Investigating on Mexico’s Holy Death
In the rough Mexico City neighborhood of Tepito, known for its huge illegal market, past boxing glories, drug dealers and gangs lies a strange cult that unites hundreds, if not thousands of people the 1st of every month.
The Santa Muerte, as she is known, or “Holy Death” in English, is a morbid adaptation of the Catholic religion, some could say the dark counterpart of the Virgin of Guadalupe. What is behind this cult, and is it really just worshipped by criminals? How did it come to be so popular and part of Mexican culture? On the 1st of December 2008, I decided to join a few photographers and video artists as they went to 12 calle Alfarería, in the middle of the Tepito neighborhood, to witness the monthly oration to the Holy Death.
On Downloading
After reading the following Techcrunch article on music downloading, and analyzing the huge number of comments, I thought it would be well worth the time to write my own views on downloading.
Since the internet has been public, individuals have been able to share files. With the advent of applications like Napster though, massively sharing files between a very large quantity of individuals has been made possible. Websites and many applications have also developed under a free model, where the user gets accustomed to having everything for free. This new model has clashed with more traditional models of distributing mainly movies, games, software or music.
The games and software industries are a little different though, as being mainly virtual, they are already part of the new economy, and all in all licenses, keys and proprietary formats have allowed them to protect their products from pirating. The movies and music industry though, have, or so they claim, being heavily disrupted by illegal file sharing. We’ve all heard of cases of teenagers being sued millions of dollars by recording companies, or are aware of how countries like France, New Zealand, Canada or the US are putting pressure on ISPs and users to prevent illegal downloading. P2P is presented by the big industry players as an evil to root out, which is responsible for their losses in profit and also guilty of preventing honest artists from making a living. At first glance you could reason that they are right, and that no individual has the right to copy and distribute copyrighted material. Yet a number of factors blur the line a bit.
Fwix brings local news to your iPhone
Techcrunch yesterday covered the release of Fwix for iPhone, an application that allows you to recevice news feeds from wherever it is you are. The application is a new development from the social news website and a smart way of showing how news can be pushed to users. In your Fwix app you have your own ‘City Feed’ which news sites, blogs and Yelp. You can also receive reviews on nearby services like restaurants or hotels and crime reports. The new ‘Neighbors’ feature lets you keep up to date with what your friends are doing and where. A ‘heat map’ also shows the most active areas in your city, based on activity, news and messages.
According to Darian Shirazi, founder of Fwix, the app is not meant as a social network, however one can quickly see the possibilities. For news sites, particularly local ones, and bloggers, this is a great way of showcasing their content. Twitter and Facebook users could also be able to exchange conversations, comments and reviews on local events or services.
Only limited to a few US cities for the moment, Fwix, will become particularly interesting once it spreads out internationally. Could this work if more control was given to users as to how and what local content appears in the feed?
ICANN conference in Mexico City
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) held its 34th conference in Mexico City in the beginning of March. More than a thousand people from around 100 countries turned up to the different speeches for a chance to hear how the Internet was going to evolve in the near future.
High level domains was one of the main topics. As you might know, ICANN decided to free the use of high level domains, meaning you might now be able to use whole words instead of just .com, .edu or .org, opening up to a lot more possibilities. To avoid it turning into a gold digger sort of frenzy, ICANN has also announced that they would first give priority to brands that are in the process of expanding on the net. High level domains will then be available to the public.
Opening up high level domain names was a natural process simply because IPv4 addresses are running out. ICANN said that it would give priority to Latin America and Africa for the acquisition of the last addresses, which should expire by 2011.
The conference was also the opportunity for the speakers to remind the public of the threat of cybercrime. Child pornography grew 21% in 2008 and attacks against financial institutions a staggering 51%.
via Netmedia.
Phoenix turning into a kidnap capital
Mexico City may be infamously known as the kidnap capital of the world, but Phoenix, USA, is right behind it. According to Latina Lista, over 370 kidnappings occured in the last year in the Arizona capital. While most of the victims of kidnappings still are criminals themselves, their families or illegal immigrants, they could soon enough start affecting the rest of the population. And with news that Mexican drug cartels are reinforcing their presence in border states, such as the south of Texas or California, it becomes obvious that the question of drug traffic will become a major topic for Obama’s administration.
