The concept – man falls in love with virtual woman – is not that original any more – but Flicka – a 12 minute Dutch film from “AtomFilms”:http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/, is genuinely touching. It is one of the films currently showing through their new free “Hi-Def”:http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/spotlight/collections/hidef/ service which downloads films in the background so you can see them at close to full-screen resolution (why don’t more sites offer this instead of streaming?). Most of the films have been frankly pretty poor (you don’t get to choose what you are sent) but Flicka was for me a genuine discovery.

The way HiDef works the films are recycled every two weeks so if you want to see it, download now. (note: the download and movie playing software is PC-only).

I have never understood why with all the advances there have been in browsers neither Mozilla nor IE has developed a proper database for managing bookmarks. If you have more than a few dozen bookmarks it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of them all. The “Keeping Found Things Found”:http://kftf.ischool.washington.edu/ project has discovered people can’t find sites they visited earlier but they seem to have developed a needlessly baroque way to deal with this problem. I have been using “Powermarks”:http://www.kaylon.com/ for several years and now have more than 5,000 bookmarks in a simple database which lets me get to any of them almost instantly. It may be the most useful software I have ever bought…

Harpers.org. The redesigned site (for one of my favourite print magazines) appears to have a lot more content on it than the old one. Unfortunately:

1) All (or nearly all) of the content seems to be historical (the magazine started 150 years ago)
2) The sites’s design and navigation is more than a little ideosyncratic (though I first read about it via its designer who seems “pleased with his result”:http://www.ftrain.com/AWebSiteForHarpers.html It seems to be designed like a sort of weblog but while weblogs are easy to put material into they can be hard to navigate around if you have a rich variety of material available.

Still, it’s worth having a look at.

Thanks to a “Bloggie award nominee”:http://www.fairvue.com/?feature=awards2004 and extremely helpful person I have managed to generate rss feeds by category for my site. Her weblog “The Girlie Matters”:http://www.thegirliematters.com/tips/ is also a great source of other ways to tune up a Moveable Type site.

What I can’t yet figure out how to do is dynamically generate the links to the XML files so they can show up on the category pages themselves or link to cute XML buttons beside each category. Until I do, just look at the URL of a category you want to monitor and edit the URL manually as follows:
“https://blog.org/archives/cat_best_of_blogorg.html”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_best_of_blogorg.html becomes
“https://blog.org/archives/best_of_blogorg.xml”:https://blog.org/archives/best_of_blogorg.xml and “https://blog.org/archives/cat_academia.html”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_academia.html becomes “https://blog.org/archives/academia.xml”:https://blog.org/archives/academia.xml

I’ve been wanting to do this for ages. In effect it turns my single blog into 47 different subject-specific blogs! (I really have to sort out a new taxonomy for my posts one of these days)

David Wilcox brings to my attention on Designing for Civil Society an article summarising the benefits of several different open source applications for activists.

Interesting and useful though the list is for some, I do think it shows a narrowness of perspective common to technically-proficient activists. It doesn’t talk about how difficult the software is for the group to install or maintain and doesn’t put much stress on whether there is a free hosted version of the software available (so an organization can just use it without having to install it or run their own web server).

The unspoken assumption of those writing seems to be that at least one person among the activist groups will know how to set up and maintain software and have access to a computer with an always-on broadband connection. Tut tut!

Corbis was one of the few sites that offered E-Cards (photographs) on a wide variety of subjects that you might actually not mind sending to people. Now it seems the only Corbis sites will be aimed at “business presenters”:http://bizpresenter.corbis.com/default.asp and “professional users”:http://pro.corbis.com/ (eg magazines). Oh well – back to “Hallmark”:http://www.hallmark.com/hmk/Website/pass_ecards.jsp?CONTENT_KEY=&CONTENT_TYPE=None&fromPage=%2fWebsite%2fISE%2ftp_section.jsp&nav=CARDS&lid=BPF1 which is just about bearable I guess – or for those with patience and a broadband connection the “Historic Tale Construction Kit”:http://www.adgame-wonderland.de/type/bayeux.php

Can anyone recommend free birthday and holiday-related ecard services that are actually tasteful?

