Cybersurf

Good morning and welcome to Cybersurf, a weekly look at what’s happening on the internet. I am Steven Lang.

This week, Time magazine announced its person of the year. Normally, the person is given this title for having been the most prominent newsmaker of the year. When the award was originally devised in 1927 it was not surprisingly, called MAN of the year.

Since then the list of People of the Year reads like some sort of American role of honour including Martin Luther King, Rudolph Giuliani, Mahatma Ghandi and almost all US presidents. But it also includes some villains such as Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

This year, Time has named as its person of the year - You – yes you, and you and you and you.

That is the official designation of the person of the year – YOU. And you can check it out at time dot com.

Yes, it’s a little confusing at first but when you read the accompanying article, it becomes clear that the YOU in question is the Internet user – because it focuses mainly on Web 2 point Oh, and especially on YouTube – the web site that allows users to upload and share video clips on line.

There is feature article on youTube.com but the article also highlights the roles of other Web two point oh sites such as MySpace, delicious, Flickr and Wikipedia.

Incidentally – YouTube was featured on Cybersurf twice this year – in August when it was nominated as one of Time magazine’s fifty coolest sites and in October when the site was bought out by Google for U$1.65 Billion .

The article does not explain however, that the YOU in question is essentially the Internet user who also reads Time magazine.

Changing tack somewhat – while following up the recent story about the Bushmen of the Central Kalahari who are campaigning for the return of their ancestral land – I found their web site at this address - www.iwant2gohome.org/

It is a very interesting site including a video message from Archbishop Desmond Tutu and hundreds of tiny photographs of members of the organisation. As you mouse-over each picture a message from that person pops up onto your screen.

A site that links to iwant2gohome has blamed De Beers for the misery of the Kalahari Bushmen. If you go to boycottdebeers.com you will find this site that accuses the diamond giant of manipulating the Botswana government into forcibly removing the Bushmen.

There are further links to two additional sites that claim to have the facts about diamonds. If you go to diamondfacts.org you will find a number of facts and news items from a De Beers perspective.

A parody site – called realdiamondfacts dot org – looks precisely like the original but the facts or so called facts are very different.

I suggest you look at both diamondfacts.org and realdiamondfacts.org and draw your own conclusions.

I will put these links up on the Cybersurf blog if you have difficulty finding the relevant pages. So note this down. Go to Cybersurf dot blogspot dot com. One more time Cybersurf dot blogspot dot com

But before you do that, I’ll sign off for today and invite you to listen to Cybersurf, next week, same time, same place.

Relevant Links:

• Wikipedia entry on Person of the Year
  
• Time Covers of Person of the Year
• I want to go home
• De Beers
• Boycott De Beers