A few weeks ago, president Felipe Calderon and Obama were quick enough to meet in Washington and discuss the relationship between the US and Mexico. Although Obama pledged to work closely with his neighbour and to cooperate on the issue of drug control, he was fairly vague on what measures the US might take. In the following weeks we’ve heard from a number of American sources, either citing the risks of drug trafficking for both countries or setting up plans to work together. Let’s hope their cooperation is more effective than when the Bush administration was around.
Mexican journalists seek simpler political asylum in US
Periodismo para periodistas reports on how a group of Mexican journalists have united with immigration lawyers to simplify the process of seeking political asylum in the US. The journalists have the peculiarity of having been threatened to death in Ciudad Juarez, a city in the north of Mexico. Not only do they suffer from being separated from their own families, but the journalists also risk being put in a detention center in the US once their tourist visas expire and if they do not obtain political asylum.
One of the journalists, Jorge Luis Aguirre, recounts how he received a death threat on his cell phone whilst driving to the funeral of a colleague. He immediately parked his car in a public parking and walked in direction of the US border. He also asked friends and family to help him reach the border safely. Aguirre recounts how much he feared he would not reach the border alive. Luckily, Aguirre managed to enter the US and is now workin from El Paso, Texas.
Reporters Without Borders and non-lucrative group Las Americas have joined the initiative to facilitate political asylum of Mexican journalists in the US.
The future of CMS
I find it fascinating to follow discussions on the evolutions of newsrooms. The internet has really disrupted how news is presented to people, and even though we master it well, we are still grappling for the best ways to integrate new technology into newsrooms. One very interesting discussion I recently read on Martin Stabe’s blog focused on the next generation CMS.
According to Chris Edwards, one of the ways to go is more metadata. This would improve interlinking between articles and relevant information and would also simplify the journalist’s work whilst providing excellent information to readers. Tags are still a pain in the ass to use though as you need to enter them manually, so there should probably be a way of automatically identifying key words and maybe giving the editor a choice as to what elements he could link to (I’m thinking of something like the automatic word correction or suggestions in Google). This might work if databases like Lexus Nexus or Factiva were interconnected and information could be shared (maybe?).
According to Martin Stabe, one great example of that, but in-house, is Reuter’s Open Calais Project. Obviously, Reuters have the technological resources and sufficient information to implement such things, but it’s even more exciting that they are making the information they are interlinking accessible to outside developers. Can’t wait to see what some creative minds are going to do with it. If you have examples please let me know.
Finally there’s the NYTimes “open universe” project whic sounds as if they are reorganizing all their data to make it more accessible and useful for journalists. Not sure if it will be open to outside developers and other users though.
I couldn’t agree more with Martin that the key is probably for CMSs to be easier to use for non techie journos. After all, the popularity of Blogpost or WordPress comes from the fact that you can create a blog in minutes and start publishing even if you know little about programming and web editing. I optimistically think that journalists will be more and more techie as time goes by, simply because it’s almost become a prerequisite for new journalists to know their way through multimedia and be comfortable with the web. As much as it’s the role of news editors to teach journalists that a story can be presented in multiple ways, new CMS need to make it easy for journalist to quickly write a story, publish a video, create an audio piece or pull together interlinked data to bring more to the table to readers.
My neighbor the narco
The lively and family friendly Condesa neighborhood isn’t where you’d expect to run into trouble. We were unlucky to live next to, what we very much believe, was a narco. The apartment we rented for the past six months was in a quiet part of the neighborhood. The owner had divided a large house into separate apartments, three of those used as offices by small businesses. The access to ours was through a courtyard. In January, the owner decided to rent the only available apartment, which was on the same floor as ours, but oriented directly towards the street. The access to that apartment was not from the courtyard but from a garage entrance, which incidentally also gave access to the roof, where our gas cylinder and phone antenna were set up.
The new neighbor turned out to be a young guy in his late 30s who wasted no time in letting everyone in the street know he had arrived. First of all was the fact that he parked his two luxury cars and motorcycles anywhere in the street. Then came the trash that was thrown anywhere on the sidewalk. Without consulting the owner, our neighbor set up an electronic door opener and effectively prevented us from accessing gas and telephone. When one night I had the chance to bump into him and try to resolve the situation, but he flat out denied he was renting the place.
