Like any self-respecting academic, my hard disk is now full of journal articles and other files in PDF form (as well as Word files etc). Microsoft provides a rather rudimentary ‘search for text in your files’ option in Windows 2000 – what I use – under ‘search’ on the start menu but it doesn’t index Acrobat files as standard and I have been unable to get the (well-hidden) downloadable Adobe patch to work.

As it happens I was putting together a course on “Internet Search Techniques”:http://www.nmk.co.uk/search/view.cfm?ItemID=4926 (now finished but I’ll do it again for any organization that wants it) so I had an excuse to do some investigation. Thanks to Jeremy Wagstaff’s excellent technology weblog, “Loose Wire”:http://loosewire.blogspot.com/ (and “this posting”:http://loosewire.blogspot.com/archives/2003_07_10_loosewire_archive.html in particular) I tried out:

• “DTSearch”:http://www.dtsearch.com/ (sophisticated, complex, expensive – aimed at corporate networks)
• “Enfish”:http://www.enfish.com/ (seemed to suck up my computer’s resources and slow it down – not as powerful and still quite clunky $50+)
• “X1”:http://www.x1.com/ – fast and easy to use (though it doesn’t yet support phrase search). They were going to offer a free version, which put it at the top of my list but now it costs $50. You can download a free trial if you want to try it for yourself. Its ability to highlight where in a gven file your search terms appear is very handy. It indexes email (several types including Eudora) and email attachments as well as documents. [obdisclaimer: they kindly gave me a full unlimited license to try it out]
• “SearchWithin”:http://www.searchwithin.com/ – its interface is pretty rudimentary (see below) and in the course of its installation several weird Visual Basic-related error messages happened (though having ignored them there seem to be no ill effects). The search results page is also basic – it doesn’t sort what’s found by relevance and it just gives you the first few words of the document rather than showing you where in the document your search terms appear. However it does have a big advantage over the others – it’s free (it’s ad supported – popping up sponsor ads in your web browser when you launch it and every so often when you use it). It also handles more powerful boolean search queries than X1.
  
  SearchWithin’s rather basic interface

• “Acrobat 6”:http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readermain.html – The latest version of Acrobat Reader has a way to search across multiple Acrobat files built in – but it is slow, and if you are not sure whether the document you want is a Word file or an Acrobat one you’d have to search twice.

So it looks like I will stick to using X1 for the moment – but I can’t help thinking Google or some other search engine provider should really put out something free and more professional (Compaq’s Altavista had a primitive product back in the late ’90s you could download).

As most of you will know by now, Amazon has started enabling people to search for text within 120,000 of its titles and view selected pages from the books – a feature that has inspired some interesting thoughts about where search could go next.

Steven Johnson in Slate suggests you should be able to tell Amazon which books you own and do a search just on those – it would get info on what you have already which it can use to sell you new books and you would get a search engine covering your paper library.

“Gary Wolf in Wired”:http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,60948,00.html uses the news of the new service to delve into the politics of copyright protection and puts the service into context with attempts to publish out of copyright works for free on the web like Project Gutenberg and on-demand book publishing.

Amazon in an attempt to calm nervous publishers “has announced”:http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/article.php/3102731 already sales growth for searchable titles outpaced non-searchable titles by 9 percent – though “one blogger”:http://scrivenerserror.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_scrivenerserror_archive.html#106764958373017865 has pointed out this could be a one-off novelty effect.

“Steven Kaye”:http://vheissu.typepad.com/about.html has been tracking the Amazon book deal on “his weblog”:http://vheissu.typepad.com/blog/ in more detail. P.S. I had refrained from commenting on this so far because for the moment I am unable to use Amazon’s book search. It turns out (in my case at least) since I haven’t bought books from the US operation recently they can’t verify my credit card even though it is valid and therefore won’t let me see the pages. Frustrating!

