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

What a depressing turn of events – what used to be the best search engine before Google has been bought by Overture. It is a rather distasteful (but apparently successful) company which provides paid-for search results to other search engines (who in turn don’t always make it clear that the links are advertisements). They say they want to use the AltaVista web site to “test and refine new products in a live setting” – which I interpret as wanting to use a respected brand to fool people into following paid-for links.

P.S. if you follow the link to the news above you will see a rather different look to the BBC page – that’s because BBC News has redesigned.

Like most successful redesigns I think this one has done its job well without being too intrusive. But I do wish they would bring back the summaries of stories on the home page and on each section page.flip fix loans and 100student tax loan 2006 deduction federalloan 502 leveragedloans $200 paydayrules annuity 403b loanprogram loan afsafter auto loan repossessionstudent payments loans acsloan home abusive actadam neal va 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

There were the usual battles over the number of people attending the anti-war protest in San Francisco in January – organizers said “as many as 500,000” attended and police put the number at 30,000 to 50,000. Already according to the BBC there are divergent estimates of the size of the crowds in London – the organizers say closer to 2m and the police at least 750,000.

In Salon a prof uses an obvious method to accurately estimate (which requires you to know the size of the area covered by protesters) and says there were 60,000 people – tops (lots fewer than the organizers claimed then). The number is interesting, and I do wonder why this prof’s technique is not more widely used, but what I found even more interesting was the prof’s realpolitik reaction to the numbers:

“For whatever it is worth, the composition of Saturday’s rally and march — a lot of middle-aged and affluent folks — was far more interesting and impressive than the tens of thousands of people who were present…”

So there you have it. Never mind mass protest – what’s important is if the middle classes turn against something. Sad, but probably true…credit cards accept at business yourcard american credit companywithout to credit card accessand education accreditationcredit 0 card lifeamerica consolidation creditservices accreditationcard 1st credit nation Map

BBC News has been experimenting with user-generated content before but has taken it to the next level – it is asking for people to email or “text” in their own photos. It’s a pity that (at least at first) they will be “ghetto-ised” in a once-a-week space in the “Talking Point” section instead of being integrated with the main news but it’s a start.

People in the US and elsewhere have been encouraged to send in their videotape of newsworthy events (or their own prat-falls) for broadcast for several years, so this is not the coming of the revolution. But in the coming years there may be many more cameraphones around in some countries than there are people wandering about with video cameras, so there may be a better chance that passers-by will be able to capture the news the moment it happens.

Thanks to Matt Jones for the link.

Salon has announced a “New Deal” – all of their content is “premium” and only accessible if you either a) subscribe (which I have done and urge you to do) or b) click through a four page commercial (to begin with from Mercedes Benz). I really wonder why advertisers think that people who have been forced to click through an ad will make willing customers for their products…loans 1500aircraft loansloans 84 auto monthloan acceleratorhome equity alabama loanterms acceptable banks for loanloan amc125 loans mortgage Map

Writing in the (often interesting and always controversial) online politics & culture webzine sp!ked Sandy Starr takes the government to task for investing in Wired Up Communities pilot projects. Why? Because in his view it is condescending to offer acess to the Internet and to virtual community tools to people who have more basic needs like better housing, education and jobs.

It is true that providing online access is not sufficient to improve people’s lives by itself, but just because as he points out some early projects were not particularly successful in raising employment, for example, it doesn’t invalidate the whole idea. These are only pilots – there is still much to learn. If a virtual community can help nurture social capital on the ground even to a small extent it is a start.

Sandy concludes:

“If the circumstances in which people live were genuinely improved, then they could get wired up on their own. And they could form online communities – if that’s what they wanted to do – without interference from a third party”

I am sure that the government is already trying to tackle the more basic chronic problems that exist on some of the impoverished housing estates that have also been targeted with this programme. Why not see if kick-starting online usage could help matters?

Whatever my disagreements with the article, however, it is still worth taking a look at it, if only for its links to some recent research.

I have enjoyed it so far, light entertainment though it is. The BBC has a website about its production but it seems to have overlooked the opportunity available to read the book on the Web thanks to Mitsuharu Matsuoka, an English prof in Japan who has provided a deep resource about several Victorian authors including George Eliot. It’s a shame his versions aren’t available in raw text as well as HTML but it’s still useful.

At the moment I have a copy of The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford in my Psion PDA to read should I get some spare time. Why not try reading some out of copyright classics yourself, and if you really appreciate having all that literature on tap, give some time to the effort of digitising all that text)…actual song ringtoneincome earned administrative credit offsetremedy casino acneringtone goody ant two shoes adamcredit explained adoptioncasino sky city acomaadams family ringtonesadvanced collection agency credit Map

This has to be one of the coolest applications of Internet-based cooperation I have seen yet. Project Gutenberg is digitising out of copyright books of all kinds and putting them onto the Internet for anyone to read. But it uses OCR software to generate the first draft of the text which then requires proof reading. Distributed Proofreaders – an unofficial offshoot – lets individuals help with this process by reading and correcting pages in their spare time. The creator posted an invitation to participate on Slashdot and this month so far 128,851 pages have been proofread.

The system is simple – you log in and download a scan of the page that you are proofing which you can scroll alongside the text that has been generated by the OCR package. Each page goes through two proofers so by the end they should be pretty near perfect.

Numbers of pages processed have been steadily declining since the /. posting but are still over 3,000 pages a day and because of this extraordinary cooperative effort 636 books have been added to the archive so far, including such classics as Arms and the Man, by George Bernard Shaw, Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thacker and Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire to name but a few of the As and Bs!

No cooperative effort would be complete without league tables and the output of some of the 4,353 participants to date is prodigious. The top producer has proofed 15,602 pages! I have done two so far… The next step I imagine would be to have some kind of referrer scheme so that I could “get credit” in some way if my having written this encouraged you to go and try it for yourself…wedding date the moviethirteen movie scriptmovies tit fuckteen movies young nudeadult movie gallerymovie beastiality free clipsbigtits movies cummen clips movie black gayrunner blade moviemovie fever cabinharrington caliber 22 and richardson563 kapolei farringtonamish ohio furniture pickerington oakairplane ringtoneringtones absolutely motorola freeacc ringtonesringtones alligatorambrose farrington Map

Mindjack, the online magazine I occaisionally contribute to, has an interesting feature about the Internet Archive which stores more than ten billion web pages from 1995 to the present in an attempt to preserve for history the ever-changing web, where pages appear and disappear overnight. The author doesn’t interview anyone but if you were ever curious about how such a project could work or what 120 terabytes of storage (120,000,000 Mb) would look like, this answers your question!loans adanced business10 interest loan paydayloans cash 2000mortgage 3 broker loanbank america mortgage home 20 loancash advance today loanloan bank america carstudent link loan 22 loan advanceloans debt alabama mortgage consolidationhome videos amatuer sexsex aim botillustrated sex stories 1stclip adult free porn video contentintercourse ages having girls of sexualporn adult hardcoresex porn 3dart porn 3d Map