If the “description of Cybergypsies I gave earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_arts_reviews.html#001171 piqued your curiosity there is an interview with the author of Cybergypsies, Indra Singha on “The Well”:http://well.com in a part of it that is open to the public – “inkwell”:http://engaged.well.com/engaged.cgi?c=inkwell.vue where lots of author interviews take place (his is number 52). It turns out that the promotional website he created for the book has been (incompletely) captured via the “Internet Archive”:http://web.archive.org/web/20010610025144/www.wiseserpent.com/cybergypsies/menu.html and what do you know – the multi-user dungeon he spent much of his time in is “still running”:http://games.world.co.uk/shades/!

Danah Boyd says she’ll double her contribution to Kerry if ten readers contribute by tomorrow.

I’m not crazy about Kerry (as a “recent posting”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_us.html#001180 might indicate) but I don’t think he’d be a bad president and I think it would be catastrophic for the US and for the world if we had another four years of Bush in the White House.

I am one of those who has decided to donate as a result (and I already donated once earlier). If Bush does get in I don’t want to have thought I could have done more to stop him. It depresses me that my most important vote is the one I make with my wallet but that seems to be the way American politics has gone.

If you are at all motivated to join me please do so and let her know. And do it soon – tomorrow is the last day you can donate!

P.S. It’s annoying that the Kerry site seems to believe you have to be a US resident to donate (the online form insists on a zip code). Don’t they want my money? There is no legal reason I can’t donate as far as I know (I am an American citizen, though I don’t boast much about it these days).

The Cybergypsies : A True Tale of Lust, War, & Betrayal on the Electronic Frontier by Indra Sinha is yet another book about unusual experiences online but with several key points of interest. Many such books were written by over-excited US journalists who just dipped into that world. This was written by someone based in the UK who had a life outside the online world (a responsible job, wife and child) but who got very involved in online communities. It’s also of some historical interest because he was writing about the pre-Internet online world where being online 24/7 wouldn’t just cost you time but a considerable amount of money.

He gives an interesting, colourful and personal glimpse of what life online was like back then for some but though the book appears to be an autobiography it is written in a deliberately poetical/impressionistic style leaving the reader uncertain how much of what they’ve read they can believe.

If there is someone out there reading this blog who was around online in the UK back in the early to mid 90s, hung out on Shades or the Vortex, met ‘bear’ there and has read the book I would be interested in your comments (public or private). How was he seen in those communities after he published? I have a feeling I have met one or two people who were there…

Thanks in part to the lobbying of the “Newington Green Action Group”:http://ngag.org/ which I helped to run for several years the council has given my local park and its surroundings a “substantial facelift”:http://community.webshots.com/album/164183779IQuNzm.

In the seven years since I moved in the neighborhood has already changed significantly – we have gained a “genuine French patisserie”:http://www.n16mag.com/issue20/p13i20.htm, a several restaurants and a “vegetarian deli”:http://www.myhackney.co.uk/hackney/restaurants-newingtongreen.htm) among other amenities. With the boost that the newly laid-out park will give, I hope what was once a neglected traffic roundabout will become the neighborhood focus it always should have been and the benefits will be felt by all who live here for generations to come.

As a Canadian (generally big-housian) living in the UK (generally small-housian) I have been struck by the different attitudes toward space in different countries and (I believe) through that towards possessions. “Donella H. Meadows”:http://www.pcdf.org/meadows/ (now deceased) of the “Sustainability Institute”:http://www.sustainer.org/ wrote about a calendar showing the “lifestyles of people around the world”:http://www.menzelphoto.com/gallery/mw.htm including their homes. She notes that on the calendar the number of family members living together varies between 4 and 13 and the houses ranged in size from 200 square feet (a six person yurt in Mongolia) to 4850 sq ft for eight people (in Kuwait City).

Bhutanese family with all their possessions in front of their house from the book “Material World”:http://www.menzelphoto.com/gallery/mw.htm

Our ‘two bedroom’ flat is tiny by Canadian standards but a moderate size for Londoners (something like 600sq feet?). It has become apparent to me that we don’t have room for any more things (whether in storage or in active use) but it doesn’t bother me all that much yet – it helps us to keep our lives simple. Thank goodness I have almost limitless digital storage available at least!

Has anyone tried the experiment where you put a sticker on anything you use in the course of a year and at the end of the year you throw away anything without a sticker?

How did it take me this long to find “Piled Higher and Deeper”:http://www.phdcomics.com/? Written out of Stanford it often seems to speak directly to me… I haven’t read through them all (the archive dates back to 1997) but already several have appealed to me like “this”:http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=472 or “this”:http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=47 or “this”:http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=463 or “this”:http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=453 or “this”:http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=302 or “this”:http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=360 or the series starting “here”:http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=408.

