Seb Paquet references an “interesting paper”:http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/138/guedon.html on the history of scientific publishing and the impact of ISI ranking. It points out how assigning numerical rankings to measure academic quality distorts the way that academic research is published.

What that paper doesn’t mention – at least not in ch 6 which Seb highlighted – is that because high citation ranking = $ many journals end up “gaming” their impact factors by choosing the kind of papers they publish in order to maximise it, which has unintended consequences. If a journal has 10 papers that it knows will be highly cited it may limit the number of other papers it accepts for example to try not to ‘dilute’ its impact factor.

It’s the same with the ranking systems used by Google and by weblog ranking search engines. If there are benefits to being scored highly, human nature being what it is people will try to maximise their scores. Yet because the ranking is ‘automatic’ it is often assumed to be value neutral and therefore above criticism.

“David Wilcox”:http://partnerships.typepad.com/civic/2003/02/about_david_wil.html, consultant on ICT use by the community and voluntary sector, talks about a new review of the literature on community informatics in the UK by veteran UK academics Barry Loader and Leigh Keeble.

It makes disturbing (though not surprising) reading, indicating that despite the Government’s best efforts these programmes often don’t reach the most excluded and rarely increase civic engagement (except among the already engaged). Take a look at the “summary of the report”:http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/findings/socialpolicy/584.asp or “download it as a PDF”:http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/eBooks/1859351980.pdf

In amongst the gloom and doom there are some suggestions for better practice in future – siting internet access centres in the community rather than in libraries or colleges and organizing training around people’s perceived needs rather than forcing them into formal courses for example – both designed to attract people who have had negative experiences with formal education.

Underlying my own research is a belief that ICT can have an emancipatory effect – for some at least – but that mere provision of the technology (closing the ‘access divide’) is not enough. Community informatics programmes must lean much more heavily towards the ‘community’ in their titles if they are to succeed.

Also see “this earlier blog posting”:https://blog.org/archives/000990.html on similar research. Some there suggest that while library access may not be a good way for new people to access online resources long term it may have a useful role in introducing people to online resources. I still have my doubts but take a look at the two reports cited there and let me know what you think…

School’s out for the summer/ School’s out for ever? Yesterday I took the last exam I ever expect to take. In a sense, my life as a student is over and my life as a teacher is beginning.

Of course, the transition is not as clear as that – on the one hand I am still a PhD ‘student’ – but the supervisor/student relationship is very different to the student/teacher one. And on the other hand I have already been teaching this year at the “London College of Communication”:http://www.arts.ac.uk/253_257.htm (though I hope to do a lot more teaching next year there and at my own institution, the “LSE”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/aboutLSE/information.htm).

Still, I feel different now. And I look forward to the exciting challenges ahead!

The 4290 inhabitants of a bunch of really isolated islands off the coast of Scotland were given computers and Internet access through some government programme. Then a few months later the BBC turned up and tried to encourage them to produce weblogs.

Well, after a couple of ill-attended meetings and promotion in the local media, altogether 72 people had created blogs by the end of six months (of those, only eight have been “updated within the last week”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/whereilive/westernhighlandsandislands/islandblogging/bloggers/). Of course part of the relatively low takeup might be to do with the fact that the BBC blogs were hosted by the BBC and were pre-moderated – you’d post something and it would take a day to be approved! Not surprisingly (since these people live in pretty close contact with their neighbours) none of the weblogs tried to be controversial in their communities or political – instead they tended to concentrate on mundane day to day community events.

I spoke to the man from the BBC (Richard Holmes) after his presentation at “NotCon”:http://www.notcon04.com/ and he said that some of the community leaders on the island did take up blogging early on but abandoned it and that those who kept blogging were a cross-section of the community. I hope some more in-depth studies have been done on this experiment and I will be interested to see how many of the people who were started off blogging carry on doing it once the BBC stops the experiment (due to finish this month).

It’s interesting to me that even with 100% access and encouragement in the end only .1% of the islands’ population ended up blogging regularly. I wish I had been there to gather some ethnographic detail that would explain why (though I have a few guesses).

