Today I went to another campus to receive the visiting professors and students from a University in the Philippines. I did that on Monday and today I needed to receive another group. Meeting them reminds me of the time when I was in the Philippines as a young journalist joining the ASEAN youth program. And I think the program like this helps me understand people from our neighboring countries a little better. I felt great to meet them, especially those who are in communication arts.

They would love to see the show in English. So I took them to see the show that I'm involved with at the state-run television station. To be honest, I personally feel that the place where I work is just okay. The staff there is nice but probably not the best to represent the experience of broadcasting industry of Thailand. I was relief to know that they went to visit Channel 3's Women to Women's live broadcast as well. That's one of the most popular shows of the country.

Anyway, at this state-run television station, some are just too much at ease when they work on the live show. They read some comic books and some even slept while on the job controlling those buttons. I don't blame them since it is their norms and niche culture that is rare to find in other broadcast station. But I felt a bit embarrassed to show this to visiting guests from another ASEAN country. I tried to explain to them that this is not common in the broadcast industry and what they experienced was not the accurate picture of the Thai television. The reaction I got from them was that they were surprised at the technology and equipment of the facilities of this state-owned television station. One of them told me that it looked better than the state-owned station in their country. I don't know if they tried to be polite or they really meant it. Or maybe their public tv station is not receiving sufficient funding.

And I started to believe that maybe our public radio station is more advanced than that of the Philippines when more students started to wow at those audio consoles and flat screen LCDs. Despite the old look of the structure, and somber paint, each studio does have new audio equipment. To help you picture this, think of audio consoles with lots of buttons and LCDs with lots of lines, colorful graphics, or sign waves.

One of the young students was saying that it was all because of corruption. The equipment they saw at their state-owned public radio back home is outdated. Well, if she follows the news about Thailand, she'll learn that corruption has been in fashion in Thailand for so long. Actually, it is the reason why the coup leader said they needed to seize power from the previous government. I'm not saying that we are better than The Philippines or our state-owned radio and television are more advanced than the other country's. In reality, the fact that we have state-of-the-art facilities might not mean anything if we do not make good use of those things. They're just tools that are sitting in air-conditioned rooms.

What we need is good management and ways to stimulate people's thinking through programming. We need shows that help us think. They don't have to be filled with AfterEffect or 3Ds or Motion and those that require long hours of rendering. But they need to have contents that we can relate to, help inspire our kids or young people, empower people or help distribute kindness to the less-fortunate ones.

Since the fall of iTV, maybe it's time we shout what kind of media reform we wish to see, what kind of progress we hope to make and what kind of people we would like to run our ideal television or radio station. It might be good that we are having a messed-up administration when some ministers obey a few people in the media fearing that they might rally against their governance. Maybe it's good that we see some group of hypocrites who claimed they didn't want to run iTV lobbying for it. And it might be great if these hypocrites are eventually awarded the concession if that is the Public Relations Department's final decision. That will be the time we need to see progress in ourselves to learn to yell and shout and stand up for the idea of media reform we long for.

Video Postcard Project
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbquaKvC_1o

Continuity Project
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYY-WaBSygE

Final Project
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxE_iaGrBl0

By
Rapee R.
Panat V.
Areerat K.
Walaikorn D.
Patcharanun S.

I've been watching all sorts of things on youtube including all those music videos I have always wanted to see but don't have time to wait for them to show up on MTV or Channel V. And youtube made my day yesterday when I was able to find the very last five minutes of Six Feet Under Finale. I watched the last season on DVD. Unfortunately, the last five minutes of the very last episode skipped on my DVD player and yes, I didn't know what really happened after watching the whole season.

It was a great way to end the story. Time is fast forwarded and we felt as if we were taken to the future to see these characters' last moments. I like the idea of the scene when the characters were about to die, they saw their loved ones. Although we never know what will really happen on our last second in this life, it's very comforting to think that death will take you to meet your loved ones who passed away.

Life is a journey. One night my mother was saying that we are, after all, living all our lives towards the very last moment in this world. But she's not sad or depressed. She lives her everyday life actively while some of our neighbors her age give up on living happily. And that's the strength I admire in her.

It's great to be a kid today. I remember the time when I was looking forward to the tour at the Royal Plaza where I could take pictures next to a helicopter. Today, at Studio 3, we had
a news reading contest. So many kids signed up. And it took us a long time to do that.
The kids got to read the script in English on the TelePrompter. Some were really nervous. It was great to see some of them really wanted to try it out even when they couldn't really pronounced some words correctly. Some were reading the script in the Thai karaoke and memorized it!!! I was amazed! But all of them would get a DVD of themselves reading the news with our show's graphic and everything. The final round was a tough one. All the three contestants were great. It was a tie so we had to watch the tape again.

