Russian leadership is grabbing global media attention. CNN was full of Russian premier Putin the past two days. On Tuesday, he presented an instructional judo DVD that bears his name and shows him throwing an opponent to the mat.
"Let’s Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin" is the product of collaboration between Putin — a black belt — and other judo enthusiasts, including former World and Olympic judo champion Yasuhiro Yamashita. It apparently was privately made and intended mainly for Russians studying judo.
Today, as if to continue the Russian theme on the international media, Dmitry Medvedev spoke about his upcoming address to the World Policy Conference in Evian in his first video address to the Presidential site’s visitors. That’s the first ever Presidential podcast.
In an interview earlier this year, Medvedev said he typically began every day by turning on his PC. “I look at the sites of our major Russian and foreign media,” he told the Financial Times, adding that he browsed sites that were “positive” about the authorities as well as ones in “tough opposition to them”.
Today one leading pro-Kremlin analyst described Medvedev’s inaugural two-minute video blog as “very good”.
“Putin is a post-Soviet leader. Medvedev is a post-post Soviet leader,” Sergei Markov, a member of the pro-government United Russia party told the Guardian. “He is very advanced at using hi-tec technologies. Among G8 leaders he is the most advanced.”
Meanwhile, Armenian President’s website is also updated and very interestingly, features a Creative Commons license on its lower right corner. That’s certainly very progressive too.
Still can’t get into president.am. First it was way too slow to access (5 minutes just to have the top banner displayed) and no the connection times out — and I’m in Armenia!
As for Creative Commons, a great step given the lack of regard for copyright here. However, as someone who has used Creative Commons for well over a year now, most people still don’t abide by its terms. The situation is getting unbearable now with organizations promising to credit when given images free, but then failing to do so.
About the only people who have been proper about it are PanArmenian.Net. Otherwise, violation of copyright still continues. On that, I must remember to chase up Zhamanak who continue to display images of mine without permission and without credit despite being informed they are violating the law. Well, I hope the Eurasia Foundation funded project to popularize CC succeeds, but I somehow doubt it.
The matter is not so much one of the law and licensing requirements, but rather the lack of respect for the work of others (especially photographers) and the absence of any enforcement. Probably court action using existing legislation is the only way to resolve the problem.
Onnik, thought I’d test the website from America with a stopwatch, since I got on in about 60 seconds when Artmika first mentioned it. Today, though, it simply crashes…Forward, Armenia! 😉
By the way, the link for pictures http://www.president.am/dummies/ could be better phrased I think….)
Ani – nicely spotted! 🙂 By the way – the page stopped opening at all on my side as well.
Observer, you will be quite interested to know, that today the website (slowly but sort of) comes up, and the photo links no longer say “dummies”…..Your website is being read by those in charge.