Wednesday, March 20, 2013

YouTube in Blurmany

Sometimes, it is hard to overlook how exceptional Germany is, even in negative instances. A few years ago, when Google began rolling out its Street View for more locations in Germany, there was unusual resistance among the general public, with quite a number of people participating in a campaign to have their own homes blurred – leading to the new word "Blurmany."

The most ludicrous thing about the campaign was that Deutsche Telekom already offered a similar Street View service that no one had objected to – mainly because almost no one knew existed. The result was blurred images on Google and perfectly normal pictures for the competition.

Recently, there was news confirming what everyone in Germany already knows: popular videos in Germany are generally blocked on YouTube because GEMA,, which collects copyright fees, cannot reach an agreement with YouTube on how much should be paid per video view. Similar agreements have been reached around the world, so Germans are now experts at tunneling into YouTube from servers abroad by means of browser plug-ins. We then get to watch, for instance, advertising in Dutch before we see our video of Gangnam Style, which was blocked the first time I tried to view it.

The study found that 61.5 percent of the 1,000 most popular videos worldwide cannot be viewed legally in Germany on YouTube. Germany comes in second worldwide in the list of blocked videos on YouTube behind the newly founded South Sudan, but ahead of Vatican City, Myanmar, Palestine, Kyrgyzstan, and Afghanistan, for instance.

Perhaps Blurmany and the YouTube dispute are not related. A small number of people objected to Google Street View in Germany, and the dispute about YouTube videos is not at all between the general public and Google. Nonetheless, Germany seems to be having trouble with the Internet on different levels.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Life after Google Reader

The announcement that Google is shutting down its RSS Reader came as a shock to me this week, though apparently insiders saw this coming a few years ago. Rather than mope about what a lot of other people are saying – Google is evil – I am trying to take the situation as an opportunity.

In 2008, a colleague recommended that I switch to Gmail, which I had already had for a few years but was not using. I explained all the reasons why I didn't think it was an option for me, and she pointed out all the ways in which Gmail was not a simple online e-mail account like Yahoo. After two days of test driving, I switched completely and have not looked back.

Could the same thing be happening now with RSS? Is there something better in the works?

I use Google Reader all the time. It is my morning newspaper, and it is an indispensable tool for me as a journalist to keep track of what is being said. It has also become a place for me to simply drop feeds to websites I don't want to forget.

Over the years, I have never really trimmed down my Reader, and in switching to Feedly (which is apparently the best alternative currently) I realize how much junk has piled up over the years – but also how important Reader is for the 10 or 20 feeds I rely on.

In switching over and reorganizing my feeds, I found that a number of them were dead, and I felt that I was no longer reading a whole slew of others. But the trimmed down selection on Feedly does not make me happy. Maybe I will find a way to organize my feeds so that I think I can see what I'm looking for, but I am not blown away yet.

The bigger question is whether there is a future for RSS at all. Is this just the first nail in the coffin? Is everything going to switch to apps, with each subscription being its own app? That would, of course, solve the financial issue that is dogging journalism today – and indeed, it seems that Google is ditching its Reader not because it is unpopular, but because the firm cannot see any way to make money from it.

One thing's for certain – getting feeds from social media is not an option. As someone who has to produce material for social media (as a journalist), I need to be able to aggregate information, so I need the overview – not the end product. And while Google Currents looks a lot sleeker, I don't need sleek – and the app does not run on my Windows desktop.

After a brief test drive, I do not think that I am going to be much happier with whatever new set up I create, as I was with the switch to Gmail. It seems that the loss of Google Reader is just that: a loss.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

US Nazi researchers "better at PR"

You may have read that a group of US historians found that far more Nazi concentration camps, labor camps, and ghettos existed than was previously known – some 40,000, in fact.

Over at Die Zeit, a German historian has reacted to the publication with charges of plagiarism. German historian Wolfgang Benz says he was surprised to hear the US historian claim that German researchers were not given the funding to look into the matter. He reiterates that his research group published a nine-volume (!) work called "Der Ort des Terrors." And he says the Americans copied out of it.

Benz seems to be quite upset, for he calls the American authors "frech, überheblich und größenwahnsinnig" (insulting, arrogant, and megalomaniac) for calling their publication an encyclopedia; he claims it is "full of gaps." He calls his group's nine volumes "a summary or documentation of what we know today."

Mainly, he says the Americans are better at PR.

What bothers him the most (and I can understand it) is the general assumption in the US that the Germans are not doing enough to work through their history. Benz says that no other nation spends so much time and money researching the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and national Socialism as Germany does.

I can confirm that television and the media in general are full of documentaries about these 12 years of German history; my American-German kids are already sick of me trying to get them to watch the next one.

And I agree that Americans generally think that Germans somehow refuse to deal with these 12 years of their history enough, as I wrote 10 years ago. I have even had Americans ask me why Freiburgers (I live in Freiburg) don't know about the concentration camp that existed here. I tell them it's because there was none (they may be thinking of this). But there are "stumbling stones" all over town where Jews deported to concentration camps used to live, and there is a sign on the Old Synagogue Square pointing to Gurs, the concentration camp in southern France where a lot of Freiburg Jews were eventually sent.

Are there such monuments in New York City showing where slaves were traded? Yes, it's the UN's. Look at the history of the old burial ground for slaves in New York City. Is this the way Americans want Germans to deal with their history?

One reason why Americans probably think the Germans refused to deal with their own past is because we Americans refuse to deal with our past. How else to explain the possibility of such recent publications as "Slavery by another name" (which discusses how Whites continued to oppress blacks in the South for a century after the Civil War) or "Sundown towns" (which discusses how whites outside the South oppressed blacks from the beginning of the 19th century all the way up to the 1980s)?

Ever heard the song "Strange fruit"? It begins, "Southern trees bear a strange fruit." The composer wrote this after seeing a photo of a lynching in Indiana – Indiana!

American TV is not full of reports about sundown towns, pro-slavery riots in Ohio, black codes in the antebellum North, etc. Maybe it should be.