Keith Hampton has announced the launch of “i-neighbors”:http://www.i-neighbors.org/, a set of free web services for neighborhoods in Canada and the US inspired by the “research”:http://web.mit.edu/knh/www/pub.html into the connection between virtual and f2f communities done by himself and Barry Wellman. With their software you can

# Meet and communicate with your neighbors.
# Find neighbors with similar interests.
# Share information on local companies and services.
# Organize and advertise local events.
# Vocalize local concerns and ideas.

Alas the site’s services cannot be used by people outside the US and Canada because of legal concerns – particularly about our EU privacy laws, apparently, possibly because the service remains part of an MIT research programme and “data will be gathered for that research”:http://www.i-neighbors.org/privacy.php – but hopefully the BBC will do something similar for the UK at least. Meanwhile, “Upmystreet”:http://www.upmystreet.com/ here in the UK offers some of the necessary services.

I encourage any North Americans reading this to use this software to try to bring together the people in your community and I look forward to reading the research that will come out of this project.

“Alex Halavais”:http://alex.halavais.net/’ decision to produce a page of links to Graduate Student Advice has inspired me to do the same. “Seb Paquet”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/ alerted Alex and me to “his collection of advice”:http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/~paquetse/cgi-bin/om.cgi?Advice_For_Young_Scholars and to those two I would like to add PhinisheD FAQs from the very useful virtual self-help community “PhinisheD”:http://www.phinished.org/ (which I have to say I have yet to actually introduce myself to).

Last but not least you may also wish to download consult one or more of the presentations and documents provided as part of the LSE’s “Study Skills Workshop”:http://learning.lse.ac.uk/detail.asp?EventID=20. The material is notionally aimed at LSE students but the general guidance is applicable to anyone. “Study-Skills.net”:http://www.study-skills.net/ may also be worth a look.

The (rudely named but nonetheless useful) Rasterbator takes any image you give it (no more than 1Mb in size) and provides an Adobe Acrobat file which if printed can reach almost any size you like (if you have enough paper and enough toner). The biggest image produced so far was made up of “352 pages”:http://www.geocities.com/i337o/rasterbator.htm! Apparently the site has been used to produce a total of 324 015 square metres of pictures. There is a “gallery”:http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/gallery.gas of images produced if you are curious (none of the first few are pornographic, the name of the site notwithstanding).

WebSM (where SM stands for survey methods), ‘is dedicated to the methodological issues of Web surveys, but it also covers the broader area of interaction between modern technologies and survey data collection.’ It chiefly provides a collection of bibliographic references and some full text. Though the site itself is academic a fair amount of the papers are produced by and/or aimed at marketers. It has an index of survey software suppliers but this isn’t very handy as it doesn’t seem to include free software and is only organized by country.

Free commercial hosts for online surveys include my3q (don’t be put off by the Korean – it offers up to 5 questionnaires without question number or respondent number limits!), SurveyMonkey (their free service handles 10 questions and 100 responses), Zoomerang (free up to 30 questions, 100 responses but results stored for limited period). QuestionPro has a particularly good student offer – you can conduct one survey free of charge with unlimited questions and up to 5000 responses as long as you cite them publicly and link to their site from your project.

Castle is a suite of quiz software (adaptable presumably to other survey use) which is created for UK higher academics to use (free of charge) but appears to generate CGI scripts which must then be uploaded to your own server. GetFAST is similarly designed to help teachers get assessments from their students and allows for up to 20 questions but could also be adapted for more broad use I imagine.

I recall learning about a service run by a US university somewhere that was also free for academic use but I can’t remember where it is.

Later… While my3q is tempting I just realised that it doesn’t appear to let you download the results- you have to rely on their web stats which limits its usefulness. Advanced Survey at $25 a month (approx) looks pretty good but it isn’t clear if they support branching – for example, if my respondents answer yes to question 1 then don’t show them questions 2-4.

Zoomerang has a discount for educators for its full version I see ($99 for 3 months) and appears to do branching and allow downloading. QuestionPro allows branching and downloading of data but the non-academic free trial option only captures 25 respondents over a single month.

