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In this Monday, Feb. 3, 2014 photo, Tolo TV staffers talk during a meeting at their office in Kabul, Afghanistan. The proliferation of Afghan media in the past 12 years is one of the most visible bright spots of the fraught project to foster a stable democracy. (AP Photo/Massoud Hossaini)

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) In a crowded room overlooking a gleaming television studio, Tolo TV's election team is strategizing for Afghanistan's presidential debate when the room suddenly goes dark. The staff doesn't miss a beat.

The 13 men and three women just keep on talking about soundboards, cameras and the taking of questions via Twitter until the station's generator kicks in and the overhead lights flicker back on.

"It's just technical difficulties," explains Mujahid Kakar, the Tolo anchor and moderator of the upcoming debate among six of the main contenders vying to succeed President Hamid Karzai in the April 5 election.

The moment is a reminder of the difficulties of reporting in an impoverished country torn by war. Yet, in many ways, Afghan media coverage of the crucial campaign that kicked off this week resembles what you'd see in any other modern democracy, with newspaper candidate profiles and political talk shows on numerous TV and radio stations.

And this week, for the first time, major contenders for the presidency will introduce themselves to the nation in a televised debate.

The proliferation of Afghan media in the past 12 years is one of the most visible bright spots of the fraught project to foster a stable democracy, even as the NATO military mission in Afghanistan nears its end with the country still riven by war with Taliban insurgents and mired in corruption and poverty.

Given that the Taliban banned television as sinful and allowed only one religious radio station before they were driven from power in 2001, the sheer number of media outlets dozens of TV channels, more than 100 radio stations and hundreds of newspapers is stunning. That they are mostly free to set their own agenda is even more so.

"It goes against some of that common wisdom that it's all doomed," says Nader Nadery, chairman of the Free and Fair Election Foundation, an Afghan pro-democracy group.

Where the Taliban banned sports, Afghans can now watch soccer matches on television. Where music aside from religious hymns was forbidden, there are "American Idol"-style singing competitions. Women were once erased from public life; now some host television shows.

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Election coverage shows growth of new Afghan media

STACY SQUIRES/Fairfax NZ

SORRY: Tenants Liam Kelly, 18, and Craig Hunter, 24, say social media is to blame for a series of out of control parties at their flat in Hands Rd, Christchurch.

Tenants at a Christchurch property home to repeated out-of-control parties say social media - and a problem flatmate - are to blame.

Craig Hunter, 24, and Liam Kelly, 18, are promising the return of peace to the neighbourhood now they have learnt which of their friends to trust.

Graffiti, abandoned bongs, broken windscreens and smashed letterboxes are the result of at least four parties at the men's rented home in Middleton's Hands Rd since they moved in about a month ago.

Police have been to the address every weekend for the last three weeks, including several times on one night to deal with about 200 teenagers.

While police could not stop parties from happening, new legislation meant instant fines could be used as a deterrent to underage drinkers and troublemakers.

On Saturday, police issued five infringement notices to people for underage drinking. Two weeks earlier, they arrested five people for throwing bottles at police.

One neighbour, who did not want to named, said "wave after wave" of teenagers had attended one of the recent parties. Residents spent one Sunday morning picking up glass and drug paraphernalia and painting over tagging.

Hunter said people posting their address on social media had caused "heaps of crowd that we don't normally associate with" to turn up to what should have been private parties.

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Facebook fuels party chaos

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Dallas, TX (PRWEB) January 31, 2014

One Safe Place Media Corp, one of the countrys leading offsite data protection and Online Business Backup companies, has successfully completed the Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements (SSAE) 16 Type 2 examinations related to Physical Tape Media Storage and Online Digital Data Backup services.

Disaster Recovery Planning and Support services controls are a validation of One Safe Places commitment to the most stringent standards of operational excellence, said Jeff Hunsucker, Operations Manager, One Safe Place Media Corp.

SSAE 16 is an attestation standard issued by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) that reports on One Safe Place Media Corp controls supporting the services provided to customers. One Safe Place Media Corp management developed internal control objectives to support Disaster Recovery Planning and Support services that were used to complete the examination. Companies that are compliance-sensitive and may require an SSAE 16 include publicly-traded enterprises, financial firms and healthcare organizations. The SSAE 16 examination report includes managements description of One Safe Place Media Corps systems and the suitability of the design and operating effectiveness of the controls. Further, the report contains a written assertion from management regarding the systems and a service auditors opinion letter.

