Technology plays an important role in journalism. It enables us to witness, hear and live worldwide events between countries without being there, or putting our lives at risk. As recent events in this region have shown us, journalists play a crucial role in society. They are the impartial witnesses to war, up-risings, corruption and disasters. Without that impartial record of events a great many travesties would go unrecorded and unresolved.

The International Conference for The Protection of Journalists in Dangerous Situations took place in Doha on January 22. It was held in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and was organized by the National Commission for Human Rights under the patronage of H.E. Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al-Thani, the Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs.

It is thought that as many as 550 journalists have been killed in the past five years whilst reporting from dangerous situations. That translates to roughly two journalists killed per week.  Two-thirds died in areas where there are armed conflicts or political violence, the other third were killed due to criminal activities by gangs and drug dealers.

At the event several real-life cases were presented explaining the dangers journalists faced and exploring the kinds of protection they should be afforded according to International Humanitarian law. There were many inspirational ideas; chief among them was the hotline for the International Red Cross. The hotline creates a connection between the journalists and their families as well as government institutions, enabling them to stay informed about journalists’ current locations and condition. Not only that, but it also helps in reporting news of the wounded, tracing missing people and transferring bodies should the worst have happened.

The conference also included several workshops on issues such as developing an international treaty for the protection of journalists and providing a formal channel through which investigations can be carried out. Several recommendations were made, including:

• For Governments: Agree that families of murdered journalists have the right to receive compensation either directly or through media institutions as well as the establishment of a fund for the victims.
• For News Organizations: Increase awareness of the conventions as well as legal and regional legislation
• For Journalists: Develop a culture that upholds responsibility for the safety of oneself and seek to train all journalists who travel to areas of conflict.

Journalists who stand between truth and danger saw much hope at the conference, therefore, the hope is that these recommendations won’t be merely ink on paper, but become a reality so that they gain international protection and legal immunity to safeguard their life and their dignity.

Education 2.0 will be a digital affair

Many Internet savvy teachers in Qatar may already be familiar with the late Steve Jobs’ vision for education, which is to Applize it. iTunes U led the way with online seminars and free courses in subjects as diverse as art to heart surgery. These are undertaken much like an Open University course but come with better digital features as you might expect.
Now, last week in fact, Apple announced the launch of iBooks 2.0, which may well have the ability to completely revolutionise the school textbook market.  Apple fans will already be familiar with Apple iBooks, the online bookstore to rival Amazon, iBooks 2.0 will fit nicely into this existing facility and naturally be a completely interactive learning experience.
Textbooks in iBooks 2.0 will be fully optimized for iPads, giving students access to videos within chapters, interactive study notes and 3D graphics, enhancing the whole learning experience. No matter what continent you live in, this makes good sense – saving the trees, easy to update content, no lugging heavy books about – it wins on so many levels.

The world leaders in educational publishing are on board, such as Pearson Publishing and McGraw Hill and there are some handy complimentary apps to help ensure absorption into the school curriculum such as iBooks Author, which provides templates for producing textbooks compatible with the iPad.
Speaking at an education event in New York last Thursday, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller said, “We want to reinvent the textbook. Current textbooks cannot compete. They aren’t portable, searchable, current, or interactive.” He pointed out that there are over 20,000 educational apps already available for the iPad and that more than a million iPads are already used in education. International universities in Qatar’s Education City already embrace the iPad, utilizing its features for workshops and as a library resource.
Yes – but what about the cost, I hear you ask? A basic iPad2 costs in excess of QR 2000, potentially making it a pricey investment for a student. Well – the really good news is that the price of the textbooks will be capped at a meagre $14.99, quite a coup considering that a typical medical or legal textbook could set a student back $100, therefore potentially making the iPad a prudent, money-saving investment.

Now an apple a day for the teacher is not what it used to be – and for that, I’m sure Steve Jobs is eternally grateful.

Everyone I know has been approached by X who has a fortune that she will share with you if you just help her by giving out your banking details; I am also a millionaire many times over with the amount of money that I have won, and my bank is forever losing my personal details.

