I just discovered that Amazon US is selling my book Dealing with E-Mail for 60% off – it’s $2.80! At that price you’d be crazy not to buy a copy. Here’s an overview of the book:

This book was designed to be a simple non-technical guide, inexpensive enough to give to everyone in an organization, that would nonetheless introduce workers at all levels to many of the key techniques they can use to manage email more effectively and the key security and legal issues they may face. These include:

• Filing your email automatically
• Managing email address books
• Making sure your address does not get picked up by spammers and…
• Removing spam automatically when it arrives.
• Dealing with email-borne viruses
• Writing clear and culturally-sensitive email
• Preventing confidential email from being intercepted and read and
• Being aware of legal issues that may arise including sexual harassment, commercial confidentiality and breach of contract.

The book has been written to be broadly applicable to users of any e-mail system and from any country.

As organizations increasingly use email as a business-critical tool they will become vulnerable to email-borne viruses, spam, legal problems and un-manageable volumes of unnecessary messages unless they ensure that everyone – not just the IT staff and HR managers – learns some of the basic techniques outlined in this book.

There is also a “companion site”:http://www.well.com/user/derb/dealingwithemail/ for the book containing more detailed information and up to date tips.

“Giles Turnbull”:http://www.gorjuss.com/index.html asked readers of a mailing list he runs “why they gave up blogging”:http://www.gorjuss.com/luvly/20040317-blogless.html. The answers were interesting, particularly if you look at them from a Bourdieusian perspective. Reading between the lines, several of them started weblogging because it was ‘cool’ then gave up when it seemed like everyone else was doing it and it therefore became uncool. Or as one respondent said, “General sense of despair with: a) myself, b) the internet population in general.” I wonder whether the generally more snarky and amusing character of the comments he received were anything to do with his respondents being more likely to be British? Hmm…

Thanks to the ever-interesting Danah Boyd for the link

Over at the academic group weblog Crooked Timber, they are asking their readers why do you run a weblog? This just happens to be one of my own PhD research questions! I intend to look at a much broader field than simply academic blogging activity but I still find the answers interesting – particularly as I try to think how I might fit such responses into my own (Bourdieusian) theoretical framework.

By a bizarre coincidence a friend of mine posted “a very similar question”:http://www.electricpenguin.com/blatherings/archives/002289.html at the same time. A “paper on the subject”:http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jpd/classes/ics234cw04/nardi.pdf [PDF] has been submitted to Communications of the ACM.

What about you? Why do you have a blog or personal home page (if you do)? If you had one once and abandoned it was there something you were hoping would happen that didn’t? Please use the comment feature to answer – I would be interested to know.

I’m coming to this one a little late – Wired reports that according to HP researchers, the most popular weblogs aren’t necessarily the ones that come up with the interesting new ideas first:

topics would often appear on a few relatively unknown blogs days before they appeared on more popular sites.

and often bloggers fail to mention the sources of their ideas:

when an idea infected at least 10 blogs, 70 percent of the blogs did not provide links back to another blog that had previously mentioned the idea.

You can try out the software that they used to do the research – the “Blog Epidemic Analyzer”:http://www-idl.hpl.hp.com/blogstuff/index.html

If you want to read their (pre-print) paper about their results it’s “here”:http://www.hpl.hp.com/shl/papers/blogs/blogspace-draft.pdf and there’s a thread about their work on “Slashdot”:http://slashdot.org/articles/04/03/05/152244.shtml though before you read it you should probably read the researcher’s own “comment”:http://www-idl.hpl.hp.com/blogstuff/faq.html#10 on that thread.

According to the upbeat article “Smile, these are good times. Truly” in the latest issue of the Economist, the drop in living standards for median income Americans since the 1970s which I have oft cited as proof that the US system doesn’t work for most people is due to the number of immigrants.

Strip out immigrants, and the picture of stagnant median incomes vanishes. Indeed, for the nine-tenths of the population that is native-born, middle-income trends continue their improvement of the 1950s and 1960s. For these people, inequality is not rising, but falling… [moreover] A quarter-century ago a typical household had three members. Today, it has just 2.6 members. Simply by this effect, median households have seen their real incomes rise by a half.

Before I start looking on the sunny side, however, I would like to take a closer look at The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook which The Economist cites and see in more detail how he constructs his figures – the devil, as usual, is in the details. I hope that some economists will be by shortly to help with this as well.

In any case perhaps the more worrying economic statistic I have come across is about the decreasing chances of improving your lot in the supposedly meritocratic US. As I “blogged earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_us.html#000975 sons from the bottom three-quarters of the socioeconomic scale were significantly less likely to move up in the 1990s than in the 1970s.

The Guardian Online produced a report on “Nokia’s Lifeblog software”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1166303,00.html for turning the contents of your picturephone into a life journal. BBC followed up with an article with a few more details – most interestingly the clever idea that the software would automatically match up the pictures you took with your phone and the location where they were taken using the automatic phone location service that mobile phone operators provide. So as well as relying on labels you add yourself you can query your lifeblog software and find all the pictures you took in central London last week.

Before you get too excited it isn’t due to be delivered before the end of June and the first version (“blog” name notwithstanding) does not connect to the Internet but this still represents the first appearance of the next generation of ‘life capture’ software on the mass market.

This site puts London’s subway system into perspective. Toronto and San Francisco are not there yet but are promised shortly.

Thanks to Harald for the link.

The UN has released a report into the negative environmental impacts of computers. Much of the BBC’s summary is familiar (at least to me) but here’s something I didn’t think of – energy-saving devices which automatically switch devices into standby mode can be deceptive as they are frequently ‘woken up’ by traffic from servers if they are connected to a network.

More information on the report is available from the UN University’s “Zero Emissions Forum”:http://www.unu.edu/zef/publications.html. Also see an “this entry about the negative impacts of computing”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_negative_uses_of_technology.html#001000 and “this posting about an earlier report”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_interesting_facts.html#000301

… on Akiyoshi’s illusion pages – I always find this sort of thing fascinating for some reason.

Thanks to “Wired”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/ for the link

I didn’t realise that as well as speaking differently, people with different languages um… pause differently too. According to the New York Times,

The French say something that sounds like euh, and Hebrew speakers say ehhh. Serbs and Croats say ovay, and the Turks say mmmmm. The Japanese say eto (eh-to) and ano (ah-no), the Spanish este, and Mandarin speakers neige (NEH-guh) and jiege (JEH-guh). In Dutch and German you can say uh, um, mmm. In Swedish it’s eh, ah, aah, m, mm, hmm, ooh, a and oh; in Norwegian, e, eh, m and hm.

For what it’s worth my totally bilingual wife sometimes uses the ‘French um’ when speaking English and vice versa…