A Youtube Divorce??

Not only is Youtube (Web Video) good for sharing Music Videos and TV Broadcasts segments, but apparently its a great tool to use when trashing soon-to-be estranged spouses.

Former actress and playwright ("Bonkers") Tricia Walsh-Smith, vented ALL of her frustrations out against her husband, Philip Smith, President of the Shubert Organization, the largest theater owner on Broadway, on Youtube.

Famous Divorce Raoul Felder who represents Smith says, "The situation is funny but Divorce isn't". "This is a victim who is holding her head up. I think she comes off well."

On the taping Smith bashes family members who gave her hell and tells the world how her husband, is allegedly trying to evict her from their luxury apartment.

She also makes embarrassing claims regarding their intimate life, and then calls his office on camera to repeat those claims to a stunned assistant.

Norman Sheresky, a Partner in the Matrimonial Law firm Sheresky Aronson Mayesfsky & Sloan says, "I don't think it's the kind of thing people should be doing, and it's the kind of thing judges frown upon".

"This is absolutely a new step, and I think it's scary," said Bonnie Rabin, a divorce lawyer who has handled high-profile cases. "People used to worry about getting on Page Six (the gossip page of the New York Post). But this? It brings the concept of humiliation to a whole new level."

To date the Video has been seen by more than 150,000 viewers.

Tricia Walsh's "Divorce" Video



Sources: Associated Press, Charlotte.com, Youtube
Photos courtesy of: Flickr

Have you spied on your partner?

Oxford University this week published research revealing one in five of some 2,000 respondents admitted checking their partner's emails or texts, and 13% to looking at their internet histories. This supports research done by iVillage - a women's social networking site - in America last year. Of the 2,551 iVillagers polled, 77% said they would snoop.

Sale away to a new life

We all have our dreams of the perfect life - a big, custom-built house in a sun-filled Australian city, a great car, new motorbike, spa, jet ski. A life filled with loyal friends and the thrills of snowboarding, skydiving, surfing and mountain biking.
But can the dream really be just the click of a button away? Darlington-born Ian Usher is giving you the option on alife4sale.com.

King of insults sees royal knockout for YouTube

Riot police stand in front of a portrait of Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej in Bangkok. Photograph: Rungroj Yongrit/EPA

You could call it 'repression lite'. You can't censor the whole internet - unless you commit China-sized resources to this - so why not target YouTube?

Thailand has become the latest nation to respond to a perceived slight to its national honour with a blanket ban on the video sharing website, after YouTube refused to remove a clip ridiculing the country's revered king.

The 44 second clip is amateurish, distinctly juvenile and seems expressly intended to inflame the feelings of Thai people.

It shows a picture of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, which is then defaced with some crudely drawn animated additions and - most seriously - placed directly underneath a photo of a woman's feet, something gravely disrespectful to Thais.

Insulting the king is a serious offence in Thailand - a fact a Swiss man found out to his cost last week when he was jailed for 10 years.

After YouTube said it would not take down the clip, Thailand's military appointed government, installed after Thaksin Shinawatra's administration was ousted in a coup in September, responded by blocking local access to the entire site.

The gospel according to YouTube

With the $1bn Viacom lawsuit against YouTube overshadowing the usual, somewhat zany, coverage given to the videosharing website, normal service is (almost) resumed with news of the first joint appearance of the Archbishops of York and Canterbury (via the all-new Lambeth Palace channel). Some may consider it Anglicanism in the 2.0 era. Some may want to take that idea further.

The video - which has value beyond its novelty factor - is filmed in the former Zanzibar slave market, ahead of the 200th anniversary on March 25 of the passing of Wilberforce's bill to abolish the slave trade in the British empire.

The blog with the scan of the diary that Mike wrote

A page from blogshank.

Blogs: they're the greatest thing ever, correct? The tool by which everyday citizens can overthrow the cultural hegemony of the mainstream media and give us their version of the world, direct and unadulterated.

Well, in part. But on a more prosaic level, too many of them can be tediously similar, both in subject (either a single overriding passion or set of opinions, or else mundane musings on the everyday) and in presentation.

Thanks, thus, for blogshank, which manages to be both delightfully random and evocative and also visually arresting.

It is made up of scans of an actual diary, each double page entry covering a week and filled with sketched drawings of seemingly arbitrary events and encounters, as well as occasional reminders of real life appointments.

Of course, not many of us can sketch so well: blogger Mike Smith happens to be a Cambridge-based freelance graphic designer and illustrator who has also written a children's book, this under the name of Walter Smith.