Stats show that up to 14.5 billion spam emails get sent out on a daily basis, the point is no matter what you do you are going to get spam. So how can you alleviate the pain that is spam?

We all know the basics to protect our email: don’t open or reply to spam messages, delete them immediately, don’t click on links that could be viruses, don’t send your personal details to anyone, don’t trust anyone you don’t know, and so on.

There are reliable methods we can use to minimize spam.

Firstly, find an effective filter to use, you may need to buy one or you can download a free version. Overall they are effective but do tend to miss craftily worded spam or alternatively can send some important messages to the trash box so be careful in how you set them up and what keywords you select as spam, but overall they can be up to 95% accurate in filtering those unwanted messages. Here are some spam filters to compare:

Spam Blocker Services:

Symantec

myTrashMail

mailexpire

Mailinator

Spamgourmet

SneakEmail

Free Spam Filter Software

http://www.spampal.org/

http://www.keir.net/k9.html

http://getpopfile.org/docs/doku.php

http://www.spamihilator.com/

These filters often do not work for domain email clients, so if you are trying to clean up Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail, these may not be the best options to use. However, most online email services such as the ones mentioned above, have built in spam filters which do a good job at filtering unwanted email into your Junk Mail Folder.  They also have built in features where the user can report spam that has filtered through into the Inbox, look for a “Report as Spam” button or a “Not Spam” button to correct false positives. You can also create your own spam filters to get the best results, by creating filters for incoming mail that flag or delete emails containing lewd content or common spam keywords. This strategy can backfire though if a friend sends a message  with your spam filter keywords in it. To help, Google has a “test” feature that lets you test-run a filter before you apply it so you can better fine tune your results.  This will further help to identify emails that might get past the spam filters.

You can also try setting up a nondescript email account used simply to accrue and therefore identify spam email. These are known as Spamtraps and will work if the address isn’t used or given to contacts. That way, any emails sent to the account can be reasonably called spam and filtered. This is one way — among others — that many professional services identify spam for their clients.

Use a dummy email for online deals, social networking, downloads or if stores ask for an email address at point of purchase. Having this type of email can divert a lot of unwanted spam away from your real account. Then keep a separate email address for your private emails, keeping your information confidential.

When you create your email addresses, make them difficult for bots (which spammers use to find email addresses) to find or recreate. Consider using more than one word, word segments or pieces, numbers and non-letter symbols and underscores_are_good, e.g.  great_scott_#2468@xxx.com.  But don’t make it too easy that bots can find it or too difficult so that no one can remember it.

Further more, when joining a network, gaming services, magazines, etc. DO NOT CHECK THE EMAIL BOX for future deals, updates, or news about the company, unless you really want to receive these types of emails. They tend to clutter your Inbox making it difficult to manage. If you have subscribed and they are becoming an issue, every email with marketing or news information on it will have an Unsubsribe button.

Finally, Ensure that the automatic update service on your PC is turned on and configured to automatically download the latest software updates.  It is not a spam fighter, but it does help to protect your PC from unwanted viruses and ensure you have the latest software on your machine.

Personally I use Gmail and the Spam Filters that they provide and try to report as many spammers as I can for my personal email, while for my fake email address I use www.myTrashMail.com.

Yes, initially it is a lot of work to set this all up, but long term the time saved by not having to delete and check thousands of emails is immeasurable.

On Tuesday, Google officially unveiled its plans for making Google+ a more focal part of its core search business. Essentially, through the main Google search function, you will not only receive the standard search results, but also personalized results based on your network on Google+. For example, if you search “Ancient Greece,” you will still get the Wikipedia background and various website dedicated to all those great myths, fables and gods, but you would also get photos that you or your friends took while visiting Athens that were shared on Google+. Check out Google’s video to see how their social search works.

