Sunday, December 04, 2005

Pew report on Bloggin (Jan 2005)

The State of Blogging

2nd Jan 2005 , Lee Rainie

http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/144/report_display.asp

By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.

View PDF of Report

Saturday, November 26, 2005

On VOIP and Skype

I've just begun to use Skype. It is the VOIP (Voice over the Internet Protocol) software company that was recently taken over by E-bay. See Wikipedia for a definition of VOIP. It is basically a system that allows you to have PGC to PC telephone calls with other Skype users across the Internet, for no cost

Skype seems to becoming the market leader in VOIP, largely because it has achieved a critical mass and now has the weight of E-bay behind it, but other companies are fighting for the market. Google have launched Google Talk. Microsoft seems slow to enter the market, but are planning to do so.

Anyway, I got round to trying out Skype when my son who is working in London wanted to save on his phone calls. Setting up the software was very easy and since then we have been using Skype regularly. More recently I have found that you can use a webcam with it too. You just need to download and install a plug in from Dialcom called Spontania at http://www.video4im.com/

Again very easy to install. I fond an old webcam I hadn't used for ages. What held me up was finding software on the web for that, as I had lost the original CD software. So now I have the whole thing working. If any of you doing sociology of cyberspace want to try contacting me, ny Skype address is BTLeach

I have only got it working at hme at the moment, but will try it at work soon. One of my colleagues informs me that American friends of hers sometimes have to be available for conference calls at their universities if they are working from home. Not so sure about that, but good if all someone is just coming in for is one meeting which instead they could happily engage with from home

Bernard

Mitchell and "Unassigned Space"

Cyborg city

William J Mitchell

James Harkin interview

Saturday November 26, 2005, Guardian

Good stuff in the Guardian today William Mitchell, the author of "City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn" (1996) and "Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City"(2004). Whilst much of the inteview is a fairly predictable look at the impact of wireless networks, I do like his notion of the importance of 'unassigned space'. Particularlly relevant for us in the sociology department at MMU as we are looking for new ways of using our buildings to go beyond the simple notions of lectures and seminars, to make more use of 'in -between spaces' - pc drop in centres, the libararies (where a ban on talking has recently been lifted), coffee bars etc

"...Mitchell tells me ...how the new wireless technologies are making much office space in cities redundant. If you go into corporate offices today, he says, the private offices are closed and dark; the workers are out in hotel rooms or on the move. The wireless laptop culture, he says, is increasing the value of sit-down space just like this.

"Unassigned space, what used to be thought of as non-productive space, is actually where all the real action happens." Like this coffee bar, he suggests, above the sound of Frank Sinatra and the whirring of coffee machines.

Mitchell's theory is that the city has always been moulding us into technology-dependent cyborgs, but that the new communications technologies have made all this more vivid by overlaying on the urban landscape a kind of central nervous system that plugs us deep into the wireless ether. Mobile phones, for example, have become so intimately a part of ourselves that they are a kind of umbilical cord, anchoring us into the information society's digital infrastructure. A whole ragbag of new gadgets and wireless technologies hold up the promise of navigating our way through cities in exciting new ways. "


full interview at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5342429-103677,00.html

Communities of fate v communities of choice.

Article from the Guardian. Extracts below. Relevant in the discussions about notions of community

The chosen
Stuart Jeffries

Our friendships have become a rare constant in a dislocated world

The Guardian 26th Nov 2005

Read the whole article at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5342223-103390,00.html

.....Fifty years ago, Vernon points out, people relied on their local neighbourhood. Now our ties are looser and we can roam colleges, jobs, cyberspace, lovers, rather than being tied to what have been called communities of fate. Now we live in communities of choice, where we can not only select our closest spiritual partners, but negotiate how close or how distant our relationships should be. We live in looser, more creative and as a result happier times. Or so goes the argument


.....
Pahl, whose research will appear shortly in a book called Rethinking Friendship: Hidden Solidarities Today, is trying to map the complicated terrain of modern friendship. He suggests seven types of friendship, four more than Aristotle. But then modern Britain is a more complex place than ancient Greece. They are:

1 A friend-like community, where a person depends more on friends than family, with close friends at the centre of the network, and more casual ones and relatives further way.

