “Great Man” theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn’t make enough PlayStation3s.

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There’s no road map for how an organism that’s not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It’s a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who’s out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you’re not just a little bit curious.

I’am so thrilled at making it to the Cover page this year after beating some stiff competition from the likes of Ahmedinejad, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong-il, Hassan Nasrallah, Sonia Gandhi and Arjun Singh.

Here’s a toast to You(and Me)!

Stop the Presses- Salon announces its Person of the Year and it is none other than the Great Macaca himself- S.R. Siddharth.

 The Virginia native and son of Indian immigrants changed history with a camcorder and introduced Sen. George Allen — and the rest of us — to the real America.

Malegaon Bomb Planter Arrested

The Malegaon case is now almost solved. The next step is to wait for the Human Rights Mafia, the leftist intellectuals and the Media to turn up claiming that the perpetrators are all innocent.They are still a bit busy with the ‘Save Afzal’ campaign for now.

December 16, 2006- Abrar Ahmed, suspected of planting bombs in the textile town of Malegaon that killed 31 people on September 8, was arrested on Saturday by the Anti-Terrorist Squad.

Ahmed was nabbed at Malegaon, about 200 km from Mumbai, and produced before a Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act Court that remanded him to police custody till December 22, a senior police officer said in Mumbai.

This was the ninth arrest in connection with the four blasts that rocked the town in Nashik district.

According to police, two Pakistani nationals were also involved in the conspiracy behind the explosions allegedly carried out by the banned Students Islamic Movement of India.

All the eight arrested earlier — Noor-ul-Huda, Shabbir Batterywalla, Raees Ahmed, Salman Farsi, Farooq Maqdoomi, Mohammed Zahid and Asif Ali alias Junaid and Mohammed Ali (the last two also accused in the July 11 train bombings in Mumbai) — have been booked under the stringent MCOCA.