The battle of Brunel

Steven Schwartz, head of Brunel University.
Photograph: Guardian
Google war has broken out between Brunel University and the lecturers’ union, the Association of University Teachers.

The head of Brunel, Steven Schwartz, announced 60 redundancies at the university last September, which the AUT are - naturally - opposing, and it’s been an imaginative battle since.

Citizen journalism still in its infancy

US South African academic Vincent Maher is disappointed that more citizen journalism didn't spring from yesterday's explosions in London.

Maher, who teaches multimedia journalism at the New Media Lab at Rhodes University's School of Journalism and Media Studies, wrote:

What this says to me, despite my enthusiasm for citizen journalism and the we media is that we have a long way to go. It could start with getting paid, of course but I think the real problem is that it is simply too easy to sit and wait for someone else to write it up and then provide commentary. Journalists are expected to get up and physically go there, take a photo, do something and get back to post the story ... bloggers seem to get away with armchair journalism and its getting worse and worse.

What we need is people posting pics and stories from their phones, as and when the events happen. Those people are the real deal as citizen journalists go. Email me examples if you find any - I haven’t as yet.

Maher's right that not a lot of citizen journalism went on yesterday. But there are good reasons why bloggers were "getting away with armchair journalism".

First: one cannot expect many London bloggers sitting at home or at work in, say, Hammersmith, on hearing about yesterday's explosions two weeks to the day after bombs that killed 52 innocent people, to jump in a cab and head for the scene of the blasts, not least because the Metropolitan police were pleading with people to stay where they were. So, not surprisingly, bloggers were restricted to regurgitating the breaking news coverage unless they happened to be on the scene of one of the explosions. What images there were reflected what was going on in the immediate vicinity of the snapper: see these ones on Flickr, or this one sent by Adam Randall from his phone to his moblog of roads being closed close to the Old Bailey and video of a pub being evacuated.

Happy returns for friends, and foes, reunited

Launched five years ago today by web designer Steve Pankhurst and his wife Julie to track down her old school friends and equip her with IT skills for a return to work after her maternity leave, the phenomenally successful website Friends Reunited now has 12 million members, writes Simon Crerar.

Run initially from a three-bed semi in Barnet, north London, the site hit critical mass in May 2001 – the point when anyone registering would recognise at least one name. By August 2001 there were one million members. One man was reunited with his mother after 53 years. Another was reunited with his cat after 10 years – his university flatmate had kept it. Numerous childhood sweethearts rekindled old passions. The oldest member was a 99-year-old woman searching for old school friends. Within a year the first Friends Reunited baby arrived, followed by an 80s compilation CD that sold over 100,000 copies.

Evolution at dawn

Seven words you cannot say in kindergarten? All the usual suspects, including shit and fuck, and one surprise: evolution.

With the warning that his film contains "foul language and political thought", New Zealand-born techie Nathan Torkington’s humorous short satirises the ongoing creationism battles causing deep divisions in the US, where he now lives with his family.

Starring his own children swearing on camera, the film is a riff on comedian George Carlin's notorious Seven Dirty Words, prohibited from use on US broadcast media, aligning the controversy of censorious adults with the ongoing controversy of censoring evolution from school textbooks.

Planet Google

Bobbie Johnson writes: First Google took over the internet – now it seems it’s trying to take over the world. Google Earth, the company’s latest attempt to make the planet searchable, was unveiled earlier this week.

It came hot on the heels of Google Print, Google Maps and Google DNA Profiling. Actually, I made that last one up - but it’s probably coming soon.

Happy birthday eBay

Praise be: eBay is 10 years old today. EBay itself is marking its anniversary this week with eBay Live!, a summit of users. Like any other self-respecting 10-year-old, it has grown out of its bouncy castles and jelly and ice-cream phase.

Leading question

It is possible that some of you, at one time or another, may have disagreed with the Guardian's carefully-considered leader columns. These articles - called editorials in the US - appear without a byline, and are set out as the opinion of the paper as a whole. Clearly, not every individual in an organisation will agree with a given article - but it is leaders that give a paper its voice.

To create a conversation, we encourage readers to send in comments for our letters page and to contact our readers' editor, Ian Mayes, with corrections or complaints. You can also post to our talkboards, contact writers directly, and post comments to the newsblog.

But we have never asked you, our valued readers, to actually write the leaders yourselves.

That's exactly what Andres Martinez, the editorial page editor at the LA Times, has proposed for his paper's website. He's called it the wikitorial, a feature that will allow readers to rewrite LA Times editorials.

