Blog.org

BT helps broadband campaigners to lobby itself?

First British Telecom generously agreed to ADSL-enable exchanges it had hitherto intended to bypass as long as enough potential customers registered an interest. Now (the BBC tells us) it is producing a kit to help members of the public lobby their neighbors to get them excited about broadband. I wonder if the cable companies could be persuaded to do similar campaigns? Though it's a seemingly off the wall idea I have a dim recollection that there were other similar campaigns when electricity was first being introduced in the US (though perhaps not directly aided by the electric companies themselves?). Women campaigners were lobbying to get electricity into their communities because of its labour-saving properties.

Sudden attack of common sense in the White House

Now that Saddam has been removed, it seemed clear to me that the sensible thing for America to do would be to withdraw from their bases in Saudi Arabia, thus denying fundamentalists an excuse for their anti-Americanism. I never expected that the US would actually do it though. If they don't end up with permanent bases in Iraq either it will be more difficult for cynical people (like myself) and fundamentalists to argue that the invasion of Iraq was merely a big ploy by the US to give itself more military leverage in the Gulf region.

I know weblogging has arrived when...

... my parents write to tell me they watched something about it on TV. Jim Lehrer's NewsHour just did a segment about weblogs - my mother told me about it (thanks, Mum!) and you can watch it, listen to it or just read the transcript. Not full of new insight but a nice little overview of the subject (including a short analysis of how weblogs may have knocked Trent Lott out of power). It also rehashed the old argument, "are weblogs journalism?" And it did reveal to me something I didn't realise - MSNBC has editors who copy-edit what their webloggers write?

Now I remember how this weblog got an RSS feed...

It was through Julian Bond's RSSify utility. Check it out yourself - though of course it won't be long before this is built into all weblogs automatically. I have discovered to my surprise via my site survey (please try it out!) that almost a third of respondents visit this site via my RSS feed.

Using tech to coordinate buses on demand

It's nice to see high tech being used to help with those on low incomes like bus users as well as businesses and the technology elite. I was envious when HP publicised its Real-time Transport Tracker which let Finns know when their next bus was approaching a stop near them via their mobile phone. Now I hear in the North of England a pilot scheme is using a central computer to coordinate the running of a fleet of door to door buses.

Where do spammers get their addresses from?

The Centre for Technology and Democracy has tried to determine the things that get you spammed the most. Their report seems to indicate posting your email address up on public websites is the worst thing you can do, but there are lots of other ways spammers can get at you. Also, they found that contrary to popular believe unsubscribing to a spammer's email does not seem to increase your likelihood of receiving further spam.

There are lots more useful details in the report but if you don't want to read the whole thing, the BBC offers a quick summary.

Privacy poacher turned gamekeeper

The Homeland Security Secretary has named the department's privacy officer - Nuala O'Connor Kelly who, it turns out, used to be vice president for data protection and chief privacy officer for DoubleClick Inc - the people who use cookies to serve banner ads at you. DoubleClick faced heavy criticism in the past for its policies (though her appointment at the time was in response to the reaction to some of their less attractive policies - I don't know where she stood on them herself).

A new heavy hitter on the weblog scene

Esther Dyson - founding chair of ICANN and producer of influential tech newsletter Release 1.0 is now doing a weblog (pretty dull and infrequently updated so far it must be said).

A peek at disused tube stations

I have always been mildly curious about the disused stations on London's underground - now, thanks to Haddock I have found more information than any sane person could ask for!

Really excellent weblog news for power users and beginners

The guys behind Moveable Type (the software I use for my weblog) are unveiling their answer to Blogger's blogspot - a way to have your own weblog without having to install software on a server anywhere. Moreover, according to Ben Hammersley's sneak preview it will contain "all the new things that have appeared or been requested in the blogging world in the past year". Hopefully this will mean others don't have to go through the hassle I have had in order to assemble a full feature set for my weblog, and will encourage more "weblog virgins" to get on board and experiment. Hopefully, too, there will be an easy migration path for existing users!

