Alas this offer is limited (though there is no need to commit yourselves) and it only works if you either buy a voice over IP telephone or download the appropriate (free) software and configure it (something which I have found less than straightforward to do in the past). Nonetheless, this is clearly the future of telephony.

By coincidence, the “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/18/technology/circuits/18nett.html?ex=1387083600&en=b28df722ab69712f&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND has just reviewed “Vonage”:http://www.vonage.com/’s Internet to telephone service and says it works just fine. I tried the free Free World Dialup service with my parents and it kind of worked as well but my voice was a little broken up (probably because of my bad habit of running 17 programs at once on my PC.)

I hope France gets connected in a similar way one day – we only pay between 1 and 4p a minute (2 to 7 cents) to call my wife’s friends and family but it still adds up!

See “Free World Dialup”:http://www.freeworldialup.com/ for details.

A new neighborhood aimed at young middle class folk in Orange County seem to have benefited from a neighborhood intranet [article in LA Times – requires registration]. It brought people together by giving them an easy way to find common interests and solve common problems (like babysitting) without having to go knock on people’s doors. What is not clear is how beneficial such an intranet would be to existing neighborhoods and to neighborhoods with a mix of rich and poor in the same area.

Thanks to “Keith Hampton”:http://www.mysocialnetwork.net/index2.php?p=37&c=1 for the link (he did an influential academic study of the building of social capital in an earlier experiment outside of Toronto).

Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age – the site speaks for itself. It’s not quite as humbling as it might be because by default it only includes people’s accomplishments at the same stage in their life, not all the things better people accomplished when they were even younger than you are.

Thanks to “Follow Me Here”:http://world.std.com/home/dacha/WWW/emg/public_html/2003_11_01_blog_archive.html#106859717029946217 for the link

In a recent article in the “Times Higher Education Supplement”:http://www.thes.co.uk/ (subscription only), “Alan Ryan”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ajryan/ mentioned in passing that UK funding of universities is ‘not much above half the proportion of GDP per capita spent in the US’. Does anyone know the correct figures? (And does anyone know how Canada compares?) It’s a pretty appalling state of affairs if true – particularly since I intend to become a career academic!

“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

A rather densely-argued “academic paper”:http://www.brookings.org/dybdocroot/gs/events/paysatisfaction.pdf presented at the Brookings Institute has been summarised by “ScienceDaily”:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/10/031003060615.htm – ‘our rank position within an organisation has a bigger effect on our happiness within that job than the happiness generated by our actual level of pay’.

Pretty uncontroversial I would have thought but this suggests that, for example, it might be better for a country to risk a lower standard of living if it could also produce a more equal standard.

Irwin M. Stelzer in a recent article about European vs American attitudes to income equality (referenced in “last week’s blog posting”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_europe.html#000892) casts doubt on an earlier study that showed this effect – I hope this latest, more large scale study will put an end to remaining doubts on this point.

When I “posted earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_online_media.html#000877 about The New Standard I forgot to mention another interesting example of alternative media different both from the IndyMedia and The New Standard styles. OhMyNews, a newspaper from South Korea, has thousands of “citizen reporters”. These get paid and go through the conventional editorial process but the pay is less than for conventional journalism and no credentials are necessary. This would seem to allow for the kind of “native reporting” (reporting by “ordinary people” and those directly involved in news events) that Chris Atton and others find a particularly appealling function of the new alternative media while preserving some of the quality standards that ensure good material is read and bad material hidden or discarded.

Significantly, OhMyNews seems to be successful as a business and a social phenomenon, though this may be in part simply because South Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world.

The “Internet Archive”:http://www.archive.org/ which has an index of 11bn web pages – snapshots of the web at various stages of its development – now has a “search engine”:http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=8569 covering at least part of the archive. So you don’t need to know the precise address of the web page you had given up for lost (though that function still works). And you can see how the web saw things over time – you can see when a topic became “hot” for example – it provides supplementary graphs.

Thanks to “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_archive.html#106280030381534395 for the link

Haven’t you always wondered where IKEA gets the names for its stuff? This link gives you general categories – you’ll have to go “here”:http://www.freedict.com/onldict/ to find a Swedish-English dictionary to get specific item names.

Thanks to “boingboing”:http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_archive.html#106262520022356136 for the linkmovies xxx filipinomovies xxx homepagemovie the xxx facialsvideos xxx and moviesmovies youngmovies sex 3d40 movie virgin year old quotesadult guide movie Mapami james sex02 analyzer and sensor temperaturesex tgp alienallison porn mackporn websites masochist adultstories 3some sexanon and al alateengalleries nude teens all Map

Now that my new book “Managing E-mail”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1405300264/qid%253D1044801476/davidbrakeswe-21 is out I shall be monitoring its sales progress with interest. I looked around for sites that could help me do this and found three – “Jungle Scan”:http://www.junglescan.com/ lets you keep track of your book’s Amazon rank, “GoogleAlert”:http://www.googlealert.com/ emails you at regular intervals to tell you what has changed in a Google search for a given term (like a book title) so you can see newly-indexed pages about your subject (useful for lots of things besides books!). The third service from “Books & Writers”:http://www.booksandwriters.com/ lets you track both Amazon and Barnes and Noble’s sales ranking but the very week I started to use it they announced they are introducing a charge.