“Indymedia”:http://www.indymedia.org/ and similar sites – created by unpaid, largely un-edited reporters – are one way in which the Internet is enabling alternative voices to be heard more widely, but this publishing model has its weaknesses. Because participants are unprofessional and unpaid, there tends to be more opinion venting and comments on existing coverage than original research. Also, the lack of editing means contributions can be ungrammatical, unreadable or even occaisionally “anti-semitic or racist rantings”:http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=44851. While many Indymedia sites have now started to hide or remove such postings, the problem is still bad enough that it is hindering the acceptance of Indymedia sites by the mainstream media and even “search engines”:http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/09/1639862_comment.php.

The New Standard wants to be a different kind of alternative media entity- one a lot closer to traditional news sources. It intends to pay its contributors to do real investigative research not just produce opinion pieces, and it will “charge its readers”:http://newstandardnews.net/promo/membership.cfm $4 to $10 a month when it launches in December.
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As I “mentioned earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_weblogs.html#000766, the people behind Moveable Type (and many of the other competitors to Blogger) are failing to offer real choice to the low-end weblogger because they lack a free hosted option. Now Blogger has upped the ante by dropping the remaining fees that were charged to Blogger Pro users and making those features available to all Blogger users. I’m guessing it’s gearing up to face the competition from “AOL”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_weblogs.html#000813.

It must be said that the “additional features”:http://new.blogger.com/feature_giveaway/announcement.pyra offered in Blogger Pro are nothing to write home about and MT (which powers this weblog) still leaves Blogger well behind in the features race…

The “Internet Archive”:http://www.archive.org/ which has an index of 11bn web pages – snapshots of the web at various stages of its development – now has a “search engine”:http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=8569 covering at least part of the archive. So you don’t need to know the precise address of the web page you had given up for lost (though that function still works). And you can see how the web saw things over time – you can see when a topic became “hot” for example – it provides supplementary graphs.

Thanks to “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_archive.html#106280030381534395 for the link

Now that my new book “Managing E-mail”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1405300264/qid%253D1044801476/davidbrakeswe-21 is out I shall be monitoring its sales progress with interest. I looked around for sites that could help me do this and found three – “Jungle Scan”:http://www.junglescan.com/ lets you keep track of your book’s Amazon rank, “GoogleAlert”:http://www.googlealert.com/ emails you at regular intervals to tell you what has changed in a Google search for a given term (like a book title) so you can see newly-indexed pages about your subject (useful for lots of things besides books!). The third service from “Books & Writers”:http://www.booksandwriters.com/ lets you track both Amazon and Barnes and Noble’s sales ranking but the very week I started to use it they announced they are introducing a charge.

I have been going through the list of sites which visitors found this blog through and found some interesting results.

Whatis? is a handy dictionary of technology terms and a few weeks back it apparently nominated this weblog as one of its “Favorite Technology Blogs“. Thank you whoever put me on that list and I hope visitors find what they are looking for.

Also thanks to Kevin Morris at Becta for putting this weblog on a list of good weblogs for UK Online centres.

It’s nice to get visitors from French and Italian weblogs, and I’m gratified at the people from around the world including Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia who have written in to ask to see some of the papers I have written.

On a lighter note, I noticed a few people coming from “http://www.web-shite.co.uk/” (now Roraz.com) which seems to specialise in linking to sites that are either gross or pornographic. I couldn’t figure out why until I noticed this entry for bl0g.org: “The mother of porn blog/user intergration/dirty/filthy/websites on the net. Either that or someone seriously needs to get a girlfriend.” Yes it’s pretty much as described and no it’s nothing to do with me! The difference one letter can make…

P.S. Someone recently wrote me to say that he read my weblog wasn’t going to be updated after Nov 2002. Has anyone read anything similar and if you have could you let me know where so I can correct that impression?of scary cast moviesapphic daily moviesmovies dbz hentaifree movies sex amaturehentai free porn anime moviessex movies free dildoporn fat free moviesgalleries hentai movie freeediting movie software freefree movies sucking matureinterrassisch Sybian MPEGsHahnerei interrassisch Geschlechtporn Spione Völlig Cartoonhentai Pissing Mädchenfucking moms Duaghtersverspritzend Anker Frauenpics bbw JapanischFrauen nackt 70 über Reifesexo interrassisch gratis de VideosTarzan Comic-Pornoscheißend GayMILF dp InterrassischKostenlos Lesben fuckingGroße Milch verspritzend TittenPapas teches Tochter Dick Mompuissy BehaarteBehaarte Kitzler teenrimming anal MädchenBlume Tucci interrassisch GeschlechtNacked Lesben

