We badly need more scholarship about weblogs outside of the Anglo-saxon world, and Performance in Everyday Life and the Rediscovery of the ‘Self’ in Iranian Weblogs provides an interesting point of view, using Goffman. The author suggests weblogging is valuable for Iranian women who lack other ways of expressing repressed identities. Some of the arguments sound quite similar to those advanced in McKenna, K. Y. A. and J. A. Bargh (1998) “Coming out in the Age of the Internet”:http://homepages.nyu.edu/~kym1/coming_out.pdf, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75 pp. 681-694.

I always assumed that the large amount of news I receive about battles with the US Congress about various communications policy issues (copyright, privacy, digital divide issues) was simply due to my own interest in these subjects influencing my choice of online media sources. But it seems according to a report by Syracuse University’s “Convergence Center”:http://www.digital-convergence.org/,

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, communications and information policy (CIP) replaced the environment as the policy domain of greatest congressional activity, as measured by number of hearings. From 1997 to 2001, the annual number of congressional hearings devoted to CIP surged to approximately 100 per year.

Tom Steinberg pointed out a while ago that the “Daily Mail”:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ – arguably the most dangerous newspaper in Britain – now has “message boards”:http://chat.dailymail.co.uk/dailymail/index.jsp. A chance to get a peek into the heads of their europhobic, often paranoid readership? Or perhaps an opportunity to change a few minds?

P.S. To get an idea of the Mail’s point of view on the world and get a good laugh at the same time try the (satirical) Daily Mail headline generator.

In the interests of better understanding of Arabs by the West, the (American) “National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education”:http://www.nitle.org/ has produced a useful overview of Arab culture – the Arab World Project. Of course I can’t say much about its accuracy but it seems fair. I would be interested to hear if anyone who knows Arab culture well finds the site lacking.

We Are What We Do is a book with accompanying website that offers 50 suggestions for small things you could do to help others and/or the planet in your daily life.

Something a little odder but in the same vein is “Join Me”:http://www.join-me.co.uk/ – an international movement started by a British comedian, Danny Wallace, who simply asks its members to do RAoKs (random acts of kindness) on Fridays (hence Good Fridays). You can buy his book and listen to a radio interview made with Danny in Wisconsin (of all places!) “here”:http://wpr.org/book/040328a.html. What I find truly heartening is that thanks to something Danny started as a joke over 100,000 good deeds have been inspired. I must get around to posting him a photo and signing up…

Search Engine Watch publishes a good roundup of the latest coverage of flaws and bias in the way Google News’s automated news gathering works in practice. They link to a New Scientist article revealing “Google China has suppressed links to ‘forbidden’ news”:http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996426 on the grounds that:

“In order to create the best possible news search experience for our users, we sometimes decide not to include some sites, for a variety of reasons. These sources were not included because their sites are inaccessible.”

. It’s an explanation but not really a justification…

The world’s second largest ISP, Savvis (who?) has at length agreed to kick 148 of the worst spammers off its network. It was initially reluctant to do so (one source claimed it earned $2m a month from hosting them) but a whistleblower went to the “Spamhaus”:http://www.spamhaus.org/ anti-spam organization who threatened to block access to all email from Savvis for everyone using their spam blocking software. Frankly I find this kind of quasi-blackmail morally dubious at best, but it does seem to have worked.

The BBC report ends, ‘as they are thrown off one service provider, there is always another one ready to take them on for the lucrative business they bring,’ but I am more sanguine. If spammers could be thrown off all the large, reputable ISPs and driven onto fringe players, they would be easier to find and their cost base would rise.

P.S. Interestingly (to me, anyway) Savvis inherited many of these offenders from its purchase of Cable and Wireless, a UK company I used to work for (on the digital TV not the ISP side).

The International Herald Tribune writes up “the poll results”:http://www.iht.com/articles/537982.html and I agree entirely with the comment of Ghost in the Machine – “Undecided voters out there, you know how you can “Ask the Audience” on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire when you’re stumped? Consider it like that.”

In “California”:http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/9588858.htm?1c a man attached a cellphone to an ex-girlfriend’s car and used it to stalk her (The woman eventually caught the guy under her car attempting to change the cellphone’s battery). Of course it is much easier to simply track your target’s cellphone – something that is apparently being done more and more frequently in Korea. I think all services should require the tracked phone user to acknowledge each tracking attempt.

See “this item from my archive”:https://blog.org/archives/000712.html for info on UK cellphone tracking services.

Following on from my brief mention of “blogs from US troops in Iraq”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_world.html#001217 I have discovered a collection of “pictures taken by troops in Iraq with picturephones”:http://www.yafro.com/frontline.php – you need to click on the ‘comments’ part or mouse over the photos to see the context they give them.

Incidentally (and probably not coincidentally) the blogger who was interviewed on NPR I mentioned earlier has now had to pull his weblog down.

Thanks to Torill Mortensen for the link