I just discovered that Amazon US is selling my book Dealing with E-Mail for 60% off – it’s $2.80! At that price you’d be crazy not to buy a copy. Here’s an overview of the book:

This book was designed to be a simple non-technical guide, inexpensive enough to give to everyone in an organization, that would nonetheless introduce workers at all levels to many of the key techniques they can use to manage email more effectively and the key security and legal issues they may face. These include:

• Filing your email automatically
• Managing email address books
• Making sure your address does not get picked up by spammers and…
• Removing spam automatically when it arrives.
• Dealing with email-borne viruses
• Writing clear and culturally-sensitive email
• Preventing confidential email from being intercepted and read and
• Being aware of legal issues that may arise including sexual harassment, commercial confidentiality and breach of contract.

The book has been written to be broadly applicable to users of any e-mail system and from any country.

As organizations increasingly use email as a business-critical tool they will become vulnerable to email-borne viruses, spam, legal problems and un-manageable volumes of unnecessary messages unless they ensure that everyone – not just the IT staff and HR managers – learns some of the basic techniques outlined in this book.

There is also a “companion site”:http://www.well.com/user/derb/dealingwithemail/ for the book containing more detailed information and up to date tips.

“Ethan Zuckerman”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ethan/2004/02/27#a138 has produced an interesting paper on blogging as a political force in the Third World – commenting on the enthusiasm for Internet-mediated political debate expressed by Jim Moore in an essay “The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head”:http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jmoore/secondsuperpower.html and by Joi Ito in “Emergent Democracy”:http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html. I blogged about the latter essay “some months ago”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_best_of_blogorg.html#000687.

He warns astutely:

“If that group [enthusiasts for ‘weblog democracy’] forgets that they’re outliers in terms of larger society and fails to include others in the shaping of these technologies, it’s unlikely that these tools will be useful to the wider world”.

He also suggests that bloggers can’t provide a critical alternative to the mainstream media when a region is not adequately covered:

“When journalists don’t cover parts of the globe, webloggers are like an amplifier without a guitar – they have no signal to reinforce. There aren’t enough bloggers in eastern Congo to give us a sense for what’s really going on.”

He suggests that Third World expats writing about their own nations from abroad and (though he doesn’t explicitly say this) First World expats writing about the countries they are visiting or trying to help could help fill the gap in coverage of third world issues and give the rest of the world a personal view.
He notes the weakness of this proposal:

these discussions are open only to people with the access to the Internet (which cuts out people in countries who censor, people in unsderserved rural areas, as well as people who don’t have money to spend time online); primarily open to people who speak and write English well; primarily open to people who can afford to spend time online engaging in these dialogues (cutting out many people whose jobs don’t afford them the luxury of working in front of a CRT).

He highlights some interesting solutions to the problem of language and cultural barriers to mutual comprehension – “Blogalization”:http://www.blogalization.info/reorganization/, for example, encourages bloggers who can speak foreign languages to translate interesting posts and news items into other relevant languages (chiefly English) – acting as a volunteer news agency. “Living on the Planet”:http://www.livingontheplanet.com/about.html is similar (but only translates to English.
In the end, he acknowledges:

Generally speaking, though, in most developing nations, the Net is not the obvious place to look for political change. So few citizens are online, and those who are generally are atypically wealthy and powerful that the Internet is a poor way to reach the grassroots. Instead, it’s useful to think about what media are analogous to the Internet in developing nations. One likely parallel is talk radio.

He seems to suggest in his conclusion that the “solution” to ensuring that the third world can part lies with the toolmakers – a technical fix.

But a real solution, I suggest, would have to involve a lot of grassroots capacity building work to ensure that a broad range of people in these countries (not just the elites):

1) have access to the technology
2) have the time and literacy to engage with them and
3) are listened to by those with power in their countries.

Big (some might say impossible) preconditions but without them a Third World Blogosphere would be an elite echo chamber. I fear that if tech boosters succeed in persuading developing country governments to foster a burgeoning blogosphere in their countries it would just serve to further benefit the articulate middle classes and elites in those countries who already have influence.

I’m getting to this one rather late but I found an excellent article by Barry Flynn expressing disappointment with the UK Government for its failure to require digital terrestrial TV to have a return path. Now the horse has bolted – many digital terrestrial customers have already bought set-tops without modems and it will be hard to get them to switch if the Government wants to encourage egovernment or edemocracy applications through digital TV.

The “Pew Research Centre”:http://www.pewinternet.org/ has just released “Content Creation Online”:http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=113 which finds that, “44% of U.S. Internet users have contributed their thoughts and their files to the online world”.

