Needless to say that it was not part of the plan for those young scandal instigators to be-first- seen on a national TV channel before-second- hitting the headlines of major newspapers all over the world.

As expected, reactions and comments around the world coming from political leaders, civil society, NGOs, bloggers and even Tsahal officials condemned the behaviors of those immature kids.

“This video finally debunks one of the most persistent Israeli myths – that ours is the only occupying army in history that does not sexually abuse the women of the occupied nation », says Israeli Editorialist Dimi Reider on his blog, Dimi’s notes. »

Besides its political taint, the reaction of the official Palestinian bodies was undoubtedly the most resourceful one.

“With the advent of easy-to-use media like YouTube, the truth is coming to light about a culture of humiliation of the Palestinians,” said a Palestinian official from Prime Minister Fayyad’s office on Tuesday, October 5^th.

Beyond the non-surprising political interpretation of the video by the Palestinian Government, what is crucial in the statement is the awareness of the impact new digital media has on today’s political realities.

The case of Israel is quite telling, as the Israeli IDF has had a long tradition of discretion and control on everything that relates to its communication. Therefore, witnessing a non-amateur army in such an uncomfortable position (to say the least) is blatant evidence of the immense power and tremendous volatility new media have today.

In fact, things seem to have changed for Tsahal, making it harder and harder for the Israeli army to control everything, as this video is not an isolated case for the IDF. In fact, this new broadcast is the third thorn the Israeli army had to deal with after two similar cases had occurred earlier this year, all three happening within a six-month period.

First, exposure of the video came just seven weeks after an Israeli soldier sparked widespread outrage by posting pictures of herself smiling and larking around next to blindfolded and handcuffed Palestinian prisoners. The army denounced the pictures as “shameful,” while the Palestinian Authority described them as humiliating, but the former soldier, Eden Abergil, could not understand why the images had caused such offence.

Second, earlier last summer, the video of six soldiers breaking out into a coordinated dance routine in the middle of the street while on duty in Hebron prompted a global outcry that had destabilized Tsahal’s communication. The video was all the more shocking, as Hebron has had a sad and bloody tradition of paroxysmal violence between illegal settlers and local Palestinians.

« Israel has not yet find the weapon against this kind of threats », says Omar Barghouti, a founding committee member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. No matter how many radars, anti-missile shields,F-15 and M-16 you may have, New Media is stronger than you.

Not an Isolated Case

Yet, Israel and the Palestinian territories are not the only places where new media are changing the rules of the communication/censorship  game.

YouTube was blocked in Thailand because of videos showing people stomping on photographs of the Thai King.

Turkey, on the other hand, is offended by videos that indicate that Ataturk, the founder and first president of Turkey, was homosexual. Turkey wants YouTube to block these videos not only in its own country, but also everywhere else. As YouTube refuses to do so, the site remains blocked there.

YouTube: spearhead of the revolution.

Originally aimed at socializing people through Entertainment videos (music, dance), Youtube has now become a major global actor playing a political role in each and every country.

Ironically on the same day the belly-dancing video hit the web and went viral, Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics at Youtube, came to Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs to have lunch with students, alumni, staff and faculty in the second brownbag lunch of the year sponsored by the IMAC specialization.

“Today with YouTube, you can’t get away from the camera no matter where you go,” he said.

“This can be both a good thing and a bad thing. YouTube was not created to become a public square. But as with a lot of such platforms, it’s most important role can be upsetting the power structure… The old world was a conversation between politicians and news organizations. In today’s world, there’s a whole other layer out there where you have regular people holding their leaders accountable.”

Here is one example of a magic picture with this app. I took this picture this Summer in Costa Brava (Spain)

The views were really nice by themselves, but I would have never realized I was in such a mysterious and wonderful place were it not for this magical application.

This application allows iPhone users to take pictures with their devices obtaining a similar result to that obtained with the Lomo cameras. For those unfamiliar with the new “hipster” trend (please, click!) of recovering the old-fashioned Lomo cameras, I should just write another post. To make a long story short, the Lomo cameras were invented by the USSR and had a very different technology from the American ones. They almost disappeared when the Soviet Union fell, as many other technologies that they had developed. The American technology was more advanced, but the results were not as beautiful. That is why Lomo cameras survived among those who prevail beauty over practicality, and why the “hipsters” are nowadays fostering its revival.  You just need to have a look to the gadgets offered in Urban Outfitters to discover that Lomo cameras are among the favorite option for a birthday present. There is also a very nice shop in Greenwich Village called Lomography where you can find all types of Lomo cameras.

For those who do not want to spend a minimum of $50 dollars for such a toy, we have the cheap option of Hipstamatic, which also allows you to play with different type of lenses.

Before I start feeling like a sales representative I am going to make the point of this post: I am totally amazed by how this iPhone app can make people look so beautiful and nice! It gets out the secret beauty inside every human being. My belief is that it photographs the souls of people and things. For instance, here there is a photograph of my soul:

And here is a last example of the magic of Hipstamatic: Don´t we look like very nice, sensible and harmless girls?

Ok, let’s see if I have this straight: You draw/sketch some objects on a canvas. You label those objects. Then the application goes out and does a search on those objects and returns images that best fits them.

Then the application composes a new image based on those found images.

Check. And crazy.

From the creators:

We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images. We also provide a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition. Each blending result is given a numeric score, allowing us to find an optimal combination of discovered images. Experimental results show the method is very successful; we also evaluate our system using the results from two user studies.

Some are calling this fake but I don’t think so. The presentation is probably prettified but projects like Photosynth from Microsoft and the University of Washington show that this is doable… or at least imaginable.

The idea was that if you combined geotagged images with the capabilities of what we see on a Flickr where Users can mark upon and comment within images, you could have a pretty amazing crowd sourcing opportunity. To jog your memory, here’s an example of people commenting within images.

This is a screenshot of an image on Flickr that viewers have written comments upon. Each “box” with the thin border around it is where a User has attached a comment to.

So, in our hypothetical you can have the layout of photos as seen in the Mt. Hood exampel with the additional information we see here. This all comes in very handy. Think earthquake, think hundreds of uploaded pictures that are geotagged so we know exactly where we looking at, and then think crowdsourcing information onto them so rescue workers can look at the images and know immediately what might be under the rubble.

But none of that is what this is about. What this is about is an article I came across in ReadWriteWeb that’s pretty amazing. It’s a review of two iPhone applications that allow you to point your 3GS iPhone at something and/or in a direction, and if you’re in camera mode, Wikipedia information about what your pointing out will appear on your screen.

As RWW explains:

Augmented Reality (AR) apps use your phone’s GPS to know where you are and the compass to know which direction you’re looking at. Then these two apps can tell you what you’re looking at that’s written up in Wikipedia.

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