2 A friend-enveloped community, with close relatives (spouse and offspring) at the centre, and a larger group of friends around the family.

3 A family-like community in which family members outnumber friends.

4 Family-dependent - family outnumber friends.

5 Partner-focused, in which a couple keep friends and relatives at a distance.

6 Neighbourhood-focused, often formed by older people in close neighbourhood communities.

7 Professional-dependent, again often formed by older people whose most important friends are carers or social workers.

Across these types the average number of friends is 18. The survey by Pahl and his co-author, Liz Spencer, indicates family structures and neighbourhood ties may not be eroding quite so fast as some have suggested. Communities of fate have not yet been replaced by communities of choice. It also indicates that we might be members of different friendship communities at different times of our lives.

The survey suggests friendly solidarity has not been completely destroyed by selfish consumerism. Friendship has mutated rather than died, and become more instrumental than our utopian thinkers imagined it to be at best.

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

social exclusion and technology - any comments folks?

Dear Bernard Leach,

Hello! I'm doing a sociology doctorate, but I'm actually getting in
touch regarding the part of my life that pays the bills, which is
researching stuff for the BBC2 progrmme The Daily Politics.
I'm looking into a piece on social exclusion and technology for
tomorrow's show, specifically the recent ODPM report. The approach will
probably be along the lines of "broadband for the homeless - it sounds
mad, but the reasons why it's not are all interesting".

I saw that this was one of your interests when Technorati brought me to
your course blog; I was wondering if you had a comment to make on the
report? Jamie McCoy, the homeless blogger I'm sure you're familiar with,
has shared some thoughts here:

http://jamiesbigvoice.blogspot.com/2005/11/answer-to-alan-conner.html

Apologies for getting in touch unsolicited and at short notice, but I
thought it might be something that was up your street.
best
Alan Connor


--
Alan Connor
Broadcast Journalist
BBC Live Political Programmes
4 Millbank
London SW1P 3JA
e: alan.connor@bbc.co.uk

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Murdoch on Blogs & the end of newspapers

From the Economist, "Yesterday's papers", Apr 21st 2005

Is Rupert Murdoch right to predict the end of newspapers as we now know them?

“I BELIEVE too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch with our readers,” Rupert Murdoch, the boss of News Corporation, one of the world's largest media companies, told the American Society of Newspaper Editors last week. No wonder that people, and in particular the young, are ditching their newspapers. Today's teens, twenty- and thirty-somethings “don't want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what's important,” Mr Murdoch said, “and they certainly don't want news presented as gospel.” And yet, he went on, “as an industry, many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably, complacent.”

The speech—astonishing not so much for what it said as for who said it—may go down in history as the day that the stodgy newspaper business officially woke up to the new realities of the internet age. Talking at times more like a pony-tailed, new-age technophile than a septuagenarian old-media god-like figure, Mr Murdoch said that news “providers” such as his own organisation had better get web-savvy, stop lecturing their audiences, “become places for conversation” and “destinations” where “bloggers” and “podcasters” congregate to “engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions.” He also criticised editors and reporters who often “think their readers are stupid”.

Mr Murdoch's argument begins with the fact that newspapers worldwide have been—and seem destined to keep on—losing readers, and with them advertising revenue. In 1995-2003, says the World Association of Newspapers, circulation fell by 5% in America, 3% in Europe and 2% in Japan. In the 1960s, four out of five Americans read a paper every day; today only half do so. Philip Meyer, author of “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age” (University of Missouri Press), says that if the trend continues, the last newspaper reader will recycle his final paper copy in April 2040.