Rather than wallowing in despair after reading this strip for a while, it might be worthwhile to join “PHinisheD”:http://www.phinished.org/ – a virtual community for people working on their PhDs – or if you are at the LSE “LSE-PhDNet”:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LSE-PhDnet/ (think I found another one earlier on too but have forgotten its address). Also see this “guide to professional skills for PhDs”:http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/network.html.

Thanks Kylie for the links

Having come back home from holiday to an in-box which I have now managed to reduce to ‘only’ 500 messages I have some sympathy for “Lawrence Lessig”:http://www.lessig.org/blog/’s novel ‘solution’ to email overload. He emailed all the people he had yet to respond to and told them he was declaring email bankruptcy and wasn’t going to reply to any of the messages unless those who had emailed him before felt it was important enough to email him again.

It is certainly hard to know what to do with those emails that don’t have to be dealt with immediately but don’t seem unimportant enough to throw away at once. I believe you should take time once a week to ruthlessly scour your inbox of email that is now outdated on the grounds that if you didn’t answer it within a week you probably won’t. But I confess I haven’t done it. In fact I have email in my inbasket from the start of 2003 (and rough blog postings I have stored but not posted dating back to June 2003). Do as I say not as I do!

I wish I had the time to do a proper write-up of the NotCon session I attended featuring Brewster Kahle, the man behind the Internet Archive whose mission is nothing less than to provide universal access to all human knowledge. Here is some stuff I noted instead.

Some interesting factoids from his presentation:

* There are 150,000 people using the Internet Archive per day. It stores 3-400Tb of data and recently upgraded to 1Gbps bandwidth.
* There were 300,000 to 600,000 scrolls in the Library at Alexandria. Only around eight of them are left.
* You can store the contents of the Library of Congress as plaintext (if you had scanned it all) on a machine costing $60,000.
* The bookmobile he produced that is connected to the Internet via satellite, travels the world and produces complete bound books from a collection of 20,000 public domain works cost just $15,000 – and that includes the van itself.
* He says that it costs him $1 to print and bind a public domain book – I assumed the books produced would be very rough and ready but he brought some along and they were almost as good as the kind you’d buy in a shop. I suspect he may be stretching the truth a bit – I believe the $1 a book cost he quotes is for an 100 page black and white printed booklet. It’s still impressive though especially as:
* He notes it costs US libraries $2 to issue a book. He suggests they could give people copies of public domain books for $1 instead and pay another $1 to the author to compensate them.

Like many geniuses he just doesn’t know when to stop and thankfully he has a private income from a dotcom or two he was involved with that enables him to try out lots of projects. Aside from archiving the web, movies, books and music he’s:

* taking the US to court to try to get their boneheaded copyright laws changed
* working on mirrors of his San Francisco-based archive in Alexandria and Amsterdam (hosted there by XS4all)
* encouraging anyone to upload anything to his archive (copyright permitting) offering unlimited bandwidth indefinitely (though the site doesn’t make it very easy to figure out how you are supposed to take advantage of this generous offer) including performance recordings of bands that have given their permission.
* Trying to collect and save old software (he got special dispensation from the US copyright office to do this for the next three years but can’t make it available). He does want your old software however so if you’ve got some he would like you to send it to him – in physical form with manuals where available. He’s even
* Trying to provide fast, free wifi across all of San Francisco.

He’s so hyperactive my fingers get sore just typing in all of the projects he is involved with! I worry that he’s taking on too much and that some of it may fall by the wayside if something happens to him. But his enthusiasm and his optimism are infectious. I am pleased to have been able to shake his hand.

P.S. Ironically, I recorded his presentation and have it in MP3 format but because it was 21Mb I can’t serve it myself and so far nobody has stepped forward to host the file. I finally found how to upload it but then discovered I deleted the original file once I passed it on to someone else to upload! So I hope someone still has them – if it does get posted I’ll tell you where.

School’s out for the summer/ School’s out for ever? Yesterday I took the last exam I ever expect to take. In a sense, my life as a student is over and my life as a teacher is beginning.

Of course, the transition is not as clear as that – on the one hand I am still a PhD ‘student’ – but the supervisor/student relationship is very different to the student/teacher one. And on the other hand I have already been teaching this year at the “London College of Communication”:http://www.arts.ac.uk/253_257.htm (though I hope to do a lot more teaching next year there and at my own institution, the “LSE”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/aboutLSE/information.htm).

Still, I feel different now. And I look forward to the exciting challenges ahead!

I have been rather jealous to read about all the net-related conferences in the US I have had to miss but NotCon in London made up a lot of ground for me – it was the most stimulating nine hours I have spent in ages. I’ll post more about it over the next week I am sure, meanwhile here are few pretty dreadful (but quickly uploaded!) “pictures from the event”:http://community.webshots.com/album/150042801KUvpqS.

I’m sure there will be lots more “weblog postings about NotCon”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xcom2002.com%2Fnc04%2F&sub=Go%21 (or “here”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.notcon04.com%2F&sub=Go%21) as soon as the rest of the bloggers get home and start chatting about it.