The BBC reports a boom in Fake universities on the web. Of course there are lots of fakes which are only meant to deceive employers, but these seems to be designed to try to rip off hapless punters who don’t realise that they aren’t properly academically accredited. Check out Greater Manchester University from the Internet archive – “April 2003”:http://web.archive.org/web/20030404133454/www.gm-edu.co.uk/index.htm – and compare with the “current site”:http://www.gm-edu.co.uk/ for example… Here’s a hint for the University-seeker – if it doesn’t have .ac.uk at the end (in the UK) or .edu at the end (in the US) it isn’t a proper university!

A fascinating news clip from October 1993 that gives what seems now a utopian view of the Internet.

The playwright cum Internet thinker John Allen who was interviewed (where is he now?) suggested that while you’d think people would be really badly behaved thanks to the Internet’s anonymity they are actually very polite because they feel they are part of a global community. Given the relatively small number of usenet users at the time and their high level of education (mostly scientists at that time I would imagine) it isn’t that surprising. Then they let AOLers in! And as for anonymity it was pretty illusory then and is even more so now…

And to think I had been “online for nine years”:http://www.davidbrake.org/nethist.htm when that programme was broadcast… Come to think of it I’m in my twentieth year online – that’s a pretty scary figure!

Thanks to “Boing Boing”:http://boingboing.net/2004_01_01_archive.html#107332806643610998 for the link.

More evidence (if more were needed) that search engines like Google have a certain amount of unaccountable power. A satirical site that (among many other things) passed on instructions on how to make a search for ‘miserable failure’ come back with a George Bush page found that “it had been banned from using Google to advertise”:http://www.blather.net/shitegeist/000169.htm. It turns out you can’t place ads using Google for a site criticising an individual unless the site is clearly labelled “satire”. Of course the site still turns up in Google searches…

It’s possible that it wasn’t so much the anti-Bush sentiment that annoyed Google’s ad staff as the encitement to ‘game’ Google.

At least according to an article in The Economist which discusses how it still turns up in some surprising places today. I spent three years studying Latin in school and have found it surprisingly useful.

I recently heard this lot in the Royal Festival Hall and you’ve never heard “Kate Bush”:http://gaffa.org/’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ until you’ve heard it played by The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain – take my word for it!

“John Weeks”:http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/ob/weeks/ at Insead did an interesting bit of ethographic research entitled “Unpopular Culture: The Ritual of Complaint in a British Bank”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226878120/qid=1070905181/ and was interviewed about this in the ever-interesting “Thinking Allowed”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed_20031126.shtml programme on the BBC. One of the first things he said was that he became interested as a grad student when he heard about the MIT project Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century and contacted one of its sponsors. Well a little Googling later wouldn’t you know – there was only one British bank who sponsored that particular project – NatWest.

He said (paraphrasing) he would come back from a hard day’s ethnographic observation and talk to colleagues about his study of organizational learning and have something like this exchange:
“What do you see?”
“I don’t think I’m seeing anything!”
“Well what are they doing then?”
So I’d describe what they were doing (complaining mostly) and they’d say
“Well that’s what they’re doing – that’s what you need to write about!”

A succinct description of the purpose of good ethnographic research!

Visual Poetry is an entertaining use of Google’s image search engine. Enter a phrase and it will return pictures based on what Google associates with each word. Try it for yourself, and when you’re done why not try “a musical equivalent”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_humour_entertainment.html#000939 I found earlier?

!http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~u1gs/404.jpg!
(By “Ahkron”:http://www.b3ta.com/board/profile.php?id=10391)
“b3ta”:http://www.b3ta.com/ (an informal art/web design group) does periodic ‘challenges’ on a theme. On the week of 14-21st November they tackled The Victorian Internet and the results (33 pages of them!) are highly entertaining. Note: as is frequently the case with B3TA several of the pictures contain sexual innuendo of one kind or another.
Thanks to “Azeem”:http://www.20six.co.uk/weblogEntry/111l41fe6cld2 for the link.

“Here”:http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/p1/src/sing/default.asp?key=w4hXB8a6 is a treat for you (if your computer has speakers). Some genius in “Sveriges Radio”:http://www.sr.se ‘radio for art, culture and ideas’ has dreamed up Let them sing it for you. It’s harder to explain than it is to experience so try it yourself and send the results to a friend!

Back in June, the Onion wrote about “social capital”:https://blog.org/archives/000799.html – now it is examining the social consequences of weblogging.