(sorry, just couldnt resist..^^ …had been googling for a good image of a golf club which I would like to propose as a logo for PNU, but then I came across this site and just couldnt stop it anymore. oh. man. omg. :-)

Saw some live coverage from the MacWorld earlier this week where ppl used this service to directly stream video from their phone to qik.com. Something like YouTube, but with the difference that everything is streamed live from the phone (Nokia N95) onto their servers. Meaning: you’ll need a decent broadband network connectivity for this to work fine.

(browser screenshot via browsershots.org)

Signed up for this service (which is still alpha) on tuesday evening and just received an invitation. Don’t know about 3G speed outside, but here @home with DSL 2048 kbit/s down & 192 kbit/s up maximum speed it’s just very charming. Haaiaa. Will need to test it again outside tomorrow in daylight and see how it is performing.

And yes, I am bit shy on camera. That’s why I haven’t really made use of seesmic so far (the “video twitter”). You may have seen it in action earlier last month when Robert Scoble blogged about it.

Why is it interesting? After all, I wouldnt want to put myself online. It’s interesting because a) it enables true LIVE coverage and b) memory space is limited on some phones, so with a service like this, ppl can just report until the battery is drained. As for the “live” part: I pressed the F5 key to refresh the user page right after I had stopped recording and there it was, my video. Dead simple.

Which phones are supported?
The latest Nokia range, imho those who are based on the S60v3 platform.

Citizen Media, here we come… muahahahaha!

(video isnt included at this time as i just can’t stand the way the “embed object” code is implemented in WP + my video plugin doesnt support qik so far..)

EDIT: Loic just twittered that Seesmic is now compatible with mobile phones via Shozu.com. Shozu! Has anyone tried it so far? Had it running on my mobile some month ago but it quickly drained the battery, also due to some autostart scripts that load when the phone boots (!) up. - I guess all these tools only make sense when your phone is within a 3G or better network and when everything is interconnected, i.e. feeds that pull content from your various multimedia resources online and aggregate them on your blog. Should be an interesting task for a WP plugin (hint, hint :-)….something that pulls content from your video & microblogging platforms and creates a blog post out of it. In short: what I would like to have is a smooth way to blog-on-the-go and have it appear on my own blog (and not somewhere on flickr, vox, seesmic, qik, YouTube, etc.). Possible? Maybe one day (soon).

EDIT 2: QIK works fine even via a normal (= slow) GPRS connection! Awesome. I will use it more often now.

Two German men and a Dutch woman arrested by Kenyan authorities on suspicion of terrorism have been released, the German Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.

A spokesman for the ministry said Gerd Uwe Hauth, Andrej Hermlin and Dutch national Fleur Van Dissel had been released from custody on Saturday. He said he could not provide details about why they had been freed.

Pressure from many angles have been used in securing this release, especially from the foreign ministries of the concerned parties. We still however moan the fact that this kind of pressure may not be there when we talk about local media and sanctions put on them by the Kenyan government. There are tear-gassed and threatened journalists out there. Who will come to their rescue?The FCAEA released the following statement urging for freedom of the media:

Statement on violation of press freedoms and intimidation of journalists

NAIROBI, January 19, 2008– The Foreign Correspondents’ Association of East Africa (FCAEA) strongly condemns incidents of intimidation against both foreign and local journalists and the violation of press freedoms in Kenya’s post-election period.

There has been a serious curtailing of press freedoms since the declaration of Mwai Kibaki as president in the name of public safety and these are hampering journalists from proceeding with their work.

We condemn the arrest and detention of one of our members, documentary filmmaker Fleur van Dissel, for trumped up charges of terrorism. We call for her immediate release and an end to the harassment of foreign journalists simply doing their work.

The FCAEA was dismayed to see the government pointing a finger at the foreign press in newspaper advertisements, urging the international media, as well as diplomats and activists, not to give “our personal opinion or analysis” and to give “evidence” of rigging in the elections.

The international media in Kenya is playing a crucial role of disseminating and documenting the events unfolding in the post-election period and is not in any position to provide the government with evidence of vote rigging.

The press freedoms of local media have been hurt, with an unacceptable gag on live broadcasts. We have heard reports of local press members being intimidated by police and we demand that such intimidation stop.

We urge the government, the opposition and any other prominent actor in the post-election period to allow the media to continue its work freely, without harassment, arrest or intimidation.