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!

Clay Shirky has posted about the inequalities of popularity in weblogs and provides a useful analysis of possible solutions (all of which involve costs and would require a lot of cooperation and altruistic behaviour among bloggers or blog software designers). This has sparked a lot of discussion in the posts following. Nothing may come of it but at least the issue is being talked about.

I don’t have a firm view on this myself except to observe that a) perhaps being seen by the most possible people is not necessarily the objective of most bloggers anyway and b) it appears that there is some data to suggest the power law doesn’t necessarily hold “for individual interest sub-groups”:http://modelingtheweb.com/ within the whole ‘blogosphere’.

“Fernanda Viegas”:http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/ at MIT’s Media Lab has produced a Blog survey on the interesting subject of, “how bloggers think about issues of privacy and liability as they publish online”. I am not sure how representative a sample the respondents will be but it is certainly an interesting subject – one with some relevance to my own research – and I look forward to the results. Do fill it in if you run your own weblog and have a minute…

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.

Whether the weblogging ‘community’ is ‘fair’ or not depends on whether you look at opportunity or outcome. Not everyone has the opportunity to blog (this takes time and an internet connection) but as “Danah Boyd”:http://www.danah.org/ points out in a pair of recent postings about blogging and fairness the weblogging community looks even more unfair when you look at outcome – who is actually doing it.

In her first post on the subject she suggests out that propensity to blog seems to be “concentrated among straight white men”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/001400.html#001400 – in the “second”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/001402.html#001402 she suggests that just because the world of blogging is in principle open to all (or at least all with time and money to spare) and therefore fair (according to “Clay Shirky”:http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/01/06/joi_are_blogs_just.php) it doesn’t mean that the situation is necessarily right.

Clay appears to agree but suggests, ‘I can’t imagine a system that would right the obvious but hard to quantify injustice of the weblog world that wouldn’t also destroy its dynamism.’

Both he and Joi Ito, whose “posting”:http://joi.ito.com/archives/2004/01/06/are_blogs_just.html sparked the discussion in the first place seem to suggest that if a solution were to be found it would be through changes to the software itself. I think the definition of the problem and its solution needs to be broader – a ‘technical solution’ to the problem of inequality of participation and outcome in weblogging is not likely because that problem is largely a reflection of inequalities in society itself.

[Update: Oops – it seems I missed a later “post by Clay”:http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/01/06/boyd_ahtisaari_and_butterfield_v_me_dont_bet_on_me.php in which he actually partly makes my point below himself, saying there is ‘equality of technological opportunity, but one heavily dependent on other, external factors.’]

My own evolving PhD project at the “LSE”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/aboutLSE/information.htm
will be looking at what kind of people do Internet self-publishing, why those people do it and what social effects this new capability is having (currently using Bourdieu’s work as a theoretical basis).

The main point that has been largely missing so far in the discussion I think is that the barriers to blogging or other self-publishing (in the developed world at least) are not solely (or even mainly) money and time but attitude. It takes a certain attitude to want to share your thoughts and experience in this way and many people who one might argue should contribute (poor and/or minority people for example) don’t because (among other things) it isn’t the kind of thing they would think of doing and nobody they know does it.

If one believes that it would be of benefit both to society and to the individual participants that the practice of weblogging were more widely distributed, making the tools cheaper and easier to use is a necessary but not sufficient step. The benefits of such activity would need to be demonstrated and promoted by and among people of those other communities.

P.S. Has anyone done a recent study of webloggers or personal home page creators that looks not just at age and sex but at education level, occupation, ethnicity or better still class?

P.P.S. There’s lots more on the question of whether we should worry mainly about inequality of opportunity or of outcome (when looking in this case at the economy) over at “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001040.html

More evidence (if more were needed) that search engines like Google have a certain amount of unaccountable power. A satirical site that (among many other things) passed on instructions on how to make a search for ‘miserable failure’ come back with a George Bush page found that “it had been banned from using Google to advertise”:http://www.blather.net/shitegeist/000169.htm. It turns out you can’t place ads using Google for a site criticising an individual unless the site is clearly labelled “satire”. Of course the site still turns up in Google searches…

It’s possible that it wasn’t so much the anti-Bush sentiment that annoyed Google’s ad staff as the encitement to ‘game’ Google.

I have just finished my library run for the holidays and as you can see my stack of material to read is pretty formidable. I have done a quick count and found I have a little over 5,000 pages of academic text to read in less than a month (not counting any of the papers I have downloaded that I may want to read).

Somewhere before mid-January I will also have to produce 10 to 15 pages on how Bourdieu’s ideas of symbolic capital – particularly notions of field and habitus – relate to the production of personal home pages and weblogs, mark six essays and prepare to teach an undergrad course at the London College of Printing.

Of course, I am somewhat exaggerating the travails of this holiday season – I have already dipped into several of the books and some of the others I signed out on the off chance they might be useful and will probably not get around to reading. Above all, several of the books are collections of essentially separate chapters, so I won’t need to read them all (and anyway I like reading – if I didn’t, would I do a “PhD”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm?)

FWIW the books I have taken home to read are hidden below:
(more…)

The New York Times Link Generator – A solution to the problem that links to the New York Times normally disappear after a week or so into their “pay to see” archive. Links generated using the service above will always be freely accessible. This has been done with the permission of the New York Times on the (likely correct) assumption that commercial researchers will still want to use the NYT’s own complete search and pay for articles from the archives because webloggers won’t be linking in to (and therefore making freely available) every last article the NYT produces on a given day.

In the “discussion”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/2003/06/06#a440 that surrounded this move I also came across “Bug Me Not”:http://bugmenot.com/ which is a somewhat more controversial tool – it gives users a way to share usernames and passwords for sites like the NYT that require registration.