Wired News reports an appeal court ruling in the US that ruled a person forwarding an email containing libellous statements to a mailing list is not themselves guilty of libel. It was suggested that this protection may also extend to webloggers who report stuff that is sent to them.

Of course the truly litigious will simply choose a court jurisdiction that is more favourable to them – the UK for example…

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.wachovia accept creditcardamex bank cards credit of canadaonline lpn accredited degreeinquiry credit allowedunion education credit amarilloexpress monitoring credit program americantax eligibility new credits 2007high test equivalency accredited school Map

And a multitude of other household uses. Register with Voicemonkey and by calling an American number you can automatically leave a voice message on your weblog, add voice messages to your email, add voice messages to personal ads etc. Of course it’s quite possible to do something similar if you have an Internet connected PC, microphone and suitable web setup and knowledge but the creator of this service aims to make it very easy to integrate and of course being able to use it from anywhere as long as you have a mobile makes it rather more versatile. Best of all, at the moment it is free of charge to use at the moment. Later there will be a phone number you can call free in the US and a sliding scale of charges to use the service.

Just for fun I thought I would do a bit of manual audblogging myself (launch recording application, convert file to MP3, upload, create and test link) to see how long it took. Of course I have broadband which helped but altogether it took me just a little over six minutes including testing the link – and three of those minutes were used in practicing to make it sound OK. Have a listen!

I wrote about another such service, Audblog (which charges) back in February.loan unsecured after bankruptcypay 24 day loan hour2 loan unsecured personal 25loan plan 401kpayday 9 payday loan simple loancredit loan equity bad home acash las loan advance vegasadvance loan cash cash paydaypayday loan check advance15 payday 10 loan and

The first lengthy review of my weblog I have seen has appeared on The Weblog Review. I am pleased to hear that the reviewer, Wendy, says “David’s a good writer and typically knows his facts” but a little chagrined that she “was expecting something huge, something that would just jump out at and scream. I didn’t really find that here.”

Oh well – keeping this updated daily takes me a surprisingly long time even though individual entries are often quite short, and the time I spend on it is (at least in theory) at the expense of other work so I guess I’m resigned to having a weblog that is not quite as useful or interesting as I would like it to be. I suspect if it was more personal and perhaps more strongly opinionated I could get more readers, but I was burned once before years ago by some over-frank remarks that were read by the wrong people so I will stick to being informative and/or entertaining in the areas I cover and you will only get the occaisional innocuous glimpse of my personal life.

Tom Coates suggests that because weblogs tend to link more to other sites that have useful information or views on a subject, one can get to “100% information saturation on any given subject in the blogosphere without reading anywhere near 100% of the weblogs in it”.

But while he qualifies the statement later on to “100% of the information available in the blogosphere” there remains an unspoken assumption that because there are so many weblogs and sites out there, there will be thoughtful posts on any given subject. But how many – say – liberal arts professors have weblogs or even websites? How many trade union leaders or indeed politicians? How many people living in the developing world?

Moreover the idea that more incoming links > a more informative opinion is flawed. People often link to things they disagree with or think are stupid(*), and sites that start being the most popular have a substantial advantage in likelihood of being linked to again simply because more people visit them and have a chance to see a view. If an issue like “will Venice sink into the sea” turns up in the news, and a weblogger who has hitherto laboured in obscurity happens to be the world expert on the subject, what is the likelihood that enough people will find her to make her weblog rise to visibility through the haze of links that are popular just because the posters are?

This is also the problem with search engines like Google that weight pages by number of inbound links – the results appear good, but lots of stuff that might be better remains obscure because it doesn’t yet have lots of incoming links. In fact the more useful the links you do find are the more dangerous it is because you may fail to realise the extent of what’s missing.

(*) Some people (can’t remember who offhand, though) have the clever idea of trying to put metadata into the HTML of links saying useful stuff like “I think this link contains useful/useless information” or “I agree/disagree with this link”. They want to come up with something that could be accepted as a standard. Of course the “installed base” of links out there is collosal so even if successful it would take years for this innovation to have much of an impact.