Gotcha!
The decline of newspapers predates the internet. But the second—broadband—generation of the internet is not only accelerating it but is also changing the business in a way that the previous rivals to newspapers—radio and TV—never did. Older people, whom Mr Murdoch calls “digital immigrants”, may not have noticed, but young “digital natives” increasingly get their news from web portals such as Yahoo! or Google, and from newer web media such as blogs. Short for “web logs”, these are online journal entries of thoughts and web links that anybody can post. Whereas 56% of Americans haven't heard of blogs, and only 3% read them daily, among the young they are standard fare, with 44% of online Americans aged 18-29 reading them often, according to a poll by CNN/USA Today/Gallup.

Blogs, moreover, are but one item on a growing list of new media tools that the internet makes available. Wikis are collaborative web pages that allow readers to edit and contribute. This, to digital immigrants, may sound like a recipe for anarchic chaos, until they visit, for instance, wikipedia.org, an online encyclopaedia that is growing dramatically richer by the day through exactly this spontaneous (and surprisingly orderly) collaboration among strangers. Photoblogs are becoming common; videoblogs are just starting. Podcasting (a conjunction of iPod, Apple's iconic audio player, and broadcasting) lets both professionals and amateurs produce audio files that people can download and listen to.

It is tempting, but wrong, for the traditional mainstream media (which includes The Economist) to belittle this sort of thing. It is true, for instance, that the vast majority of blogs are not worth reading and, in fact, are not read (although the same is true of much in traditional newspapers). On the other hand, bloggers play an increasingly prominent part in the wider media drama—witness their role in America's presidential election last year. The most popular bloggers now get as much traffic individually as the opinion pages of most newspapers. Many bloggers are windbags, but some are world experts in their field. Matthew Hindman, a political scientist at Arizona State University, found that the top bloggers are more likely than top newspaper columnists to have gone to a top university, and far more likely to have an advanced degree, such as a doctorate.

Another dangerous cliché is to consider bloggers intrinsically parasitic on (and thus, ultimately, no threat to) the traditional news business. True, many thrive on debunking, contradicting or analysing stories that originate in the old media. In this sense, the blogosphere is, so far, mostly an expanded op-ed medium. But there is nothing to suggest that bloggers cannot also do original reporting. Glenn Reynolds, whose political blog, Instapundit.com, counts 250,000 readers on a good day, often includes eyewitness accounts from people in Afghanistan or Shanghai, whom he considers “correspondents” in the original sense of the word.

“The basic notion is that if people have the tools to create their own content, they will do that, and that this will result in an emerging global conversation,” says Dan Gillmor, founder of Grassroots Media in San Francisco, and the author of “We the Media” (O'Reilly, 2004), a book about, well, grassroots journalism. Take, for instance, OhmyNews in South Korea. Its “main concept is that every citizen can be a reporter,” says Oh Yeon Ho, the boss and founder. Five years old, OhmyNews already has 2m readers and over 33,000 “citizen reporters”, all of them volunteers who contribute stories that are edited and fact-checked by some 50 permanent staff.
With so many new kinds of journalists joining the old kinds, it is also likely that new business models will arise to challenge existing ones. Some bloggers are allowing Google to place advertising links next to their postings, and thus get paid every time a reader of their blog clicks on them. Other bloggers, just like existing providers of specialist content, may ask for subscriptions to all, or part, of their content. Tip-jar systems, where readers click to make small payments to their favourite writers, are catching on. In one case last year, an OhmyNews article attacking an unpopular court verdict reaped $30,000 in tips from readers, though most of the site's revenues come from advertising.

The tone in these new media is radically different. For today's digital natives, says Mr Gillmor, it is anathema to be lectured at. Instead, they expect to be informed as part of an online dialogue. They are at once less likely to write a traditional letter to the editor, and more likely to post a response on the web—and then to carry on the discussion. A letters page pre-selected by an editor makes no sense to them; spotting the best responses using the spontaneous voting systems of the internet does.

