Who remembers the Google Wars website that was doing the viral rounds a few years back – a mildly amusing, non-scientific snapshot of the search-driven, internet world we live in?

It lives on at www.googlebattle.com where you can enter two search terms, say ‘Lennon vs. McCartney’ or ‘Left vs. Right’, and let the internet pick a winner by the number of search hits each word gets.

As we reported here – the virtual world has become a real battleground in the ongoing Gaza conflict – with all sides deploying significant resources.

For Israel – where hasbara or PR has often been frowned upon as unnecessary pandering to international opinion that never turns in Israel’s favour anyway – the second Lebanon war underlined the need for a coherent media and PR strategy coordinated at the centre of government.

The post-mortem of the month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006 - known as the Winograd Commission - recommended a centralised approach to hasbara to avoid spokesmen from different ministries, the army or the police telling different or conflicting stories to a voracious local and international media.

Notwithstanding the fact that the head of the new National Information Directorate did not make it to a scheduled interview with our reporter on the story above  – as my colleague Dan Williams reported here the strategy certainly seems to be working for domestic consumption.

Sources inside the Israeli government have said they are generally happy with the way the strategy has worked internationally as well despite growing international calls for a ceasefire and increasingly angry protests around the world.

The media strategy has been backed up by zero tolerance within the military and security establishment for anyone going “off message” - field commanders or political insiders who seemed to relish leaking tid-bits to their favoured reporters in 2006 are now keeping mum.

And while the virtual media war has raged – with pro-Palestinian websites like electronicintifada.net or Hamas’ own website http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/ ratcheting up the rhetoric alongside their Israeli foes – many in the traditional media (or dare I say MSM) complain that they have been totally defeated by Israel’s media strategy which has prevented them from entering Gaza or a ‘closed military zone’ neighbouring Gaza.

The world’s press has been herded on to a hill-top 2 kilometres from the Gaza Strip - where Israeli political and military spokespeople wander among the satellite trucks and live positions ‘briefing’ journalists with the official view of what’s going on inside Gaza.

As much as the protagonists have been duking it out in the virtual world - online media now has the clout to shape the way war stories are told and delivered.

The most surreal example of this is probably Joe the Plumber - yes, that Joe the Plumber of US election campaign fame - who has been engaged by pro-Israeli US website Pajamas Media to file reports from Israeli towns under Hamas rocket fire.

Joe’s basic premise seems to be that the media is inherently biased against Israel and journalists have no business being in the war zone anyway.

While you might not agree with his point-of-view - Joe is an example of the sort of do-it-yourself journalism with a strong voice that has been empowered by the Internet.

Read these two accounts - one from my colleague Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and this one from another Gaza journalist - and I think you’ll agree that reporting from inside a warzone is important, journalists should be there and the combatants should facilitate rather than threaten this effort.

And by the way - in case you were wondering - a GoogleBattle between Israel and Palestine gives Israel a decisive victory. IDF vs. Hamas, though, has Hamas edging it.

PHOTO CREDITS

Photgraphers take pictures of Israeli tanks. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

Massive explosion in southern Gaza town of Rafah. REUTERS/Ibrahim abu-Mustafa

U2 lead singer Bono dropped the mike to take up the pen.

The Irish rocker’s first opinion column for The New Times appeared on Sunday, and it wasn’t about debt, poverty or Aids in Africa — causes on which he has long been outspoken.

No, his initial incursion onto the op/ed pages is an ode to the Chairman of the Board.

Frank Sinatra’s defiant voice singing “My Way” is a “foghorn” at a time of world uncertainty in business, love and life, Bono writes.

Bono says he was struck by Sinatra’s lack of sentimentality in the song, when listening to a deafening chorus of Irish “rabble-rousers” sing “I did it my way” midst the revelry of a crowded Dublin pub at New Year’s.

“Is this knotted fist of a voice a clue to the next year?” the U2 frontman asks himself.

“In the mist of uncertainty in your business life, your love life, your life life, why is Sinatra’s voice such a foghorn — such confidence in nervous times allowing you romance but knocking your rose-tinted glasses off your nose, if you get too carried away.”