Tom “plasticbag” Coates mused a while back about webloggers getting into bed with marketing companies and asks what can/should be done about it.

In the interests of full disclosure, any books I mention – particularly now that I am using Blaxm (which alas does not seem to be taking off) – I link to Amazon using an Amazon affiliate link. So far 46 people have followed those links but none have actually bought books.

It’s not that I even particularly like Amazon or that I expect the money I might get from any transaction to do anything more than perhaps take me to dinner once a year – it’s just that the software exists that makes it easy to make such links thanks to Amazon’s market dominance and if I am linking to Amazon anyway why not get free money if it were offered me?

I also recently received a registration code for some email software because someone who read it noticed I have just written a book about email. I will review it shortly but I assure you that the free license did not influence my review (as you will see when it comes out!)

So far I don’t think weblogging is big enough to make it worth marketers making large scale efforts to co-opt people but it’s definitely something to watch out for – particularly with the avowedly commercial weblogs like Gizmodo.loan aafesloan 450 fico home equityscholarship p loan u advantage ocredit 25,000 unsecured poor loanstudent loan barred statute albertafor loans calculator amorization autoalberta student legal loanspayday loans 1hr$40,000 loan with interest adoption 0no cosigner all loans

… my parents write to tell me they watched something about it on TV. Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour just did a segment about weblogs – my mother told me about it (thanks, Mum!) and you can watch it, listen to it or just read the transcript. Not full of new insight but a nice little overview of the subject (including a short analysis of how weblogs may have knocked Trent Lott out of power). It also rehashed the old argument, “are weblogs journalism?” And it did reveal to me something I didn’t realise – MSNBC has editors who copy-edit what their webloggers write?movie teen chris another not evansmovies lesbian dirtymovies free easyboyfriendmovies sucking 69 freebestiality free movieblack pussy free moviesdownloadable movies sex freefuck movie free clips Map

It was through Julian Bond’s RSSify utility. Check it out yourself – though of course it won’t be long before this is built into all weblogs automatically. I have discovered to my surprise via my site survey (please try it out!) that almost a third of respondents visit this site via my RSS feed.

Esther Dyson – founding chair of ICANN and producer of influential tech newsletter Release 1.0 is now doing a weblog (pretty dull and infrequently updated so far it must be said).loans texas teachers 2007 home forapproved payday loans 100arm loan 5-1poor 12000 loan creditfinancial loans american education institution studentof loans treatment accounting swaploan personal $2500quick cash alaska loanmortgage loans down 50 paymentcredit adoption card loans adoption and

The guys behind Moveable Type (the software I use for my weblog) are unveiling their answer to Blogger’s blogspot – a way to have your own weblog without having to install software on a server anywhere. Moreover, according to Ben Hammersley’s sneak preview it will contain “all the new things that have appeared or been requested in the blogging world in the past year”. Hopefully this will mean others don’t have to go through the hassle I have had in order to assemble a full feature set for my weblog, and will encourage more “weblog virgins” to get on board and experiment. Hopefully, too, there will be an easy migration path for existing users!

I also gather that Blogger isn’t standing still and that with the support they’ve had from being bought by Google they have been developing a new version of their stuff too.101 sexalice extreme sexland inamputee sex fuckingsex amature storiespositions sex adultabc definition analysisposnetki porno amaterskicom 23sex Map

It’s not surprising in an informational vacuum like the one we faced during Gulf War II there was a great online search for alternative “authentic” information sources, but I don’t know why people seem so inclined to believe in sources like the “Baghdad weblogger” Dear_Raed or the “reports from Russian intelligence” that I kept hearing about. Before the media storm about these sources I could just about believe that they might have been authentic, but I find it hard to believe that the Russians or Iraqis would have stood by and failed to try either to stifle or capitalise on these “unofficial” information sources for their own ends.

If they are really who they claim to be why has nobody been able so far to verify this conclusively? It all seems a bit too neat to me. But I suppose now the war’s over people will quickly lose interest in who really did create those websites and why.

If anyone runs across conclusive evidence that both these sites are either authentic or hoaxes, please drop me a line.