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.

Sébastien Paquet has “written a paper”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2004/04/21.html#a1548 about the usefulness of “Internet Topic Exchange”:http://topicexchange.com/ – a rather nifty web service that lets several people with weblogs that handle trackback group their postings together by subject.

It’s a little hard to explain – for example, I create a ‘UK Media Studies’ topic exchange page, then every time I make a post that relates to that topic I add a trackback link to that page (just as if it was a weblog). Other people do likewise. Instead of checking all of their weblogs for new postings I can just check that subject page. Take a look at this “weblog research”:http://topicexchange.com/t/weblog_research/ topic exchange to see how it’s done.

Thanks to Lilia Efimova for the link.

opensourceCMS is a very cool idea. It’s a sort of playground where you can kick the tires of lots of open source groupware, weblogging and content management software. This kind of software requires some skills and time to install so having a way to try it out and see what it feels like to use without having to install it yourself (and then uninstall it if it isn’t what you want) is very useful. Of course nothing you do with it is permanent – ‘Each system is deleted and reinstalled every two hours. This allows you to be the administrator of any system here without fear of messing anything up.’

Regular readers will know (archive item 1, “archive item 2”:https://blog.org/archives/001061.html) that I am keen to find search tools for the files on my own hard disk (and email). So far I have been dissatisfied but it seems Google is about to enter this market if you believe the rumours about Project Puffin. “According to the New York Times”:http://news.com.com/2100-1011_3-5215707.html Google’s desktop search software has been in use within the company for about a year.

Don’t expect Googling your hard disk to be as effective as Googling the web though – Google’s web searching relies heavily on the ubiquitous cross-linking in web pages to indicate the importance of one page over another for a given search and most people’s hard disks don’t contain that kind of handy cross-referencing.

Microsoft is also looking at this kind of thing of course but I’m not sure I want to wait for the next version of MS’s operating system and upgrade to it in order to take advantage of their new search features.

In the spirit of Phil Gyford’s rendition of “Pepys Diary”:https://blog.org/archives/000604.html there are several other weblog-ified classic literary diaries that have started up. The classic Victorian diary spoof “Diary of a Nobody”:http://www.diaryofanobody.net/ is quite entertaining.

It is “Simon Cozens”:http://simon-cozens.org/’ (rather free) English translation of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon Pillow Talk, however, that is to my mind the most successful adaptation yet. Why? Because in his rendition it seems exactly like the blog of a contemporary teenage girl, yet the reflections (of a woman in the court of the Japanese Emperor) are a thousand years old. Rarely does history seem to speak to us so directly.

Of course “some people”:http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/32554 think in making its relevance apparent Simon is barbarously mangling the poetry of the original text. Well, there’s nothing to prevent people who find it interesting from taking a look at the extracts translated by others that are “available online”:http://home.infionline.net/~ddisse/shonagon.html, buying the ‘canonical’ paperback translation by Ivan Morris (Amazon UK) (Amazon US) or even the reading it “in the original”:http://www.wao.or.jp/naniuji/koten/makurano.htm. Besides, his is the most complete translation available online for free (that I am aware of).

An interesting organization based in the UK Swap And Play is using the Internet as a way to get people together face to face to lend each other music, games and videos as physical objects – something that is somewhat more cumbersome than peer to peer network-mediated file sharing but is of course completely legal (as far as I can see). A friend of mine is already doing this on a “more private basis”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/000598.html using the “Open Media Lending Database”:http://opendb.sourceforge.net/.

Thanks to AudioBerkman I can download MP3s of people talking about the legacy of WSIS or an interview with John Perry Barlow. Now I can spend every last second of my waking life thinking about the social impact of technology…

It’s nice to see someone trying to do something a little experimental to help people get an overview of the messages on the message boards they use.

They say initial feedback has been positive – hard to tell whether that is just because people react well when researchers pay attention to them but they intend to continue keeping an eye on the experiment.

I hope it is successful – we need new “blue sky” thinking to make online communities more approachable and useful – and I hope if it is useful they release the enabling software into the public domain.

The paper about the research is here – Rehman Mohamed is one of the researchers.

Thanks to Mathemagenic for the link.

The New Republic has published a story “dictatorship.com”:http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040405&s=kurlantzick040504 pooh poohing the notion that access to the Internet in a nation can help to undermine dictatorships. Needless to say this was like a red rag to a bull for some of the more Internet-philic – “Jeff Jarvis”:http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_03_27.html#about calls the piece, “load of naysaying, stick-in-the-sludge, cynical, behind-the-times, underreported, snotty crap“.

Though Jeff is right to pour scorn on TNR’s occaisional recycling of un-researched prejudices like the assertion that the Internet “lends itself to individual rather than communal activities”, I have to say I think TNR’s article is on the whole a welcome corrective to the kind of utopian thinking often espoused by online pundits and the furious reaction to the piece only reinforces this view. That’s not to say that the Internet does not have a potential role in the growth of civil society – of course it can be helpful. But to say as Jeff Jarvis does that, “In the last century, Coke meant freedom. In this century, the Internet means freedom” is to indulge in knee jerk technological determinism that overlooks the vital importance of the social context of technology use.

Also see an “earlier blog entry”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_academia.html#000758 of mine on an excellent book on the Internet in authoritarian regimes cited in the TNR piece.

I continue to look for a good cheap way of searching my local hard disk as easily as I search the web. Jeremy Wagstaff has just produced a handly master list of hard disk indexers. I am still toying with all of them. All I want is decent Boolean search and Acrobat support. DTSearch has this but it also has a crappy interface and costs too much for consumer use.

80-20 doesn’t integrate with non-Outlook email (I use Eudora) – indeed if you don’t use Outlook it really really doesn’t want to install at all. X1’s price seems to have gone up from free to $50 to $100 and it doesn’t offer Boolean search. The latest entry, “HotBot Desktop”:http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb040322-1.shtml doesn’t offer Boolean search either though they say they are using DTSearch’s technology which should have been able to provide this function. I’ll still be taking a good look at it though.