HawaiiReporter.com's 9th Anniversary Gala

HawaiiReporter.com held its 9th Anniversary Gala at the Waialae Country Club on October 15. The celebration commemorated the 9th year for the daily news website, often billed as the first in Hawaii

The Friday night gala was a successful party that featured recognition to the site's financial contributors, reporters, staff, and supporters. A silent auction was held and the keynote speaker was Jason Stverak of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity.


HawaiiReporter.com is operated by publisher, editor and founder Malia Zimmerman and her business partner, Jay McWilliams. The two ladies started the site back in 2002 with hardly any knowledge or experience in the world of web publishing. They have grown the site from its humble beginings as a hackable Microsoft run blog to a premiere news and opinion source now running on a Wordpress back end.

Over the years HawaiiReporter.com has run several high profile stories including the sagas of the Koloko Dam disaster on Kauai, slave labor in American Samoa, the woes of rail transit and the ongoing fiasco of liberal Hawaii politics. HawaiiReporter recently added several new reporters to its roster including Greg Wiles and Jim Dooley, both veterans in Hawaii media.

What's Up With 'Justin.TV'?

For more than a week now, the biggest internet rage seems to be "Justin.TV." The media, geeks, bloggers and many others are viewing and covering this internet "experiment".

What is Justin.TV? It's a live web feed on this guy named Justin Kan. Mr. Kan is a young man who has made it his priority to have a live camera strapped to himself or one close by to record his every move and utterance throughout the day. The images and sounds are transmitted out to the world on a live internet feed. You can watch Justin wake-up, eat, sleep and engage in his day to day activities. It's kind of like having YouTube following you around 24-7.

People have written extensively about this guy in the last 9 days since the webcast launched. Ryan Ozawa, one of the geek experts that I know writes on his blog "So Meta it Hurts. Yes, there's something deeply compelling about watching "online life" and "real life" blend so thoroughly. Justin chats up a girl at the bar, and viewers on his website jeer as he strikes out. He ducks out to go to the bathroom, and people on the other side of the planet question whether he washed his hands or not."

JustinTV may be the latest rage on the net. I am quite sure that imitators are strapping on their own web cams and starting their own online chronicle. Some blog boldly states that our private lives are over and that every move of our day is being recorded, chronicled by someone, somewhere. Not a very comforting thought.

I don't like being photographed or recorded by someone else. In today's modern and connected world, it is getting harder and harder to be somewhere where a surveillance camera or someone with a camera phone is not around recording your presence and those of everyone else. Our privacy is eroding.

As a public service for this latest web rage, I offer you a live feed of JustinTV right here on this blog. All you have to do is click on the button within the embedded Justin graphic and see what this guy is up to... right there and right now. Have fun!