Good to have more hard figures and particularly useful to have demographics. It’s interesting that the writer at Cyberatlas spins the story to make them seem more democratic. If it was me I would have used the same figures but said something like, “despite receiving quite a bit of media attention, only two percent of people who are online have created weblogs [does this include ones that are no longer active?] and these are heavily skewed towards a wealthy demographic – almost half have a household income greater than $60,000. According to this census report US median income in 2001 was $42,000.”

I was surprised that only 4 percent of the Internet-using population reads blogs, but if you consider that they tend to contain 1) personal stuff aimed at a circle of friends and family 2) political stuff at a level of detail most people don’t need or 3) technology-related stuff at a level of detail most people don’t need it becomes less surprising.

OK it’s a bit obvious when you think about it but this article in The New Yorker was nonetheless insightful in the way it presented the case clearly. Economists may be starting to worry about deflation while many bills just seem to keep going up. Why? Because some parts of the economy are inherently more resistant to productivity improvement than others – labour intensive ones like plumbing or education. As other things get cheaper, these get relatively more and more expensive.

What made me think was Surowiecki’s observation that, “Cost disease isn’t anyone’s fault. (That’s why it’s called a disease.) It’s just endemic to businesses that are labor-intensive. Colleges, for example, could do many things more efficiently, but, since their biggest expense is labor, the only way to reduce costs is either to increase the number of students each professor teaches or to outsource the work to poorly paid adjuncts.” And furthermore:

“Some of the most important services that the government provides—education, law enforcement, health care—are the hardest to make more productive. To keep providing the same quality of services, then, government has to get more expensive. People pay more in taxes and don’t get more in return, which makes it look as though the public sector, at least compared with the private sector, is inept and bloated. But it could be that the government is merely stuck in inherently low-productivity-growth businesses. It’s not inefficient. It’s just got a bad case of Baumol’s.”

Test.org pointed me to this entertaining collection of turn of the 20th C postcards predicting what life would be like in a hundred years. I’m still waiting increasingly impatiently for my personal flying machine (and it doesn’t seem to have come much closer!)advance cash illinois loanloan 2007 home maximum valoan advance feefees advance loanfast cash loan america secured inproperty 100 loan for commercialadvance no credit cash check loanloans realestate aaainterest loans only of advantagescash fast loan online advance

Dr Duncan Watts, the principal investigator for the Small World Research Project (looking at online social networks) was interviewed by Odyssey on WBEZ back in February as part of an hour-long program about network theory. He said in the course of conversation that his results so far suggest that contrary to popular belief (and my own preconceptions), social networks (at least in his experiment) are pretty egalitarian – the most well-connected people are not as important to the overall network as he thought. I don’t see any links to published results on the Small World site, though – has anyone heard any more about what he found?

Researchers have found that good information doesn’t always drown out bad in recommender systems. In fact, the research done by the creators of movielens shows if you give (for example) a movie a higher rating than it “deserves” other people will also be inclined to give it a high rating. So “innocent” people will unconsciously “play along” with people trying to influence the system and reinforce their dirty work. Unfortunately for the creators of recommender systems, users will notice when overall a recommender system’s results are poor. The writers of the academic paper (available in full here) suggest one way to avoid this problem would be to hide the rating of a film from users who want to rate it themselves so they aren’t influenced by others’ ratings.

I didn’t find collaborative filtering useful when I did use it, but that was nearly ten years ago when the MIT Media Lab was playing about with what became Firefly. Perhaps if my DVD Recorder was smarter and networked with other such recorders to compare my TV/film preferences with others’ without my needing to enter the details by hand it would have enough data to be able to adequately predict my viewing tastes. Personally I suspect mine are atypical enough that it would be difficult to predict what I would like mathematically. Then again, most people probably think they are unique in this respect!