I also gather that Blogger isn't standing still and that with the support they've had from being bought by Google they have been developing a new version of their stuff too.

More 'free' flights around Europe

Discount UK and Ireland-based airline Ryanair.com is at it again offering a selected number of free flights booked any time up to Thursday midnight. However it appears from what people have commented (via the comments on an old posting about a previous offer) that the free seats may be few and far between. Still might be worth having a go, though.

I can't go home any more?

I was talking a day or two ago to my parents who live in Oakville, a small town just outside Toronto and they said they were not going into the city because of fear of SARS. I thought at the time they might be over-reacting a bit but it seems both the World Health Organization and the UK government are recommending that travellers stay away from Toronto! Needless to say the mayor is not happy about this.

I tend to be pretty phlegmatic about these kinds of media panics but now I'm starting to worry a bit - lots of my friends live in the city. Though they've exchanged a few emails about SARS they don't seem too concerned yet. I hope they stay safe!

Big Mother is watching you

A wearable device that lets you track your kids everywhere?
It had to happen sooner or later - and in fact the technology was foreseen and sold via spam years before. I can see how it might be a comfort to parents but what will this technology and tools like it do to parents' relationships with their kids? Pandora's box is already open - tools like this are already being used to track mobiles and the new generation of mobile phones make such tracking much easier and more accurate.

To say that such tracking has to be consented to is not really that comforting as people like parents and employers have the power to strongly encourage or compel consent.

I suspect the only answer to such innovations is to make it difficult legally to use such information even with consent.

Make time go s-l-o-w or reallyreallyfast

Playing With Time is an educational site that lets you see everything from a blink or a cat slurping milk slowed down to a pregnancy speeded up or a woman ageing 69 years in a few seconds.

Something I am so glad I don't have to put up with any more

Check out this amusing (if a teeny bit misogynist) Flash animation short - Hearts and Hammers.

If you love G & S or Tom Lehrer or chemistry you'll like this

A list of the elements as sung by Tom Lehrer to the tune of the Major General's song from the Pirates of Penzance (in the form of a flash animation). For more G & S Parodies, see here, for more about Gilbert and Sullivan see this and for more about Tom Lehrer see here.

Gullibility in wartime

It's not surprising in an informational vacuum like the one we faced during Gulf War II there was a great online search for alternative "authentic" information sources, but I don't know why people seem so inclined to believe in sources like the "Baghdad weblogger" Dear_Raed or the "reports from Russian intelligence" that I kept hearing about. Before the media storm about these sources I could just about believe that they might have been authentic, but I find it hard to believe that the Russians or Iraqis would have stood by and failed to try either to stifle or capitalise on these "unofficial" information sources for their own ends.

If they are really who they claim to be why has nobody been able so far to verify this conclusively? It all seems a bit too neat to me. But I suppose now the war's over people will quickly lose interest in who really did create those websites and why.

If anyone runs across conclusive evidence that both these sites are either authentic or hoaxes, please drop me a line.

About Schmidt - un-settling but ultimately un-satisfying

About Schmidt

Alexander Payne

I am pre-disposed to like anything with Jack Nicholson and I enjoy edgy, downbeat alternative movies, so I was hoping About Schmidt would turn out to be quite a treat for me, but I ended up somewhat disappointed. I found it oddly uneven in tone - seemingly about to veer into conventional Hollywood sentimentality in places then retreating into embarassment or gloom.

Perhaps I've been too conditioned to look for something to ''take away'' from a film? I never felt I really knew Schmidt and by the end of the film I didn't feel I understood human nature any better. I just felt a little more depressed than I was when I started watching.

The first blog report about 3G in the UK I've read...

... and (completely unsurprisingly) first impressions aren't good. Even months after the much-delayed launch. Oh well - I'll give it another two or three years at least before it starts to become something I would have an interest in (and I'm certainly part of the target market).

