'One strategy that major record companies have been employing lately to deter downloading is adding bonus computer content to new CD releases. I recently discovered that this technique is not unique to CD's, but had in fact been practiced in the vinyl era as well. That's right: there were a handful of records released in the late 70's and early 80's that contained computer programs as part of the audio. This is totally insane, and totally great.' [Thanks, Alex!]

A Cornell University study finds that people are less likely to lie online than in real life. Students lied 25% of the time face to face, 37% of the time on the phone, but only 20% of the time on IM and 15% of the time on email.

So much for the lawless virtual world, then? Perhaps not. For a start, there's a big problem with the study: only 30 people took part. And new figures from the US show online fraud is up sharply, prompting some eBay vigilante action (half the complaints the US regulator received were about online auctions). So who's telling the truth? Answers below please ...

Landscape architect and urbanist, Walter Hood, is profiled in the New York Times [via Dan Hill]:

Mr. Hood's landscapes are about "connecting the dots," as he puts it — understanding the deep history of a place, observing it over time, and listening to community needs.

It's a touching vision, but how far towards sentimentality can this form of urbanism go before it entirely loses the progressive, modern element in urban planning? Take this quote:

"I'm interested in how the everyday mundane practices of life get played out in cities, the unheralded patterns that take place without celebration," he said. "There's a structure to cities, a 4/4 beat. Designing is like improvisation, finding a sound for each place."

Substitute the word 'villages' for 'cities', and you'd have petty nostalgic Toryism, or worse. Of course a city isn't a village, but the more we apply ruralist perspectives to urban neighbourhoods, the weaker the distinction between the two becomes. When I saw Richard Sennett speaking at LSE a few months ago, I asked him what distinguished him from American communitarianism, to which he replied that he was an advocate of cities. But I'm interested to know how long cosmopolitan liberals can continue to hang their politics on a strict urban/rural distinction, while allowing their analyses to blur the distinction between the two. Is there such a thing as an anti-anti-planning movement?

Serendipity must be ironically titled, removing all sense of serendipity from the process of meeting someone:

Would-be daters looking for a "significant other" may soon be able to subscribe to a service which stores in their phones a personal profile and information on what they want most from a partner. When there are enough similarities between two people, and they happen to be in close proximity, the service tells their phones to communicate with each other.

About as romantic as you'd expect from someone using the expression 'significant other'.

[Thanks Todd!]

Not sure whether David Blunkett is running Movable Type or not, but our Comments field appears to believe that all comments are spam unless proven otherwise. Sorry to those who have tried to add comments, and been accused of spamming! Once it's been fixed, I'll let you know.

Last year I wrote a report on social capital and social software, which achieved an analytical leap between Heidegger and Slashdot in the space of only a few lines (p. 36). We haven't quite matched this since, but iSociety has an essay in the latest edition of Renewal which manages to include both Toms, past and present, in its end notes (Hobbes and Coates), which we're quite proud of.

The piece is called 'Invisible Villages', and tries to locate social uses of the internet within broader political disputes about the future of the public realm. Here's a nugget:

The challenge, then, is to develop and defend a model of the public realm that doesn't place government at its centre, as both socialism (in which government is there to resist the market) and liberalism (in which government is there to regulate public interaction) require. By being simultaneously public, and yet without centre, the internet provides both a model and a set of possibilities for this to happen. The politics of the web are potentially threatening to traditional political conceptions, but then, with only half of the electorate bothering to vote in the last general election, so are the politics of British society.

The piece is the fore-runner of a pamphlet that we're putting out with the New Local Government Network in May. Any thoughts on the article will be appreciated, as ever.

At what point, precisely, in one's journey towards Marxism do the surgeons remove the gland which gives you an appreciation of political agency? And what is it about this operation, exactly, which makes it so difficult to reverse, should one then renounce Marxism?

Manuel Castells hit town tonight, and so it's been an evening of systems, processes, networks, technology, hubs, nodes and states, but very few 'individuals' (or 'subjects', as those technologically naive philosophers used to call them).

It is rather a truism to point out that new technologies and new tools, especially in the rapidly-growing realm of social software, call for new manners and new codes of conduct.
Yet sometimes the abstract realities of changing practices in social interaction are made painfully real, as I discovered recently.
Having logged on to MSN Messenger I noticed a good friend was online, and said 'hi' to him. This friend - we shall call him 'James' for the purposes of our discussion - responded immediately, and said that he was in the middle of chatting with a mutual acquaintance. But then he didn't invite me to join their chat, but kept me in a separate conversation...
Was this a social gaffe on his part? I had no way of knowing who else he was talking to, so had he not told me directly I would have been blithely ignorant, but as it was I instantly wondered what they were discussing - and what they were saying about me!
It also made me wonder what the proper etiquette is for rewriting someone's Wiki entries or if failing to note and comment on blog entries which mention you is just a new way of snubbing people...

I likes Google Local, but I don't understands it...

The politics of this are too complicated for my little brain. The last time I applied said organ to imagining a geo-Google, I became a blathering post-structuralist, and lessons have been learned. (But seriously, though, what does happen when objectivity starts being affected by definitions that are subject to power laws? And what happens when you throw in your own crazed hierachical social network into the mix???... Enough.)

The Seventh Virtual Communities Conference is happening in The Hague in June, and I'll be discussing how social software can be embedded in physical places (second day).

"The mobile telephone is becoming a life recorder," said Christian Lindholm, former head of user interfaces at Nokia and now the man behind the Lifeblog project.

Surely the mobile phone is already a life recorder, it's just that now the user is going to start avidly cooperating.

From the BBC.

London Voices is entirely new to me. It's effectively a meta-community portal (a city portal, even!). In more whimsical times, I'd have had something to say about the relative merits of this versus Upmystreet Conversations (for instance, in comparison to London Voices, is Upmystreet actually a 'performative contradiction', in the sense that it provides a one-size-fits-all for unique individual communities?). But I don't.

[Thanks to Brian Jenner for the link]