[Editor's note: The following is from the December 2011 issue of NTEN:Change. Read the complete issue by subscribing to the journal for free!]

Livestreaming events is increasingly becoming a popular way to share content with remote audiences. It is surprisingly simple and affordable. There are three main parts: the source, or camera that you use to capture video and audio; the encoder, which is software that you use to produce the live video; and the player that viewers will watch the video on.

In a scenario ripe for Hollywood exploitation, protests have erupted in Guatemala over the slaying of a lawyer. According to Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing:

Protests are taking place today in Guatemala City to demand justice for an attorney who was assassinated on Sunday, and who claimed in a posthumously released YouTube video taped before his death that if he were to die, it would be at the orders of Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom.

All sorts of applications of technology are tied up in the protests:

• The video making the claims was posted on YouTube, making it widely available and difficult to suppress.
• The protests are currently being live streamed, with intermittent police interruption.
• There is, inevitably, a Twitter hashtag used by the protesters.

Now, if only somebody could whip up some code to send the Twitter stream through a machine translator so I didn't have to rely on my rusty Spanish...