Cartoon News is The Future

Next Media now produces about 60 computer-animated dramatizations daily that draw about five million hits a day, all aimed at a generation under 40 hooked on video games and the Internet.

"They grew up watching TV and playing video games...so the future is obviously the visual world," Lai told AFP from his spartan office in an industrial park far from Hong Kong's glittering financial district.

"But the whole thing is a two-sided trial and error process -- we have to get used to the right way to present it and people have to get used to accepting it."

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"I really don't care what people say to be honest... Just because nobody has ever tried something doesn't mean it's crazy." ~ Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai, whose flagship Apple Daily is a must read in Hong Kong.

Lai is famous for his unconventional style, rarely holding back on sensitive political matters, unlike some of his fellow Asian media moguls.

Despite making more than a few enemies through Apple's coverage and being an alleged target of a foiled assassination attempt in 2008, Lai has never had a bodyguard. And he continues to speak out.

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The printed word still has a future, he says, but not without big changes in the way it is presented.

"The future has to be in visual and we have to be in that business."

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-cartoon-news-future-hong-kong.html

The Wide Appeal of Wikipedia

On Jan 15, 2001, Wikipedia was born.

It was only supposed to be a test. But within a month, there were already 600 entries, which was more than Nupedia had. Within a year, it was 20,000 – to the astonishment of the founders.

Increasingly, Wikipedia entries topped Google search lists for any given subject. People were turning to it for information. It was not always reliable, not always well-written. But it was there, instantly, at the click of a return button.Conventional encyclopaedias could not compete.

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In 2003, Wales founded the Wikimedia Foundation, moving all intellectual property rights and domain names pertaining to Wikipedia to the new foundation, whose purpose is to establish general policy for the encyclopaedia and its sister projects on a donor-funded basis.

The big question then and now is why thousands of authors spend their own time crafting entries which do not bear their own names and which later on may be totally rewritten by someone else – or deleted with a mouse click.

"There is a certain appeal in compiling knowledge without the limitations of copyrights," says Christian Stegbauer, a German sociologist...

http://www.sun2surf.com/article.cfm?id=57807