Following on from my brief mention of “blogs from US troops in Iraq”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_world.html#001217 I have discovered a collection of “pictures taken by troops in Iraq with picturephones”:http://www.yafro.com/frontline.php – you need to click on the ‘comments’ part or mouse over the photos to see the context they give them.

Incidentally (and probably not coincidentally) the blogger who was interviewed on NPR I mentioned earlier has now had to pull his weblog down.

Thanks to Torill Mortensen for the link

When Psion stopped producing the Series 5mx I reluctantly abandoned the Psion/Symbian platform for a Palm because I wanted something pocketable but with a full-size(ish) keyboard. Nothing available from Symbian did the trick then or (to the best of my knowledge) now. But it looks like the “Nokia 9500”:http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,8764,54113,00.html “previewed here”:http://my-symbian.com/9210/review_9500.php may do so when it launches – for a price. And if you don’t mind waiting a little longer I now discover they may do a little brother – the 9300 without wifi and built-in camera.

I am smitten, but the projected price of $1000 before subsidy for the 9500 is a little off-putting! Also the review seems to suggest you can’t automatically synchronise Office documents – only contacts, calendar and email. I hope I wouldn’t have to remember to copy the documents I want back and forth between the phone and my PC!

Remember my hard disk crashed? Well, I’ve been kicking myself ever since for a stupid thing I did early on in the recovery process. I managed to boot from my backup disk and found I could access the original. ‘Great!’ I said to myself, ‘I’d better copy across all my most valuable files quickly in case the disk stops being accessable again!’ Did I copy them into new directories? Nooo… I copied them over the earlier backup files. Well the files looked fine and I did check some of them before copying. But it turned out several of the email folders I hadn’t checked were in fact corrupted. And even when the mailboxes looked fine (the ‘overview’ showed the right names and subject lines) the contents were corrupted as well. Ten years of email gone!

So remember if you get files back from a disk that has been giving you trouble, make sure to preserve your old backup files just in case!

P.S. In the wake of this catastrophe I was thinking of moving my emailing to my gmail account but gmail still doesn’t support basic things like email groups so I guess I’ll have to hope that the hard disk doctors I gave my disk to can get the files off.
P.P.S. And yes, it is a little embarrassing that I wrote a book about good email practice but managed nonetheless to mess up!

NPR reports that one US soldier – Colby Buzzell – has been reprimanded about his popular “My War” blog and two others have had their blogs shut down after alleged concerns about their revealing sensitive information. Others suggest the Pentagon is more interested in suppressing overt dissent among the troops. The NPR report links to 18 soldier-run weblogs from its page.

I have to say that for all my expressed skepticism about the importance of blogs in general, blogs like My War seem to me to be fulfilling an important role and genuinely doing something novel – allowing ordinary individuals caught up in situations of international importance to express what they are feeling and thinking with a rare directness. Buzzell’s site may not be anything like as influential as the mass media but he says he sometimes gets up to 100 emails a day from readers and that he is now thinking of trying to get his weblog postings published.

It’s stories like his that inspire my own research into the social significance of weblogging and home page creation.

I have recorded a discussion and am listening to it through my computer using the excellent piece of software called “Dictation Buddy”:http://www.highcriteria.com/main_productfr_dicbuddy_info.htm so that I can make a rough transcription. The weird part is that I’m making the transcription using Microsoft’s voice recognition software (via “OneNote”:http://office.microsoft.com/home/office.aspx?assetid=FX01085803). Of course if I could just get the voice recognition software to listen to and recognize the discussion I wouldn’t need to do this but I suspect even if the computer program was capable of accepting input from a file instead of the microphone it would not do nearly as good a job of recognition as I do so I am forced to use myself as a kind of of voice recognition peripheral!

By the way is there any documentation available anywhere on how to use Microsoft’s voice recognition software in detail? I would be particularly interested in knowing how I could add frequently used words to its dictionary like ‘Bourdieu’ (which it thinks is Bork To?) or ‘structuration’ (structure Asian?).

Ping-o-Matic! automatically notifies “Weblogs.com”:http://www.weblogs.com/, “Blo.gs”:http://blo.gs/, “Technorati”:http://www.technorati.com/ and ten more weblog update services when you’ve made a new post so people know to come and see it. Saves you having to put all of them into your ‘urls to ping’ box (assuming it works as advertised).

