Archive for December, 2006

As expected, there’s already video of Saddam’s hanging — I mean the actual death — online. A blog reader pointed me to this. It looks like someone had a video camera phone with them and surreptitiously shot the few minutes before the actual hanging, because the camera moves around a lot and after the floor drops and Saddam falls, there’s a period of black and lots of voices before the camera manages to focus again on his face and broken neck.

A check on Youtube turns up only images of Saddam up to the point of having the noose put around his neck — the same images as seen on TV, provided by Iraqi state television, which don’t include the actual point of death.

As I’ve said before, mainstream news editors can no longer expect to be the sole arbiters of taste when it comes to what the public sees in events like this. The full gruesome reality is available online and likely will be from now on when it comes to big news stories. The camera cell phone truly changes everything, because they’re now everywhere, and are easily concealed. (I don’t know that this was a cell phone video, but it sure looks like it.)

While someone alerted me to the video, it isn’t hard for anyone to find. A quick search on Technorati turns it up, although using Google it’s a bit trickier. It takes only the smallest amount of Internet savvy to find the graphic video of Saddam’s moment of death.

UPDATE: The link to the hanging video above was removed. However, do a Technorati search as I describe above and it’s easy to find. 

OK, it’s my turn to play the Blog Tag game. B.L. Ochman “tagged” me last week, and it’s my duty to tell five things about myself that most people don’t know, then tag five more bloggers.

1. I was born in the UK, in Essex, about 90 miles from London, and lived in a tiny village (Castle Hedingham) until I was 7, when my family moved to Colorado. I had an English accent until age 8, by which time it was completely Americanized. I can’t even fake a good British accent now.
2. I love convertibles. My current car is a Saab 9-3. One of my family’s cars will probably always be a ragtop. I’m annoyed that no car manufacturer offers a hybrid convertible. C’mon guys!
3. My favorite bumper sticker slogan is: “Militant Agnostic: I don’t know and you don’t either!” Organized religion in general, but especially fundamentalist religion, gives me the heebie-jeebies. Read Sam Harris’ “Letter to a Christian Nation” and you’ll know what I think.
4. I was a golf nut when I was a kid. Now I’m a mountain bike nut — but only aspire to have fun and not hurt myself. I took a class last summer, at the age of 49, to learn how to jump a mountain bike properly. The worst injury I’ve had on my mountain bike is a fractured finger that no longer bends completely — a souvenir from one of my many trips to Moab.
5. After I trained and completed my first marathon, I lost all desire to ever run that far again in a single race. (My time was an unimpressive but I suppose respectable 4:14.)

Here are the 5 people I’m tagging: Derek Scruggs – Amy Gahran – Steve Klein – Walker Thompson – Mark Potts

Here’s a Blog Tag Tree that shows who’s been tagged. … Yeah, this does seem kinda chain letter-like. But it’s fun, and I’d like to better know some of my fellow bloggers, so why not?!

That’s a no-brainer, as far as I’m concerned. The answer is yes, when you’re talking about online. If you’re thinking of publishing gruesome photos on the font page of your newspaper, or video of the actual hanging on a news broadcast, then (especially in the USA, where we’re still puritanical about such things), don’t do it unless you’re prepared for a public backlash from more sensitive readers and viewers. But there’s no logical reason that I can see not to make it available online — where you can precede it with graphic warnings about what an online visitor will see if he/she clicks that link.

There are a few reasons for this:

1. This is big news, obviously, and it should be covered fully — and that includes offering images that may offend some.
2. The photos and videos of the hanging no doubt will be readily available somewhere on the Web. To not make them available (with appropriate warnings) just marks you as an anachronistic editor who’s still trying to enforce his/her own sensibilities on a public that no longer needs editors dictating what they do or do not see. The new-media ethic lets news consumers make up their own minds.
3. This will reflect my political bias, but I think that US citizens, especially, should see the results of their tax dollars at work. Electoral outcomes in the US have created the mess in Iraq, and I think that American citizens should see everything that their votes have wrought — from Saddam’s hanging to the gruesome violence and despair that is today’s Iraq.

The news media should not sugar-coat the reality of today’s world.

A friend pointed out this strip from For Better Or Worse, which was posted on the cartoonist’s website.

Watch the eyes of the characters. … It’s a simple animated GIF file, yet for a traditional cartoon strip, I suppose this is cutting edge! I wonder when more cartoonists will truly embrace what’s possible on the web and follow in Mark Fiore’s footsteps?

I’ve wanted smart-phone functionality for a long time, but resisted buying one because I couldn’t deal with carrying a brick around with me all the time. So I’ve stuck with small, lesser-function phones. Well, finally, I’ve found a smartphone that works for me! The Blackberry Pearl.

This candy-bar style phone is actually smaller and lighter than my last phone, but is a full-function PDA. I know many of you have been using Treo’s, Blackberries or other smart-phones for a long time. But I’m excited to finally have my e-mail in easily digestible form wherever I am!

And now I’m at least a little better equipped to snap photos with my phone; it’s got a 1.3-megapixel camera, whereas photos from my old phone were crap. It’s about time that the standard cameras in phones got a bit more reasonable, which is a good thing for eyewitness journalism. I toyed with getting a 3.2-megapixel camera phone, but was swayed by the PDA functionality of the Blackberry.

I just added a new feature to my (resurrected) blog. Check out the new link treatment, via the free service Snap. Mouse over a link in my blog and you should see a small preview of the page that’s linked. … We’ll have to wait and see if the novelty of this wears off and it becomes annoying, but at first blush I like this. What do you think?

Not that I’ve been blogging all that much in the last month and half, but due to a server swap-over that went less than perfectly, I’m missing my posts for the last several weeks. I may be able to get some of them back.