Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

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3 October 2005
Filed under:Academia,Personal,Travel at7:51 pm

I’m taking a couple of days ahead of time to look around. If you are coming to the conference as well, drop me a line – probably text messaging to +44 793 171 1988 is easiest if you can do it, or leave a message/call me at the Congress Plaza 312 427 3800 – and maybe we can meet and chat before I start running around like a maniac seeing all the interesting sessions (there are more papers that sound interesting than I can possibly catch in person, alas!)

P.S. Do check out and contribute to the AoIR Chicago wiki I started up.

P.P.S. You might want to use the Technorati tag to tag any postings relating to the conference once you get here.

20 September 2005

Policy has an article in this month’s issue by Johan Norberg (who has a blog). I have posted earlier about Layard’s theories and other theories about how to maximise happiness in society. Layard (baldly summarised) believes money over a certain level doesn’t make you happy so progressive taxation is useful as are social policies like pushing for full employment – even if that is economically inefficient – because employment stability is very important in determining happiness (and since highly stratified incomes produce envy and the perceived need to match your neighbors which produces unhappiness).

Norberg correctly identifies that in societies where individuals have little hope of bettering themselves they tend to be unhappy and uses the example of communist states, and of states where there is low or no growth (Ireland in the 70s and 80s). It is true that low growth and high unemployment lead to unhappiness, but this is not inconsistent with Layard’s thesis – welfare states can have growth and low unemployment as well (though granted it seems to be more difficult).

He does have his finger on something when he says that, “the fact that growth has continued that makes it possible for us to continue to believe in the future”. But this I believe is something we need to work on educating people out of, both in schools and through the media. Unless we can find a way to ‘grow smart’ we will end up running into natural limits sooner or later – especially if developing countries take the same course. It may be true as Norberg says that the increase in wealth in developing countries continues to raise our overall levels of happiness, but it is also true that the rate of increase in happiness is slowing almost to a halt while the cost to our environment of the rise in wealth is increasing.

He also suggests, provocatively, that the welfare state reduces happiness because it takes away the challenges that we need to be happy. But the psychological research he cites refers to the benefits of challenges that are hard but within our power to tackle. The danger of states with inadequate safety nets are that many people living there are faced with challenges that are simply insurmountable – the challenge of getting your kids into university when the fees are not subsidised and the only jobs you can get don’t pay a living wage for example. And those challenges are not, I would suggest, conducive to happiness.

In the footnotes to his article I found the World Database of Happiness which has various interesting indices and lots of links to related papers.

An aside: I have become so used to being able to comment on blog postings or messageboards/comment boxes on media websites that it was irritating to find neither Johan’s blog nor Policy magazine (subheads ironically “ideas, debate, opinion”) have a means of instant
feedback (though at least they offer email addresses for private comment).

14 August 2005

Laurie Taylor in his excellent Thinking Allowed radio programme recently interviewed Simone Abram at length about her anthropological study of tenants’ experiences of “urban regeneration” in Norfolk Park, Sheffield (she has produced a film about this as well with accompanying website). The programme also features interviews with the residents themselves. Strangely enough she concludes that even with the best of intentions the connection between consultation and results on the ground can be very tenuous – especially when a public private partnership (or a tangle of overlapping partnerships) is involved!

28 February 2005

I have mostly been blogging over at the Media@LSE group weblog – tonight I am blogging from the LSE itself where I am at an event about The Fall and Fall of Journalism – featuring one of my supervisors, Prof Robin Mansell.

6 February 2005
Filed under:Academia,Best of blog.org,Personal,Weblogs at12:21 pm

If you are an academic – particularly one in my field – please check out the Media @ LSE Group Weblog, follow the link to my thesis proposal then return to the groupblog and let me know your thoughts.

22 January 2005

Ethan Zuckerman has written thoughtfully about Wikipedia in response to a recent “article”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html (by a former editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica) suggesting it is impressive but its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. Zuckerman points out that Wikipedia is great if you are looking for in-depth coverage of (say) how “GSM”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM works but, ‘when I use Wikipedia to obtain information that I could find in a conventional encyclopedia, I often have a terrible experience, encountering articles that are unsatisfying at best and useless at worst.’

Danah Boyd notes usefully that one of the benefits of signed, scholarly resources over community ones like Wikipedia is that “scholars have something to lose”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/01/08/on_a_vetted_wikipedia_reflexivity_and_investment_in_quality_aka_more_responses_to_clay.html when they get things wrong.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the debate about the quality of Wikipedia has spread fairly widely across the Internet punditsphere. It now even has its own “wiki page”:http://www.emacswiki.org/cw/WikipediaQualityControlDebate which attempts to summarise the debate (and if you use a blog search tool like “Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html you’ll find 83 more sites with something to say on the subject).

