How would you sample home pages and weblogs in the UK? My definition would be: “sites that are not primarily in furtherance of professional goals (eg online CVs, galleries of art from artists etc), are not explicitly temporary, are substantially the work of a single individual, and are not closed to the public either explicitly (through a password) or implicitly (for example collections of photos from an event without an accompanying narrative that are only meant to be accessed by a small group for a short time even if they are openly available online).”

If I had a long list of random UK home pages I could weed out the ones that didn’t belong myself, however.

I thought about sampling randomly from directories compiled by Geocities or Freeserve/Wanadoo but I looked and it seems they no longer index their pages. Do they have directories somewhere I missed?

Using Yahoo or DMoz would introduce obvious biases because submission is not automatic.

Tripod still does have “directories of its UK users”:http://www.tripod.lycos.co.uk/directory/homepages/ and it seems like the best bet so far but how representative would Tripod users be of all users? Searching for ‘personal home page uk’ in Google gets me nowhere.

How should I balance blogs with home pages? Using the stats from Pew suggests I should include about one blog for every four home pages. What do you think is the best way to randomly sample weblogs? There used to be a master directory of Blogger ones. Is there still? Is there any up to date info on the relative popularity of the various weblogging platforms?

But it seems that one of the best-known conservative bloggers has come to the same uneasy conclusion that I have about the Iraq war.

The one anti-war argument that, in retrospect, I did not take seriously enough was a simple one. It was that this war was noble and defensible but that this administration was simply too incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively. I dismissed this as facile Bush-bashing at the time. I was wrong.

I backed the war originally (though I held my nose – I certainly wouldn’t call it noble). Unfortunately, I don’t think the aftermath of the war could have been managed worse by the US.

I am relieved to find early pictures showing Brits also abusing Iraqi prisoners “were false”:http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/20983.htm, though it seems there “may have been some bad apples after all”:http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/story.jsp?story=521760.

It was interesting to see so many bloggers f2f though it wasn’t exactly a random sample either of the population or even (I suspect) of bloggers. The “gathering”:http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki/LoicLondonMay04 was about 90% male and mostly in the Internet/IT industries.

One of the interesting things about blogging that I was aware of but this brought into focus is the existence of an important group of blog enablers – people who aren’t prominent bloggers themselves but who develop the services or support others’ services without payment because they can. Public-spirited people like “Bruce”:http://www.growf.org/ who helps out the “NTK”:http://ntk.net/ gang and Tom who set up and runs “bbCity”:http://www.bbcity.co.uk/. I also met “Anders”:http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/ (who will have more pictures from the event on his “photo blog”:http://www.extrospection.com/) and Annie who runs a weblog (and a site) all about “London Underground”:http://london-underground.blogspot.com/ but not from a trainspottery perspective.

See “here”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fjoi.ito.com%2Fjoiwiki%2FLoicLondonMay04&sub=Go%21 for more postings from other London bloggers about the gathering as they happen.

I have a few (very poor quality) pix “here”:http://community.webshots.com/album/142686002dtOLws.

If you read this and have a) some money and b) the ability to get to Oakville, Ontario, Canada it might be worth your while to check out of the this exhibition of the works of “David Blackwood”:http://www.davidblackwood.com/. There was an exhibition of other Blackwood works I saw earlier this year and I found them curiously fascinating.

I note that the exhibition’s site features a few image scans that are large enough to serve as desktop images if you like the look of them.

Harald has been using it for a while and while I have long been skeptical of the benefits and uses of this software I have finally let curiosity get the better of me. So if you know me and you’re on “Orkut”:http://www.orkut.com/ (the Google-owned social software site), look me up. It seems already “I am connected to 244374 people through 1 friend”. I think this reflects the rather tenuous idea they have of connection rather more than it reflects any real godlike social status!

It’s in the planning stages (see “this wiki”:http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki/LoicLondonMay04) but seems to be settling around the evening of May 12th. It looks as if there’ll be at least 50 people coming, including quite a few of the people on “my blogroll”:http://www.bloglines.com/public/derb/. I’ll be there – especially if it’s at a Japanese restaurant…

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

(If you like this you may also want to check out “Notcon”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_net_politics.html#001081)

Sometime in the last couple of days without noticing it my “Endnote”:http://www.endnote.com/ database of book, journal and academic web page references broke through the 1,000 record mark. Record 1000 was probably one of the papers I recently downloaded from the site of “Dr Nick Couldry”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/nickCouldry.htm, one of my supervisors…

Note: I haven’t read all of the documents I have entries for – and some of them date back to my Masters…

Well, I finally plunked down my plastic and picked up a Tungsten T3. Now what? I have already downloaded:

• “Eudora Internet Suite”:http://www.eudora.com/internetsuite/download/ so I can sync my Palm with my Eudora email and
• “Avantgo”:http://www.avantgo.com/ for content on the move

  I’ve also bookmarked:

• “Palminfocenter”:http://www.palminfocenter.com/
• “Handheldnews”:http://www.handheldnews.com/ and
• “Brighthand”:http://www.brighthand.com/morenews.php?site=Palm

for news about what new stuff is coming up. Where should I be looking to find lists and reviews of the best freeware and shareware apps for my Palm? Are there any must-have applications I should run and get right away? Any I should shy away from? Where should I look for the most up-to-date news about Palm-related stuff? And where should I go for good Palm-related peer tech support?

Later: This article suggesting that there may be “no upgrade path to PalmOS 6”:http://www.brighthand.com/article/palmOne_Refuses_to_Confirm_OS_6_Upgrade for existing models has me nervous. Should I cancel my order (I ordered online and it hasn’t arrived yet)? I don’t want to be stuck with the last incarnation of a dead-end OS. On the other hand, if I waited a few months to get a new PalmOS 6 model it might be buggy… What do you think? Do you think they’ll make the top-end models of Palm upgradeable but just don’t want to guarantee anything?

Today’s Independent runs a short interview with me as part of an article about getting a postgrad qualification (starts about 3/4 of the way down the page). It’s a little more upbeat in what it highlights than I felt I was but otherwise fine.

A fascinating news clip from October 1993 that gives what seems now a utopian view of the Internet.

The playwright cum Internet thinker John Allen who was interviewed (where is he now?) suggested that while you’d think people would be really badly behaved thanks to the Internet’s anonymity they are actually very polite because they feel they are part of a global community. Given the relatively small number of usenet users at the time and their high level of education (mostly scientists at that time I would imagine) it isn’t that surprising. Then they let AOLers in! And as for anonymity it was pretty illusory then and is even more so now…

And to think I had been “online for nine years”:http://www.davidbrake.org/nethist.htm when that programme was broadcast… Come to think of it I’m in my twentieth year online – that’s a pretty scary figure!

Thanks to “Boing Boing”:http://boingboing.net/2004_01_01_archive.html#107332806643610998 for the link.