Toshiba (which makes nuclear power plants as well as laptops – who knew?) has offered to give an Alaskan village a ‘mini-nuke’. It seems they’ll take it – after all it will reduce their cost per kilowatt/hr from 28 to 10 cents (they only pay the running costs). At the moment they get all their power from diesel which has to be barged in during the ice-free months…

(see also “my earlier posting”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_positive_uses_of_technology.html#001340 on nuclear power).

“Wired”:http://www.wired.com/ provocatively suggests that if we are going to crack global warming we need to go Nuclear Now! I’m inclined to agree – we should be investing in better energy saving practices first, working to improve the economic viability of renewables second but given the projected growth in energy demand – primarily in the developing world – I can’t see an alternative to working on better, safer and more efficient nuclear power plants. There are problems with them of course but the known problems with conventional coal powered plants are much worse…

The BBC helps Shropshire-based Andy Close to propose (on streaming video) to the New Yorker who he met on the Internet. Several of my friends met this way and so far it has worked out well for all of them. Hope it does for Andy too!

Ethan Zuckerman has written thoughtfully about Wikipedia in response to a recent “article”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html (by a former editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica) suggesting it is impressive but its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. Zuckerman points out that Wikipedia is great if you are looking for in-depth coverage of (say) how “GSM”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM works but, ‘when I use Wikipedia to obtain information that I could find in a conventional encyclopedia, I often have a terrible experience, encountering articles that are unsatisfying at best and useless at worst.’

Danah Boyd notes usefully that one of the benefits of signed, scholarly resources over community ones like Wikipedia is that “scholars have something to lose”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/01/08/on_a_vetted_wikipedia_reflexivity_and_investment_in_quality_aka_more_responses_to_clay.html when they get things wrong.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the debate about the quality of Wikipedia has spread fairly widely across the Internet punditsphere. It now even has its own “wiki page”:http://www.emacswiki.org/cw/WikipediaQualityControlDebate which attempts to summarise the debate (and if you use a blog search tool like “Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html you’ll find 83 more sites with something to say on the subject).

P.S. Sorry if this is coming to the debate rather late – I am not doing as much blogging as I used to to free up time for writing my PhD about it instead – and where I am blogging I tend to do it on the “Media@LSE Group Weblog at get.to/lseblog”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php I set up. In the last few weeks I have blogged about “Korea leading the world in numbers of bloggers”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=39, a “database of predictions about the Internet”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=28 “Santa Studies”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=23, “Online transcription services”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=22, “The Economics of Search”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=15 and the “global broadband digital divide”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=20 (and my colleagues in the LSE’s PhD programme have also had several interesting things to post). Pleas come and take a look (at least if you want to hear about the academic side of my life).

If you have a Windows PC (running Win 2000 or later) it would be well worth your while to visit Microsoft Windows AntiSpyware (Beta) and download and run it. Even if you have other anti-spyware programs you run from time to time each manufacturer seems to have their own database of spyware and each catches different things.

Oh, and if the scan does find spyware, one of the first things you should consider trying is switching browsers to “Mozilla or Firefox”:http://www.mozilla.org/ as Internet Explorer is more of a target for hackers…

According to “Reuters”:http://www.reuters.com/audi/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNews&storyID=7047174 Yahoo will release a desktop search tool of its own based on X1’s technology. Of course it may not provide X1’s full functionality but the report seems to suggest it will include its PDF searching (which so far Google’s search doesn’t do). There’s more detailed information “here”:http://insidegoogle.blogspot.com/2004/12/yahoo-announces-desktop-search.html.

Thanks to Guardian Onlineblog for the link.

In an October Wired article I just got around to reading, the editor in chief argues the importance of what he (and others) have called the ‘long tail’. As we know most people want things that are popular (expressed through the so called “power law”:http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/01/13/inequality.php which indicates visits to web pages (or weblogs) tend to be concentrated on a few big sites, or through book and music shopping where most people buy blockbuster books or CDs). What the ‘long tail’ thesis suggests however is that there are still substantial numbers of people who look at, read or otherwise consume stuff outside the mainstream “bump” – and this article suggests that there is money to be made in serving them as well as more mainstream customers.