Even if established media groups—such as Mr Murdoch's—start to respond better to these changes, can they profit from them? Mr Murdoch says that some media firms, at least, will be able to navigate the transition as advertising revenue switches from print-based to electronic media. Indeed, this is one area where news providers can use technology to their advantage, by providing more targeted audiences for advertisers, both by interest group and location. He also thinks that video clips, which his firm can conveniently provide, will be crucial ingredients of online news.

But it remains uncertain what mix of advertising revenue, tips and subscriptions will fund the news providers of the future, and how large a role today's providers will have. What is clear is that the control of news—what constitutes it, how to prioritise it and what is fact—is shifting subtly from being the sole purview of the news provider to the audience itself. Newspapers, Mr Murdoch implies, must learn to understand their role as providers of news independent of the old medium of distribution, the paper.

Tackling Social Exclusion Through New Technologies

Interesting new report by the UK Government's Social Exclusion Unit:

"Inclusion Through Innovation: Tackling Social Exclusion Through New Technologies"

You can download it (PDF, 2330kb) at:

http://www.socialexclusionunit.gov.uk/page.asp?id=583

"The new report, Inclusion Through Innovation: Tackling Social Exclusion Through New Technologies, explores the potential that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have to improve service delivery and quality of life for the most excluded groups, and argues that effective use of ICT is key to addressing exclusion and meeting complex needs...."

Monday, October 24, 2005

good guide to blogs from Blueoregon.

The Big O on Blogs

Jeff Alworth Oct 23 2005

http://www.blueoregon.com/2005/10/the_big_o_on_bl.html


Since its new redesign--which seems in part a response to the popularity of blogs--the Oregonian has run commentary about blogs by Regina Lawrence, a PSU professor of political science. In today's issue, Lawrence discusses the function and use of blogs--and she completely misses the boat. She argues that blogs are now dominated by a few main sites (she identifies Drudge and the Free Republic, neither of which are blogs) which dominate all discourse. These dominant blogs are guilty of the same crime they accuse the mainstream media of committing--focusing too narrowly on a few stories--which further skews reality. Finally, blogs, acting in reaction to the "failures" they identify in the MSM, are hopelessly partisan.

Lawrence, as a political scientist, may be measuring the effect of blogs on the political process. Based on the success of the liberal blogs, candidates like Howard Dean and Paul Hackett have managed to mount surprising dark-horse campaigns, buoyed by support and dollars from a previously-disconnected base. In this regard, her analysis of the effect of blogs may be accurate. But as an analysis of blogs as emergent media, she misses the actual function of the blogosphere and patterns of consumption. Worse, by addressing content at the expense of delivery, she misses blogs' most potent function.

Let's take function first. Blogs don't exist, like mainstream outlets, as stand-alone media. Blogs would surely wither and die if they didn't exist as a neural net. Because bloggers don't have vast newsrooms, they depend on other bloggers to cover the entire newscape. To argue that they all cover the same thing is willful blindness: Juan Cole, an expert on the Middle East, almost never expresses an opinion on domestic political races, but is the blogosphere's go-to guy on Iraq. Look at the top fifty leftist blogs, and you'll find just the opposite of what Lawrence describes: a sorting out of the best bloggers by subject area. Kos, which she eventually does cite, is the go-to guy for political strategies, while Josh Marshall is the inside man on Washington scuttlebutt, and Brad DeLong and Max Sawicky (professors both) cover economics. Other blogs cover the environment, law, labor, and media.

In terms of consumption, I'm wary of her reading of the numbers. Blog readers do tend to select a few central players (she identifies aggregate stats to support this). But then readers also add a few other sites that have more focused content or smaller readership. BlueOregon is a perfect example (as was, alas, the now-defunct Communique). No one that I know of has done an in-depth survey of blog readership, but the existence and traffic of blogs like this one demonstrate that while the bigs pull in the lion's share of readers, other blogs can find their own robust readership.

But the biggest mistake Lawrence makes is confusing blogs as just another content-delivery medium. This is a mistake the MSM has made from the start, and they do it at their peril. The reality is that blogs are the first organic, interactive medium. They are focal points for ongoing conversations. When I booted up BlueOregon this morning, I saw that Jack Roberts had joined the discussion on a post about an interview he'd done on another blog. This kind of conversation has never existed before--and can't, within the confines of a daily print newspaper or TV broadcast.