“TypePad”:http://www.typepad.com/ (the all singing all dancing hosted weblog service I mentioned here which comes from the same company that does my weblog software) has now launched and costs $4.95 to $14.95 a month. Looks like Blogger (which has a free option and offers free hosting through “Blogspot”:http://blogspot.com/) gets to keep its market share.

Can’t fault them for trying to tap the “high end” blogger customer though – they have to get money somehow! I would rather buy it outright when Moveable Type Pro becomes available – though that depends how they price it…movie film dialogue scriptsmovie free porngirl next door movieguidelines ratings movieicon gifs moviewallpaper poster moviemovie poster running matessoundtrack romeo juliet moviemovie stripslut movie teacheroutstanding miss 2006 teenmodels teen abercrombieaj sex tapeanalysis alchemistfree porn beastiality 100alex teensex video blogs adult amatuerblogs porn amature Map

I forgot about this – It’s here (if you don’t want to use the “Google Alert”:http://www.googlealert.com/ service I already mentioned).

Thanks to azeem for the link

There are several sites available to let you compare your favourite nations to one another online. Each has its merits and specialties so if you don’t find what you want from one, try one of the others.

NationMaster – the one I found out about most recently – lets you look at statistics in hundreds of different categories. Earlier I found the similar Your Nation.com – which relies on rather old CIA Fact Book data (1998) – and the UN’s “Infonation” aimed particularly at schoolkids which has a somewhat eccentric navigation system and a shorter list of countries to compare. It’s a pity someone doesn’t make a comparative database like these but which is dynamically linked to the latest sources of information – these while interesting will become increasingly out of date.

If you want to dig deeper Offstats provides a database of links to official statistics from several countries across the Internet, but without the whizzy direct comparison engine.

One key measure missing is the UN’s ever-popular quality of life (“Human Development”) index (report / index in PDF form). Of course how you score a country depends on what you value – one could come up with a different ranking with different criteria – but it’s always interesting to see how different countries fare. Canada long valued its top position through much of the 1990s (it dropped to 8th this year – behind the US(!)) and I notice the EU is blowing its own trumpet with six of the top ten countries.

The State Department’s assessment of the cost of living in many world cities is also entertaining, though it seems to find most places more expensive to live in than Washington DC which suggests to me that the “basket” of goods and services they use to generate the index is a little skewed.

Thanks to Eszter for the NationMaster linkringtone amber pacificcode nokia ringtone 3390650 free midi ringtone treoctu tv 24 show ringtoneringtone composer free nokia 3310ringtone blackberry 7290free 8390 download nokia ringtonedownload ringtone mosquito alarm Mapringtone nokia 33608700c ringtonephone ringtones alcatel cellfree absolutely ringtone sprintfor mp3 verizon agency ringtonesringtones alltel funnyringtone palm treo 6007600 nokia ringtones Map

If you are a journalist you have almost certainly seen this cryptic text: “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. In dapibus magna et velit…” etc.
lipsum.com collects in one place information about the origins of this text – used in place of actual copy when pages are being laid out – and provides a way to automatically generate as much of the dummy text as you need.

ChefMoz is a clever idea but a little under-cooked at present. Looking at the London section it has 172 restaurants listed and categorised (out of c. 10,000 available restaurants) and just 24 reviews linked – the Paris entry has 226 entries and 31 reviews. The search engine is pretty limited in its ability to use the categories that have been input. Nonetheless, it is an idea that deserves to go far and I hope it gets developed a little more. If you want to know where to eat in, say, Afghanistan (where conventional restaurant guides may fail to cover you) dmoz may have the answer one day – right now it just has one review.

The main existing London restaurant guides I used to rely on online – Zagats, the Evening Standard and Time Out – all now charge to use them.

Thanks to Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka for the link