JD Lasica “suggests”:http://ojr.org/ojr/technology/1092267863.php that because blogs like “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/ and “Slashdot”:http://slashdot.com/ are linked to more often than many websites of many ‘old media’ organizations, this means bloggers are starting to trust other bloggers more than the mainstream media.

While “Technorati’s chart of in-links”:http://ojr.org/ojr/uploads/1092273094.jpg (and “pubsub’s”:http://www.pubsub.com/linkranks.php) comparing ‘old media’ properties and blogs are interesting to see, they under-state the importance of the mainstream media to set the agenda because a very substantial proportion of the posts to blogs that are linked to are in turn derived directly from those same old media sites. A better (but more difficult to do) analysis would be to try to measure how many of the posts most linked to add significant facts or thought out opinions (more than just ‘I agree’) to existing debates in the press.

Moreover, it is absurd to extrapolate from the readership habits of bloggers to the readership habits of the wider public. Bloggers are in no way representative – we are much more likely to read other people’s weblogs than the broader Internet population (see “the analysis I did earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/001206.html) and of course most of us are geekier (Slashdot is the most popular weblog cited – QED).

The Living Room Candidate is a fascinating site which archives campaign commercials from 1952 to the present including “‘independent’ ads”:http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/desktop/shadow.php from interest groups like the “Swift Boat Veterans”:http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/player/index.php?ad_id=1152 one which disgracefully tries to call Kerry’s war record into question. It even includes a “Desktop Candidate”:http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/desktop/index.php section which links to various Internet-based ads.

P.S. To track the veracity of claims made in campaign ads on both sides of this year’s race, check out “Factcheck.org”:http://www.factcheck.org/ which has done a thorough analysis of that “controversial swift boat ad”:http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=231.

My hard disk started acting oddly a few days ago and now works at best erratically. Fortunately I had a backup – make sure you have a backup for your main computer and do that backing up frequently! But I spent most of yesterday getting a new drive to back up my backup onto so I could try backing up my main disk onto my backup disk without losing the earlier backup that was on it (if you see what I mean).

Now I am working from my backup but I want to make as few changes as possible to my disk in case I can get the data off my original drive successfully later. This is a hassle but is less tricky than it once would have been. A lot of my work is in email (which I can do via the web). I have an “MP3 player/storage device”:https://blog.org/archives/000901.html which may have more recent copies of some of my most used files on it and which I can use for temporary storage. My most up to date contact and calendar information is backed up on my Palm along with many of my most frequently used documents. Some of my email is in an exchange server at the LSE. And of course I haven’t lost any of the data on this weblog because it isn’t on my machine either.

Without really thinking about it I have come to realise my data is no longer centralised on my computer – it has spread itself into a kind of web across several devices. Sometimes that can be quite handy!

Later: It’s a bit like coming home after a small robbery. At first everything seems fine then you find out that things in odd corners are lost or broken. In my case, so far, I have lost a few Mozilla settings and (more serious) all of my Eudora email folders seem to be corrupted and some ‘ghost’ folders and messages of gibberish have appeared. So far after rebuilding the email database for my inbox only a small amount of damage seems to have been done but the depressing thing of course is that (as with a real or virtual breakin or virus damage or whatever) you can never be sure what it is you are missing or what problems you will stumble across next. Very traumatic!

P.S. Another discovery – a 160Gb hard drive (that could store all my data twice over) costs just 75 quid these days – the simple caddy that it fit into (it’s removeable) cost me nearly half that!

Thanks to “Simon Bisson”:http://www.sandm.co.uk/simon/index.html who helped calm me down when the problem first became apparent…

If you want to see what influential US Internet pundit/policy wonks think about the potential of the Internet to change politics you should keep an eye on the Extreme Democracy weblog and download the chapters of the book in progress there.

“Emergent Democracy”:http://www.extremedemocracy.com/archives/2004/08/chapter_1_emerg.html which I “commented on earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/000687.html is there for example. It has been edited since my comments but it still appears to overlook the very real problem of the continuing digital divide both in the US and across the world and both in Internet access and, more importantly, in the forms of Internet use. I suspect most of the chapters of this book shares this problem though I have yet to read more of them.

All the evidence I have been able to derive (based on the raw data of a Pew survey in Mar/April 2003 which was made into a “report”:http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/113/report_display.asp) suggests weblogs – particularly political ones – are read by a very small audience. To quote some earlier research I did based on the Pew data:
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