I’m actually quite excited about the possibilities for making search more social. Like many, I rely quite a bit on my social media networks – mostly Twitter and Facebook – for interesting news items, quirky stories or useful tidbits. Unfortunately, once these items pass, they are often difficult to find again, especially if they were on a friend’s wall or just a tweet that you didn’t retweet. Of course, Google will be making content from only its Google+ product available to users of social search, so if you or your friends or people with public profiles – aren’t posting interesting content there, it’s pretty worthless. Could this be the nudge that people need to really start making Google+ one of their primary social networks? Maybe!

There are certainly people that will raise privacy complaints about this, but Google seems to have taken a fairly proactive approach to ensuring privacy on this one. It will definitely be interesting to see how other social networks respond, especially Facebook. I don’t imagine Google has plans to make Facebook posts show up in its search results!

Take a look at Google’s announcement for more details about their launch of a more social search, and let us know what you think. This really could be a huge change in the way we search!

1. LEGO Digital Box

The Lego AR kiosk called “DIGITAL BOX” has been developed by LEGO Digital Systems and Metaio.  It allows the consumer to visibly see what the Lego product being sold can be built into. The kiosks are out in LEGO brand stores worldwide and are widely seen as one of the best examples of augmented reality in marketing.

2. Rihanna and Nivea Cream
As a sponsor of Rihanna’s US and European Loud Tour, Nivea created a few digital advertising experiences with Rihanna. One of these was an AR experience by buying a tin of Nivea Creme or printing one out from Nivea’s website, you could hold either up to your computer’s webcam. Then, voila, Rihanna appears.

3. Arm Tatoo
A fun AR app, where a simple barcode marker is tattooed onto someone’s arm which when viewed through a camera transforms into a three dimensional animation of a flying dragon, this App was created by ThinkAnApp.

4. Tesco’s Online Shopping

Online shopping made easy with British retailer Tesco launching an AR program for consumers to see 3D images of some of their products online. Users merely hold up images from the catalog to their computer’s webcam to see the 3D version of the product. Hide those credit cards quickly.

5. BMW and Ray Ban

I love the way advertisers are using AR to market products, and was torn between two marketing campaigns so I have added both of them.  The zooty little BMW Z4 racing around the desk and Ray Ban Sunglasses where you can see how they will look on your face, perhaps the only downfall is you cannot feel how the products will handle or feel.

Z4 Campaign

Ray Ban Campaign

6. Axe

On 5 March this year, Unilever owned brand, Axe deodorant took there “Angels falling to earth” campaign a bit further by adding a sign in the Victoria Railway Station telling travelers to look up to a giant video screen. When looking up, they saw an image of themselves plus one of the angels, who were featured in the US and English ad campaigns. This video shows the reactions.

7. AR Apps that we have found useful include some of the following:

• Car Finder, not that any of us need it but if you know of someone that may this nifty little app helps you find your lost car.

• Pocket Universe: Virtual Sky Astronomy, ever looked up at the sky and wondered what you were looking at? This app helps to decipher the stars, planets and constellations for you. Once the app is downloaded you don’t need connectivity, this clever app contains data on 10,000 stars, 88 constellations and lunar phases, while the “tonight’s sky” feature shows meteor showers and visible planets based on your location.

• TwittARound, this app uses the GPS, compass and camera to show where Tweets are coming from, cool when you want to see who is twittering what at an event or just generally around you.

• Nearest Tube, this app will help you to find the nearest subway station in the UK, no reason to ask for directions, get lost or be late.

• Wikitude AR Travel Guide, this app allows you to just hold up your phone and it will display Wikipedia information on the site you are looking at, allowing you to learn everything about anything. This is just one of many of the Wikitude apps, take a look here at the others.

8. Business Cards

Finally some innovative AR business cards, just for fun. These cards can provide a wealth of information when done correctly, including additional text, images and even video just by holding the card up to a webcam.

9. AR In Reality

Want your world to come to life? Autonomy, a leading enterprise infrastructure company, has a new technology that can change the way we look at and interact with physical objects.  Called Aurasmsa, it works with smart phone and tablets in real time, turning static images or even objects into videos, games and interactive experiences. You can aim your phone at a building and see a video about that building, aim it at a picture in a newspaper, magazine or bus stand and launch an interactive experience.

