Links for today: The cost of the BBC's 'Breathing' sculpture etc

The Breathing Sculpture was unveiled last month to commemorate journalists who have been killed while reporting in the name of freedom and democracy. It's part of a building project at the BBC's Broadcasting House.

A Mr Hodges wanted to know how much it costed. So he used this useful Freedom of Information website to get the answer he was looking for - at least £889,898.

In the 'other interesting stuff department':

• The 'oldest' blogger in the world has died in Australia. 108 is pretty old but of course there is no easy way to find out whether this person is actually the oldest blogger in the world. ('Old' blogger doesn't make for such a great headline though.)

• Jay Rosen has a definition for 'citizen journalism' that he thinks everybody should use.

• I want to watch a mini-series on the war in Iraq called Generation Kill. (The website itself looks great and here's the New York Times review). It's produced by HBO - the same people who made the Band of Brothers series. Unfortunately I haven't worked out how to watch this in the UK. Any suggestions gratefully received....
  

Downing Street twitters on Zimbabwe pictures

The people running the 10 Downing Street Twitter feed have replied to Sokwanele, the Twitter feed of the 'This is Zimbabwe' blog to emphasise the government's position on Zimbabwe.

Sokwanele is a pro-democracy movement in Zimbabwe. Recently they have been posting photos of violence perpetrated against MDC supporters on their blog.

sokwanele @DowningStreet We saw this terrible pic had an impact at the G8 (http://is.gd/Q26) Can you ensure the PM sees all of these? http://is.gd/Q28 about 4 hours ago from web in reply to DowningStreet

DowningStreet sokwanele The UK Government is aware of the beatings and violence in Zimbabwe and is pursuing the matter vigorously 1 minute ago from web

Blogging (barely) in the BBC Trust Report

The BBC Trust report is published today. I trawled through...I say 'trawled' - I mean I stuck 'blog' into Acrobat's search box...to see what I could find.

Mentions of 'blog' were scarce and only nine instances of 'blog' were found in total.

• Blue Peter: "We’re attracting new and younger audiences through these sites and making it possible for them to take our content and embed it in their own blogs and social network profiles."

• Five Live Breakfast: "The show’s blog took audience interaction in a new direction. Across the output we used material from listeners for special NHS and Education days – just two examples of how the continued growth of audience interactivity resulted in more listener-originated, and original, stories on air last year than ever before. We will continue to explore more opportunities to do this."

• And (on a similar theme) identified as a priority for Radio Five Live: "Expand use of user-generated Content. The station’s Audience Team continues to get a high number of stories and guests to air. The breakfast show blog provided material from listeners for special NHS and Education days."

• Sport: "The year also marked the rise of the blog. Editors’ and contributors’ comments sparked new levels of debate. For example, Tom Fordyce’s and Ben Dir’s blog account of their campervan journey though France during the Rugby World Cup broke all records, with around 10 million page views. Blogs are one of the ways in which BBC Sport provides a more joined-up offering across all platforms in our coverage of events like the Cricket World Cup and the Rugby World Cup."

• Test Match Special: "We provided complete coverage of England’s internationals at home and abroad. The Test Match Special Blog is consistently the most popular blog on bbc.co.uk"

• Engaging with Audiences: "Millions of people have a face-to-face experience with us every year, and millions more phone, text, write, email, send us their photos and videos, or post on one of our many blogs. We are committed to doing our best to make each of those contacts a positive experience."

Links for today: BBC shows shooting and blogging bits and pieces

• 'The BBC' (speaking, I imagine, with one booming voice) decides to apologise for the decision to show the shooting of the man driving the bulldozer on the Jaffa Road in Israel. Hussan Dwyatt killed three people in the incident and injured dozens more, before he was shot by Israeli police.
  

• The announcement must have been a blow to the programme's editor Craig Oliver who had already written a blog post justifying his editorial decision to show the moment of death.
  

• A commenter called 'the magic monkey' makes an interesting point on the matter here:

"The Guardian's media section reported today that the BBC received 61 complaints [now double that figure at 120 but the point stands]. I think the 10 o'clock news gets something like 5 million viewers a night. Why are the complaints of the usual tiny minority always taken so seriously? Clearly roughly 4,999,959 viewers were mature enough to handle this clip which was a lot less disturbing than what many countries would think perfectly normal to show at any time of day."

• Just how many people need to complain before action is taken by the BBC? Is it 10, 20, 30?
  

In other blogging news:

• Here's an interview with Nasim Fekrat, arguably Afghanistan's leading blogger/free-press campaigner.

• The Kurds have stopped blogging. Global Voices asks why.

Researcher's view

I've been copying and pasting some research material from the BBC's internal website. This doesn't make for an interesting blog post unfortunately.

The stuff I'm reading is good but I can't write about it (yet) because it's not in the public domain at the moment. Various permissions will have to be sought...which is a job for another day.

In between 'Ctrl+C' and 'Ctrl+V', I've been gazing out of this window...

Another update on the end of LT G at Kaboom

I've linked to him regularly, his writing was superb, and his insights candid. But LT G, a US Army officer serving in Iraq, crossed the 'too-much-openness' line and has been forced to close down his blog. He certainly isn't the first and he won't be the last.

I've been covering this for Frontline so if you want to read more about how this US military blogger bit the dust click here and for more on the reaction from bloggers and commenters go here.

Hermida on rethinking 'local' news

Alfred Hermida has written about something Dave Lee and I have been thinking about for a while.

"The concept of local news is based on the news value of geographical proximity - the notion that events close to us are more relevant than those in far away lands.

"The problem with this approach is that it is based on an out-dated model of news, where there was a scarcity of news and information and the sources for this were limited by geography.

"Maybe rather than asking whether journalism should be local, we should ask ourselves what does local mean in the 21st century."

The full post is well worth a read.