I thought I would check out the top 100 most popular free audiobooks downloaded via Books Should Be Free and alongside the Swiss Family Robinson and other likely suspects I noted this:

I wonder how many extra copies of Beowulf this ludicrous book cover sold?

I wouldn’t have expected the EU to have anything as sexy as a map-based visualisation tool but Eurostat’s is not bad at all and lets me generate all kinds of infographics (like the one below) for teaching use.

Percentages of households with broadband in Europe 2009

I would like to give my students a web-based way to book appointments to see me which would then sync with my calendar. Features needed:

• They should be able to request a booking without registering and see my calendar with busy parts greyed out.
• I should be able to approve, modify or deny appointment requests and have the approval or denial notification sent to them.

I have been struggling with Timebridge for a while now which does much of this but it doesn’t let me modify students’ appointment requests - it only lets me approve them (if I want to suggest another time I have to do so by hand). It also doesn’t seem to check to see whether I am actually available when people try to book times.

With Google Calendar I can display my availability but as far as I can tell I would need to have students all register with GCal to add appointments and I would have to make each of them my ‘friend’. Same with Yahoo (which seems to have invented a new category called “special friends” who can edit calendar entries!). Calgoo seems not to be working and Doodle seems to require users to register and to require me to suggest times instead of the student.

Any ideas? Surely this is not too unusual a requirement?

I have been using tweetdeck for a while but have a few issues with it:

• I can’t do a keyword search across my twitter feeds so if I want to find a tweet from several days ago I am out of luck.
• If I clear the tweets I have read I can’t then see how to get them back (but conversely they seem to re-appear when I restart)
• There are several people who I follow but who also show up in a twitter list I follow (@nancybaym/internetresearchers). I would like their posts to be set to “read” when I read them in another column.
• I would like to be able to say “mark this and all previous tweets as read” so I don’t have to read all the way to the “top” of my tweets before I mark them all read.

Surely these are not un-feasable features? Does anyone know a decent twitter client which can deliver on some or all of these?

I was listening to the most recent This American Life about long shots. It was explained that in California, when prisoners who are committed for life eligible for parole are deemed by the parole board to be safe for release, the governor has the right to review their cases. Presently Schwarzenegger turns down 75% of these, and the previous governor turned down 99%.

What I found really shocking though was the opinion expressed by the judge who advised the governor between 2003 and 2005, Justice Peter Siggins. When it was suggested that these decisions were not made on merits but were rather based on political criteria (ie the potential embarrassment if a governor released someone who then went on to commit a crime). He said:

Part of a governor’s job is to be responsive to the constituents who elected him. The fact that the governor would think that a lot of people would be upset that this person got out of prison… it is the governor paying attention to the preference of a large constituency in California.

So essentially, yes - whether a prisoner is released depends not on whether an extensive examination of his character and conduct suggests he would be a risk to the public but whether the public (who knows nothing of him save his crime) would be happy for him to be released. How can a judge think this is right?

If you get a lot of email (and who doesn’t?) may I suggest my book, Dealing with Email? It was recently re-released in epub ebook form and for the Kindle via Amazon US (you can preview pages from it from Amazon’s page.

For the academics among you, how about a copy of Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-representations in New Media (also previewable on Amazon) featuring a chapter by yours truly about MySpace users? The paperbook is $30 - cheap for an academic work…

Due to recent breakages and having an income after years of studenthood I find myself looking for a bunch of consumer electronics goods at once and I’m coming to realise that:

1) Even in this most-covered commercial area, there are annoying information gaps (products that are UK/European models are much less often-reviewed than US ones).
2) Being able to find reviews of any individual product is no substitute for buyer’s guides that would help you sift through dozens of similar products by your own criteria.

So can you help me find the following?

• A cheap (sub-£150) digital camera that is good in low-light conditions (ie shoots well indoors without a flash)
• An inexpensive 22″ TV with reasonable speakers and (if possible) support for high resolution connection to a PC for use as a monitor (am currently considering the John Lewis 22″ or the LG22H2000)
• A cheap mobile phone with decent calendar/organizer function (ie an up-to-date version of what Palm used to sell as an organizer alone) - preferably with keyboard - am currently considering the INQ Chat or the LG GW520 - should be on three because of their Skype support and cheap internet.

Other suggestions?

I looked back and found that my earliest blog post was ten years ago today. Readers will note that it has been used steadily less and less over the years because it falls between two stools - most of my recent blogging has been academic and hosted on the Media@LSE group weblog which I set up. Since I am no longer there I plan to phase that out. This blog is therefore primarily for more personal blog entries, but I find that for the most part things that are personal I only wish to share with my friends and acquaintances and I am therefore using Facebook more - particularly now that the latest update allows item by item privacy controls. This blog may therefore end up being my ‘public-facing’ blog again, mainly about academic-related things. Stay tuned for further announcements…

Since I go 2-3 times weekly London to Leicester these days I have to book lots of tickets in advance but all registering with the East Midlands trains site lets me do is auto-fill “london” and “leicester” in the search box and fills in address and credit card details at the end. It doesn’t remember favourite train times or seat locations. Nor does it send booked train time information back in email in a form that can be easily imported into Outlook or iCal. It takes 13 clicks to add each single journey to my basket! Alas Trainline and Raileasy both cost £1 more per ticket and £1 per transaction to book (more if using credit cards). Megatrain’s tickets are cheaper but trains arriving at 11:00 and leaving at 15:00 wouldn’t give me much time to work.

Any other ideas?