While the MSM is busy panicking about the fragmentation of media, bloggers are seizing on it. Not everyone can join in a conversation about whether Jack Roberts should run for the Supreme Court--but as newspapers know, very few would even want to. The O has recently shifted its local content away from politics precisely because there aren't enough readers interested in it. The O has a daily circulation of 350,000 readers. BlueOregon's is less than 1% of that figure--though at 2,000 hits, it's one of the "bigger" blogs. We capitalize on the interest of the readers that the Oregonian can no longer well serve--exactly the reverse of the trend Lawrence sees.

Blogs are a poor substitute for newspapers. Few of them are hosted by professional journalists, and most of them depend on newspaper reportage to craft their posts. (This post is an example.) But blogs aren't trying to deliver the news. They're trying to make sense of the news. Had Lawrence pondered their efficacy on that score, she might have come away with a different conclusion. I'd love to see the O continue to look at the effect blogs are having--but they must be critiques based on someone who actually understands the medium.

Now 19.5 million blogs on the Internet....

Blogs stray further afield

Posted on Mon, Oct. 24, 2005
The Journal Gazette
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/living/12983821.htm

Gerard Voland

There now are 19.5 million Web logs – or blogs – on the Internet, with an estimated 12,000 sites created each day, according to Technorati.com.

ComScore Networks estimated that nearly 50 million people visited blog sites during the first three months of 2005.

Blogs received immense media attention during the 2004 presidential election when certain postings indicated that CBS News had not properly verified the authenticity of documents used to buttress its claims about President Bush’s National Guard service. Beyond politics, blogs also have had a significant effect on product design and marketing, as in the case of Kryptonite bicycle locks that were found to be easily opened with a ballpoint pen, leading to a product exchange program by the firm that is estimated to have cost $10million.

Web logs first appeared in the late 1990s as personal diaries. Since that time, not only have their numbers grown dramatically, but the types of blogs also have expanded from the diary to interactive sites where visitors can post comments and formal company blogs used to promote products and enhance customer good will.

Certain blogs are internal Web sites accessible only to those within the host firm or organization. Although many public blogs encourage postings by visitors, some accept commentary from a only a select group of invited authors.

Certain Web sites provide visitors with the opportunity to easily create their own blogs, increasing the number of blogs managed by those with little technical skill but who wish to publicly proclaim their views and communicate with others in the blogosphere. These blog development sites include blogger.com, sixapart.com/typepad, and livejournal.com.
Company blogs are becoming increasingly popular as mechanisms through which a firm can internally communicate its ideas, policies and research results among its employees while better coordinating projects. Companies also use public versions of their blogs to introduce and promote new products, respond to market changes and post commentaries on current industry topics. Boeing, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Verizon and Microsoft are among the many companies with corporate blog sites.

The more mature and established blogs are supported through paid advertising. Because a community of frequent visitors often forms around a blog that focuses on a topic of mutual interest, it makes sense that certain firms with services or products that might appeal to that group would advertise on the site. The danger for advertisers is that controversial statements or offensive language might be posted on the blog, linking the firm to this material.

Some sites use software filters to prevent objectionable language or inappropriate topics from being posted. An extreme example of this approach is used by mainland China to prevent its 3 million bloggers from posting certain political or other unacceptable comments. An alternative approach is used by Kaboose.com, which hires parents to act as chaperones to oversee the content of postings and online conversations among the children visiting its Web site.
Other challenges within the blogosphere include how best to ensure the accuracy of posted information so visitors can discern facts from opinion, and how best to deal with the ever-increasing volume of blogs so that Internet search engines can lead visitors to the most relevant sites and postings.