Following on from that news, it turns out Google has its own book search plans covering 60,000 titles and is also going to incorporate links to library catalogues – some two million of the most popular books will be indexed and readers in North America (and only there for the moment it seems) will be directed to their nearest library that stocks the book when they enter the postcode.

All of this is very welcome news – there is a lot more “quality” information around in paper form than the Internet alone provides so people should be encouraged to broaden their searches to include books.

“A new survey”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~oxis/index.html by the “Oxford Internet Institute”:http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/ has provided some invaluable detail about the exact nature of the digital divide. I find the conclusions drawn in media reports as interesting as the data itself. The Guardian’s headline and opening paragraphs: Digitally divided by choice concentrate on the survey’s discovery that only 14 percent (mis-reported as four percent) of the UK population doesn’t have Internet access themselves and doesn’t at least know someone who could send an email for them.

It’s true that many of those who are not online themselves could get access at local libraries or ‘borrow’ Internet access from a friend, but without much first-hand experience of Internet access they are unlikely to understand what it could do for them.

The BBC: “Net ‘worth little to many Brits'”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3121950.stm gets more to the heart of the matter, though its headline is misleading – it should say something more like, ‘Net perceived as unimportant by many Brits’.

I think Tom Steinberg gets it exactly right when he “suggests”:http://partnerships.typepad.com/civic/2003/09/its_about_the_v.html that if 96% of Internet non-users don’t feel they are missing anything it is important that government and civil society organizations start giving them good reasons to get interested. I would add that the way the Internet is presented when it is discussed is also at fault. The Government depicts it as a way to learn and get employed, commercial organizations depict it as a place to shop and the news often depicts it as full of oddballs and paedophiles. There isn’t much room for discussion of how to use it to meet people (other than sexual partners), express yourself creatively or to organize politically.

It is worth noting that the questionnaire options for perceived disadvantages of lack of Internet access appear to be limited to: ‘could do job better [if I was online]’, ‘trouble being contacted’ and ‘disadvantaged at work’. Nothing about learning, information gathering or even saving money let alone political organizing as possible things someone might have missed out on.

The information available via the OII and news reports remains sketchy – the full results are due to be publicised and discussed “in Oxford on 22nd October”:http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events.shtml

Thanks to “Techdirt”:http://techdirt.com/articles/20030918/0047201.shtml for the link

“Indymedia”:http://www.indymedia.org/ and similar sites – created by unpaid, largely un-edited reporters – are one way in which the Internet is enabling alternative voices to be heard more widely, but this publishing model has its weaknesses. Because participants are unprofessional and unpaid, there tends to be more opinion venting and comments on existing coverage than original research. Also, the lack of editing means contributions can be ungrammatical, unreadable or even occaisionally “anti-semitic or racist rantings”:http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=44851. While many Indymedia sites have now started to hide or remove such postings, the problem is still bad enough that it is hindering the acceptance of Indymedia sites by the mainstream media and even “search engines”:http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/09/1639862_comment.php.

The New Standard wants to be a different kind of alternative media entity- one a lot closer to traditional news sources. It intends to pay its contributors to do real investigative research not just produce opinion pieces, and it will “charge its readers”:http://newstandardnews.net/promo/membership.cfm $4 to $10 a month when it launches in December.
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Yesterday I handed in my dissertation – my MSc in New Media, Information and Society is now officially over and in a month and a half I return to the LSE to start a PhD in Media and Communications. Here’s the abstract of my dissertation, which I hope to turn into a published paper later. I am also keen to summarise the results for a non-academic audience for a thinktank or newspaper so if it sounds interesting, give me a call!

Civil society campaigning organizations have an important role to play in the public sphere according to deliberative democratic theory. The new communicative capabilities offered to such organizations by the Internet in recent years must be evaluated in the light of a digital divide that has persisted even in developed countries. This study measures and attempts to explain patterns of Internet usage among activists, and examines the possible implications of these choices for the public sphere and political participation.