The author assembles several interesting facts including the figure that 57% of Amazon’s customers are buying books that aren’t in its ‘top 130,000 books’ (the number of books in a typical Barnes and Noble store).

As a frequent would-be consumer of goods in that ‘long tail’ I am all in favour of encouraging the kind of attention to diverse needs that the article goes on to call for but I have to note one or two flaws in the article’s argument. First of all, Amazon (and the other vendors they highlight) may have lots of ‘long tail’ customers precisely because they are known for the breadth of what they stock. If there were lots of people serving that market, the proportion of sales going to ‘long tail’ customers for any individual one may be lower.

Also, the author dismisses the impact of the free file sharing networks on music too quickly. These already provide much of the variety that conventional distribution has so far failed to offer and there is a danger that the longer commercial organizations stay out of the ‘long tail’ market the more likely consumers are to become used to and dependent on free file sharing networks. And as broadband gets more widely available, movies may increasingly ‘go free’ as well. Indeed, I am a little surprised Wired didn’t suggest this would be a good thing – or at least threaten businesses with this as an alternative future…

Interestingly this article is (perhaps at an unconscious level) an attack on one of the key planks of the arguments advanced by copyright reformers like “Lessig”:http://lessig.org/ (traditional Wired allies) who say that it is ridiculous to retain strict copyright rules for lengthy periods because the commercial lifespan of most material is limited. But if the Long Tail encourages companies to try to wring even small amounts of money out of their lower-worth properties they will have a stronger interest in sticking with existing restrictive copyright rules.

Update There is a Long Tail blog and there will be a book. Also it appears the 57% figure for Amazon (one of the more interesting ones) may be exaggerated.

My friend “Reid”:http://rae.tnir.org/ comments rightly:

The thrust of your post seems to indicate that Lessig et al are labouring to make copyright less restrictive than it is. Fine and good, but it would have been better to point out that this would just return to the way copyright was for years and years (centuries?) before companies in the US pushed to change them starting in the late 20th century.

They key issue is that the duration of a copyright is increasing at about one year per year. Needless to say, this is not good. Read more about all this at the Opposing
Copyright Extension page.

I agree on this point – copyright expiry dates need to be looked at afresh from scratch and a new balance needs to be struck (certainly for example the need to assert your copyright after x years in order to have it valid which was removed a little while ago in the US needs to be returned so works which have no residual commercial value would revert to the public domain faster).

If you want to collaborate in real time with other people online on something visual rather than something textual here is a pair of options. Imagination Cubed provided by GE (I don’t know why – they certainly don’t seem to promote its existence) is for more business-like uses, “isketch”:http://www.isketch.net/ is for fun – each player gets a chance to draw a word which the other players will try to guess. Both in their different ways seem like interesting and useful Internet tools and both are free…

It seems – contrary to suggestions made earlier by Cass Sunstein in Republic.com and “essays”:http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR26.3/sunstein.html (and by many others) – people using the Internet don’t tend to just get more political information that agrees with their previously-held beliefs – they are better informed about both sides than their offline counterparts – at least according to the latest report based on a large scale survey from the excellent “Pew Internet & American Life Project”:http://www.pewinternet.org/.

Before you say ‘well that is just because Internet users are on average better educated or of higher social status’ (as I admit I was tempted to do) they found:

Simply being an internet user, controlling for demographic factors such as gender and education, as well as the other factors already discussed, increases the likelihood that a person has heard more arguments about a candidate.

This seems quite persuasive to me but I doubt this argument will go away in a hurry!

We badly need more scholarship about weblogs outside of the Anglo-saxon world, and Performance in Everyday Life and the Rediscovery of the ‘Self’ in Iranian Weblogs provides an interesting point of view, using Goffman. The author suggests weblogging is valuable for Iranian women who lack other ways of expressing repressed identities. Some of the arguments sound quite similar to those advanced in McKenna, K. Y. A. and J. A. Bargh (1998) “Coming out in the Age of the Internet”:http://homepages.nyu.edu/~kym1/coming_out.pdf, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75 pp. 681-694.