personal

Many have asked me for a link to the CNN interview broadcasted on American Morning last Thursday. Marsha Walton at CNN today published a bigger piece of the interview, where I explain it in much broader terms what it is all about. Read the article
here.

Remember to take a look at http://ajgar.com while you are at it as it enables you to do this on your own.

An interview with me was broadcasted today (27th July 2006) at CNN at 7.40AM EST. The interview focused on my site for citizens in Lebanon and Israel to share and tell their stories via cell phones, but also on my work here at Stanford to developed for the user simple posting techniques for cell phones to any CMS-system.

I also wrote a longer blog entry on the future of the new improved media, or as some like to put it citizen media. I prefer the new improved media.

Cell phones today transmit audio, video, graphics, photographs and text. When combined with the proper web application, cell phones enable any citizen in any country of any background to publish information and share it with the world. The importance of social networking cannot be over exaggerated. The answer is pretty simple. The philosophy behind the UN and the European Union is to build friendships and relations between countries to prevent them from getting into arguments/disputes that end up in wars. It is a known fact that you don’t, hopefully, attack your friend. What is so cool today is that modern technology enables borderless and “blind” communication between all individuals, especially when you enable wireless posting via cell phones such as SMS and MMS. You can speak to anyone, anywhere at anytime. Why not use it? The New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman writes about it in his book “The World is Flat” even though I think that the conclusion is even broader than he concludes in his book.

You will find the full blog entry here:
http://inthefieldonline.net/blog/2006/07/27/the-future-of-the-new-improved-media/

Mark Glaser at MediaShift PBS met me some time ago and we spoke on the subject of citizen media and the future of it. I truly believe cell phones are the right way to go here if combined with the proper business model.

Key quote from article:
“The key here is that the media organizations need to realize they are losing control. They can’t really control [the news] now because people are posting this stuff to other blogs. I think it would be better to merge traditional reporting with citizen media rather than have a [totally] new media.

To take the best of the old fashioned news organizations and bring in the power of the bloggers, because you have so many people investigating. Mix them and you have an extremely good organization and you’ll have content that’s really important in finding out the truth.” — Erik Sundelof, Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University

The interview is found here.

It has been a long time since I have written anything here. It has been an intense period and a lot of things has happened. I have met incredible people, and learnt so much about myself. The time and environment here is amazing. I have had some friends over from Sweden and it was great to show them around and give them a taste of the daily life here.

Next week I will speak at a conference NetSquared on the use of cellphones in developing countries and emerging markets. I will present my work here at Stanford and discuss the design of the new generation of cellphone applications. By that I mean the architecture and not a discussion on the network generation. I have written a blog entry on this here.

June 3rd I will be at Teddy’s great place up in the mountains and party with the fellows. It will probably be as great as last time, when it ended up as an all-nighter. It can’t go wrong. Great people, great diversity of food and a great place…

It is now decided that I will stay in the Bay area for some time so I will most probably miss the Swedish summer, but hopefully I will be able to fly home during early autumn for a short while. I will try to be more frequent in my blogging here, not to mention the photo upload.