The first day of the “AoIR conference”:http://www.aoir.org/2004/ didn’t start until the afternoon but already I’ve met several stimulating people and am really looking forward to the next few days. It’s so nice to be surrounded by smart people who care about the social implications of the Internet and think in academic terms. The LSE has a fair number of these as well of course but it’s nice to meet new faces to bounce new ideas off of and to meet face to face the people whose work I have admired.

Today’s keynote speaker was “Ted Nelson”:http://xanadu.com.au/ted/, who certainly dreams big dreams (but maybe tries to dream too many at once)! I had hoped to give you a picture of him in full flow but discovered that my camera’s batteries are flat. Maybe tomorrow…

I’m off tomorrow to Internet Research 5.0: Ubiquity? the “Association of Internet Researchers”:http://www.aoir.org/’ 5th annual conference – my first major academic conference, in fact. I won’t be delivering a paper there, alas, but I look forward to meeting many of my fellow Internet-studing academics over the next four days.

I may even take some pictures, but don’t expect instant blogging as there is no wireless access.

P.S. A reminder – please if you read this and are British and have a home page or weblog go “take my survey”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_best_of_blogorg.html#001250!

Plunder!

Originally uploaded by derb.

A once in a lifetime opportunity came up for me – well-known academic publishers Routledge moved from central London yesterday and rather than pack up all their books they selected some and left the rest for hungry scholars to grab (charities didn’t want most of them for some reason). This was my haul. But they aren’t exactly free – given a bookshelf six shelves high I figure the space they take up in our flat would still be worth about 55 pounds given the cost of London real estate these days.

Still I’m not nearly as much of a book hoarder as some friends of mine – and with easy access to ‘one of the largest libraries in the world devoted to the economic and social sciences‘ I don’t really need to be.

Hmm… I seem to be turning into a book stack photoblogger – something of a dull niche! I promise if I put up more pictures they will be a little more interesting. Meanwhile take a look the few pictures I “have made public so far”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/derb/…

P.S. On the whole ‘buy vs sign out from library’ issue, I just came across a terrific little (free) tool described and linked to on the “43 folders”:http://merlin.blogs.com/43folders/2004/09/request_a_libra.html weblog. It lets you look up a book on Amazon then check to see if it is available at your local librar(ies) before buying. Mind you if your library has the book but with a different ISBN it won’t turn up. Definitely worth trying though – particularly if you prefer Amazon’s search to your library’s search.

If you are based in the UK and have a personal home page (this includes weblogs and journals), please visit this home page creation survey and fill it in – it should only take you ten minutes.

If you are an academic I would also be interested to know what you think of it as a survey and how I might improve it (bearing in mind it is only a very rough pilot at the moment!), and if you have a weblog or home pages (anywhere but particularly one that might be seen by Brits) please publicise this survey on your site. The survey will only be up for a month (or less, if I get enough respondents before then).

I don’t expect to publish anything from it as the sample size will be too small and it is very open-ended at the moment so I can get some idea of the kinds of answers people give, but if anything interesting comes out you will hear about it here.

P.S. I am using “QuestionPro”:http://www.questionpro.com/ to do this survey, which from what I have found appears to be one of the best options around for serious surveys (I did some earlier “investigation of survey software options”:https://blog.org/archives/001183.html). If you want to try it out too, please “contact me”:http://davidbrake.org/contact.htm so I can invite you (I would get $10 if you end up using it).

R. A. Stebbins “Serious Leisure: A Conceptual Statement”:http://playlab.uconn.edu/stebbins2.htm has devised a separate category for ‘fun’ things that are or can be also ‘hard work’. He suggests amateurism, hobbyist pursuits, and volunteering are the three forms of serious leisure and that these kinds of leisure are ‘better for us’ than others. Certainly there are many weblogs and personal home pages that contain elements of all three. As to whether we are better off blogging than we would be reading a good book I am not at all clear. But the idea is an interesting tool to think with.

Thanks to Kylie at The Internet Genealogy Community Study for the link.

A study reported in New Scientist “found”:http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996374 regular diarists were more likely than non-diarists to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness.

It’s worth noting however that, ‘the authors acknowledge that the experiment could not demonstrate which came first – the diary writing or the health problems’. It seems not unlikely that ‘the worst affected of all were those who had written about trauma’ because on average most people did not have serious traumas! Unfortunately I have been unable to find the original paper on the web.

Danah “wondered”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2004/09/09/diarying_bad_for_your_health.html whether this has implications for bloggers, too. The ‘side effects’ of personal web publishing – intended and unintended – are something I plan to look at in my own research. One of the things I am curious about is how often people who publish online find that they “lose their jobs”:http://news.com.com/Friendster+fires+developer+for+blog/2100-1038_3-5331835.html or are “embarrassed in other ways”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2003/11/13/mom_finds_out_about_blog.html .

Thanks Danah for the link

John Battelle asks:

Imagine the ability to ask any question and get not just an accurate answer, but your perfect answer – an answer that suits the context and intent of your question, an answer that is informed by who you are and why you might be asking. The engine providing this answer is capable of incorporating all the world’s knowledge to the task at hand be it captured in text, video, or audio… What opportunities arise when knowledge can be so easily gathered? What threats? How might this change our social structures, our politics, our economy?

As far as I am concerned, the danger is not what would happen if such perfect search existed – the danger is that “good enough” search might exist that seemed to deliver near-perfect results but actually relied on still flawed or commercially biased algorithms and had an underlying database that was incomplete. People might forget to use other better but harder to use sources of information and those other sources might gradually disappear. They might also put too much trust in the results they get.

In fact I fear this is already beginning to happen with Google.

It’s a harder question than it looks if you really start thinking about it.

This debate may not matter to most of you reading so I’ve hidden it but I encourage academics in my field to read on because I would welcome your guidance!
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What I’m reading now

Originally uploaded by derb.

534 PDF files accumulated in the ‘Academia’ directory on my hard disk
1,281 accumulated references – 384 of them coded as relating to my “PhD”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm (the rest relate to the coursework for my “MSc”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mScInNewMediaInformationAndSociety.htm, my MSc dissertation, my teaching or just look interesting).

Never mind the quality, feel the weight 😉

The stack pictured is all the books I have signed out of the library at the moment which may give you some idea of the direction my thesis is taking (you can click on the picture to see it more clearly). Behind it in the background you can just see my filed photocopied journal articles…


For an earlier view, see “what I was reading in December last year”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_academia.html#000965.

If you want to see what influential US Internet pundit/policy wonks think about the potential of the Internet to change politics you should keep an eye on the Extreme Democracy weblog and download the chapters of the book in progress there.

“Emergent Democracy”:http://www.extremedemocracy.com/archives/2004/08/chapter_1_emerg.html which I “commented on earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/000687.html is there for example. It has been edited since my comments but it still appears to overlook the very real problem of the continuing digital divide both in the US and across the world and both in Internet access and, more importantly, in the forms of Internet use. I suspect most of the chapters of this book shares this problem though I have yet to read more of them.

All the evidence I have been able to derive (based on the raw data of a Pew survey in Mar/April 2003 which was made into a “report”:http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/113/report_display.asp) suggests weblogs – particularly political ones – are read by a very small audience. To quote some earlier research I did based on the Pew data:
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