This video was supplied by Autonomy.

10. Augmented ID

Augmented ID is a TAT concept that visualizes the digital identities of people you meet in real life. With a mobile device and face recognition software from Polar Rose, Augmented ID enables you to discover selected information about people around you. All users control their own augmented appearance, by selecting the content and social network links they want to show to others. Modifying your augmented ID is easier than saying 1 2 3!

Watch Mickey Mouse celebrating turning 83 in Times Square in true Disney AR style. Enjoy!

What Augmented Reality apps have you come across lately? Share these with us here!

Everything’s changed. And privacy will keep changing just as the way we access and use data is. ictQATAR recently held its latest “Connected Speakers” event, which featured Jules Polonetsky, Director and Chair of the Future of Privacy Forum. Jules spoke to ictQATAR about how social media, mobile and online advertising are changing the future of privacy.

Check out this video interview to know more about what tomorrow’s privacy will be like:

Step in Refresh.  I was pleasantly surprised that Qatar has a growing open community of experts in web designing, development, e-marketing, content and a group of entrepreneurs, who work to refresh the creative, technical and professional culture of the internet.  Even more so that they come in all different shapes, sizes, cultures and ages. Refresh provides an opportunity for like-minded people to meet-up, discuss issues relating to business, design, development, online marketing, technology and increase the ICT networking community in Qatar all for free.

On 19 November, this group brought together four speakers to discuss reshaping the web with Multidisciplinary Design, Blogging & Social Networking, Starting a website and Global innovation within the local culture.  With the web having undergone a variety of transformations over the last few years, so has the front-end design, which has been influenced by a variety of design trends, the advancement of mobile devices and improvements to the scripting language used.  Trends which anyone in the business of designing, developing, marketing or owning an online business should be keeping abreast with.

Michael Hersrud kicked the presenter session off by discussing the influences of new creative trends and how they are responsible for visually reshaping the future of the web. He concentrated on the impact that new design has on how content can be presented in diverse visual styles, with twists in the tails of fonts and cleverly varied videos. His discussion on grid designing showed how creating a visual impact is key to attracting users, but how keeping them on the site with an easy accessible interface and solid content can make or break it. Taking the talk locally, he spoke about the potential of the Arabic font which can be created as a story in itself and one that has endless possibilities in the Middle East Arabic media environment. Interesting creatively grid and font designed sites mentioned include; Spacecollective.org Gallery, Leids Film Festival, Effect Games Demos, and The Wilderness Downtown.

Ammar Mohammed discussed how blogging and social media content can improve the visibility of a person, company or organization. It was interesting to note how many individuals and companies in Qatar have taken to Social Networking.  Individual’s social media usage has increased since 2008 due to the now familiar use of the medium to share experiences, open dialogue, and freedom of speech within the MENA region.  Some companies have developed a solid Marketing Strategy for their social media allowing them to make head way in ensuring continuous status updates with solid valuable information. Some companies however, have joined networks but have not updated their status’ once, this has a negative effect on their business, showing a lack of interest in their client’s requirements. ictQATAR’s Digital Media Landscape Report can give you more detailed statistics on Media Usage within Qatar.

Abraham Kararck brought me back to the basics of concrete web design start up requirements, to create a web presence that is sustainable. His basic presentation on design with a white screen and black text for the design impaired was original and amusing.  He emphasized how critical having a solid Design Strategy can be, from learning design lingo, setting up a storyboard and having a solid SEO strategy. Web design can make or break a new start-up and many make mistakes in the initial set up that can be detrimental to the success of the online business. His presentation concentrated on some main processes; creating a Storyboard, the initial Wireframe (buttons, fields, content, look and feel, etc), Design should initially be clean and simple before going elaborate and expensive, the Development (choosing a developer and language for the site to be written in) and finally Managing the site. It is important to make the correct decisions and use the correct tools to ensure a successful web business. He gave insightful short-cut cheats and processes to designing a site with great reference sites to use; Smashing Magazine, Elance, 99designs, Visual Mess, Capturely.com, Balsamiq, Icon Finder, Istockphoto, Aviary and don’t forget Google Analytics.

