The topic of the presentation is how social media can be used in conflict situations. Are they always helpful, do they drive developments in a positive way, enable them even – or are they harmful because they simulate an impact that doesn’t exist, keep people from engaging in “real”, sometimes dangerous forms of protest and give authoritarian regimes a more effective control than ever before? Download the PDF here (9,5 MB).

Investigative journalists from Russia (and the former U.S.S.R), Eastern Europe, The Balkans, Caucasus, Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America are now welcome to apply for grants that will cover their travel and stay at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference 2010 at Geneva, Switzerland.

More info here. So publish that earth-shattering esposé that still sits in your bottom desk drawer, fine-tune your CVs and off you go to meet the world’s finest. Good luck!

Technical difficulties add to the problem: my – very interesting – short Audioboo interview with Thomas H. Kaspar, Executive Editor for Community at Chip, a community with 1.5 million members and outlets in more than 10 European countries and India, vanished from the face of the earth without the option to make a backup before publication. And the Qik videos my colleague Van from Vietnam supposedly live streamed this morning during our visit to jetzt.de never showed up on the website. I have no idea where they went.

During the session with Jochen the mic didn’t work but checking the sound was impossible because the phones outlet refused to provide anything but noise. So I found out afterwards that we cannot use it. The Zoom recorder switched itself off towards the end of the session with Thomas and right at the beginning of the session with Dirk von Gehlen at jetzt.de, even though I had just replaced the batteries. Luckily, Lauben noticed and let me know immediately. And finally, when editing in Audacity, the project crashed and ate up all the work in such a sophisticated way it even made it impossible to recover the saved sessions.

So that’s probably one of the reasons why Twitter has become so successful: very short messages, very reliable (ok, when their server’s up) and just very fast. So have a peek at the IIJ’s Twitter feed (also in the right hand column on this site) and try to derive whether we had a good time or not.

Ok, I’ll give it away: we had a very good time. Talking to Thomas Kaspar saved every participant a couple of thousand Euros in consulting fees (have a look at a presentation very similar to the one he gave us), and Dirk amplified Thomas’s words by giving us some good examples of the idea that journalism nowadays needs to be a conversation rather than a lecture. So some very nice discussions for us, but not a lot to show.

One of the people at the video studio would not like to be shown on the Internet so we took down the video until we can post an edited version.

It was a fantastic visit. We learned a lot about cheese making, milk production, farm subsidies, 16-hour workdays during harvest season and that this farm has been passed on from one generation to the other for about five and a half centuries.

It’s the start to our eight day study tour of Germany. We’ll pay visits to eight of Germany’s most interesting online news outlets: focus.de, Chip.de, jetzt.de, Deutsche Welle, KStA  Online, DerWesten, Hamburger Abendblatt and Einestages and talk with their executive editors, including some of this countrAies most prominent journalists, including focus.de’s Jochen Wegner and Claus Strunz of Hamburger Abendblatt.

This being an online / multimedia course it should go without saying that we should try to do multimedia reporting. But this becomes more difficult the closer you look at it. Most of the participants don’t have laptops, and even if they do: free broadband connections are hard to come buy. (Charges in the Munich Vitalis Hotel are typical for Germany: 5 Euros per 30 minutes, 12,50 Euros for 24 hrs. An outrages rip off.)

We have two Nokia N82 mobile phones with t-mobile daily data flats (5 Euros per day). Twittering from a mobile like this is a pain in the butt if you don’t use a Bluetooth keyboard – which is impossible to use without a desk. So twittering will probably be limited to our Q&A sessions with the editors where we’ll set up a Bluetooth keyboard. We have assigned tweeters for each session and I’ll try to instruct them to not forget to indicate who’s tweeting (they are Jiang from Tanzania, Maricel from the Philippines, Tussie from Indonesia, Abhi from India, Bilal from Pakistan, Elvis from Ghana, Vusa from Zimbabwe and Zahi from Bangladesh).

Technonolgywise it’s been a frustrating experience so far. I succeeded to establish a G3 Internet connection on my MacBook with my SonyEricsson K610i and E-Plus as my service provider long ago, and tethering with the iPhone was a piece of cake once I had iPhone OS3 installed (also with E-Plus) and discovered this marvellous Austrian iPhone site. But I can neither get the N82 to work with my Mac nor the Sony Ericsson with t-mobile as the service provider. I hate tech when it comes to this. Plug and pray is a much too friendly expression for this. It plainly sucks.

So what does that mean for our endeavours on the road? I don’t know yet. It might mean we’ll only be able to post some tweets and pictures and a Qik video once in a while – that’s it. That would be a disappointment considering that I am carrying a Canon HD camera (HF10), a Flip camera and a Zoom audio recorder. But if there’s no proper access there’s no online publishing. I might post some AudioBoos as well and try to set up notifications via Twitter.

For those of you who still would like to follow what little reporting we’ll do, make sure to follow IIJ on twitter, IIJTrainer on Qik, and matthias on AudioBoo. I’ll try to update these channels as often and timely as possible. But don’t expect too much.

Tomorrow we hope for a sunny day in this dreadful summer that’s way to cold and rainy even for the taste of us Germans. We are planning to got to the mountains, visit a traditional Bavarian farm and take the cable car up to the Hochrieshütte to have a beer on the Hochries peak at  1569 meters ( above sea level.

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