The iSociety alerted me to recent coverage by the BBC and the Guardian Online about EdenFaster. It is a community-led project supplying broadband to a valley in rural England which would otherwise be passed over by telecomms suppliers.

What is interesting about EdenFaster is that while it provides some Internet access it intends to use the speeds it offers – up to 40Mbps – primarily to deliver community-generated content.

I hope they are successful, but I am not sure they will be able to find enough active information providers among a small community of rural farmers to provide a serious amount of deep, well-maintained content. Freenets in the 90s (mostly in the US) sprang up with similar intentions to offer community networking and Internet access to their local areas “on the side”. Unfortunately, people were mostly attracted by the ability to access the Internet and when commercial Internet providers appeared, the Freenets gradually died away.

To my mind community content will succeed when
1) broadband is reasonably ubiquitous in an area (and people know their neighbors will be reading)
2) Tools are available that make providing content and community participation easy for everyone
3) Enthusiastic leadership evangelises use and provides support.

Let’s hope all three elements are in place with the Edenfaster project and that it can be an example of good practice for other such projects.

Gill Sellar was hired as project coordinator for the Albany GateWAy in 1999 – a service designed to act as a community web portal for a rural, dispersed community in SW Australia. Fortunately for us, she was also a PhD student who decided to do her thesis on the subject of her work – particularly whether such a project could be sustainable. I have been hosting a draft of her thesis for a while, and now she has provided the final copy (3Mb – or 1.75 Mb as a Zip file). It’s 315 pages long but well worth a look if you are interested in how virtual community services can be sustainable and help to build social capital in rural areas.

I have asked her if she could provide an “executive summary” and if she does so I will post it here or link to it.

A fascinating exposé in the NYT (requires registration) by Michael “Liar’s Poker” Lewis of a 15-year-old who masqueraded as a legal expert on askme.com. It’s rather lengthy – the “good stuff” starts about a third of the way through.

Here is one of the bizarre exchanges from the article:

“Where do you find books about the law?” I asked.
“I don’t,” he said, tap-tap-tapping away on his keyboard. “Books are boring. I don’t like reading.”
So you go on legal Web sites?”
“No.”
“Well, when you got one of these questions did you research your answer?”
“No, never. I just know it.”

“You just know it.”
“Exactly.”

!!!
And this guy ended up the most popular legal expert on AskMe… even after it was revealed who he was!

Does that say something about people’s tendency to correlate good service with good products? The democratising power of the Internet? Or does it just call into question the value of lawyers?

Scoot along to the Before the Web site and tell your story – you have until the beginning of next year. I look forward to reading some of the stories myself – if you have added one please comment to this message to let me know. Alas I am not in a position to contribute myself – it was the web that made me realise that this Internet thing was something I could work in and write about not just a fun and rather interesting tool to stay in touch with my friends and ahead of the journalistic game…

(More on my own net history here).ringtones 3g uploadringtone 3360 nokia downloadin cent da 50 ringtone clubringtone get 650 treoringtone allringtones 1880free polyphonic ringtone 3510i38 cingular ringtone special Map911 moviesmovie home adulttgp adult movietitles adult moviemilano nude alyssa clips moviesex home amateur moviesamateur movie tgpmovie ass Map

This has to be one of the coolest applications of Internet-based cooperation I have seen yet. Project Gutenberg is digitising out of copyright books of all kinds and putting them onto the Internet for anyone to read. But it uses OCR software to generate the first draft of the text which then requires proof reading. Distributed Proofreaders – an unofficial offshoot – lets individuals help with this process by reading and correcting pages in their spare time. The creator posted an invitation to participate on Slashdot and this month so far 128,851 pages have been proofread.

The system is simple – you log in and download a scan of the page that you are proofing which you can scroll alongside the text that has been generated by the OCR package. Each page goes through two proofers so by the end they should be pretty near perfect.

Numbers of pages processed have been steadily declining since the /. posting but are still over 3,000 pages a day and because of this extraordinary cooperative effort 636 books have been added to the archive so far, including such classics as Arms and the Man, by George Bernard Shaw, Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thacker and Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire to name but a few of the As and Bs!

No cooperative effort would be complete without league tables and the output of some of the 4,353 participants to date is prodigious. The top producer has proofed 15,602 pages! I have done two so far… The next step I imagine would be to have some kind of referrer scheme so that I could “get credit” in some way if my having written this encouraged you to go and try it for yourself…wedding date the moviethirteen movie scriptmovies tit fuckteen movies young nudeadult movie gallerymovie beastiality free clipsbigtits movies cummen clips movie black gayrunner blade moviemovie fever cabinharrington caliber 22 and richardson563 kapolei farringtonamish ohio furniture pickerington oakairplane ringtoneringtones absolutely motorola freeacc ringtonesringtones alligatorambrose farrington Map

For less than £500 per person, two thousand people in a high rise tower block in Melbourne, Australia are being provided with computers, training and broadband access to email and community services.

It’s too early to tell, but I would hope that with the right community software and appropriate help this could turn out to be a crucial tool to building social capital on the estate and improving both people’s skills and their environment.

The scheme is already up for the Stockholm Challenge Award. The award is interesting in itself as it helps to make prominent examples of good practice from around the world.

The first example I have come across of its usefulness for crime prevention.

A small town next to a forest preserve, South Orange New Jersey is unique in many respects. Unfortunately for one con man, the town also has one thing many communities don’t: an active virtual community. When a door-to-door salesman’s visit left one resident suspicious, she did some digging and found out it was a scam. So she alerted the police and posted a warning to the town’s message boards. Several other residents had been victims, too, but word spread quickly. Six hours later, when the con man knocked on another door, the resident already knew his name and his spiel. She told him that the whole town was on to him, and the police had his description. I doubt he’ll bother South Orange again.

day 7 week a loans payday2008 conforming limit mac loan freddienational abbey bridging loanssloane aidanloan pawn akronaboriginal government loanspersonal bank adelaide loansaz phoenix 5,000.00 loans in203k new loans hampshiredown hoepa payment 20 loan

The New York Times is publishing a weekly digest summarising some of the more entertaining comments from readers in its “Reader’s Opinions” virtual community. This backs up what I have always said – that the best way to encourage user participation (if you are a media organization) is to demonstrate that you are paying attention to it by using it from time to time. Now if it publishes these in the paper as well as online that would be really something…add slvr ringtone to mp3ringtones airtel downloadpolyphonic home alabama ringtone sweetcarter wayne 2 ringtone lilfree nokia ringtone tone 6310iringtones aladdin htmphone alltel ringtone downloadalltel phone music ringtone free Map

A heartening tale of how two business models that aren’t supposed to be profitable on the Internet – self-publishing using e-books and virtual community – have turned out to work profitably together for at least one person – a publisher of fantasy books.

It’s the sort of thing I would have said ought to work but in the last few years a lot of things that seemed as if they would work have proven unprofitable. Glad to see this actually does work. It may be that the particular audience of fantasy readers he is addressing is fanatical enough that they represent a special case…

The presentation I did to UK local government about the usefulness of virtual community and its care and feeding is now online in Powerpoint format.