Weblogging makes you a slave to technology

Thanks to my poll I know that some people at least are interested in how I made my weblog in the first place and weblog-related hints - so here are a couple, mixed in with a rant about how complex all this stuff is getting to be.

I feel as if there's a kind of arms race going on as more and more weblog-related technologies are implemented. Weblogs used to be simple - I just typed in some text on a web form and magically it appeared on my site.
Then I put in a counter so I could track my traffic.
Then I decided I liked the idea of being able to categorise my writing for easier access (see long list at R), so I moved to Moveable Type. Then I started to hear more and more about RSS and XML so I added this XML feed - I no longer remember how but someone else's computer is generating it automatically.
I have always been interested in the idea of content rating as a voluntary way of ensuring kids are protected from unsuitable material, so I gave my site an ICRA rating.
Then trackback came along so I had to figure out what it is and what it does (let you see who is linking to you) and I had to change my template so that people could do it.
Then I learned about affero and decided it would be fun to give people a way to express their aggregate opinion of my site.
Then I was intrigued by the idea that sites could indicate where they come from so I registered my site at geourl.
Then I thought I would put up a poll to find out how people were using blog.org.
And now I spotted a feature I thought was really interesting - offering people the ability to search the weblogs I read myself (which you should now see at R). But in order to use Micah Halpern's code I had to convert my list of weblogs I link to into "blogrolling" format (I still don't quite see why editing one's HTML template to add or subtract a simple link is so hard people use external software to do it, but it does mean that my list of links is now in a database and can be used and accessed in other ways as well). And then I got a Google API key so your searches wouldn't use up his allowance.

So altogether having a moderately sophisticated weblog has tied me in to at least nine different organizations or sites providing different complementary capabilities! And I know there are lots of other weblog capabilities I haven't yet implemented - and that there are features provided by the sites I have already used that I am probably not fully utilizing.

Weblogging takes too much time and intellectual energy at this moment in its evolution - and that's not even counting the time and energy that go into writing these posts! Of course you can always just ignore the various new technologies coming out and keep plugging away with simple text and links but there's always the risk that one of those new facilities will turn out to be the Next Big Thing and if you don't have it your weblog risks looking hopelessly out of date.

Concorde's demise marks the end of a dream

The BBC has reported that Concorde is to retire in October.

I know Concorde is environmentally destructive and noisy but they used to fly over my flat regularly when I lived in South London and I thought the planes were gorgeous. They also remind me of the days (I am too young to remember myself) when people dreamed that one day we would all travel supersonically or by now we'd have colonies on Mars. The dreams might have been unrealistic or even pointless but they were at least ambitious and exciting. As this rather sniffy post-mortem points out, it may be many years before we get to fly supersonic again - even with newer technologies it appears we still can't make supersonic flight economic.

I spoke too soon?

The Kurds had obligingly stayed out of Kirkuk, but now they've gone in - and they're looting, apparently. Let's hope the military observers Turkey will be sending don't stir things up further...

Looks like the war in Iraq is over - at least for the moment

The BBC has declared victory and it's good enough for me. I will admit I was a little nervous in the second week but it does appear that after all, as I predicted, when challenged the Iraqi army decided there was not much percentage in fighting to the death. Baghdad was no Stalingrad after all despite some dire warnings. And the Iraqis estimate 1,250 or so killed and 5,100 wounded civilians (alongside less than 100 US and 30 British troop casualties - see The Guardian's casualty summary). All deaths in war are unwelcome but this seems a fairly modest death toll.

Whew! Now we have to try to win the peace...

[Later] This - US-backed militia appearing to be goons is the kind of thing we have to make sure doesn't happen!

Two interesting ways to harness the collective knowledge of webloggers

blam! is a weblog add-on for book and other product reviews, linked to Amazon. The interesting bit is that it pulls various bits of information from Amazon into one's posting automatically (including a link to a book jacket photo if there is one) and can also automatically post your review to blaxm, which is a meta-weblog containing other people's reviews. (It's a pity it doesn't post them into a more flexible database instead, but it's a beginning).

