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/!

As pointed out on Crooked Timber at last there is a study on UK political weblogs (downloadable “here”:http://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/assets/Final_Blog_Report_.pdf). Political weblogging really isn’t well established here in the UK though and it shows. The Hansard Society chose eight weblogs to focus on and even then “one of them was from overseas (Blog for America)”:http://www.blogforamerica.com/ and another, “VoxPolitics”:http://www.voxpolitics.com/, while often interesting, is also pretty much dormant at the moment.

Because the Hansard Society is mostly interested in building interest in political participation their emphasis – unusually – was not on the weblog creators but on what people who read them thought. They chose a (fairly) random jury of eight readers and made them comment on what they read, whether they found it interesting and whether it made them want to write a weblog themselves.

Perhaps not surprisingly, few of the readers found the weblogs they were assigned interesting (they might have been more enthusiastic if their local MP or councillor had a weblog but of course that would be pretty unlikely). Also unsurprisingly, only one of the eight actually expressed an interest in producing a weblog of their own after reading them.

It seems to me that at least in the early to middle stages the main importance of political weblogs (To the extent that they are important) would be in the way that they enable policy wonks to talk to other policy wonks as observed in the “paper I remarked on earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_academia.html#001178 about US political weblogs.

Thanks also to “Harry”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ (one of the bloggers mentioned who told “Chris Bertram”:http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~plcdib/ at Crooked Timber about it)

The report on children’s Internet use I “mentioned earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/000905.html has now been made available in full.

UK Children Go Online is an excellent overview of kids’ online experiences in Britain and I am pleased to see it taking a very sensible balanced view of the risks and benefits of childrens’ online use. From the conclusion:

one cannot simply recommend greater monitoring of children by parents. From children’s point of view, some key benefits of the internet depend on maintaining some privacy and freedom from their parents, making them less favourable particularly to intrusive or hidden forms of parental regulation. Moreover, the internet must be perceived by children as an exciting and free space for play and experimentation if they are to become capable and creative actors in this new environment.

I am a little disappointed, however, that the press release leads on “parents underestimating risks”:http://personal.lse.ac.uk/bober/PressReleaseJuly04.pdf and lo and behold the “BBC’s coverage”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3910319.stm doesn’t mention anything about the possible benefits of childrens’ online use or the divide that was found in the ‘quality’ of their use.

It is true that, ’57 per cent have come into contact with pornography online (compared with 16
per cent of parents who say their children have seen porn online)’ but as “Josephine Fraser”:http://fraser.typepad.com/edtechuk/2004/07/lse_uk_children.html points out a large problem with this survey is that it’s investigating ‘children’ between the ages of 9 and 19 (of course the data is usually split by age in the body of the report but not often in the summaries).

If you are concerned mainly about under-12s exposed to porn (for example) the proportion drops to 21 percent and this doesn’t indicate how often this exposure happened or how ‘severe’ it is. Would a single exposure to the promotional front page of a porn site in a few years of a ten-year-old’s surfing really be traumatic? Doesn’t it depend on what kind of stuff is considered pornographic (the report does not provide a definition)? I presume such sites don’t normally display really hard-core stuff on their front page without payment and young kids are exposed to soft-core images like that in lots of other ways. It’s true that 20% of 12-19 year olds say they have seen porn on the Internet five or more times but 17% of the same kids say they have seen it that often on TV.

Likewise it may be true that, ‘8 per cent of young users who go online at least once a week say they have met face to face with someone they first met on the internet’ but of those only 1% – one person (!) age unknown – said they didn’t enjoy the experience.

I guess as the report concludes what you see in it depends on your prior expectations and I am a ‘glass half full’ person more keen to ensure that kids have the opportunity to become digitally literate without having parents and teachers excessively limiting their chance to explore. And of course I am not the parent of an Internet-surfing child – if I were my views might be different!

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…

My supervisors have been active in the “CRIS”:http://www.crisinfo.org/ ( Communication Rights in the Information Society) programme and have called my attention to its work. On this year’s CRIS agenda is:

The CRIS Global Governance Project, sponsored by the Ford Foundation. The project’s aim is to support the emergence at national level of the concept of communication rights … advocacy on governance issues including civil society participation in governance structures… and in various global governance fora.

If you’re an academic interested in the connection between media participation and civil society take a look and join in!

An article from the Chicago Tribune about how a neighbourhood email list helped bring neighbours together. “Keith Hampton”:http://mysocialnetwork.net/’s new research appears to “show the same thing”:http://web.mit.edu/giving/spectrum/spring04/internet-connection.html but with a caveat (not noted in the article about it I just linked to). From what I remember of a presentation he gave a while ago online-enhanced networking only seems to take place in areas already conducive to neighbor to neighbor contact – when for example it was tried in an urban apartment block it didn’t take off.

There was a similar earlier article about a virtual community in Orange Country I “blogged about”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_virtual_communities.html#000949 but the LA Times’ link no longer works (curse them!).

“David Wilcox”:http://partnerships.typepad.com/civic/2003/02/about_david_wil.html, consultant on ICT use by the community and voluntary sector, talks about a new review of the literature on community informatics in the UK by veteran UK academics Barry Loader and Leigh Keeble.

It makes disturbing (though not surprising) reading, indicating that despite the Government’s best efforts these programmes often don’t reach the most excluded and rarely increase civic engagement (except among the already engaged). Take a look at the “summary of the report”:http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/findings/socialpolicy/584.asp or “download it as a PDF”:http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/eBooks/1859351980.pdf

In amongst the gloom and doom there are some suggestions for better practice in future – siting internet access centres in the community rather than in libraries or colleges and organizing training around people’s perceived needs rather than forcing them into formal courses for example – both designed to attract people who have had negative experiences with formal education.

Underlying my own research is a belief that ICT can have an emancipatory effect – for some at least – but that mere provision of the technology (closing the ‘access divide’) is not enough. Community informatics programmes must lean much more heavily towards the ‘community’ in their titles if they are to succeed.

Also see “this earlier blog posting”:https://blog.org/archives/000990.html on similar research. Some there suggest that while library access may not be a good way for new people to access online resources long term it may have a useful role in introducing people to online resources. I still have my doubts but take a look at the two reports cited there and let me know what you think…

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.

Want to check up on yourself? FutureMe.org will send you an email with whatever text you want at some future date. So you can remind yourself not to eat that chocolate bar or to start studying for that test or whatever.

TheyWorkForYou.com, launched yesterday at “NotCon”:http://notcon04.com/ is a great example of barn-building by the energetic community of public-spirited, capable, policy wonk/tech geeks here in the UK. It takes the speeches in Parliament and breaks them down by speaker allowing things like commenting to or linking to specific passages and monitoring what a member of parliament says about a subject. It also includes lots of useful links to data about each MP like what organizations are paying them to consult for them.

Cory “called it”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/06/06/theyworkforyou_fines.html the ‘finest advocacy web-app in the world’. I wouldn’t go that far. It doesn’t really demystify the political process here in the UK – it doesn’t explain what the connection is between the speeches in Parliament and what gets done (if indeed there is one) so it is likely still to appeal most to policy wonks and it doesn’t cover select committees where (I gather) a lot of what parliamentary power is left is exercised. Nonetheless considering the fact it was coded by a small team in their spare time it’s pretty impressive. Definitely worth a look if you are interested in tracking UK politics.

Best of all, the whole project is open source and they encourage feedback and creative re-use of their work so if you want to help them build more features or want to take the framework and apply it to (for example) the European parliament, the House of Lords or the workings of your local council you are encouraged to do so.