MediaWatch 13 January 09

Victory for Bloggers!. Three of whom had been denied press credentials in New York City have won their case and are now "legitimate" - The Daily Gotham posts - snippet: I used to think that because no one paid me for this I wasn't a "real" journalist. It took a very interesting situation and a discussion with a lawyer from the Media Bloggers Association to make me realize that very often I am in the position of being a journalist and I actually take it more seriously than some so-called journalists for fake news outlets like "Fox News."

via New York Magazine: Media Wins Some Battles Against Death

South African Donn Edwards blogged about the dubious marketing tactics of a holiday rental company called Quality Vacation Club. He was sued for defamation. This was interpreted as an attack on all bloggers in South Africa so a campaign to support him was launched, a Facebook group and dozens of bloggers wrote about it. Here are a few lessons on libel for bloggers.

Congress has struck a deal with YouTube to establish as Web site allowing the politically uninitated the opportunity to connect with their representative.

An "internet cleansing movement" launched by the Chinese authority, is sweeping across the Net.

NSA's Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Mistakes: pcworld.com reports that an industry group has published a list of the 25 most dangerous software programming errors.Two of these bugs led to more than 1.5 million Web site breaches last year.

More and more applications these days are migrating to the Web. Without platform constraints or installation requirements, the software-as-a-service model looks increasingly attractive.

On to movies: India's A.R. Rahman — who won a Golden Globe for the score of "Slumdog Millionaire" is often called "the best composer you've never heard of" --- he is Muslim and his fans are hailing Indian films, music and deejays, saying "Brown is the new black." Rahman aka "the Mozart from Madras" has sold over 200 million albums worldwide: more than Madonna and Britney combined.

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, “RocknRolla” tops the chart this week...

Here's a photo of that Ione Skye-Ben Lee wedding in India.

via Geekologie: texting Queen

and for those interested in the arts, BlackLooks says Canopic Jar 22 is now available online with contributions of poetry, prose and visual art.