“Alex Halavais”:http://alex.halavais.net/ has tried to produce a ranking of

American academic trade publication The Chronicle featured an article last year about Scholars Who Blog. As you might expect, those who do it often find it rewarding: Blogging ‘has some of the best aspects of peer review built into it,’ Jacob Levy wrote in a “post about blogging”:http://jacobtlevy.blogspot.com/2002_09_01_jacobtlevy_archive.html#81283697. Scholars’ entries ‘are instantly monitored and responded to by others as well-informed as they are.’ Interestingly, the article claims:

“To a remarkable degree, blogs also appear to bring full professors, adjuncts, and students onto a level field. With no evident condescension, senior faculty bloggers routinely link to the political-affairs blog maintained by Matthew Yglesias, a senior at Harvard University.”

It certainly isn’t just faculty producing interesting stuff – I was impressed recently when I came across “Read Me”:http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/ReadMe/ – which turned out to be produced by students in the Department of Journalism at New York University.

It seems to me the UK is far behind the US when it comes to the amount of academic blogging going on (see “PhDWeblogs”:http://www.phdweblogs.net/ for evidence – if it is working). I wonder if it is the speed of diffusion of technology, cultural differences between the US and the UK or attitudes to technology or self-disclosure here that make the difference?

A month ago I put my two cents into the discussion going on “here”:http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/~paquetse/cgi-bin/om.cgi?Research_Blogs/Self-Organizing_Directory_Development about what an ideal database of research weblogs would look like. Lots of interesting ideas on the page but I don’t know, alas, if any development is actually going ahead. I wish I had the expertise to do something myself. Maybe someone will pick up the ball during the summer break?

See this page for more postings about weblog metadata.

Sébastien Paquet has “written a paper”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2004/04/21.html#a1548 about the usefulness of “Internet Topic Exchange”:http://topicexchange.com/ – a rather nifty web service that lets several people with weblogs that handle trackback group their postings together by subject.

It’s a little hard to explain – for example, I create a ‘UK Media Studies’ topic exchange page, then every time I make a post that relates to that topic I add a trackback link to that page (just as if it was a weblog). Other people do likewise. Instead of checking all of their weblogs for new postings I can just check that subject page. Take a look at this “weblog research”:http://topicexchange.com/t/weblog_research/ topic exchange to see how it’s done.

Thanks to Lilia Efimova for the link.

The site owner has revealed that it will vanish on the 9th of June, thus putting an end to a fascinating blog that shot from nowhere to (relative) fame in a little more than a year by providing a place for (mostly American) junior academics and PhD students to vent their frustration and share knowledge.

I was initially complacent, thinking ‘well if I want it I can always check out the Internet Archive’ but the last ‘backup’ of the site by the Internet Archive took place “5th June 2003”:http://web.archive.org/web/20030605225140/http://invisibleadjunct.com/ – a year’s worth of insights will be lost forever! Will nobody step forth to persuade the mystery owner to keep it going? Or hand it over to a third party?

(This also is an unwelcome reminder of the ‘fragility’ of cyberspace – how, even with the Internet Archive, pages can appear suddenly and disappear suddenly without leaving a trace…)

How would you sample home pages and weblogs in the UK? My definition would be: “sites that are not primarily in furtherance of professional goals (eg online CVs, galleries of art from artists etc), are not explicitly temporary, are substantially the work of a single individual, and are not closed to the public either explicitly (through a password) or implicitly (for example collections of photos from an event without an accompanying narrative that are only meant to be accessed by a small group for a short time even if they are openly available online).”

If I had a long list of random UK home pages I could weed out the ones that didn’t belong myself, however.

I thought about sampling randomly from directories compiled by Geocities or Freeserve/Wanadoo but I looked and it seems they no longer index their pages. Do they have directories somewhere I missed?

Using Yahoo or DMoz would introduce obvious biases because submission is not automatic.

Tripod still does have “directories of its UK users”:http://www.tripod.lycos.co.uk/directory/homepages/ and it seems like the best bet so far but how representative would Tripod users be of all users? Searching for ‘personal home page uk’ in Google gets me nowhere.

How should I balance blogs with home pages? Using the stats from Pew suggests I should include about one blog for every four home pages. What do you think is the best way to randomly sample weblogs? There used to be a master directory of Blogger ones. Is there still? Is there any up to date info on the relative popularity of the various weblogging platforms?