I just ran across the website for “The Idea Channel”:http://www.ideachannel.com in the US which features wall to wall interviews with professors including several Nobel prize winners. As well as being able to download a few short interview excerpts you can access a transcript a month if you register on the site.

It’s a pity they have just two entries under Sociology but there are lots of economists, political scientists and historians to listen to as well. I don’t suppose my cable company will carry it though…

By a strange coincidence, “BBC4”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/ here in the UK is doing a “profile of Richard Rorty”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/listings/programme.shtml?day=today&filename=20031104/20031105_0140_4544_31367_30 tonight 1:40 – 2:10 AM. I’ll be programming my “recordable DVD player”:http://www.panasonic-europe.com/homecinema/main.asp?lang=en&nav=dvdrec …
Thanks to Follow Me Here for the Idea Channel link.
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I got talking recently to a guy who runs Internet hotel booking services for a living and naturally I had to ask him how to get cheap hotel rooms online. He suggested two services – Travelaxe (a downloadable app) and “SideStep”:http://www.sidestep.com/ which installs inside your browser (IE or Netscape only, apparently).

I tested these using London as an example over the weekend of Nov 15 to Nov 16 and trying to find the cheapest possible rooms. SideStep failed to find the “Atlantic Paddington”:http://www.newatlantic.co.uk/ hotel (really a hostel) which has some of the lowest prices and neither has many hostels or B & Bs – primarily because these are generally not yet ‘plugged in’ to the major reservation systems. As a result you may be better off going to (for example) “ase.net”:http://ase.net/servlet/HotelList?type=8%2C4&dist=2 and contacting the individual B & Bs and hostels listed individually.

Still, either may be worth a try if you travel on business and need/want to stay in hotels instead of B&Bs.

P.S. both apps are free of charge and the creators make their money via the commission they get from sending traffic to the hotels when you book through them. As far as I can tell this commission doesn’t raise the price to you…

What a good idea from “Tom Steinberg”:http://www.tomsteinberg.co.uk/ – mySociety.org. His recent “piece in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/chatroom/story/0,12529,1073754,00.html explains the idea better than I could, but basically the idea is to provide a way for private funders to pay for inexpensive but useful websites that are not commercial but which the UK government doesn’t feel it is able or willing to produce.

There are already a few interesting ideas on the site including mobile phone-based “car sharing”:http://mysociety.blogs.com/mysociety/2003/10/mobile_phone_lo.html and websites to facilitate “local swapping of power tools, lawn mowers etc”:http://mysociety.blogs.com/mysociety/2003/10/local_swap_shop.html I hope it will go on to be the start of something big.

Already he has something which other sites of this kind usually don’t – he has some money he can offer to kick-start these projects. It’s only £10,000 so far but it’s enough to get people to put in bids…

(Title for this posting was shamelessly pinched from “Tom Loosemore”:http://www.tomski.com/)

Some very useful-looking web tools to help UK citizens to hold their national representatives (MPs) to account and to organize offline and online campaigns for change. Public Whip takes publicly available information about all Westminister MPs and brings it together in an easy-to-view manner. You can see how often your MP votes, how often they vote with their party and, most importantly, how they voted on specific issues.

“iCan”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ican/ from the BBC is a long-awaited site (still in beta) designed to enable and encourage community activism. It includes advice from activists, tools to link grassroots campaigns to larger organizations, and roving reporters who will publicise success stories. If it is done right this could be big (but if it is too successful it could involve the BBC in some interesting rows!). One interesting thing I notice already – I don’t know yet whether this is crucial or a weakness – is that to register you are encouraged to give your real name. For most online communities this would be an advantage, but if I were starting a campaign on something controversial I might not want to do so in a way that could allow employers to identify me. Of course, there’s nothing in the BBC’s registration process to prevent you from lying…

Thanks to “NTK”:http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/10/ for the links.

If you are in London tomorrow, have a half day free and have £150 (£120 concessions) I encourage you to attend a “half-day workshop”:http://nmk.prismix.com/courses/course.cfm?ItemID=4926 I am running on Internet research methods. It’s not too late to “book”:http://nmk.prismix.com/courses/register.cfm?CourseDateID=120! Assuming all goes well, I hope to do it again – possibly for a full day. Meanwhile take a look at my “search engine category”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_search_engines.html for some of the latest news and my thoughts on the subject.

Ever wanted to get several people coordinated across the world using a calendar? Microsoft Exchange lets you do this easily across the web (and has other useful features like the ability to automatically schedule events) but of course it costs money and using Outlook does make you more vulnerable to viruses. There are a couple of free solutions available, each with benefits and drawbacks. Of these the best two I have found are Localendar which looks slick and (if you are in the US) includes an interesting “see public events near you” feature. You can also add features like import/export to Palm or Outlook or a message board if you pay.

“Calendars.net”:http://www.calendars.net/ would be my choice. It looks very powerful – it lets you edit calendars offline (and sync with Palm or Outlook) using a separate Windows application – “iCal”:http://www.brownbearsw.com/ical/newical.htm – then upload them, and allows multiple security levels (so you can set certain groups with the ability to view, others who can post new events etc). It also supports email notification for events and works in different languages. The drawback is that it looks as if it might be somewhat complicated to get to grips with as a calendar administrator.

The only thing none of these calendars seem to do is allow you to automatically enter pre-set locations (meeting rooms etc) and schedule them or auto-schedule people if you know what their schedules look like. If anyone knows any free web-based software that does this I would be interested to hear about it!

Like many other Moveable Type weblog owners I have been suffering from a recent onslaught of automated, offensive ads for porn posted as comments to messages. Jay Allen has just produced a “spam blocking tool for Moveable Type”:http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/ which should help some – I fear this is not a final solution to the problem but merely the start of a depressing “arms race” between spammers and weblog users which may substantially reduce the usefulness of weblogs for everyone. In a way I am surprised this took this long to happen, people being what they are.

P.S. I apologise in advance if you accidentally stumble across any offensive links in comments – it will take me a while to get around to deleting all of them because at least for the moment there is no easy way for me to bulk-delete comments.

I just read that Demos – an influential UK thinktank – has now put almost all of its catalogue up online for free download (using a “license”:http://www.demos.co.uk/aboutus/openaccess_page296.aspx derived from the “Creative Commons”:http://www.creativecommons.org/ license).

Worth a browse if you are a UK-based policy wonk…

A good idea to encourage Internet use from the UK Government – a downloadable “information pack”:http://getting.ukonline.gov.uk/oee/getstarted.nsf/sections/angels/$file/angels.htm that helps people help their friends and colleagues to get online for the first time.

I have to say I was rather hoping it would turn out to be something even more ambitious – a scheme to recruit volunteers to donate their time to be online and answer new users’ inquiries there. Perhaps that could be phase two? I have a suspicion that something like that is already out there if only one knew where to look but government publicity would be needed to make sure enough people knew about it to make it a success.

Of course people are more likely to turn to their friends and relations than to absolute strangers for aid getting online, and if you’re able to use a chat tool while surfing you are already a fair way along the road to Internet mastery so perhaps a programme like that would have limited effectiveness.

Thanks to Matt Jones for the link.

I have just finished “a simple guide to email use”:http://www.davidbrake.org/dealingwithemail/ for individuals or companies to accompany my book, “Dealing with E-mail”. It features additional material and numerous web links covering anti-spam and anti-virus techniques, legal issues, using email sensitively and effectively to market your products or services and simple ways to organize your old e-mail messages for easy retrieval.

I hope you like it – if you have any additional ideas, comments or (heaven forbid) corrections, please comment below.