A poll of polls organised by Electoral Vote. Of course if the ludicrous results of the last election had caused America to “change this absurd system”:http://www.electionreform.org/ERMain/priorities/ec/default.htm we wouldn’t need a special additional set of calculations to figure out who is winning but since no change seems likely here’s a tool to help figure out what is going on. Of course it’s much to early yet to read much into it but I will be watching it anxiously closer to November.

Microsoft Watch has created a Web ranking tool which brings together various publicly-available ways of assessing the popularity of a given page – Google’s PageRank, Alexa’s traffic rank and a count of total external backlinks from Yahoo (which reports these much better than Google apparently).

None of these are very precise measures but they are the only ones available for sites that are not big enough to turn up in commercial surveys of web popularity as far as I know – anyone got any better ones? Come to that are there any easy ways to get at some of the site popularity data produced by people like “Comscore”:http://www.comscore.com/ without paying them commercial rates?

My supervisors have been active in the “CRIS”:http://www.crisinfo.org/ ( Communication Rights in the Information Society) programme and have called my attention to its work. On this year’s CRIS agenda is:

The CRIS Global Governance Project, sponsored by the Ford Foundation. The project’s aim is to support the emergence at national level of the concept of communication rights … advocacy on governance issues including civil society participation in governance structures… and in various global governance fora.

If you’re an academic interested in the connection between media participation and civil society take a look and join in!

In light of “this report”:http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx?story_id=2014183 which suggests a quarter of students admit to plagiarising – and almost all of them are getting away with it – here are some UK anti-plagiarism resources.

I wish I had the time to do a proper write-up of the NotCon session I attended featuring Brewster Kahle, the man behind the Internet Archive whose mission is nothing less than to provide universal access to all human knowledge. Here is some stuff I noted instead.

Some interesting factoids from his presentation:

* There are 150,000 people using the Internet Archive per day. It stores 3-400Tb of data and recently upgraded to 1Gbps bandwidth.
* There were 300,000 to 600,000 scrolls in the Library at Alexandria. Only around eight of them are left.
* You can store the contents of the Library of Congress as plaintext (if you had scanned it all) on a machine costing $60,000.
* The bookmobile he produced that is connected to the Internet via satellite, travels the world and produces complete bound books from a collection of 20,000 public domain works cost just $15,000 – and that includes the van itself.
* He says that it costs him $1 to print and bind a public domain book – I assumed the books produced would be very rough and ready but he brought some along and they were almost as good as the kind you’d buy in a shop. I suspect he may be stretching the truth a bit – I believe the $1 a book cost he quotes is for an 100 page black and white printed booklet. It’s still impressive though especially as:
* He notes it costs US libraries $2 to issue a book. He suggests they could give people copies of public domain books for $1 instead and pay another $1 to the author to compensate them.

Like many geniuses he just doesn’t know when to stop and thankfully he has a private income from a dotcom or two he was involved with that enables him to try out lots of projects. Aside from archiving the web, movies, books and music he’s:

* taking the US to court to try to get their boneheaded copyright laws changed
* working on mirrors of his San Francisco-based archive in Alexandria and Amsterdam (hosted there by XS4all)
* encouraging anyone to upload anything to his archive (copyright permitting) offering unlimited bandwidth indefinitely (though the site doesn’t make it very easy to figure out how you are supposed to take advantage of this generous offer) including performance recordings of bands that have given their permission.
* Trying to collect and save old software (he got special dispensation from the US copyright office to do this for the next three years but can’t make it available). He does want your old software however so if you’ve got some he would like you to send it to him – in physical form with manuals where available. He’s even
* Trying to provide fast, free wifi across all of San Francisco.

He’s so hyperactive my fingers get sore just typing in all of the projects he is involved with! I worry that he’s taking on too much and that some of it may fall by the wayside if something happens to him. But his enthusiasm and his optimism are infectious. I am pleased to have been able to shake his hand.

P.S. Ironically, I recorded his presentation and have it in MP3 format but because it was 21Mb I can’t serve it myself and so far nobody has stepped forward to host the file. I finally found how to upload it but then discovered I deleted the original file once I passed it on to someone else to upload! So I hope someone still has them – if it does get posted I’ll tell you where.

Want to check up on yourself? FutureMe.org will send you an email with whatever text you want at some future date. So you can remind yourself not to eat that chocolate bar or to start studying for that test or whatever.