Drawing on a postal survey of 109 London-based activists and open-ended interviews with four of those surveyed, respondents were found to have predominantly high levels of education, higher than average incomes and high levels of access to the Internet consistent with those factors. However, high levels of access did not translate into high levels of use in all contexts.
While email was extensively employed, other uses like participation in open online discussion or web-based publishing were much less prevalent than traditional campaigning activity. Some access and skill barriers were noted but the principal barrier to greater use of the web in campaigning appeared to be a perceived lack of its relevance or importance in that context. The fact that much Internet use by activists is via email and therefore tends to be “invisible” except to participants in the dialogue might contribute to that perceived lack of relevance.

The study also suggests that the existing socio-economic divide between the “core” activists surveyed and the broader public could be accentuated if, for reasons of efficiency, those activists moved their attention away from traditional activities like meetings and newsletters towards email-mediated dialogue or if the Internet does make it easier for the relatively privileged who are already online to become more involved at the expense of those who continue to fall on the wrong side of the digital divide.

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Salon’s Farhad Manjoo recently produced an interesting piece on the battle between cable companies and big tech companies over equal access to content over broadband cable.

As I commented on Eszter Hargittai‘s blog entry this issue appears at first to be a straightforward one – cable industry bad, free access good. But there are sound business and technical reasons why some forms of discrimination between different forms of content may be useful. For example, for good video quality cable companies want to put stuff in servers directly connected to their networks. But they can’t afford to put all streaming video content there so they may want to cut deals with certain providers. Is that unfair to the other providers? Internet users would still be able to see their stuff – just not as well.

Cable companies might also want to charge users who want to stream stuff from their “non-preferred” suppliers but keep “preferred supplier” content free (or lower cost). But while discriminatory the practice would also be fair, since the cable cos would be incurring different costs depending on where the content they were streaming came from.

Perhaps all legislation should do is demand open bidding for content deals and that per-Gb charges should have some proven relationship to the cost of providing bandwidth.calculator loan table amortizationestate ag real loansloans amortization bankmortgage get amc loan outhome loans guardian americanok loan sacramento cash payday advance$88 car loansbaltimore loans 100 investoradversary proceeding student loansexpert loaned servant alabama issues doctrinealpena alcona unions creditcredit rating advantis union financialcredit abc warehouse appliance storeaenima creditscredit card blogspot com accept e2for accreditation center detention youthon abet accredited lineabc card credit appliance warehouse Map

The guys behind Moveable Type (the software I use for my weblog) are unveiling their answer to Blogger’s blogspot – a way to have your own weblog without having to install software on a server anywhere. Moreover, according to Ben Hammersley’s sneak preview it will contain “all the new things that have appeared or been requested in the blogging world in the past year”. Hopefully this will mean others don’t have to go through the hassle I have had in order to assemble a full feature set for my weblog, and will encourage more “weblog virgins” to get on board and experiment. Hopefully, too, there will be an easy migration path for existing users!

I also gather that Blogger isn’t standing still and that with the support they’ve had from being bought by Google they have been developing a new version of their stuff too.101 sexalice extreme sexland inamputee sex fuckingsex amature storiespositions sex adultabc definition analysisposnetki porno amaterskicom 23sex Map

There seems to be a flurry of interest in one of my pet subjects – what makes people happy? Particularly, whether and how money has to do with this.

Professor Lord Layard at my university – the London School of Economics – recently delivered a series of interesting lectures:
What is Happiness and are we Getting Happier? (answer: no)
What Causes Happiness? Rethinking Public Economics and
What would make a happier society?

In brief 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. He also makes a particular pitch for better care for the depressed, since he notes that in the UK, “only a quarter of people now suffering from depression are being treated, and most of them just get pills from a non-specialist GP. If we really wanted to attack unhappiness, we would totally change all this, and make psychiatry a central, high-prestige part of the NHS.”

He has (rightfully) made a bit of a stir in the Guardian and the Times.