You missed the eBay boat, Bob

Live 8 organiser Bob Geldof. Photograph: Dave Hogan/Getty

Call me a fawning capitalist lackey. Brand me a World Bank-loving, anti-poor, rich world boosting, multinational adoring sellout. Go as far as accusing me of being a slightly uneasy bedfellow with the Adam Smith Institute.

But whatever you do, please do explain why Bob Geldof is right to call eBay, the online auction marketplace, "an electronic pimp [that] arrogantly thought they were powerful enough to ignore public anger" when the company allowed its users to sell Live 8 tickets on its site.

And, while you're at it, can someone justify why he's fair in calling those who tried to sell their tickets "miserable wretches who are capitalising on people's misery"?

Love in cyberspace

• Hsiao-Hung Pai writes:

At a time when the Chinese authorities have ordered all websites in the country to register or face closure in China’s largest-scale crackdown on free association online, it's hard to understand what has led more than 100,000 Chinese internet users to register for marriage and form "virtual families" online.

The bizarre nature of the phenomenon only began to hit the nation when Mrs Lin from Harbin, a northern Chinese city, divorced her husband after finding out that he has been having an "affair" with a cyber partner (whom he’s never met) for over two years and has had a child with her – not physically, but virtually.

Gillmor combs the grassroots

San Francisco Bay. Photograph: Ben Margot/AP

Grassroots journalism guru Dan Gillmor has unveiled his long-awaited new project, Bayosphere. He describes its mission like this:

We will reflect - and reflect on - the news, needs and ideas of the San Francisco Bay Area and especially the technology sphere that is the prime economic driver of the area.

It's taken Gillmor a while to get this project off the ground since he left the San Jose Mercury News in February. At the moment, though, there's very little there aside from a new home for Gillmor's blog.

Such citizen journalism projects are spreading like a rash in the US at the moment: inevitably, some will thrive in the manner of South Korea's Oh My News, and some will fall: at the moment it's hard to know which. Although Gillmor's unimpeachable reputation for being as a guru of citizen participation in journalism will garner plenty of attention, I can't help thinking it's a bit unfortunate that the Bayosphere site has been unveiled in a such a skeleton state, without the bells and whistles that would really show visitors how the community is going to work.

Check out Cyberjournalist.net's Citizen Media Monitor for a list. Such projects haven't caught on in the UK in the same way yet - as far as I know.

Upturn on lastminute rollercoaster

Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman, the co-founders of lastminute.com, pictured in 2000. Photograph: PA

Lastminute.com has been a rollercoaster ride since it floated at the height of the internet boom in March 2000.

At the time, Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, lastminute's co-founders, were Britain's favourite entrepreneurs. The pair were ubiquitous: they frequently popped up on TV and received favourable media coverage. Their picture was even hung in the National Portrait Gallery, and ads for the company were plastered on the side of London buses.

Singapore libel laws claim first blogger

Singapore's tough libel laws claimed their first blogger today. If you go to Caustic Soda, the blog is gone. All you get is a single-page apology for a post on the Singapore government's science and technology agency website.

"I recognise and accept that a number of statements … were defamatory of A*Star, its chairman, Mr Philip Yeo, and its executive officers," writes Chen Jiahao, a 23-year-old postgrad who posted from the US.

We've won a Webby!

Guardian Unlimited has won the best newspaper category at the Webby awards. We were the only British site shortlisted in the newspaper category alongside the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post and the US entertainment paper Variety. It�s a great honour and we�re thrilled to have won.

The Webbys are the leading international awards honouring excellence in web design, functionality and creativity and are chosen by an expert panel from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Time has described the Webbys as the Oscars of the internet; in the light of today's news we can only respectfully agree.

This year�s contest, the ninth annual award, attracted some 4,000 entries across more than 60 categories. Other category winners include Google (best practices), BoingBoing (best blog), Jamie Oliver (celebrity/fan), and the CIA (employment). There's a full list of winners here.

Yahoo! gets personal

In the esteemed pages of Online, Ben Hammersley claimed that Yahoo! was the new Google. Maybe that's why Yahoo! were so keen to tell me about their latest service. "We've definitely been launching a lot of new products," Salim Mitha, the director of Yahoo! Search UK and Ireland, said with a chuckle when I spoke to him yesterday about the company’s latest innovation, MyWeb.

In effect, the MyWeb personal search matches Google's My Search History. It then ups the bells and whistles quota by allowing users to save what Mitha called an "electronic photocopy" of a web page rather than a link or cache version, which could change over time.