Olivier Auroy closed the workshop by discussing online businesses surviving in a globally branded village and how brands in Qatar and the Gulf can contribute to improving our daily lives. The audience was blown away by the brilliant bq sunglass concept developed from the Burqa and taking this idea into a more modern day conceptual design to cover the female face.  The design was inspirational and I could quite easily see Western women buying the product.

Overall nothing ground breaking in the concepts presented, but if you are a start up company or student it was insightful to be made aware of good business practices. For someone that has a website, it was a way to recap on lessons once learned and forgotten along the way, to take a moment to pause, step back and have a look at where we are as a site and repurpose where necessary.

Creative Commons Qatar and ictQATAR brought Liam to Doha this week to meet with numerous institutions in Qatar to explore how they could work to help grow a vibrant Wikipedia community in Qatar and the Arab world, openly share content and contribute to knowledge available in the public domain. Much of the valuable content created here has value well beyond our borders, and if shared through Wikipedia, can greatly add to the world’s collective knowledge. The Wikimedia Foundation is planning to invest significant resources in the MENA region, so Qatar has a great opportunity to take a lead in increasing shared knowledge from the region. Here’s a quick recap of some of the meetings.

Qatar Museum Authority – Liam spoke to Qatar’s museum community, including people from the Museum of Islamic Art, the Qatar National Museum and Mathaf. In his presentation he said that Wikipedia is a way to bridge cultural divides and encouraged QMA to find ways to contribute to the Wikipedia community. He stressed that QMA, by sharing some of its valuable content, whether digital images, artist profiles, or expert knowledge on artifacts, the museums could establish themselves as leading voices in their areas of expertise and share they collections far beyond their museum walls.

Liam Wyatt talking GLAM (by CC Qatar)

Liam challenged the museums in Qatar to make more contently freely available, and to make “free” the default policy. He shared tangible examples of ways other museums had participated in the Wikipedia community and highlighted efforts he led during his time as a Wikipedian in Residence at the British Museum. Museums here seemed enthused about the ideas and discussions are under way to develop some concrete projects here.

Al Jazeera – An early adopter of Creative Commons, it’s no surprise that Al Jazeera was extremely receptive to being a more active part of the Wikipedia community. Al Jazeera’s rich multi-visual resources would be invaluable to Wikipedians if they are shared in a way that can be used freely. Already, still shots from Al Jazeera footage is used on Wikipedia, however images from their Flickr account couldn’t be used because of their licensing. Right after our meeting, Al Jazeera changed the license on their Flickr photos to CC’s Attribution-Share alike license, making them usable by Wikipedians and they are already populating Wikipedia.. Also, Al Jazeera is exploring ways to make it easier to use their content as sources for articles and also considering offering video footage in an open source format so it can also be used on Wikipedia. Great potential!

ictQATAR – Yes, I made sure Liam met with my organization too. Liam specifically met with our teams leading digitization programs and business incubation efforts. As a result of the meeting, ictQATAR will work to ensure that any work cultural works digitized through ictQATAR are shared in a way that can be used by Wikipedians so it reaches a broader audience, and also ictQATAR will look at more “open” business models for a variety of incubation services.

Let’s Tweet in Arabic (Taghreedat)– You can’t help but be impressed by the work of Taghreedat. What started as a small group that wanted to Tweet more in Arabic has grown into an active community of more than 15,000 people on Twitter that are discussing a wide range of topics regularly and even working to develop the Twitter Arabic interface. Liam met with numerous Taghreedat members and shared a variety of ways they could be engaged in the Wikipedia community, including enhancing the Wikipedia Arabic interface and becoming active Wikipedia contributors/editors. I am expecting some exciting Taghreedat/Wikipedia collaboration soon!