P.S. Sorry if this is coming to the debate rather late – I am not doing as much blogging as I used to to free up time for writing my PhD about it instead – and where I am blogging I tend to do it on the “Media@LSE Group Weblog at get.to/lseblog”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php I set up. In the last few weeks I have blogged about “Korea leading the world in numbers of bloggers”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=39, a “database of predictions about the Internet”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=28 “Santa Studies”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=23, “Online transcription services”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=22, “The Economics of Search”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=15 and the “global broadband digital divide”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=20 (and my colleagues in the LSE’s PhD programme have also had several interesting things to post). Pleas come and take a look (at least if you want to hear about the academic side of my life).

13 December 2004

I just added a “post about global broadband penetration”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=20 and a few days ago I posted about research on “hit counts as a predictor of the number of citations”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=14 for academic articles published online. There have also been some recent postings by other blog members on “literature reviews”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=13 and the “use of the Internet for politics in the UK”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=18. I have some postings yet to come there about search engines (you should look there for any future information on search engines – especially as one of my colleagues there is studying them for her PhD)…

P.S. If you want an easy-to-remember address for the site (which does not yet have its own ‘proper’ domain) you can get to it by typing “http://get.to/lseblog”:http://get.to/lseblog.

8 December 2004

In the tradition of departmental group weblog sites like “INCITE”:http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/incite/index.html and “ReadMe”:http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/ReadMe/, I have set up a new unofficial weblog for the “Media department”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/Default.htm at the “London School of Economics”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/ and have managed to persuade several of my fellow PhD students to start posting there. I, too, will start posting my more academia-related musings there rather than here pour encourager les autres, though for the first little while at least I will probably post here to remind you to look there when I add something. Go along and check it out – I hope you find it useful.

P.S. As you may have noticed, I have not been posting as often on this blog. “Mark Brady”:http://home.btconnect.com/glottalstop/blog/ recently interviewed me for his PhD thesis about blogging and I began to realise as I was talking to him just how much in doubt I was about the usefulness of what I have been doing. So don’t be surprised if this blog settles down to a post-or-two a week blog instead of a daily one. But don’t blame him 😉

7 December 2004

“BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net/ which appears to be one of the top 5 weblogs on the Internet (by “these”:http://www.technorati.com/live/top100.html “measures”:http://www.bloglines.com/topblogs “at least”:http://www.blogstreet.com/top100.html) has “announced”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/03/boing_boing_traffic_.html it is publishing its full traffic statistics. It’s as good a way as any to get an idea of the ‘upper bound’ of popularity of weblogs as a phenomenon. Their traffic has nearly tripled in the last nine months and in November they had 1,182,402 ‘unique visitors’ (though how you would compare that to conventional media I don’t know – a visit to a weblog doesn’t seem to me equivalent in significance to the purchase of a magazine, say).

Depressingly, the top four search terms used to find their site are ‘anal’, ‘hentai’, ‘porno’ (and ‘boing’). My top five are “interesting facts”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_interesting_facts.html, “free ocr”:https://blog.org/archives/001249.html, “basic origami”:https://blog.org/archives/000176.html, “am I going down”:https://blog.org/archives/000223.html (bafflingly) and, of course, ‘blog’. There’s a lot about my own statistics that I have to admit puzzles me. For example why is it I have so many Dutch readers? My stats suggest I have half as many Dutch visitors as I have (identifiable) UK ones. And what is it you want to find when you visit? Are you getting what you want?

P.S. If Boing Boing are in the mood for more disclosure I’d be interested to know what their financial situation is like. It must take a few $$$ to pay for a connection that can transmit 469.29 GB of data a month…

3 December 2004

David Weinberger at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society raises an important issue in a recent discussion at Harvard using a metaphor I hadn’t thought of before:

Put aside for the moment question of what is legally ours on the Net. Instead, consider what’s ours in a less explicit and less rigorous sense. Google feels like ours (even though it legally belongs to its shareholders) while Microsoft’s new search site feels like theirs. Weblogs feel like their ours while online columns do not. The Mac feels like it’s ours while Dell computers do not. Craigslist feels like ours while newspaper classified ads and Monster.com feel like theirs. In fact, many of us feel and act as if downloaded mp3s were ours.

Is this sense of “ours” an illusion? Is it a temporary artifact that will vanish in months or years? What makes something that’s not legally ours still feel that way, on the Web or off? And does this provide a way of figuring out why many of us feel so passionately about the load of bits we call the Net?

Well of course not everyone agrees on what technology they consider ‘theirs’ – I don’t feel a big psychological difference between Google and MSN search for example. But I think David W is on to something here. The Berkman folks will likely approach this from a legal perspective (should laws be written from the POV of how people have come to feel about a given tech?) while my interest is more cultural – (what makes people invest a tech with personal significance?)

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