I haven’t had the chance to dig into the detail yet but some of the activities they class as online content provision don’t match the kind of activity I am most interested in studying for my PhD. The people of most interest to me are the 13% with their own websites and the 2% with weblogs. I wouldn’t count the 20% who allow others to download music or video files from their computers as being content creators, nor would I count the 8% who have contributed material to Web sites run by their businesses if they didn’t do it out of choice. But doubtless different people would slice the data different ways.

Given my reservations about their definition of content creation I am cautious about leaning too much on their results but I note that even with their rather liberal definition, online content provision tends to be done by a relatively priviledged sample of the US population – particularly in terms of education. For example, 6% of people who didn’t graduate high school contributed content online compared to 46% of those with a college degree or higher. I find it interesting that although there is a section on the demographics of content creation in the survey this stratification is not mentioned in the “summary of findings”:http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/reports.asp?Report=113&Section=ReportLevel1&Field=Level1ID&ID=484.

I look forward to getting my hands on the raw data (Pew “makes its data sets available”:http://www.pewinternet.org/datasets/index.asp six months or so after they have been collected).

Telltale Weekly is a scheme which offers audio books in MP3 or Ogg format charging from $0.25 a story. After five years (or 100,000 downloads) each audio clip will be put into the public domain. It’s great way to fund the development of a public domain library. I have my doubts about whether they will get anything like enough customers to make it worthwhile but it is certainly an interesting and valuable thing to try.

Alas the list of “upcoming releases”:http://telltaleweekly.com/index.php?Show=Schedule is not very exciting – but you are encouraged to “make your own suggestion”:http://telltaleweekly.com/index.php?Show=Feedback – personally I would like to hear an English translation of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education…

I wonder if librarians could get together and give Project Gutenberg and other similar projects like this one an idea of which are the most important texts to work with? I can’t believe that what the world needs next is texts like “The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction”:http://www.gutenberg.net/1/1/3/4/11348/11348-h/11348-h.htm (the latest text produced by the “Distributed Proofreader”:http://www.pgdp.net/ project.

Thanks to “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/ and “Ben Hammersley”:http://www.benhammersley.com/dparchives/008110.html for the link.

Edward Felten posted defending the way Google search results are delivered, suggesting the ‘votes of web authors’ is a fair way to determine website prominence in search. This touched off an interesting argument. As one poster pointed out, “think about how you will feel when a search on evolution brings up creationist sites explaining why evolution is wrong and evil. That’s a widespread view in the U.S., currently under-represented online but that may well change as the net penetrates more deeply into society.”

I was also struck by the comment by “Armature”:http://abstractfactory.blogspot.com/ in which he points out, “One interesting side effect of Vivisimo’s clustering of search results is that Vivisimo’s less vulnerable to tyranny of the majority than Googlocracy.”

Apparently they intend to sue if there are any public readings of Joyce’s work (which is still in copyright) during the festival commemorating the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday this June – more details “here”:http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/2004/0209/2893527271HM3JOYCE.html (registration required). “Cory Doctorow”:http://craphound.com/ is rightly outraged.
thanks to Boing Boing and Lawrence Lessig for the link.

It’s so outrageous that you might almost think it was part of a conspiracy to make the EU’s current copyright stance look foolish.

The TrueMajority Oreo video is to my mind a very well-crafted political ad (done as a Flash animation). It shows dramatically just how much money goes towards US national defence and how much goes to – say – renewable energy programmes or food aid.

It gets around what I see as the biggest problem there is in trying to tackle macroeconomic issues seriously – nobody outside of a few policy wonks can juggle government programs costing hundreds of millions and billions of dollars and keep them all in proportion.

“TrueMajority.org”:http://www.truemajority.org was founded by Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s fame and is a broad-based liberal lobbying organization based around getting people to respond to monthly action alerts and send faxes to their political representatives by filling out web forms. I suspect fax deluges are getting to be a discredited tactic as they are relatively cost-free for the participants – I hope that truemajority will take the “Dean Road” instead and start getting these people to organize themselves.

dodgeit lets you set up one-time-use email addresses for when you have to register for something but don’t want to get spammed – and it lets you read those emails via “RSS”:https://blog.org/archives/000880.html instead of having them delivered to you (if you are really addicted to using RSS for everything).

According to E-government Bulletin (which unfortunately doesn’t have an archived version of this newsletter yet), the “Department for Transport”:http://www.dft.gov.uk/ will be launching an integrated transport guide (at “transport.info”:http://www.transport.info/ – not live yet) that would, “include car routefinders; bus, tram and rail timetables; and a range of maps, updated regularly by external partners such as bus companies”.

Here in London something like this already exists – “JourneyPlanner”:http://www.journeyplanner.org/ and while inevitably it doesn’t always come up with the best possible route it will still be a great advance when it launches this Spring. I hope that at some point either JourneyPlanner or transport.info starts to offer a direct connection between the Internet and the counters that tell you when the next bus is coming at bus stops….