Companies choose One Safe Place Media Corp to help protect their mission-critical data and systems, and the SSAE 16 Type 2 examination demonstrates our commitment to the highest level of global security and data protection standards and to our clients located in 53 countries around the globe, said Scott Scheffe, Chief Technology Officer, One Safe Place Media Corp.

Delivering Best-in-Class Data Protection More than 50 of the Fortune 1000 and businesses across 53 countries trust One Safe Place to protect one of their most important assets their data. Founded in 1985, One Safe Place now counts more than 25 years experience and thousands of successful disaster recovery drills for clients as reasons for its continued growth.

About One Safe Place Media Corp: (OSP), based in Dallas, TX, is an offsite data protection company, specializing in Online Data Backups, Offsite Tape Storage, Video Tape & Film Archiving, and Certified Media Destruction. Founded in 1985, the company began offering the very best in offsite tape storage more than two decades ago and then added video tape and film archiving. In 1997, One Safe Place became one of the first companies in North America to provide online server backups. One Safe Place protects more than 50 of the Fortune 1000 and businesses worldwide. For more information visit us at http://www.OneSafePlace.com.

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One Safe Place Media Corp Completes SSAE 16 TYPE II Review

When the Sochi Winter Olympics begin next month, they're bound gobble up social media bandwidth. Team USA has already begun an online "Dream Stream," part of a multi-faceted social media hub that also includes social Q&As with athletes, spotlighted tweets by influencers, and a user-customized homepage ("Social Podium") that allows fans to follow activity around their favorite teams.

Behind the experience is tech developed by Mass Relevance, the Austin-based company that has powered brands from Purina to Microsoft since 2010. Mass Relevance designs participatory social marketing campaigns delivered for virtually every platform, from mobile to TV to Times Square jumbotrons. The concept is one that is becoming increasingly popular with brands of all kinds--market with consumers instead of at them by encouraging and reacting to relevant conversations and imagery on social media, and then surfacing that user-generated content in a curated, designed experience.

In the past, designing the campaigns required a lot of close work with the Mass Relevance team and/or significant tech resources, but this week the company launched a new platform that gives marketers more control and the ability to make on-the-fly changes on their own.

"Because we've expanded so much in working with agencies, brands, media, all these different folks that have matured, for the first time the platform is an open platform," says Mass Relevance founder and CEO Sam Decker. "What we've learned over the past couple of years of working with our clients is that there are two groups. There's a technical group that wants a lot more control, and there's a nontechnical group that wants things to be created and deployed more quickly and easily."

The result is a new platform that has more intuitive features, including a large template library, which allow a nontechnical marketer to curate, customize, and update a design-based social media marketing campaign with a minimum of technical resources. At the same time, developers and designers now have access to the platform's HTML and stylesheets, so they can go in-depth and modify or create new experiences without necessarily involving Mass Relevance.

"For example, for media clients, when they do sponsorships, they want more flexibility to integrate the sponsor into the experience, and be able to do it without a lot of heavy tech and design resources," says Decker. "Now we've made it easier if they don't have the tech resources, and more flexible if they do."

One of Mass Relevance's most established clients is Fox Sports, which has used the platform to power social elements of its Super Bowl hub, including an interactive poll allowing visitors to vote for their team and predict the score, as well as a Facebook-powered breakdown of where, who, and how many people are talking about the big game at any given time. FoxSports.com also uses Mass Relevance to power the right rail of its show pages with related tweets and images.

"Crowd Goes Wild, our flagship show, is a very socially driven show, so having the visuals from Mass Relevance allows us to take what the users post and put it on our site in a way that is much more engaging than a basic Twitter stream," says Fox Sports product manager Greg Urbano. "Also, Facebook and Instagram integration [into Mass Relevance's data] has been huge. It used to be 'well, this is a great way to display tweets,' but now we can see how the conversation is different on the different platforms and really use that."

More relevant to the big Super Bowl sponsors, says Urbano, will be the television broadcast's Mass Relevance-powered social push onsite in New York, where the Fox Sports set will include a dynamic mosaic to highlight tweets from Fox talent, as well as an array of monitors with fan tweets and photos flowing through.

Regarding the new Mass Relevance platform, which Fox Sports has helped test, Urbano says that "if someone were just to be thrown into it, it's much more intuitive," and "exposing the CSS styling, etc., makes it easier for me, and way easier on the engineer to dive in."

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Here's How All That Super Bowl Social Media Sausage Gets Made