One of the more draconian ways to prevent spam is only to allow into your mailbox email that either comes from a “whitelist” of people you know or submits to a human-designed test. I recently emailed a blog notable and got back an automated message from Mailblocks that asked me to fill in a web form before my email was forwarded to him. First of all, if I was on dialup I would have to connect to the Internet just in order to ssend him his message but more annoying still the request for confirmation email took more than 20 hours to arrive! Imagine if I had actually needed to reach him urgently about something.

Nonetheless this kind of technology may be the only reasonably sure-fire way to protect your email from a mountain of incoming spam once the spammers get ahold of it. That’s why I have always taken care that my own email address isn’t out on the Internet in a machine readable form anywhere. And you can try it out for yourself for free (with a 5Mb mailbox) and see how you like it.

Dave Winer has created a catchily-named service – Share Your OPML. It doesn’t do anything very clever yet, but put together with some collaborative filtering software I am sure it could… To explain for the 99% of the world who have better things to do with their time than memorising TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) or in this case FLAs – RSS readers can normally import and export OPML files which are simply lists of the sites you subscribe to. What ‘Share Your OPML’ does, then, is let you compare what blogs and other news sources you read regularly with others. Blogrolling, which has a much bigger installed base, could do this too but so far it hasn’t done much with its data (except produce its own top 100 list).

Anyhow, if those of you who do read this via RSS could pop along to that site and sign up – you might push this humble blog into Winer’s top 100!

P.S. If you’re wondering what on earth an RSS reader is, I “posted about that”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_weblogs.html#000880 here too.

A U of Berkeley study – How Much Information?– has attempted once again to estimate how much data of all kinds is generated across the world annually. It was done in 1999 and again in 2002 so we can see how things have changed. A couple of interesting facts culled from the executive summary:

• The United States produces about 40% of the world’s new stored information, including 33% of the world’s new printed information, 30% of the world’s new film titles, 40% of the world’s information stored on optical media, and about 50% of the information stored on magnetic media.
• Email generates 400,000 Terabytes of “information” each year – it would be interesting to calculate how much of this is signatures and quoted text…
• The searchable Web by contrast is only 170 Terabytes and if you count Internet-accessible databases you get a further 66-91,000 Terabytes (very rough estimate)
• North America generates lots more paper than Europe – “each of the inhabitants of North America consumes 11,916 sheets of paper (24 reams), and inhabitants of the European Union consume 7,280 sheets of paper (15 reams). At least half of this paper is used in printers and copiers to produce office documents”. So much for the paperless office!

David Wilcox posts a link to “twelve academic reports about technology and everyday life in Europe”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/EMTEL/plan.html recently published by the “European Media and Everyday Life Network”:http://www.emtel2.org/ and suggests given their usefulness that a user-friendly version should have been written. Indeed it should but one could argue that it is not necessarily the role of the academic to produce such a summary.

To some extent the complexity of the language does stem from the fact that the papers are aimed directly at an academic audience and only indirectly at the wider public (as “Prof Roger Silverstone”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/rogerSilverstone.htm, one of the report’s authors, responded).

As far as I can make out there are four possible paths from academic research to policy:

• paper -> policy (rare – as papers are usually not widely read or readable outside their intended audience)
• paper -> journalist/writer -> policy (here is where hopefully someone like David Wilcox or myself might fit in)
• paper -> academically-trained civil servant -> policy (does this happen often? I hope so, but lack evidence)
• paper -> academics -> students who eventually become politicians/activists/journalists etc (the ‘mainstream’ way academic knowledge gets used – rather slow and indirect but, I hope, effective)

I would be curious to hear from my readers which road to academic policy influence is most effective and how academics with interest in policy could help the process along.

Getting back to these particular reports, many academic papers these days come with abstracts – a hundred words or so providing a summary of what the research has found – and often keywords as well, for integrating into databases. It is a shame that the ‘house style’ in this instance seems to be not to have such a summary. There are abstracts for the project reports but these are easy to overlook on the report web page and they are themselves several pages long.

David Wilcox’s observations point to a possible need for a second abstract for academic papers aimed at policy questions – one that tries to give the layman an idea of the paper’s findings without touching on the theoretical background- even if all that does is get the layman to ask an academic friend to take a look at it for them!