The worst though was the noise. At any time of day or night, he decided to organize parties and made sure to put his techno music as loud as he could. At these times the street filled with the Audis and Mercedes from his friends. Being in the same building, we quickly found the music intolerable, as it made our whole apartment vibrate. All the neighbors, including many from the next door ten story building complained. To no result. For some reason, he also decided to watch TV as loud as he could. I one evening spent at least half an hour shouting at his window for him to lower the sound with no answer from his part.
We quickly realized that the guy did not seem to have normal working hours, as he sometimes spent all his days at home, as the music could testify. We also started to doubt the legality of his activities when we and other neighbors saw many distinctively dressed women come in and out of his apartment at any time of day or night. And why would you rent such an apartment when you had these types of cars? We never managed to fully discover what his business was, but speaking with other neighbors, one which worked in the Mexican judicial system, it was clear there was something fishy about the guy. Reason for which we decided not to take any risks and moved to a much quieter and nicer place in the same neighborhood.
If the guy is a narco, as the neighbors believed, then it’s scary to think that these people are not even afraid to hide anymore and that they can flat out flex their muscles, as they know that no one will stop them. Is this country getting better or worse?
Mozilla working on open video format
As if aiming to dominate the browser market wasn’t enough, Mozilla has set its sights on developing an open video format. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great initiative, as anybody whose suffered through encoding videos and finding the right codec can tell. According to Techcrunch, Mozilla will give a $100,000 grant to the Wikimedia Foundation for the development of Theora, an open-source video codec. It will also implement support for Theora and the lesser known Vorbis in Firefox. Let’s hope, as Techcrunch’s Erick Schonfeld believes, that Theora will truly become a serious competitor to MPEG4 and WMV.
Evangelist Christopher Blizzard explains why this is such an exciting project, focusing on the lack of openness of video formats, particularly when it comes to licences and rights. Theora could just be the codec that lets you turn elements of a video into images or docs and not worry about having to buy expensive software to produce or read the video itself. All in all, it would be a truly flexible video format. But then naturally you’d have issues of rights with the content found in the video. Could an mix with the codec and Creative Commons be a solution? Maybe it’s a step too soon, let’s first see how good the quality of Theora turns out to be and how well it spreads among users.
Dealing with information overload
The greatest challenge that new technologies have brought on to us is probably information overload. So many news sites, tv channels, papers, opinions to read and so much information being churned out constantly makes it a mammoth task to try to stay on top of everything. You simply can’t. I use Google Reader and remember how a year ago I spent at least one hour daily, screening through the thousands of feeds I had, tagging interesting articles, then trying to read all of them in a day. If that is your main task then you can probably space it out through a day, but if you have many other things to do then it can quickly drive you crazy. Just like Sisyphus condemned to push a rock up a mountain endlessly, you are condemned to every day sift through thousands of new stories, many of them that are repeated.
So how can we make sure that we control information and that it’s not the other way around? It’s probably just a case of being very selective as to what sources you choose to follow and make sure to constantly filter out those that are irrelevant. But that in itself can also be hard work.
Back in their November/December issue, the Columbia Journalism Review had a great article just on information overload. The piece itself is a long but excellent read which explains how we live in an age of extreme consumption, where we always want more and at a faster rate every time. But we also have to accept the limits of human attention, and know that the more information we process the less useful and in depth it risk being. Instead of taking the time to analyze and think over information we have retaught ourselves to just go through and pick news. Where we have greatly improved in sifting through great loads of feeds we have lost out in the ability to synthetize and develop.
It’s surprising how news outlets still aim to create more and more news, obviously because of the need to have enough page views so that online ads become profitable, when they should focus much more on quality and originality. We are seeing new sites pop up though that aim to offer this sort of information such as Global Post or Spot.us. Some news companies also aim to adapt journalists to their new role of interpreting stories and putting them in context for readers. The AP for example has instituted the “1-2-3 filing system” to eliminate redundancy and confusion in the news room. El Pais recently merged its digital and paper newsrooms. While this will mean more work for the same pay for journalists, it also implies a more fluid news process.