This is an early example of the kind of collaborative content tool I would like to see- something that lets you express yourself personally but at the same time share the results with the world in a structured way.

I found blaxm a little frustrating in its implementation - but through it I found allconsuming which doesn't yet provide the same e-z integrated automatic posting that Blam does (or is supposed to anyway) but is built around a database interface and has some interesting features of its own (it's easier to look at it for your self than to explain).

A minor grievance is that since these rely heavily on Amazon's database, if the book you have isn't there, you can't use these tools to indicate you have read it - at least not easily. Oh well - nothing's perfect.

Here's an example review I just did using Blam (together with the sample HTML they recommended I paste in here, which as you can see doesn't work too well):

At Home With Computers

Elaine Lally

A useful academic book for anyone who wants to examine the place of computers in everyday home life (in Australia). It takes an ethnographic perspective which means at the end of the day you can often think, "but that was obvious" - yet it is sometimes useful to state the obvious in an academic form. It looks at such issues as "why do people buy computers?", "who uses them in the home?" and "where do people place their computers in the home and why?"



[Later] Oops - I forgot to credit Ant's Eye View for helping me find this stuff in the first place.

E-commerce not a priority in third world development

A new report by one of my professors, Robin Mansell is summarised here by the BBC. It points out (what should in any case be obvious) that third world organisations are not getting significant new orders via B2B exchanges because these tend to facilitate exchange between firms that already know each other. Companies are reluctant to place large orders with others without some kind of ongoing relationship built up through personal contact.

A site that shouldn't die

UpMyStreet, a pioneering experiment in delivery of geographically-based information in the UK, (which also employed a number of people whose work I respect) has
gone into administration. I hope that someone decides to pick up its assets and do something with them. The idea of linking information and discussion to postcodes is an excellent one and with the growth of location-based services of all kinds the site is bound to have a future - its directors say it is "only months from turning a profit".

Please tell me what you think of blog.org

I have just put up a small poll to try to learn more about what brings people to this blog and how to improve it. I hope you will take a few minutes to fill it in. It's anonymous and it isn't being used for any commercial purpose - I just want to get to know you better.

Putting the weblogging phenomenon into perspective

Despite the media coverage of weblogs, Pew finds they are barely on the radar of most Americans:

"Some 4% of online Americans report going to blogs for information and opinions. The overall number of blog users is so small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses blogs.
The early data suggest that the most active Internet users, especially those with broadband connections are the most likely to have found blogs they like. "

Pew's research suggests between one and four percent of Americans publish online depending on what you ask - 1% "Create a web log or "blog" that others can read online" while 4% "Create content for the Internet, such as helping build a web site, creating an online diary, or posting your thoughts online". That could even just include posting your thoughts to someone else's messageboard.

To my mind this emphasises the importance of making the weblog and other content publishing tools we have easier and promoting the possibilities they offer over making the tools more sophisticated (though we should be doing both).

Of course making them work multilingually is also going to be key to international adoption, and making them work well offline (so you don't have to compose while connected).

Better than usual weather we're having...

Accordin to the BBC, the UK has had the brightest March since records began, and the first two months of 2003 were the UK's second sunniest since records began in 1960. Since the last three years were pretty crappy it's about time we had some climatic payback!

RealVNC - handy remote control software

RealVNC is a handy open source tool that allows people with a wide variety of different kinds of computer to view and control the screen and keyboard of a machine from across the Internet. It does the same kind of job as PC Anywhere but it costs nothing and it is small and very easy to install. Windows XP Professional can do this too but RealVNC works on anything from Windows 95 upward and 39 other operating systems!

I found it very useful when I wanted to help my Dad 3000 miles away sort out computer problems. Thank you AT & T Research and the University of Cambridge!