Peaches turns fashion designer...

My favourite celebrity is apparently now bored of being a writer and has turned her hand to fashion designing, The Guardian reports today.

Her first capsule collection for PPQ is apparently "inspired by her personal style", in a similar vein to celebrities such as Kate Moss and Lily Allen's forays into design.

Is this really what we want from fashion designers - a churning out of endless copies of celebrities' own clothes? What happened to original ideas?

Georgina Baillie and the sad tale of be-careful-what-you-put-on-your-myspace

When social media first became popular, many of us surrendered our private information to it without a second thought. Dates of birth and addresses were posted and hundreds of photographs uploaded with little consideration as to who could access them or own the rights to them. But as identity theft and other examples (hello, Sarah Palin) of the risks of this lack of privacy appeared, paranoia set in and we started to set our profiles to 'private', deleted suspicious 'friends' and un-tagged photos. Some even committed facebook suicide and opted out of social networking altogether.

But even if you go to all these lengths to protect your identity, you can never be sure that all your information is completely safe.

Now I don't think Georgina Baillie, the woman at the centre of the 'Sachsgate' scandal, should need much introduction. I was actually acquainted with Georgina about two years ago, albeit through a rather tenuous link - she was friends with the girlfriend of someone in my social circle at the time. Let's call the girlfriend 'A'. As the controversy escalated last week, I clicked on to the website of a national newspaper to read what was being said about Georgina. They had harvested several photos from her MySpace account, and one in particular gave me a shock.

Nope, it wasn't stills from her dance troup's "cheerleader massacre" routine, it was a rather more innocent picture of her with some friends on a night out. And who was standing next to her? 'A'.

'A' had not even uploaded the picture up to MySpace herself, Georgina had. But now her image was splashed over national news without her consent and without her control.

Web 2.0 technology means that anyone can upload content, and even if you go to great lengths to protect your privacy it's almost impossible to stop other people sharing your information if they want to.

As social media continues to play an ever-larger part in our lives, should we be educating people more about its benefits and risks? It could help the non-new-media-literate elderly and disabled, providing them with greater access to services and community, but also ensure that we all know about the risks to our privacy and personal information.

Aliens!

Today I came across this rather amusing article in The Daily Mail from back in September (thanks to the genius spEak You're bRANES )

What planet does The Daily Mail live on? It's certainly a strange one, like the land in Northern Lights: "one similar to ours, but different in many many ways."

It appears to be a near-parallel universe rewound back to 1955 and where the most powerful person is a faceless evil PeeCee brigade and not, in fact, a right-wing Texan christian. And the good ol' ordinary folk have to live in cupboards wearing rags eating scraps foraged from bins cos we've been taxed out of existence by these evil PeeCeers to pay for foreigners to live in crystal palaces waited on by a thousand serving maids. The foreigners also control the ordinary folks' lives telling them what they can and can't do, until the ordinary folks can't do ANYTHING without offending the foreigners and just have to sit inside their cupboards all day long. Eating scraps.

But no one would want to leave the cupboards even if they could because the streets outside are running wild with hoodies trying to stab them. Or is it the foreigners who want to stab them? I'm confused.....

I have come to the conclusion the staff and their readers are aliens from another planet, and this 'newspaper' has made its way into our universe by accident. Because the world it reports definitely doesn't resemble the one I live in.

Digital Storytelling

"A picture paints a thousand words" or so they say, and with digital storytelling the pictures no longer have to sit on the page (or screen) confined to their box - they can fully come alive thanks to film and audio technology.

As journalists working in a multimedia age we have many different ways of telling a story available to us. Adding audio or visual content to a written story or vice versa may enable us to shine light on parts of it that would otherwise be difficult to highlight, or tell it with a new angle that may not have worked previously. And multimedia digital storytelling now provides us with ever more creative ways of presenting our stories.

The challenge for us will now be to decipher which medium is best for telling which story.

