Perhaps inevitably, the attempts by people like “NZ Bear” to rank weblogs by popularity have spurred some to try to ‘game’ the system and get to the top of the list. This practice has spurred some discussion by Clay Shirky (an A-list blogger) and others. As Shirky points out if you get into ‘A List’ rankings you will probably get more curious readers and your ranking may perpetuate itself.
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People often use the Internet to try to get a personal glimpse of what things are like across the world. “Webcams”:http://www.comfm.com/webcam/ give you a peek but they can’t talk back, and travel guides written by travellers for travellers like “Wikitravel”:http://www.wikitravel.org/ or “igougo”:http://www.igougo.com/ but if you want a day by day slice of life account of life in a country weblogs can provide one. A very large proportion are “from the US and Europe”:http://www.blogcensus.net/?page=map but I recently heard about two weblog indexes from further afield sinosplice indexes weblogs in English from or about China and “Blog Africa”:http://www.blogafrica.com/ should be reasonably self-explanatory!

The creator of “Technorati”:http://www.technorati.com/ apologises for some growing pains.

‘Right now, we’re adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We’re also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds.’

Of course this is a self-selecting sample – those who know about and choose to register with the site – so actual numbers are even higher.

It has been suggested that because weblogs are highly linked to one another, weblog postings are likely to “dominate Google search results”:http://www.robertkbrown.com/2002/07/16/blogging_killed_the_google_star.html In July “Microdoc News”:http://microdoc-news.info/ decided to test this and found that for a selection of typical searches weblogs seemed to have little effect. What this didn’t test, however, was whether weblogs dominated subject areas webloggers were writing about – after all, the discourse of webloggers tends to be concentrated in certain specific areas. I imagine if you searched for the stuff the most prolific webloggers tend to publish about – US politics, for example, or computing – you might still find a lot of weblog entries. Then again, why shouldn’t you?

Back in June, the Onion wrote about “social capital”:https://blog.org/archives/000799.html – now it is examining the social consequences of weblogging.

Weekly INCITE comes from ten researchers and PhD students at the “Incite centre”:http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/incite/index.htm at “University of Surrey’s Sociology department”:http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk.

Recently one of them expressed concerns about “providing the raw data from academic research”:http://www.weeklyincite.blogspot.com/2003_10_26_weeklyincite_archive.html#106760924917923058 for others to analyse. It seems to me fundamental to the whole nature of the academic enterprise that raw data should be as widely available as possible. There is always the risk that people will take your data and interpret it in ways that you don’t agree with but one answer to this is to ensure that the data’s creator(s) are notified whenever the data is downloaded and/or republished. That way if you disagree with the new analysis you can present a counter-analysis of your own and/or point out any methodological issues in your research that make the interpretation given untenable.

There is also the question of whether research subjects should also be re-notified somehow every time the data is re-used. I suppose that would be ideal ethically but might make it practically impossible to use the data. I suggest the best course is full disclosure – something like this: ‘you will not be personally identifiable from this research and I intend to use it to do X but the anonymous data will also be made available to other academics who may do their own analysis.’ I wonder how often this is done at present?

It seems there is a larger question behind this issue – if the whole truth about a study could be damaging to an already disadvantaged group is it right to suppress the damaging information? Is an academic’s highest duty to do good science or to do good (as she or he sees it)? I guess I have absorbed enough of the values of the journalist to try to tell the whole truth first (including providing all your findings) then provide your own interpretation.

In the long run your ideological opponents will likely eventually do their own research and discover the facts you have omitted, putting their own spin on them and devaluing what you have produced. My gut feeling is you should get all the facts out in the open and get your retaliation in first!

The machine it was hosted on had a hard disk crash and was last backed up on the 26th – at least that’s how it looks things happened. Thankfully I hadn’t done much in the meantime. Thanks, “Harald”:http://www.cfrq.net/~chk/, for bringing it back up so quickly and for having the foresight to back it up frequently! Service should be back to normal…

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.

Tom Coates comments on a phenomenon that I hope will not turn into a real problem – people posting spam as comments on weblogs. I’ve had some of that (which I have promptly deleted) but what I find odd is that none of it seems to have been automated – it’s actually been typed in by hand. I can’t imagine it would be worth anyone’s time to do that. But if someone finds a way to automate posting comments to popular weblogs it could start to become a real hassle.

I also seem to get a lot of people just typing stuff like ‘hi’ as a comment. I delete those comments as well since I can’t see anyone else being interested in reading it. If you do just want to say hello, please send me an email via my “contact me page”:http://www.davidbrake.org/contact.htm and if you can, tell me where you are from and how you found me.

I know I am coming late to this but I have finally gotten around to using an RSS reader myself and I have been tweaking my template settings now that I can see what my weblog looks like in that format. You may note I now have a link to “FeedDemon”:http://www.feeddemon.com/ which is the best RSS reader I have found so far and I now have two feeds – one “RSS 1.0 compliant”:https://blog.org/index.rdf and one “RSS 2.0 compliant”:https://blog.org/index.xml. Enjoy!

If you’re wondering what I am talking about, RSS is, “An XML-based format for headline syndication, in which headlines and links to the actual content are made available to other Web sites” (TechEncyclopedia). Interestingly I couldn’t find a definition in the “Foldoc”:http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/index.html tech dictionary or “Whatis.com”:http://whatis.techtarget.com/ which suggests to me this stuff is still not mainstream (though you’d think everyone was using it if you read some weblogs)….