New Media Center

On February 9th the Joint Parliamentary Committee of the RM and the EU organized a public discussion on the topic of “Safer Internet”, in order to mark the European day of safe Internet. A representative of New Media Center took active part in this public discussion. The event took place in the auditorium “Boris Trajkovski” in the palace of the Assembly of the Republic of Macedonia. It was facilitated by the chief of the Delegation of the Macedonian Assembly in the EU, Aleksandar Spasenovski. Besides him, keynote speakers of the event were the President of the Assembly, Trajko Veljanovski, the vice-president of the Assembly, Jani Makraduli, the Professor from the Faculty of Electronic and Information Technology, Dr. Dimitar Trajanov and Patrick Paquet, from the EU Mission in Macedonia, Head on Information and Communication. Other Members of the Assembly, emplyess from the relevant governmental organizations and civil sector representatives participated in the duscussion too.

The focus of the presentations and the discussion was put on the protection of children and minors from offensive and harmful content on the Internet. The negative aspects of the social networks were discussed, and issues like private data protection and identity-stealing were touched upon as well. However, the main tone of the discussion was too moralistic and, in my opinion, paranoid at moments.

Anastas Vangeli, the representative of New Media Center, in his expose tried to present a different perspective, arguing that it is counter productive to try to regulate social networks and to “control” children. As well, he tried to relativize the arguments about the plenty of pornographic and violent contents online, by suggesting that the urge of young people to watch pornography is not an “online issue”, but a reflection of the lack of sexual education in their lives. Anastas also argued that unlike the TV news which bombard the public with violence, Internet users can freely decide what they want to watch. Finally, he supported the struggle for the protection of private data, but also warned that there are existing laws, such as the one for Following personal communications, that grant the government a very easy access to anyone’s private data, including logs from the Internet usage.

Low quality video of his address is available on this link: Anastas Vangeli address on Safer Internet (in Macedonian)

From 16th to 18th of December 2009 a training for promoting results of CSOs via Internet platforms was carried out in MIM’s premises. The training was conducted by Darko Buldioski (New Media Center) Zoran Ricliev, and Petrit Saracini, experts for online media, online journalism and public relations.

The goal of this training was to give the NGOs detailed input into the process and practices of online media today, as well as on the modern forms and tools for promoting the work of CSOs through various Internet platforms. This training is a part of MIM’s activities in the frames of the Civil Society Straightening Project (CSSP).

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We are delighted to have behind us the third exciting Glocal Communication Conference – Inside Social Media in Skopje. This three-day event gathered academics, researchers and industry practitioners from different countries, cultures, and generations, providing space for discussion of their common interest: the social media.

The New Media Center team was completely responsible for all online media activities and technical support of the event. After successful promotion we’ve created livestream website where we aggregated different content and video stream.

We’d like to say one big Thank you, to the local and regional online community for the honest support. As follow up you can watch the videos and slides of some of the presentations.

We had the pleasure to follow the presentation of Time’s Journalist Barry Hillenbrand held on May 5th at American Corner in city library “Braka Miladinovci” in Skopje, Macedonia.

Thanks to all that were there esspeccially to Barry and the lovely people at the American Corner who allowed us to make video of this event.

On Tuseday (30th September) wihin the regional project Renaming Machine, New Media Center presented its reserach named: Renaming Semantic Cloud. The presentation was part of the two day conference held in Skopje as second part of this big project.

Our work was based on 35 blog posts, from the local Macedonian blogosphere, with their comments and disscusions about the ongoing name dispute between Macedonia and Greece. We colected all different names that were used for both countries and people. The visual result is this semantic cloud:

As support of the cloud we have made short video animation that illustrates the ongoing struggle.

You cah download the Renaming Semantic Cloud as:

Renaming Semantic Cloud JPG 3600px ~900KB
Renaming Semantic Cloud PDF file ~430KB
Renaming Semantic Cloud WMV video ~18MB
Renaming Semantic Cloud 3gp video ~6.5MB