For other perspectives on this interesting subject also see this interview with Ed Deiner in New Scientist and this from a study of lottery winners from the University of Warwick. The U of W professor Andrew Oswald features alongside a Fast Company journalist (who recently wrote a related article) on a one hour long phone-in programme streamed online – The Connection.
I believe that a further examination of the subject will be coming to Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed programme as well, though it doesn’t appear on the website yet.

Just to give you a taster, here is one fascinating (and probably dubious) chart that Prof. Oswald came up with (based I assume on a person with a baseline average US income). It purports to indicate how much additional money you would have to get to compensate you for not having x:

Event Impact ( per Year )
Marriage $100,000
Children $0*
Losing job -$60,000 ( man )
Widowhood -$245,000
Poor health -$180,000 to -$220,000 ( Decline from excellent to good )

-$600,000 to -800,000 ( Decline from excellent to fair )

*”It’s one of the most surprising results,” says Oswald. “There’s no value judgment implied. All it’s saying is that people without children recorded equally high happiness levels as people with children.”

For what it’s worth, I am (normally) pretty happy, but then I have my health and am recently married…

Update (2005): Johan Norberg takes on Layard in an Australian magazine – and I respond.music ringtone nextel allmp3 6102 ringtone nokiaalcatel composer ringtonesringtones lyrics popular all1200 lg ringtone cingular3560 cellular ringtone one nokiaringtones a620free ringtone sprint 1200 lg Map

Joi Ito has written a fascinating paper – Emergent Democracy about edemocracy, weblogs, the power law, trust and “emergence” (self-organizing systems).

It’s fascinating and I think it moves the debate along significantly but I don’t altogether agree with the optimism it expresses about the democratising power of weblogs. I also fear it bites off more than it can chew – bravely, Joi Ito tries to tackle edemocracy, privacy and copyright law in a single paper.

See below for a more in-depth initial analysis. In the spirit of the democratic weblogging phenomenon he describes, I welcome further comments.

I wrote a paper recently on a very similar theme: “Do the new digital media enable wider participation in the public sphere?“. I certainly wish I had read Joi’s paper earlier, but I hope mine still has interestingly contrasting things to say and I would be happy to email the full paper to people who are interested in reading further.

Thanks to Cory @ boingboing for the link
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Azeem Azhar argues the BBC should make (some?) of its content open source. He has taken a certain amount of flak for this from some quarters but I think the basic idea is a sound one. The BBC because of the license fee is able to produce stuff that the open market can’t afford to – particularly online, where at the moment there just doesn’t seem to be enough money to be made to make a business case for public goods like virtual communities.

Historically it hasn’t shared its content or tools but with the growth of open source as an ideology perhaps it is time to think again. We’ve all paid for the material and technology the BBC produces – why not make it more accessible by making it available freely – to both commercial and not-for-profit organizations? Even if another company makes money out of BBC material we haven’t lost anything.

The BBC isn’t that good at commercially exploiting its material anyway – and when it is, it gets accused of stifling the commercial competition – it can’t win whichever way it goes.

There is one risk, however – if commercial companies online can get acres of excellent content free where is the incentive to make content of their own? We already see this on news sites where a lot of the stories are just slightly re-edited AP and Reuters stories. Well, one hopes they will innovate to differentiate themselves from both the BBC and other commercial providers who now also have access to the same content…

I confess that this is potentially a huge subject area full of controversial implications but I hope that it gets taken up and examined seriously at a higher level. Even if it is not broadly applicable for political or institutional reasons, the open source mentality might still be usefully applied in narrow areas.post fuck free moviemovies free erotic length fullpreviews hentai free moviefree hustler moviesfuck movies free longfucking free movies midgetsfree movie adult clipsbackgrounds desktop free moviesexy free movienude free movie starssex after hysterectomy bleedingsex swinger adult videosalfa teensnaked amanda bynes sexvideo minute porn clip 15 freesystem analysis and aircraft trendingadventurous sexamber sexual Map