Members of the Taghreedat community discuss Wikipedia (by CC Qatar)

Education City – The librarians at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar and Northwestern University Qatar organized a public presentation on Wikimedia for the Education City community. Liam shared a range of ways educators, librarians and students could become more active contributors to the Wikimedia community, including as editors, translators and by sharing original works in the Wikicommons or Wikisource. He showed examples of schools that have incorporated Wikipedia editing into the curriculum and also highlighted some innovative libraries sharing more of their collections in ways that are usable by Wikipedians.

Clearly, there were a lot of positive meetings and discussions! I’m hopeful we’ll see some excellent Wikipedia/Wikimedia oriented initiatives coming from Qatar soon, in addition to the formal partnership of Qatar Foundation with the Wikimedia Foundation. I look forward to working with the various organizations as part of CC Qatar to share more knowledge from Qatar freely!

This post originally appeared on the Creative Commons Qatar website. 

A bit scary, right? This comes directly from the website of the Future of Privacy Forum, which is a Washington, DC-based think tank that seeks to advance responsible data practices in the digital age. Jules Polonetsky, the Director and Co-Chair of the Future of Privacy Forum will be in Doha on Monday, November 28 as part of ictQATAR’s Connected Speakers Series. (Register here) Jules, a former Chief Privacy Officer at AOL, is one of the leading experts on privacy in the world, and his current focus areas are online data use, smart grid, mobile data, apps and social media.

I spoke with Jules a few weeks ago as he was preparing for his talk and was truly astounded by the sheer amount of data that is out there about each and every one of us, and just how little regulation there is about how this data is used. The fact is, each of us willingly shares more and more data each day, whether it is through our favorite websites, a mobile application or via various social media networks. The Internet has certainly made sharing easier and more of the norm, so it’s likely we will continue to share more about ourselves online. The question then is, how can we be sure this data is used responsibly and that we are protected from serious risks? Clearly there are tons of innovative uses of this data, but what is the line between innovation and privacy? I’ll leave that to Jules to answer during his talk!

For anyone that is interested in learning more about the future of privacy, particularly online privacy, I highly recommend checking out the resources on Future of Privacy Forum website, and of course, don’t miss Jules’ talk on Monday, November 28 at 6:30 p.m. at the Sharq. To register, visit the event’s Eventbrite page. Also, feel free to submit any questions via comments and I’ll share them with Jules before his talk. Hope to see you there!

Plagiarism is unfortunately rife on the world wide web, to the extent that entire website content and images are copied and used as original content by the plagiarizer. Where does this leave the original creator? The person who has searched to find just the right keywords to match their business, who has spent money to develop their website and who has built up their SEO popularity on search engines? They may well find that their search engine rankings are lowered and all their work becomes less relevant.

Firstly, website owners should scan the web to find if there content is being used elsewhere.  If they are articles and information that you are interested in having reused, then ensure that the sites mention you as the originator.  If not, then email them requesting a mention and if this is not forthcoming, comment on the piece of work allowing readers to know where the content did originate from. Legal advice may also be required in these instances.

If your entire website has been copied, such as my friends’, including the use of her client recommendations which were passed off as the plagiarizers own clients, then this is a more serious scenario and legal advice or action may be necessary.

This is where Copyscape becomes an interesting tool for web owners. They provide a free plagiarizm checker, which allows users to find copies of their web pages online.

You simply enter your web URL and wait. Copyscape will scan the web and display any websites that may contain your content.  You would however, have to search page by page and enter each URL into the Copyscape search block.

Their professional solutions tools will search your entire website and help to prevent content theft and fraud, they contain more powerful detection tools than the free service, including copy-paste originality checks, batch searches, private indexing, case tracking and an API.  Plus the Copysentry service can scan your website daily or weekly and if new copies of your content are found they will alert you via email, this does come at a cost per page.

Copyscape has four basic steps that you can follow to prevent plagiarism, these include using there plagiarism warning banner which can be placed on each of your web pages for free, using the Copysentry service, including copyright notices onto each page, and knowing your rights and the appropriate steps to take if your website is plagiarized.

For more information you can go to their FAQs or watch their How To with Copyscape video.