If all goes according to plan, in three years or so I will likely become a lecturer in that much-maligned subject, media studies. An article in The Times does not fill me with hope of bringing enlightenment to keen young minds, however. A correspondent who taught a journalism course at Thames Valley University (an ex-polytechnic, I believe) found standards not high:

Of nearly 60 students, only a couple had ever picked up a broadsheet. A handful occasionally bought the Daily Mail and Evening Standard. About a dozen read The Sun and Daily Mirror — and the news pages were invariably skipped through in favour of showbiz and sport. The most popular daily newspaper turned out to be the freebie Metro…

…One student thought that Scotland’s biggest city was Newcastle. Another reckoned Russia’s currency is the dollar.

There is a small upside, however – “Over the past six years, the number of British students accepted on to media studies university courses has risen by nearly 50 per cent”. So there should be plenty of room for advancement!

Seyla Benhabib: Democracy and Difference

This collection of academic essays contains short essays by all of the the main people I have come across who problematise deliberative democracy including Habermas, Young, Mouffe, Phillips and Mansbridge and an excellent defense of deliberative democracy from Benhabib herself (“Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy”).

… my parents write to tell me they watched something about it on TV. Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour just did a segment about weblogs – my mother told me about it (thanks, Mum!) and you can watch it, listen to it or just read the transcript. Not full of new insight but a nice little overview of the subject (including a short analysis of how weblogs may have knocked Trent Lott out of power). It also rehashed the old argument, “are weblogs journalism?” And it did reveal to me something I didn’t realise – MSNBC has editors who copy-edit what their webloggers write?movie teen chris another not evansmovies lesbian dirtymovies free easyboyfriendmovies sucking 69 freebestiality free movieblack pussy free moviesdownloadable movies sex freefuck movie free clips Map

The Toronto Star reports that one of the best magazines about the Internet, culture and society has published its last issue after ten years. It never had Wired‘s lavish resources, but it avoided or at least toned down the US magazine’s obnoxious techno-boosterism. Fortunately, it seems that the magazine’s website continues – at least for the moment.

Let’s hope that Salon, at least remains alive. It looks as if they will need to double their subscription revenue to do so, so please, subscribe now – I have.afterbankruptcy loansloan amortization payment calculatorservice acs loanloan unsecured $25,000loan 5000 signaturebuilding farmers 5$ association mechanics loanloans approval on payday garaunteed 100ace loan fundingabbey national loan100 personal loan

Azeem Azhar argues the BBC should make (some?) of its content open source. He has taken a certain amount of flak for this from some quarters but I think the basic idea is a sound one. The BBC because of the license fee is able to produce stuff that the open market can’t afford to – particularly online, where at the moment there just doesn’t seem to be enough money to be made to make a business case for public goods like virtual communities.

Historically it hasn’t shared its content or tools but with the growth of open source as an ideology perhaps it is time to think again. We’ve all paid for the material and technology the BBC produces – why not make it more accessible by making it available freely – to both commercial and not-for-profit organizations? Even if another company makes money out of BBC material we haven’t lost anything.

The BBC isn’t that good at commercially exploiting its material anyway – and when it is, it gets accused of stifling the commercial competition – it can’t win whichever way it goes.

There is one risk, however – if commercial companies online can get acres of excellent content free where is the incentive to make content of their own? We already see this on news sites where a lot of the stories are just slightly re-edited AP and Reuters stories. Well, one hopes they will innovate to differentiate themselves from both the BBC and other commercial providers who now also have access to the same content…

I confess that this is potentially a huge subject area full of controversial implications but I hope that it gets taken up and examined seriously at a higher level. Even if it is not broadly applicable for political or institutional reasons, the open source mentality might still be usefully applied in narrow areas.post fuck free moviemovies free erotic length fullpreviews hentai free moviefree hustler moviesfuck movies free longfucking free movies midgetsfree movie adult clipsbackgrounds desktop free moviesexy free movienude free movie starssex after hysterectomy bleedingsex swinger adult videosalfa teensnaked amanda bynes sexvideo minute porn clip 15 freesystem analysis and aircraft trendingadventurous sexamber sexual Map

J Bradford DeLong in the latest Wired magazine tries to shame more people into helping existing projects to digitise books and encourage governments to do the same. Oh, and let’s not forget to start archiving more out of copyright audio and pictures too…movie download pornporn stars moviemovies pretty lesbianplayer pc for quicktime movierare vampire moviesmovies real sexron movie clips jeremyunderwear sapphic moviesshemale movie hardcoreslut movie

This is the area I am studying at the moment so I found this special report interesting.

It is a little lightweight but cites some useful books. It maintains among other things that the Internet may not after all be a big threat to authoritarian regimes and that it may lead to more direct democracy in democratic countries. It also goes over familiar ground on the issue of privacy.

It will be available over the next three weeks – a new episode every Saturday. Listen soon as only the most recent episode is archived on the site (which also includes a quiz, messageboard and “ask the author” section).

(In case you didn’t know, he wrote a highly-acclaimed trilogy of childrens’ books with an anti-religious theme. Sort of an anti-Narnia series. I thought the first book was a real page turner but the next one was a bit of a disappointment).

P.S. (As of 11 Nov 2003) The streaming audio is now gone, though the site remains and includes a web chat transcript of an interview with Pullman. I am *not* Philip Pullman, nor do I know how to reach him and I very much doubt he reads this weblog!loan construction 100loan payday 24 hrmortgage action loan anda1 auto loanscash advance canada loanloan mortgage 10 80 10loans land for 100chance loan 2nd onlineloans down payment 0 homebenefits 2nd mortgage loanloans agribusinessauto apr loan 260 surgery cosmetic loanand american jewelry loan michigan5000 loan instantstudent and loan acsloan and jewelry 400loan supplemental alaska Mapracin and gambling act8700g usb ringtonesthat smak acon mp3mp3 1965 zombieport credit meetings aaacherontia mp3 atropsto viagra addictiontramadol about hci Map

Learn more about the thoughts of the man who wrote Neuromancer and several other classics of the cyberpunk genre. The weblog is a new addition to theWilliamGibsonBooks site.

Thanks to BoingBoing and Stefan for the heads up.

What Would Samuel Pepys Do [in the 21st century]? Keep a weblog, of course. Phil Gyford, who I know slightly, will be publishing Samuel Pepys’ diary online as a weblog a day at a time, complete with links to more in-depth historical information.

Pepys, probably the world’s best-known diarist, wrote about his life in 17th Century London – Phil provides more detail here.

If you prefer the text in an easy-to-carry-around form or want to “cheat” and read ahead, Project Gutenberg has the whole text for you to download thanks to Dr David Widger, who has also added a lot of other etexts to the public realm.

Later Phil has been interviewed by the BBC and a passing reader of the story pointed out that Pepys would not have kept a public weblog – his diary was in a very hard-to-decipher shorthand.