This week’s Australian Story provides a great illustration of just how effective YouTube can be as a platform for networked journalism.

It tells the story of Daniel Meadows - a shy young man who found love in the USA via the internet.

When he left home to follow his heart across the globe he walked into an American Homeland Security nightmare that denied him access to the USA.

Daniel responded by telling his story on YouTube (where he’s known as Dr Lemur), sparking a frenzy of outraged vlogging and blogging around the world and attention from mainstream media here and in the US.

Daniel is still unable to enter the USA, but his story is now out there via YouTube and it seems likely that the respective government’s will have to respond to Daniel’s circumstances.

We’re all familiar with “techno-lust” - that driving desire created by marketers who convince us that our lives will improve immeasurably when we get out hands on the next big (actually, usually small) thing. But there’s often a cost associated with this next-gen tech bling that goes far beyond our own pockets, and I’m not referring to “always-on anxiety”.

John Lasker has taken look at the “Play Station War” that’s been raging in the rugged volcanic mountains of the Congo for ten years. The name came about because of a black metallic ore called coltan that, after it is refined, becomes a bluish-gray powder called tantalum, which is defined as a transition metal used to make cell phones, laptops and other electronics.

Evidence shows that during the war hundreds of millions of dollars worth of coltan was stolen from the Congo - a nation in desperate need of revenue. The UN also discovered that Rwandan troops and rebels were using prisoners-of-war and children to mine for the “black gold.”

Lasker says, “For the most part, tantalum has one significant use: to satisfy the West’s insatiable appetite for personal technology.”

In a piece he’s written for Mediashift, Alfred Hermida has looked at the challenges facing journalism schools in teaching technical skills without losing sight of the journalism.

The challenges for journalism schools are two-fold. First, students need to be taught how to use a wide range of technical tools. Second, and more importantly, they have to learn how to produce real journalism using the technology. This is perhaps the hardest part.

Our students are digital natives, living in an always-on, always-connected world. The challenge in the classroom is less about teaching the technology and more about providing an understanding of how new media tools can be harnessed to create quality journalism.

Hermida makes the critical point that journalism educators need to be part of the digital world if they are to teach digital skills.

Too often academics are observers looking in from the outside, rather than being part of the new media world inhabited by our students.

The BBC is losing the support of “swaths” of the UK population, according to a major new survey.

The Guardian reports on a poll showing that a large proportion of the population do not feel the licence fee that funds the BBC is good value for money.

Perhaps most troubling for BBC executives is the finding that a majority of people do not believe the licence fee ensures the provision of distinctive programming not available elsewhere - long one of the key arguments for its existence.

Opponents of the case for the licence fee argue that it will be difficult to sustain in a fragmented digital age as the amount of time people spend consuming BBC programs declines.

Conversely, the BBC (and public broadcasters generally) argues that content proliferation gives it a more important role than ever in bringing high-quality public service content to a wide audience.

Just one week to go to friend and colleague Fergus’ Media in the Pub gig on the 26th at the Clarendon Hotel in Sydney’s Surry Hills.

A gaggle of garrulous media mavens will be taking a look at Australian media jobs in ten years time. What are they going to look like? How do contracting and new skills interact? What does the fragmentation of media sources mean for finding people to pay for your time?

Be there or be square!

Weird! In the US, as you might expect, they’ve been obsessed with swimmer Michael Phelps’ quest for eight gold medals. The official Olympic broadcaster, NBC has been taping and broadcasting Olympic events that did not coincide with their ‘primetime’, so when a CNN story breaking the result of Phelps’ eighth win went out on a Twitter feed hours before NBC planned to broadcast its delayed coverage, all hell broke lose.

Predictably, NBC was cranky because it owned the exclusive broadcast rights (obviously they’ve forgotten what breaking news is), but so were the audiences. Tech Crunch grabbed this:

Fox News has bought into a video-based college news network. The deal will see student reporting feature on the Fox News cable network.

Forbes.com says the move will help Fox News and its advertisers connect with college-aged audiences as well as help Fox parent company, News Corp. gain access to social network site Facebook’s well-to-do, upwardly mobile college and university student users.

We’re back! Sorry about the hiatus, but sometimes there just isn’t the time… (and dare I admit, the inclination…). Anyway…

Google turns 10 next month. Yes, those student visionaries Larry Page and Sergey Brin have taken only 10 years to turn their little project to inject some order into the web into the planet’s biggest, and possibly the most influential, media company.

We’re about to be blitzed with media coverage and prognostication on the meaning of Google: Is it good or evil; is it providing a service to humankind or expanding the consumerist nightmare of endless targeted marketing; is it merely providing a convenient one stop shop for all the world’s information or is it plundering and profiting from the intellectual efforts of others?

The Guardian gets in early with a range of opinions on the pros and cons of a Google world.

Documentary director, Adam Curtis, has an interesting view:

Machines like Google know something about us as human beings that we really don’t want to know - that we are not individuals: ‘If you like this then you will like that…’. So Google is a paradox. It gives us the feeling we are wild and free individuals, powerfully reinforcing an idea of us as heroic figures in the consumer age. Yet at the same time it is powerfully proving the opposite - that we are completely predictable…. The really interesting question is whether it is really a cult….

It’s not unusual, when at conferences or information sessions where the talk turns to the new work structures that are needed in media institutions, for someone to bring up Google. Often they talk about the 20% rule, where employees get a day a week to work autonomously in their own projects. Or it’s about the support and resources given to staff, or the way ideas are allowed to percolate up from the bottom of the organisation.

So, is all this true? What is it really like to work for Google?

Mitsu Hadeishi has just started working for the search giant. He was a bit doubtful that Google was really that different from other companies.

I mean, sure, I expected it to be a reasonably cool place to work, laid-back yet intense, filled with bright people and interesting projects, etc. But — when I told friends I was starting a job there, for the most part they reacted with tremendous enthusiasm, as though I’d won the lottery or gotten into some exclusive club — enthusiasm far beyond what one might expect in response to any other “I’m starting a new job” announcement.

Well, it turns out that his friends were right to be enthusiastic. It’s only been a week, but Mitsu’s saying with a fair degree of confidence that Google really is different.

Believe it or not, social media and ice cream have a lot in common…