It was fun and I had a great time helping them to perform on camera. The hard part was when I, as a judge, was being asked by a mother why her son came in third. And one kid was on the verge of crying when he didn't get to the final round. His parents wanted to see the scores!!! I thought it was obvious. But I guess a mother would always sees her son as the best in all situations.

I just think the day was just a great opportunity to try to be on camera and get a DVD as a souvenir. The prizes were just extra bonus.

I've just finished this novella. I was reading it while proctoring the midterm today. And I got sucked into it and couldn't wait to finish it right away.
It made my heart race trying to figure out what would happen next. I still feel very excited as if I was following that young boy. A good read.

Last night, I was so tired from the TV job. Rumors were spreading since late afternoon that there might be another coup. We didn't really believe them but more and more people starting calling me or my co-workers and we wondered if there was any truth in that. Some said there were tanks on the streets. Some thought they were for the upcoming Children's Day.

So we called some sources who might have the insider's tip off. The answer was no.
A clear no came from Gen.Sondhi Bunyaratglin himself on a live interview on Channel 9. But it was a spooky and errie evening for us. It reminded me of the coup last September. Rumors were going like that. Everyone was trying to call friends and colleagues to verify the source. And that night, it happened. Luckily, we dodged the bullet that night. We taped the show and everyone left just before the soldiers came to interupt the broadcast of the station. Other staff were "asked" to gather in the green room.

Anyway, hoax bombs are still going. I think it was too kind to let some lazy students go unpunished when they were threatening their own schools simply because they didn't want to study. Bombing is a crime. It's not a joke or an excuse to get out of school early.
What do you think?

Young Turn to Web Sites Without Rules
Jill Connelly for The New York Times
Hideki Kishioka, left, chief executive of Stickam, with Andy Bower, an employee.


By BRAD STONE

Published: January 2, 2007


SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 1 — Popular Web sites like YouTube and MySpace have hired the equivalent of school hallway monitors to police what visitors to their sites can see and do by cracking down on piracy and depictions of nudity and violence.

So where do the young thrill-seekers go?

Increasingly, to new Web sites like .., which is building a business by going where others fear to tread: into the realm of unfiltered live broadcasts from Web cameras.

The site combines elements of more popular sites, but with a twist. In addition to designing their own pages and uploading video clips, its users broadcast live video of themselves and conduct face-to-face video chats with other users, often from their bedrooms and all without monitoring by any of Stickam's 35 employees.

Other social networks have decided against allowing conversations over live video because of the potential for abuse and opposition from child-safety advocates. "The only thing you get from the combination of Web cams and young people are problems," said Parry Aftab, executive director of the child protection organization WiredSafety.org. "Web cams are a magnet for sexual predators."

The larger Internet companies have come under increasing pressure to make their sites safer for children and friendlier to copyright holders, so start-ups like Stickam are pursuing their own slices of the market, often at the price of taste, ethics and perhaps even child safety.

"Letting people do whatever they want is one way for these sites to differentiate themselves," said Josh Bernoff, a Forrester Research analyst. "It is the race to the bottom."

Video-sharing sites in particular are filling niches abandoned by YouTube, which is now owned by Google and had more than 25 million visitors last month. Since its inception in 2005, YouTube has banned nudity and taken down copyrighted material when rights holders file specific complaints.

Last March, under additional pressure from copyright holders, YouTube placed a 10-minute limit on clips.

Smaller start-ups who are not able, or willing, to be as diligent are seeing their audiences explode as users seek the more freewheeling environment that typified YouTube's early days. Users post 9,000 new videos a day to Dailymotion, which had more than 1.3 million visitors in November, up more than 100 percent since May, according to the tracking firm ComScore Media Metrix.

A recent search on Dailymotion, which is based in Paris, found hours of copyrighted material: entire episodes of NBC's "Heroes" and CBS's "Without a Trace," recordings of Beatles concerts and plenty of nudity. The firm places no length restrictions on uploaded video.

Benjamin Bejbaum, the chief executive of Dailymotion, said the firm's 30 employees move quickly to take down video when users or rights-holders flag it as inappropriate or illegal. Mr. Bejbaum's company is seeking the kinds of revenue-sharing deals with copyright holders that Google has struck, he said.

Dailymotion currently shows ads to its users in France, which make up 40 percent of visitors to the service, and is studying an entry into the United States.

Another new video-sharing site, LiveLeak, based in London, has positioned itself as a source for reality-based fare like footage of Iraq battle scenes and grisly accidents. Last week, popular clips on the site included one of an agitated man in Muslim dress on a fast-moving treadmill and video of an American A-20 aircraft bombing Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

Hayden Hewitt, a co-owner of LiveLeak, said that people who have been barred from YouTube for uploading explicit footage of the Iraq war have migrated to his site. LiveLeak "won't ban anyone for showing the truth," Mr. Hewitt said. The site also features ample sexual content that would never make it onto YouTube or MySpace.