Public debate recently has focused on the effect of blogs on conventional news coverage, leading some to wonder whether the role of the mainstream media will be marginalized as the public increasingly relies upon the Internet for news and information. In fact, the Kryptonite lock case, the 2004 presidential election and other instances suggest that print and broadcast journalists will continue to serve society in primary roles that cannot be filled by bloggers alone.

Bloggers essentially acted as the catalysts for initial scrutiny of the claims made in these cases, but conventional media provided the public stage and considerable resources that were necessary for comprehensive investigations to be launched. It only was five days after the first blog posting about the Kryptonite lock design that major news media outlets such as the New York Times and the Associated Press turned their spotlights on the issue as well, and then only five more days before the firm reversed its public assertion that the lock was effective and launched its exchange program.

After other major news organizations began to focus on the veracity of the CBS allegations about the president’s National Guard service, the broadcast giant began to back away from its claims. Bloggers can confirm and publicize information by working together as a community, but the conventional news media are able to devote a broader array of resources for investigation and wider public discourse. The reality is that bloggers and the mainstream media need to work together to properly serve the public.

Gerard Voland is dean of the School of Engineering, Technology and Computer Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.

Google Moves Against Spam Blogs

Google Moves Against Spam Blogs

by Shankar Gupta, Monday, Oct 24, 2005 6:00 AM EST

Online Media Daily

RESPONDING TO GROWING COMPLAINTS ABOUT spam blogs, or "splogs," Google implemented new security measures to make it more difficult for users of its blogging service to create and maintain fake blogs.

"We pushed out a change that will prompt some users to solve a CAPTCHA if our spam classifier identifies the blog as spammy," wrote Google's Blogger Product Manager, Jason Goldman, on Blogger Buzz. "So far, we have observed a slight decrease in the amount of spam being created." The "CAPTCHA" test is a method by which automated programs that post or create blogs can be foiled--where the user is asked to type in a sequence of letters from a line that people can read, but computers can't decipher.

Spam blogs generally fall into one of two categories: Link farms, which pack hundreds or even thousands of blogs with gibberish or recycled content, and contain multiple links to a particular Web site, which allow them to game Google's PageRank algorithm, creating artificially high organic search rankings; and spam blogs that simply recycle content with AdSense or other advertising on them in the hopes of making money from errant users clicking on the ads.
Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Intelliseek, a firm that monitors and searches blog content, said that spam blogs--especially on Blogger--present a major problem for the corporate blogosphere. "We predict 30 percent of all the new blogs are spam-oriented," he said. "To some extent, it risks killing the bloom. It's hard enough to convince companies to blog, and spam blogs are giving them a really easy out: 'why would I want to deal with this?'

Blackshaw also said that spam blogs pose a threat to major brand names as well--certain popular brands or even Hollywood celebrities can find their names being exploited to drive traffic to spam blogs. "Most brands have no idea that they're being used as bait, but that's a taint on the brand--no brand wants to be associated with garbage," he said. "We might start to see some brands raise some tough questions about how they're used in these spam blogs in the same way that tough questions have been raised about buying certain keywords on Google," he said, referring to the Google-Geico lawsuit in which the search giant was accused of profiting by allowing competing advertisers to buy Geico's name as a keyword ad.

David Sifry, CEO and founder of blog search engine Technorati, had a much lower estimate of the percentage of blogs that were spam--2 to 8 percent--but said that spam blogs were an inevitable feature of the blogosphere. "Every health ecosystem has parasites," he said. "The really big question here, though, is--is it manageable?"

He added that major search engines, blog search engines, and net advertisers have begun working together to eliminate the economic incentive for spam blogging by identifying spam blogs at the source and simply not indexing them. "In the case of Web spam--and the reason I'm so much more optimistic about it than e-mail spam--is that in the end, it's all about accountability," he said. "The difference with Web is that in the end, every single thing on the Web has a URL. If you see one domain that's sending a lot of suspicious content, you can stop it right there at the source."

Sifry took a wait-and-see attitude toward Blogger's most recent move to cut down on spam blogs, but said that excessive measures to curb spam could damage the freedom inherent to the blogosphere. "This is a larger issue of how can you deal with the fact that you've built an open system," he said. "We want to make it easy to let people create content--but still enforce a good level of accountability and reputation."