Bono has joked that he was “never great with the full stops or commas.” To that end, the 48-year-old rock star recorded a podcast to accompany the column.

The New York Times says its new guest columnist will occasionally write about a diverse range of topics and major issues facing the world.

Bono has campaigned to lessen the debt burden on the world’s poorest countries and fight poverty and AIDS in Africa.

Reuters photo by Chip East  (Bono speaks during the Clinton Global Initiative, in New York, September 24, 2008)

The concept of a televised war was born in January 1991, when news networks reported live on the missiles slamming into Baghdad and millions watched from the comfort of their living rooms as tracer fire lit the sky above Iraq’s capital. A decade later,  the world watched in minute-by-minute horror as the twin towers came crashing down in New York. 

Now, with the ferocious militant attacks in Mumbai, we have arrived in “the age of celebrity terrorism“. Paul Cornish of Chatham House argues that apart from killing scores of people, what the Mumbai gunmen wanted was “an exaggerated and preferably extreme reaction on the part of governments, the media and public opinion”. 

It’s too early to tell if governments will respond with extreme reaction, but the saturation coverage of the drama in the world’s media would suggest that, at least on this level, the killers were successful.  

“Almost within minutes, television screens showed harrowing scenes of pools of blood where people had died or been injured, hotels ablaze, Indian army snipers firing at distant targets, and CCTV images of the attackers,” Cornish writes.

The first reports of shooting in the streets of India’s financial capital did not actually come from the mainstream media.  A BBC news technology blog suggested that the social networking site Twitter  ”came of age” during the attacks because it carried messages on the shootings some time before television networks and news agencies started reporting them. Indeed, according to a Reuters report, blogs fed an information frenzy on the 60-hour gun rampage and siege, underlining the emergence of citizen journalism in news coverage.  

However, the live coverage that followed on television networks, particularly Indian ones,  was shrill, sensationalist and bordering on the hysterical. As the Financial Times points out, this is not new in India’s competitive television market, where some channels flash the words “Breaking News” all day and “the only thing that matters is to be ‘first’, even if first is wrong”.  The blizzard of reporting inaccuracies over this incident was astonishing. In a despatch on why we should take reports from the scene of a massacre with a grain of salt, Jack Shafer catalogues the instances from Mumbai of what he calls “crap masquerading as authoritative news”.

How does high-octane reportage like this feed into the popular mood, and how far could that influence the hands of policy makers in New Delhi and Islamabad?

To find out, watch for Breaking News.

Siemens’ announcement this week that it has appointed a woman to its management board has generated a loud hullabaloo in the media, with newspapers trumpeting “the womanless age at Siemens is over” and “Barbara Kux, the strong woman at Siemens.”

But how was the news of a woman’s appointment to a senior executive position deserving of a celebratory press release and the ensuing excitement? Surely in an era of equal opportunities in developed countries, such news should be commonplace.

The fact that this news is not self-evident, and that Barbara Kux was the first woman appointed to Siemens’s managing board in its 161 year history, goes to show how far we have yet to go before women are equally represented at leadership levels.

Fifty-four year old Kux , who will be responsible for Siemens’s annual global procurement of 42 billion euros ($52.02 billion), will be one of a handful of women  on  the management board of a German blue-chip company. 

German management boards are notoriously white, male and middle-aged. As a young, female journalist in Frankfurt, it is hard not to feel like the odd one out at annual general meetings and corporate events.

Earlier this year, even Siemens’ own chief executive said his company’s top management was too German, too white and too male for its own good.

“We are too one-dimensional,” Loescher told the Financial Times in an interview, publicly subscribing to the theory that a company that does not represent its customer base can not tap its full potential.

Loescher’s charge applies to most companies in continental Europe and the UK.  Still, Germany seems to be lagging in the representation of women at executive levels, and that despite usually ranking highly in wide-ranging assessments of gender equality and boasting a female chancellor. Germany ranked 11th out of 130 countries in the World Economic Forum’s latest gender gap ranking, released on Wednesday.

The think tank said that while women are reaching near-parity with their male peers in educational attainment, health and survival, they are still lagging far behind men in terms of decision-making positions, both in corporate and political careers.

