Monday, February 27, 2006
Monitoring local elections and Microsoft Vista - Beta version
It’s only two days to go before the local elections, so I have had a sweep through a number of sites that will be monitoring the elections.
The first stop must be the Independent Electoral Commission’s web site at www.elections.org.za – the problem is that the site has been up and down over the last week. This is particularly disappointing because in previous elections the IEC site has been quite reliable and informative. The site appears to have taken a downturn.
It has a special section on the 2006 municipal election – but this section does not have a complete list of candidates – in fact I couldn’t find a complete list anywhere – this is a problem because I am sure that the IEC does have such lists – so why not put them on the Internet?
Next stop was the Department of Provincial and Local Government – the government department is supposed to monitor the implementation of several municipal acts. The site is functional, but the news section has very little that is relevant to the current election. However, it does have links to two very practical guides to establishing ward committees. These committees are supposed to be the bedrock of local involvement in government – but of course most of us have no idea about the role of ward committees and whether we should get involved or not.
Go to the DPLG site at www.dplg.gov.za and you will find very good background information on wards.
As far as news goes, the DPLG follows the example of most government sites and simply puts up the speeches of the minister and a few press releases.
A site that offers some interesting news about the elections and anything to do with government is the Bua news service which you will find at……http://www.buanews.gov.za/
Let’s leave elections for a brief moment because this week Microsoft made an important announcement about its new operating system. For a long while it was called Longhorn, but the system that will eventually replace Windows XP is now known as Vista. According to the announcement, precisely 500,000 copies of a beta version will be sent to customers for testing with a final version set for release late this year.
The software giant says that together with Internet explorer seven – which is in advanced beta testing – Vista will provide a more secure environment for users.
If the new operating system makes it out on schedule it will have been half a decade since it released its previous OS – five years – that’s a long time in the internet world.
And with that we wrap up today’s edition of Cybersurf – remember to check for results on the sabcnews.com site or you can dial 082 152 for audio results in four different languages.
Thanks for listening and do join me again next Monday for more on the best of the web.
Monday, February 20, 2006
Elections less than ten days away
As you might, or might not know, the elections on March first are run quite differently to the national elections – and it is not very easy to understand the mechanics of the local election. For example, why is the municipality chosen through a proportional representation system but ward representatives are elected on a first past the post basis?
To explain all this, and other aspects of how the local elections work – the sabcnews.com web site has put up a special presentation explaining the ins and outs of the local elections. Even if you are confident that you know how the system works, it is really worthwhile looking at this presentation – you will need a Flash 8 player. And you can download the player using a link on the SABCnews.com web site.
Now let’s look at some of the web sites.
All the parties that I checked – and I admit that I did not go through all 97 parties – have a serious internet presence. They all appear to focus quite heavily on their respective leader – which is a little strange because their leaders are not up for election. But I suppose they have to start someplace, and the party leader is a good focal point.
The second common element in the party web sites is a party manifesto. This is good because they make it easy to find out what the party is all about.
Last week, the DA announced with some virtual fanfare that it had just released the first party political podcast in this country. Now whether this is true or not depends on your definition of what is a podcast. The Da’s podcast is really an MP3 recording of excerpts Tony Leon’s speech at a school – fair enough – that could count as a podcast.
But then the ACDP also has MP3 recordings available for download from its site. In this case the party describes them as radio adverts in English and in Sesotho. So did the ACDP really have the first political podcast?
The ANC has no audio on its fairly extensive election sub-site but it does have comprehensive candidates’ lists – still no mayoral candidates – but you can see quite easily who is on the PR lists and who are the ward candidates for each municipality. Most party web sites do not carry lists of their candidates.
The DA party lists are a little scrappy – for some provinces they are quite complete; and in others there are only PR candidates while some have none at all.
The IFP – which has a really old picture of its leader – actually has a button on its navigation bar for candidates – but the button doesn’t work.
It really is not a good idea to raise expectations if you don’t have the material to display. And talking about displaying material, while preparing this programme yesterday – the independent electoral commission web site at www.elections.org.za appeared to be off-line – hope they’ll be rocking and rolling pretty soon.
That wraps up this special election edition of Cybersurf. Next week we’ll be coming to you directly from the IEC centre in
- SABC News.com - Elections Feature
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Protest against caricatures of the Prophet
And to get some synergy going between the SABC news dot com web site and our special parliamentary broadcasts this week. We are putting up a special section on the SABC news dot com web site where you will be able to have a look at what we are doing. In the features section we will give you an idea of who we are going to interview and what we are going to discuss on the after eight debate.
So remember that – go to special features on sabcnews.com and you will find the section by scrolling down the left hand side navigation bar.
Let us change focus now to one of the more dramatic events of this past weekend. Protestors in Damascus – the capital of Syria attacked the embassies of Denmark and Norway because they objected to caricatures of the prophet Mohammed that were printed in certain newspapers.
The attacks and weekend protests in Lebanon were triggered by a set of twelve cartoons published in a Danish newspaper – Jyllands-Posten - in September last year. They were subsequently carried by one or two Scandinavian publications without provoking a huge reaction. Last week Muslim reaction ratcheted up several notches when French, Spanish and German newspapers republished some of the caricatures.
However, in my view, the scale of the protests would have been far less if these drawings had not been widely distributed on the Internet. While there is no doubt that the perceived insult to Islam greatly offended those Muslims who read Danish newspapers, it is unlikely that the cartoons would have enraged the crowds in Damascus and Beirut.
Without the Internet’s ability to penetrate borders, no more than a handful of people on the streets of Damascus would have known about the cartoons. We can therefore conclude that the existence of the Internet was at least indirectly responsible for the anti-Scandinavian rage sweeping through Muslim communities.
Is this boiling down to an argument against the Internet, or perhaps for facilitating censorship on the Internet as Google and Microsoft have just done in China?
On the contrary, it is an argument against the gagging order imposed this weekend on a South African newspaper. The pre-publication censorship of a newspaper considering the publication of cartoons is an exercise in futility because anyone who wants to see the cartoons can go to any one of dozens of web sites and blogs that have already put the caricatures online. If a listener would like to find the addresses of some of these sites, please check out the Cybersurf blog at www.cybersurf.blogspot.com
If you object to such drawings then please do not go to the Cybersurf blog.
The unfolding reaction to the cartoons is extra-ordinary – the UN is to investigate the publication of the caricatures; Sudan has boycotted Danish products and CNN – that great bastion for free speech showed pictures of the cartoons on air – but pixilated the images out – and the station admitted that it was doing so not because it was against the dissemination of the caricatures but because it was afraid.
And that wraps up today’s edition of Cybersurf. Thanks for listening and please tune in again next Monday for more on the best of the web.
Related links:
- SABCnews.com - Feature on Parliamentary briefings
- Die Welt
- Jyllands Posten
- Stuff New Zealand
- Cryptome - caricatures
- SANEF
