“Danah Boyd”:http://www.danah.org/, who is researching online social networks, recently “presented at ETech”:http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4948 and was good enough to provide a summary. Her points all make sense – what I can’t understand is why designers of social network software keep making the same (fairly obvious) mistakes that she outlines.

New Scientist “briefly describes”:http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994663 research that compares lying behaviour on the phone, by email and in face to face communication. Turns out it’s not email – it’s the telephone where most lying occurs (at least in this experiment). Who would have thought? The researchers suggest a reason we don’t lie as much by email is that it leaves a trail and we can be called to account for it later.

“Pablo J. Boczkowski”:http://sloancf.mit.edu/vpf/facstaff.cfm?ID=17351&ProfType=F&sortorder=name has produced a book that sounds interesting – “Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers”:http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?sid=C429EE84-02E6-4F1A-A20D-B9B5BC908D9E&ttype=2&tid=10145 a summary of which is provided as part of an article in the Online Journalism Review. He suggests that (in the three news organizations he studied) the online version of the news was more open to the readers’ voices but also that online news was more influenced by advertisers and more focused on ‘micro-communities’ of interest. That said, his choice of organizations to study was at the cutting edge of online news practice at the time and indeed two out of the three projects he highlights – HoustonChronicle.com’s “Virtual Voyager”:http://www.chron.com/content/interactive/voyager/ and New Jersey Online’s “Community Connection”:http://www.nj.com/cc/groups/index.ssf seem to have been closed down.

I take a more pessimistic view – there does not appear to be much of a business model yet for rich interactive journalism and until one arrives nearly all online news (with some honourable exceptions) is likely to remain largely re-publishing of existing old-media product.

I look forward to the book however as it is time we had an academic’s-eye view of how the cultures of existing news organizations may be changed through greater online involvement (to the extent it exists).

An interesting (if now old) interview with “Marc Smith”:http://research.microsoft.com/~masmith/ about his work studying the overall dynamics of Usenet news. This form of online discussion is rather ‘old school’ on the Internet these days but it’s still interesting to look at and it lends itself well to the kind of quantitative analysis he performs. You can use some of his tools to search and study Usenet yourself – check out “NetScan”:http://netscan.research.microsoft.com/ for example.

I have never understood why with all the advances there have been in browsers neither Mozilla nor IE has developed a proper database for managing bookmarks. If you have more than a few dozen bookmarks it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of them all. The “Keeping Found Things Found”:http://kftf.ischool.washington.edu/ project has discovered people can’t find sites they visited earlier but they seem to have developed a needlessly baroque way to deal with this problem. I have been using “Powermarks”:http://www.kaylon.com/ for several years and now have more than 5,000 bookmarks in a simple database which lets me get to any of them almost instantly. It may be the most useful software I have ever bought…

A Powerpoint presentation summarising the results of the first UCLA World Internet Report is “now available”:http://ccp.ucla.edu/downloads/World_Internet_Project_Media.ppt. The main conclusion the media seems to be touting is, “the typical internet user, far from being a geek, shuns television and actively socialises with friends”:http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/19/1074360689758.html. Now don’t you feel better?

From my persepective one of the most interesting (if expected) findings is that, “in all of the countries in the World Internet Project, the wealthiest quarter of the population is much more likely to use the Internet than the poorest quarter of the population.” That holds true even when the poorest quarter of the population is still not that poor by world standards – only 1/4 of the UK’s poorest, and one in ten of Italy’s poorest are online.

People also don’t buy the argument that the Internet helps people have more of a say on political matters: “Most people do not believe that the Internet gives people more say about what the government does. Only 8.6% of Hungarians agree or strongly agree that by using the Internet people can have more say about what the government does. At the other extreme, 37.1% of Italians agree or strongly agree with this statement” (though this includes people who are not online).

Thanks to Many-to-Many for the links

Today’s Independent runs a short interview with me as part of an article about getting a postgrad qualification (starts about 3/4 of the way down the page). It’s a little more upbeat in what it highlights than I felt I was but otherwise fine.

A professor of African Studies, Gavin Kitching, wrote a contentious piece back in 2000 explaining why left studying Africa to study SE Asians instead – he “found African Studies too depressing”:http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP1600gk.html.

(From the mid-70s onward) …the African ship of state was ploughing through heavy international seas, yes. But that only strengthened the need for an excellent captain and navigator at the helm and a well disciplined crew. But as it was, the captain and all his officers seemed to be drunk or absent from the bridge and the crew engaged in various forms of mutiny. No wonder the ship had run aground.

Three years later, African Studies Quarterly published a series of responses. Another author – Timothy Burke – “added”:http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v7/v7i2a12.htm,

The moral outrage, which suffused most Africanist historical and anthropological writing about the apartheid state, is largely absent when it comes to postcolonial African misrule. The genocide in Rwanda passed without anything even remotely resembling that outrage: it was left to a journalist, Philip Gourevitch, to write a clear (and intellectually satisfying) indictment. Africanists have followed Gourevitch either by redirecting the force of causal explanation back to the colonial era or by insisting that the genocide was irremediably complex in ways that Gourevitch failed to appreciate.

Similarly, the disasters of high modernist state socialism in postcolonial Africa have fallen to a non-Africanist, James Scott, to explicate and condemn: there are few Africanist works that echo Scott’s clarity about the follies of ujaama villages and similar high modernist and statist blunders.

Several other authors wrote in the “same issue”:http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/ and Kitchin penned an interesting “response”:http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v7/v7i2a17.htm to those responses and other critics.

“Fernanda Viegas”:http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/ at MIT’s Media Lab has produced a Blog survey on the interesting subject of, “how bloggers think about issues of privacy and liability as they publish online”. I am not sure how representative a sample the respondents will be but it is certainly an interesting subject – one with some relevance to my own research – and I look forward to the results. Do fill it in if you run your own weblog and have a minute…

The BBC reports a boom in Fake universities on the web. Of course there are lots of fakes which are only meant to deceive employers, but these seems to be designed to try to rip off hapless punters who don’t realise that they aren’t properly academically accredited. Check out Greater Manchester University from the Internet archive – “April 2003”:http://web.archive.org/web/20030404133454/www.gm-edu.co.uk/index.htm – and compare with the “current site”:http://www.gm-edu.co.uk/ for example… Here’s a hint for the University-seeker – if it doesn’t have .ac.uk at the end (in the UK) or .edu at the end (in the US) it isn’t a proper university!