“Given that women have almost closed the gap with men on health and education, it is a waste of their talents if they are not catching up in economics and politics,” said Saadia Zahidi of the World Economic Forum.

Certainly in Germany, women may be achieving top grades at university, but they account for only a quarter of Germany’s senior managers and a third of its federal lawmakers.

One of the main reasons for this is seen to be a school system that makes it hard for mothers to hold down full-time jobs, with children finishing school around lunch-time and childcare prohibitively expensive.

But what about cultural attitudes towards women at work and in positions of power – to what extent do these play a role, and can government and corporate policy change these?

Siemens this year appointed its first chief diversity officer, and it is not alone — many other companies have diversity programmes, pushing for greater representation of women and ethnic minorities within the company at all levels.

But the question remains: do such programmes contribute to closing the gender gap, or do they degrade women’s achievements? And does the excitement about Kux’s appointment to Siemens’ management board ultimately expose her as a token woman executive and a rare curiosity in a still male-dominated society?

Kux, who received an MBA from top French business school INSEAD, was previously chief procurement officer at Dutch electronics giant Philips, having also worked for Ford, Nestle and McKinsey. One wonders how she will feel this morning, upon reading in the financial papers that she has been appointed the first female executive board member of Siemens “in a landmark move to improve its diversity”.

The heir to one of Greece’s most distinguished political families, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, helped his conservative New Democracy party sweep to power in 2004 by convincing Greeks tired of decades of socialist graft that he would clean up Greek politics.

But public discontent with a new set of scandals and a slowing economy has hit the popularity of his government and party. 

One of the many problems Karamanlis faces is over the role played by the wife of one of his closest aides, Minister of State Theodoros Roussopoulos, who is also the minister dealing with the press.

His wife, Mara Zacharea, is a journalist who appears on television as a news commentator and also co-owns a media company. 

Petros Tatoulis, a New Democracy party rebel, has criticised the arrangement, describing it in his blog http://tatoulis.blogspot.com/ as an “unprecedented conflict of interest”. He compares the situation with that of couples in other countries where one of the two has given up a job to avoid any hint of impropriety.

The liberal press and opposition parties have been just as tough in their condemnations.

The minister and his wife hit back, saying they were victims of a political war. They took the moral high ground, pointing out that questioning her role was anachronistic and showed opposition parties believed women in the 21st century should be limited to playing second fiddle to their husbands.

During his annual appearance in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki this weekend, Karamanlis faced an unprecedented barrage of questions about alleged misconduct in party ranks - ranging from allegations about hiding of wealth in an off-shore company to accusations about kickbacks for island sailing contracts.

Asked about Roussopoulos, Karamanlis echoed his minister’s own defence: “Such views are anachronistic, if not medieval, about the role of women in modern society.” 

An opinion poll showed 56 percent of those asked were not convinced by his answer. The press appeared equally sceptical, with most liberal dailies saying that with only 152 deputies in the 300-seat house, Karamanlis could
hardly afford to crack the whip. 

In a European Union country where women make up only about 16 percent of parliament but more than 60 percent of the unemployed, the debate drew ironic comments.

“The one thing for which I loudly applaud the minister, is that he has finally forced New Democracy to talk about feminism,” wrote blogger Christos Loutradis on Press-gr http://press-gr.blogspot.com/.

At the security checkpoint on the way in to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s chancellery building, two small posters are displayed.    

“Stop Russia,” says the first. The second is a quotation from British World War Two leader Winston Churchill: “Never, never, never give up.”

Together, they sum up a national mood of grim defiance in Georgia after a short, disastrous war with Russia, followed by the loss of two provinces that have been outside Tbilisi’s control since the early 1990s but have now cemented their split by getting Moscow to recognise them as independent states under its protection.

Sitting in front of a row of Georgian and European Union  flags,  Saakashvili projects remarkable energy for a man under intense strain, three weeks into a national crisis. ”The first couple of days he didn’t sleep, we were all worried about him,” says a staffer in the presidential building. 

For several nights this week he held late-night sessions with Western reporters, sometimes finishing as late as 3 a.m., as he sought to gain the upper hand in the media war that has run parallel to the conflict on the ground with Russia.