To support itself, LiveLeak runs ads from the syndicated ad network Adbrite. Mr. Hewitt said the company was not trying to get rich or dethrone YouTube, but to create a place on the Web for unvarnished reality.

Few of these new video sites, though, worry child-safety advocates as much as Stickam, which mostly attracts young people comfortable with the idea of a continuous self-produced reality TV show starring themselves. Stickam, based in Los Angeles, says it has 260,000 registered users — 50,000 of them say their age is 14 to 17 — and is adding 2,000 to 3,000 each day.

Advanced Video Communications, a Los Angeles company that builds video conferencing systems for companies, founded Stickam (pronounced stick-cam) late last year to demonstrate its technology. Its first product was a program that let users bring a live Web cam feed directly onto their MySpace pages and other social networks and bulletin boards.

In October, MySpace blocked the Stickam service. MySpace's chief security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, said the firm "has not implemented video chat features, given the safety implications for our users."

By then, Stickam was testing its own social networking service to compete directly with MySpace. The new site prohibits anyone under 14 from joining, and its terms of service forbid "obscene, profane and indecent" behavior. But since the company does not verify a user's age, and because users' broadcasts are live, even the firm's chief executive, Hideki Kishioka, concedes those rules are unenforceable. The company is "relying on users to monitor each other," he said.

Even enthusiastic Stickam users say the site often feels lawless. "People are very vulgar and like to 'get their jollies' from harassing people, mainly girls, to take off their clothes," said Chelsey, a 17-year-old user from Saskatchewan in Canada, who signed up after her 13-year-old sister violated the site's age rules and joined the service.

"I'm pretty sure none of their parents know or even think about the things that they are doing on this site," said Chelsey, who said in an e-mail message that she did not feel comfortable using her last name in an interview.

Other companies that offer Web cam chats say that the technology seems to attract abuse. "There are just some people who, if you give them a Web cam, are going to take off their clothes," said Jason Katz, founder of PalTalk, an eight-year-old service that lets users converse over Web cams on various topics. Unlike Stickam, PalTalk asks for a credit card and charges a monthly fee, which it says prevents minors from signing up.

At least one major media company has embraced Stickam. Last month, Warner Brothers Records opened a page on the service for two of its artists, Jamie Kennedy and Stu Stone, and trained a Web cam on them as they recorded a music video. More than 9,500 users watched the event and chatted with the performers during breaks in filming.

Robin Bechtel, Warner's vice president for new media, said she thinks Stickam "could be the next MySpace" and that people would migrate to even controversial video sites if they have features that MySpace and YouTube did not. "People are going to go where the content is," Ms. Bechtel said. "If Stickam has celebrities and is entertaining, they will go there."

Mr. Kihioka of Stickam said that in some respects, his site was actually safer than other social networks. Live video feeds let users "know who they are talking to," he said. "Unlike MySpace, it is hard to disguise yourself." But he added that his company had the same concerns about child safety as MySpace and was working on an automated system that would monitor live video feeds for indecency.

Child-safety experts are not convinced. They say that sites like Stickam are the motivation for them to work closely with sites like MySpace and YouTube to create safeguards.

"If we discourage the use of the more corporately responsible social networking sites, kids will go underground to more edgier ones," said Donna Rice Hughes, president of the Internet safety organization Enough Is Enough in Virginia. "Then we'll have more of a problem."

It was a very hectic day with all these hoaxes reported almost every few hours. Starting as early as 8 am at a school in downtown Bangkok. Then, The Nation newspaper got a mysterious phone call saying that the bombs would explode in the next three hours---3 pm.
Then, someone called me and asked about the rumor of a bomb going off at Triam Udom High School. But I asked the editorial desk and they said there was no official report. Then, another friend of mine said a mysterious package was found outside the TMB's headquarters in Paholyothin.

No explosives were found at all these reported locations.

But Gen.Chavalit's reaction to the allegations that he might be related to the incidents should have been covered tonight. Unfortunately, limitations and restrictions at work prevented us from running this story or anything about Thaksin. (Well, fairness, objectivity we learnt in Journalism School doesn't apply here.) Gen.Chavalit publicly said that maybe the military should look into its own ranks to figure out who really plotted this. Everyone's speculating a similar idea. But it's him who said that maybe the military staged this itself to create a sense of insecurity.

Of course, I was very frustrated that there were way too many hoaxes. It started to get into my system at the end of the day. When I was going home tonight, at the stop light, I saw a few guys talking on their cell phones at the Victory Monument. They were looking up at the building right across the street. Of course, I looked at them and the building, trying to figure out if they were seeing something unusual. A few seconds later, they just walked away. And I realized I had taken in too much of the bombing hoaxes today.