I’m coming a little late to this – it’s something I meant to blog a while back but haven’t had time to. Salon writer Farhad Manjoo has written an excellent piece on interactive television spyware – how cable companies and makers of “personal video recorders” like TiVo have the potential to track every programme you watch (and every interactive TV feature like gambling or gaming you use) and send that information to advertisers so they can target you more accurately. He also deals in passing with the debate over whether future PVRs will allow you to skip “regular” ads or whether they will actually add new “interactive” ads.

David Burke of White Dot – one of the only people I know who appears to be following this issue regularly – points out the risk that, for example, political advertisers could use this technology in future to tailor their messages more precisely at each viewer, pandering to their prejudices. I am more worried that if advertisers know down to the individual home whether an ad is likely to work, they will eventually want to be able to heavily subsidise packages of cable programming aimed at the rich and will want to yank their ads (and their subsidy) for poorer households, so multi-channel TV will be even more expensive for those least able to afford it.

P.S. Sorry this is a Salon Premium article and there is no longer a “see for free” option, but a year’s subscription is just $18.50 if you accept ads. Moreover, Salon allows existing subscribers to give gift subscriptions to people for $20 (without ads) or $12.40 (with ads). If you would like me to sign you up just email me a note and credit my paypal account using the link on the R accordingly (no I won’t get any commission on that – Salon seems to have stopped its affiliate programme – but if you would like to slip me a few extra $ because you like my content, please do!).8100 lg mp3 ringtoneindian alcatel ringtone8250 ringtonessamsung ringtones a800ringtone nokia 62253155i free nokia ringtoneamerican missed ringtone one callringtone 3560 nokia 3520 Map

Still going strong after 20 years. I didn’t realise that while it has declined somewhat it is still quite healthy – “At its peak, around 1997, there were more than six million terminals in use, and payments worth about $750m passed through the system – roughly equivalent in size to the entire US e-commerce market at the time…” and 4.8m of the original terminals are still in use generating $500m of business. But that doesn’t count the 4m people who have downloaded an Internet-based emulator. And it has a future as well – by the end of the year Minitel will run on GPRS-enabled mobile phones. Ironically its low tech interface will make it ideal for phones and (though they don’t mention it) digital television.

It still doesn’t work too well. “Only 7.4 percent of online consumers who noticed these systems said they often purchased recommended products, according to a report issued in February by Forrester Research. About 22 percent said they found the recommendations valuable, and about 42 percent said the products listed were not of interest.”

I posted about a Wall Street Journal article on this subject earlier which pointed out such problems can be not just annoying but dangerous.movies view pay permovies pedomovie the poison ivyreality movie teensample shemale moviemovies sapphic extasysapphic incest moviesmovie shemale trailersstreet racing movieshardcore teen movies freeringtone 2.99index ringtones polyphonic 3510iringtone blackberry download 7100itaste a of ringtones honey6256i ringtone nokiaa680 ringtonesmyx free ringtone sagem 2nokia free 3570 ringtone cricket Map

Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas: Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule

This set of studies seems to indicate that Internet access can be successfully controlled for state ends in practice. How? Not mainly through technological means but through intimidation. You don’t need to monitor everyone’s email and web access to frighten people – you just need a society where people censor themselves and are aware that at any time their Internet access could be being monitored. Indeed by making state government more effective and efficient it may even strengthen authoritarian regimes.


The book mentions an interesting resource – the Global Internet Liberty Campaign – “a free-lance journalist is traveling the world to report on the methods of Internet censorship used in the various countries and the ways possible to gain access to sites that are censored by governments and other groups”.home accredited loansunion acu creditcollege online accreditedamerican credit expresscredit alpena alconaaea credit unioncare accreditation ambulatory for association healthassociation american laboratory for accreditation Map

The Centre for Technology and Democracy has tried to determine the things that get you spammed the most. Their report seems to indicate posting your email address up on public websites is the worst thing you can do, but there are lots of other ways spammers can get at you. Also, they found that contrary to popular believe unsubscribing to a spammer’s email does not seem to increase your likelihood of receiving further spam.

There are lots more useful details in the report but if you don’t want to read the whole thing, the BBC offers a quick summary.