“Russia clearly intended this as a blatant challenge to world order. It’s now up to all of us to roll Russian aggression back,” he told Reuters in an interview that started at 20 minutes after midnight.

Saakashvili has lost weight, says a Western observer who knows him well, but his face shows barely a trace of the sleepless nights.  

He seems energised by a loud chorus of Western support for Georgia after Russia’s recognition of breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia – a contrast with the start of the conflict, when some Western officials privately suggested his own hot-headedness was at least partly to blame for triggering Russia’s invasion.

Is Saakashvili’s leadership secure? For now, at least, the mood of national solidarity should make him immune to any domestic political challenge, analysts say. 

Longer-term, the prospects are less certain. Saakashvili is pinning his hopes on Georgian entry to NATO, which would commit the alliance to come to its defence if it were attacked. But many analysts believe NATO, after this crisis, is not ready to make that promise and risk being drawn into its own war with Russia.

The opposition has in effect called a moratorium on criticising the leadership. ”But the time will come when the Georgian society will start to ask them questions about what has happened to our country,” said an opposition leader, Tina Khidasheli.

Privately some Georgians blame Saakashvili for leading them into their current debacle, and the public mood is subdued and tired. ”Everyone is depressed, no one feels like working,” says a young man, Alex. A dancer at Tbilisi’s Nabadi folk theatre, Tako Svanidze, says no one is turning up to performances: ”No one has time for singing and dancing…People aren’t in the mood.” 

On Thursday Georgians
flocked to their Orthodox churches to pray for the country on a major religious festival, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.      

 ”We believe the mother of Christ will save the whole of Georgia,” said Nino Dzigua, a young woman in an orange headscarf. 

Did she think that Western support could rescue the country? 

“Only God,” she replied. 

Ever since Russia launched a massive counter-offensive in response to Georgia’s attempt to retake the pro-Russian, breakaway region of South Ossetia, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has been omnipresent in Western media. He has appeared on CBS, CNN, BBC and pretty much every other English-language TV channel to accuse Russia of penetrating Georgia far beyond Ossetia, planning an assault on the capital and plotting his overthrow. 

On Aug 11 he wrote an opinion column in the Wall Street Journal warning Georgia’s fall would mean the fall of the West.

At the start of the conflict the verdict was unequivocal. Saakashvili was winning the media war hands down. While the Kremlin’s press operation was largely silent, Saakashvili, an urbane, U.S.-educated lawyer, was assured in putting Georgia’s case. The world’s media and many political leaders swung behind him (in words if not deeds).

But is the tide turning? Saakashvili’s wall-to-wall media coverage may be starting to work against him and the Russians have become more nimble in dealing with the media and countering Saakashvili’s accusations.

Even close ally the United States has reined him in, knocking down his assertion that U.S. forces would take control of Georgia’s airports and ports.
Is Saakashvili’s well-oiled public relations machine starting to work against him? Is he losing sympathy internationally?

 What makes Russian President Dmitry Medvedev tick? How independent is he of his predecessor, Vladimir Putin?
Medvedev gave Reuters a chance to find out more about his plans, and get some clues about the questions being asked by Russia watchers, analysts and diplomats, by granting us an interview in the Kremlin.
During a 90-minute question-and-answer session he played down differences with Putin, his long-time ally who is now prime minister, and portrayed himself as a continuity figure but the contrast in style and tone between the two men was striking.
Medvedev made none of the harsh attacks on the West that became Putin’s trademark and used considered, lawyerly phrases that sounded quite unlike Putin’s more direct and earthy language.
Medvedev said Russia’s foreign policy would not be swayed by criticism from abroad, but added that complaints about its policy were normal. He avoided echoing Putin by making charges of Western hypocrisy and double standards.
But he did sound more like Putin when discussing Russia’s media, saying television channels, newspapers and websites were “absolutely free” and dismissing any possibility of special controls on the media in Russia.
Some analysts think Medvedev is a deliberately more liberal choice than Putin who can usher in an era of greater freedom, private property and foreign investment. Others view him with suspicion as little more than a Putin puppet.

 What do you think?