WordPress, an open source weblog engine, is what this website uses and from my experience it is every bit as powerful as Moveable Type – but free of charge. I noted earlier that a small organization, Blogsome, was offering free hosting of WordPress blogs. Now WordPress.com is offering the same and I hope (given the name) with substantial backing (though it’s not clear to me how it is that hosting is paid for).

If you are or have been a long-term resident of the US or of China, please visit this survey by a student at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. It “focuses on different uses of weblogs in mainland China and the United States and is a first step to investigating the increasing political influences of the weblogs in Chinese civic lives.”

I have been involved with many discussions about rules for participation in virtual communities – Speaking to Me: Terms and Conditions does a great job of making fun of the kinds of “community rules” documents that result.

On a slightly serious note it does suggest some of the actual issues that may arise when increasing numbers of people blog their daily lives – eg:

6. By speaking to Tom Peyer, you grant the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, unrestricted worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display the material (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, including in any parallel universes.

The American consumer advocacy group Consumer Reports recently published a online hazards survey which found:

• 33% of those surveyed said a virus or spyware caused serious problems with their computer systems and/or financial losses within the past two years.
• 50% reported a spyware infection in the past six months. Of those, 18% said the infection was so bad they had to erase their hard drives.

  To avoid spyware, 51% of all online users reported being more careful visiting Web sites, and 38 % said they download free programs less frequently.

• 64% of survey respondents said they had detected viruses on their computer in the past two years. 4% found them at least 50 times.
• Macs are safer than Windows PCs for some online hazards. Only 20% of Mac owners surveyed reported detecting a virus in the past two years, compared with 66% of Windows PC owners. Just 8% of Mac users reported a spyware infection in the last six months vs. 54% of Windows PC users.

To this I would add that my guess is that a fair amount of the virus reporting by Mac owners is probably "false positives" – people whose Macs stopped working for some unrelated reason and they blamed it on viruses. Ditto for spyware. I don’t think viruses or spyware aimed at current Macs are still around outside of the labs of anti-virus software companies.

There are some good recommendations linked alongside the report but interestingly it fails to mention one of the best ways to reduce the incidence of viruses and spyware – don’t use Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer. It’s not that they are bad in themselves (though I would argue the free alternatives like Eudora and Firefox are better) – it’s that virus and spyware writers tailor their programs to work with the most popular email and web browsing programs out there.

A note about computer literacy – 17% of respondents weren’t using antivirus software and 10% of those with high-speed broadband access–prime targets for hackers–said they didn’t have firewall protection.

Also see two recent reports from the excellent Pew Internet and American Life project:
Spam & Phishing (April)
Spyware (July)

Laurie Taylor in his excellent Thinking Allowed radio programme recently interviewed Simone Abram at length about her anthropological study of tenants’ experiences of “urban regeneration” in Norfolk Park, Sheffield (she has produced a film about this as well with accompanying website). The programme also features interviews with the residents themselves. Strangely enough she concludes that even with the best of intentions the connection between consultation and results on the ground can be very tenuous – especially when a public private partnership (or a tangle of overlapping partnerships) is involved!

When fighting a ruthless enemy there is always a danger that democracies can lose the moral upper hand through over-reaction. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal was bad enough but the latest UK government anti-terrorism proposals (full statement here) seem to be going a long way too far in an attempt to curb terrorism. Making “justifying or glorifying” terrorism anywhere an offence and “automatically refusing asylum to anyone with anything to do with terrorism anywhere” seem OK on the surface but are rife for misuse. As our mayor Ken Livingstone points out, twenty years ago these laws could have been applied to Nelson Mandela and his supporters.

The fact that some of the proposed rules may be applied retrospectively is also very alarming. And while many of the most draconian restrictions are applied to non-citizens resident here, Blair envisions the extension of powers to strip existing citizens of their citizenship for being “engaged in extremism”.

As with all such rash laws they may well be used initially to target people most of us would consider dangerous or distasteful (and the blurring of the distinction between the two is an important part of the problem). However there is no guarantee that such laws would not be misused by a future administration.

There has been a lot of alarm raised (by the BBC among others) about sites and people who publicise and glorify the terrorism of Al Qaeda and its ‘fellow travellers’ but rather than trying to stamp them out (probably a hopeless task) and criminalise writers and readers shouldn’t we be keeping an eye on those who are already involved and (as I noted earlier) shouldn’t we be trying to minimise legitimate Muslim grievances so the radicals eventually lose their moral ‘ammunition’?

As Salon pointed out to me, the wonderful folks at the Internet Archive have 150 tracks of Caruso singing – part 1 and part 2 – turned from 78s into MP3s. Download what you like before some idiot lengthens the term of copyright even more and it goes out of the public domain again…

And along similar lines, I was encouraged to learn that the BBC’s recent experiment with free Beethoven downloads garnered millions of downloads – many more than any commercial single sales.

To my small collection on Flickr. I have to say it’s pretty astonishing to me that my 44 pictures (mostly pretty rubbish or unlikely to be interesting for anyone but myself and family) have been viewed altogether 2153 times to date. Of course several of them were taken at a wedding which would help boost pageviews…

Traditionally if you wanted a WordPress weblog (open source so free to use and arguably the most feature rich blogging product around) you needed to be techie yourself or at least have a techie friend with server space spare. Certainly it is only thanks to my own connections in the tech fraternity that I have been able to have this blog hosted using first Moveable Type and now WordPress.

Recently, however, I have discovered that blogsome offers a free hosting service similar to blogger‘s so anyone reading this could have a blog like mine. I’m a little concerned that blogsome don’t have any apparent means of gathering revenue to offset the cost of hosting so they could disappear one day – particularly if they get popular – but my guess is that by the time they do there will be lots of other places able to take over hosting.

If you are already running a weblog using another service you may need a little help getting your archives across to this new platform but once you have taken the plunge I’m sure you’ll agree it was worth it to get features like categories, password protected posts and an extensible architecture for people to add features.

I am not using blogsome myself – instead this weblog, like my other group weblog at the LSE is now generously hosted by Tim Duckett.

Hope you enjoy the new look. Feel free to comment with suggestions and do let me know if there are any problems.

P.S. If you are in the UK don’t forget to vote!

I just read in “Wired”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/start.html?pg=7 about NASA World Wind – a free application which (if you have a powerful enough PC) lets you hover over the globe and zoom in on any part you like to see a satellite overview of it. It only runs on Windows, alas.