Take a look at some of the earlier items...

Welcome to Denise, Gillian and Huseyin who are completing the Online Master's programme at Manchester University. It would be worth your while taking a look at some of the early articles on this Blog by clicking on Sep 2004 on the sidebar. They will help with the blogging assignments

I advise you to try and start up a blog of your own, just to get a feel for it. Even better do your assignment in the form of a blog - but that isn't mandatory

Bernard

Sunday, April 03, 2005

Blogging from East to West

Blogging from East to West, David Reid

"What should we make of blogging? Is it simply the latest internet fad, a truly democratic tool for change or, as some have suggested, a vehicle for mob rule? David Reid finds blogs are rocking the boat both East and West."

BBC Online, Fri April 1st 2005

Friday, April 01, 2005

Blogging Beyond the Men's Club

"Blogging Beyond the Men's Club"
Since anyone can write a Weblog, why is the blogosphere dominated by white males?
by Steven Levy, Newsweek Technology & Science, 21-3-05

"It has taken 'mainstream media' a very long time to get to [the] point of inclusion," Jenkins wrote. "My fear is that the overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere ... will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one."

"The top-down mainstream media have to some degree found the will and the means to administer such care. But is there a way to promote diversity online, given the built-in decentralization of the blog world? "

Friday, March 11, 2005

Code begets community: On social and technical aspects of managing a virtual community

Daniel Pargman's Ph.D. thesis: "Code begets community: On social and technical aspect". Recommended by Dave Randall.

"This thesis looks at a Swedish-speaking adventure mud - SvenskMud - a text-based "virtual world". I have taken a broad view and describe how this mud functions, with a special focus on "the work to make it work". More specificly I describe the activities in and around the mud from three different perspectives:

- Where muds came from, how they work and how this particular mud works.
- The mud as a computer program and an ongoing systems development project.
- Management of the mud as a task or a hobby for the mud administrators (called "magicians" in the mud)."

Provides an excellent model of how you can go about studying a virtual, online community

Friday, March 04, 2005

Trust and Community on the Internet

the journal Analyse & Kritik has published a special issue on
"Trust and Community on the Internet".

The issue contains 16 articles within the following categories:
Concepts and Background
The Internet as an Environment for Trust
Reputation and Online Auctions
Groups and Networks
Law and the Internet

You can find detailed information at

http://www.analyse-und-kritik.net/english/current_issue.htm.

These articles are a selection of papers that were presented at the
international conference "Trust and Community on the Internet" that
was held at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefed,
Germany in Summer 2003. You can find the complete list of all
conference presentations at
http://www.uni-duesseldorf.de/~matzat/conference.htm.

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Circling the wagons: the net politics of exclusion

Before you finish off your community group assignment, worth having a look at an article written by Will Davies, "Circling the wagons: the net politics of exclusion" in the Register, Nov 8th 2004:

"I think we have a difficulty in viewing the net sociologically and critically partly because it is a global system with very remote governance structures. Rather than see it as a constructed social system, driven by politics, it is far easier to see it as an entirely neutral and indeed natural social space, within which new political units can be created....

The real politics of the net does not consist in creating new communities, with new forms of governance, moderation and values. It consists in mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion, that tend to follow pre-existing sociological and economic divisions....

There’s an analogy often made between the American settlers and internet dwellers, and it’s a good one (things like ‘the cyber-frontier’). Like the American settlers, internet dwellers create a myth that there was no politics before they arrived. In order to establish entirely new and egalitarian communities, American settlers had to ignore the fact that the land was already occupied. To the same end, Internet settlers choose to ignore the historical and sociological facts of how the Internet is run, who can't get on to it and why, and the mechanisms used online to divide people.The risk is that the politics of the net follows America towards gated communities, each having only an inward-looking, group-based notion of politics, and ceases to question the macro institutions and systems around them."