Millions of Peaches

Recently I read an Adbusters article called Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilisation attacking those uber-trendy pointy-shoed neon-sunglassed Nathan Barley-esque "shoreditch twats" that most Londoners are used to seeing stumbling down brick lane or out of hackney warehouse parties at 6am.

It stated that "we’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum." Fair enough, I thought - so the 'hipster' movement has no ideological backbone other than how cool one can be or how wasted one can get. It's not raging at the world and seeking to change it the way youth culture in the 60s and 70s may have. But did it ever claim to be? Did it ever position itself as a serious 'counter cultural movement'? I don't think so. And does anyone take this whole lifestyle that seriously? It's just people dressing up and having fun, which they have always done - I don't believe that every single teenager of the past was trying to change the world. I'm sure there have always been ones who just wanted to party.

Then I came across Peaches Geldof's first column for Nylon magazine. Oh dear.

So in between spending her dad's money, attending parties, shopping for clothes and obsessing over being 'cool' little Peaches has managed to convince herself that she is actually part of 'a movement'. Yep, her exact words.

Of course there's nothing wrong with wanting to be fashionable and have fun, which is clearly what she's after. But don't confuse what you're doing with something that actually has meaning.

If only Peaches could see that the shallow, moneyed-up Nylon world she inhabits is nothing more than a trendified naughties version of the society pages of old. But she probably won't, and we'll have to see a lot more of self-indulgent deluded drivel until the world bores of her.

The atheist bus - Web 2.0 in action!

Today I came across a brilliant example of what networked journalism can lead to.

Back in July, Ariane Sherine blogged on The Guardian's 'Comment is Free' section about religious advertising on a London bus that stated all non-believers would be sent to hell. She suggested, rather tongue-in-cheek, that all atheists reading her article should club together and buy a bus ad with the slogan "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and get on with your life."

Thanks to the interactive nature of CiF it became clear that her readers were genuinely enthsiastic about the idea, with many pledging far higher donantions than the original suggested £5. And today The Guardian has announced on its front page that the atheist bus is go!

Would this have happened in a print world where the reader's only means of interaction was writing and posting a letter to the editor? I doubt it.

Networked Journalism

I wanted to be become a journalist because I wanted to document the world and people around me. I wanted to give a voice to those who don’t have one and make their stories heard. And after learning in more detail about networked journalism, I can see just how web 2.0 can connect us with people and enable us to achieve this.

When first learning about Citizen journalism, it’s easy to see it all as us vs. them: user generated content vs. trained 'expert' content, the public vs. the press, the ‘peasants’ vs. the professionals, as it were. But it doesn’t have to be a conflict. With networked journalism, both can work together to create exciting, relevant stories that converse with the readers rather than lecturing at them.

Jeff Jarvis, a networked journalism enthusiast, describes it as “professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives. It recognizes the complex relationships that will make news. And it focuses on the process more than the product.” And I think this sounds like a very exciting process to be involved in.

Through blogs, commenting, twitter and other such tools we can interact with the readers, share information with them, involve them in the creative process and get to know them inside out. One of the journalist’s primary functions is to understand and serve its audience, and web 2.0 can help us to achieve this as we engage in conversation with them. And what better way to find stories that really mean something to your readers than to get them involved in the story-making process themselves?

I know many of my fellow students remain sceptical, arguably even technophobic, about what we’ve been learning in this online module. But all this seems to boil down to is a fear of change and the unknown. Having worked in online media for a year before I started this course I am already familiar with much of what we’ve learnt, but I can still see how all these new concepts must be slightly overwhelming at first. But fear of change may blind you to all the potentially great opportunitiesit may hold. Stop running away from it and look at how you can embrace change instead.

The only potential pitfall I can see with networked journalism is if we become too dependent on it. Only 1% of web users interact with media outlets in this way on a regular basis, and we shouldn’t get lazy and just rely on them to fuel our content. There are still another 99% of people out there who we need to cater to and whose stories we can tell; we just have to dig a little deeper to get to them.