It’s a little weird and off-centre but this post to fafblog has convinced me it is funny enough often enough to be worth adding to my “blogroll”:http://www.bloglines.com/public/derb/. I can’t explain it you have to take a look yourself…

Thanks to “Alex Halavais”:http://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=767 for plugging Fafblog until I started to find it funny

A poll of polls organised by Electoral Vote. Of course if the ludicrous results of the last election had caused America to “change this absurd system”:http://www.electionreform.org/ERMain/priorities/ec/default.htm we wouldn’t need a special additional set of calculations to figure out who is winning but since no change seems likely here’s a tool to help figure out what is going on. Of course it’s much to early yet to read much into it but I will be watching it anxiously closer to November.

As an instinctive free trader I am pleased to read that the World trade talks have reached agreement but I hope the developed world follows through promptly on its promise to eliminate some subsidies at a “date to be set”.

I was somewhat surprised to see the BBC essentially pushing the neo-liberal ‘party line’ though, saying, for example:

According to the World Bank, a successful final deal could add $520bn (£280bn; 420bn euros) to the world economy by 2015, if rich and developing countries cut their tariffs. Most of the benefit would, the World Bank believes, go to poorer countries.

Personally I believe this to be true but it’s hardly an uncontested claim. While there is discussion of “the iniquity of developed world farm subsidy”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3183139.stm (for example) I couldn’t find a part of the BBC’s news site (at least not the part linked from the front-page story) where they give space to the broader claims of the (self-proclaimed) “global justice movement”:http://www.weareeverywhere.org/ that free trade harms the poor more than it helps them.

Actually I am curious – where on the Internet should I look for a reasoned argument that free trade (free on both sides not just free entry to poorer countries by the rich) would be bad for the poorer ones?

If the “description of Cybergypsies I gave earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_arts_reviews.html#001171 piqued your curiosity there is an interview with the author of Cybergypsies, Indra Singha on “The Well”:http://well.com in a part of it that is open to the public – “inkwell”:http://engaged.well.com/engaged.cgi?c=inkwell.vue where lots of author interviews take place (his is number 52). It turns out that the promotional website he created for the book has been (incompletely) captured via the “Internet Archive”:http://web.archive.org/web/20010610025144/www.wiseserpent.com/cybergypsies/menu.html and what do you know – the multi-user dungeon he spent much of his time in is “still running”:http://games.world.co.uk/shades/!

I have always admired “John Frankenheimer”:http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001239/’s best work. Films like “The Manchurian Candidate”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056218/, “Seven Days in May”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058576/ and “French Connection II”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073018/ are well-known (at least among film buffs). I even liked “Ronin”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122690/ one of the last films he worked on before he died.

I just saw one of his early films (1966) that I feel was at least as good as his famous ones but has received less attention – Seconds. It’s a trenchant commentary on materialism and an emotionally gripping, imaginatively shot parable based on the (not particularly original) idea of faking your own death to have another chance to live your life. It isn’t hard to figure out from almost the beginning how it will end but I was consistently engaged throughout. If you can get ahold of it at your local cult video store do try (North Americans you can apparently get it on DVD or video “from Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005RDAJ/imdb-adbox/002-2907813-7514440).

P.S. I didn’t realise – “Jonathan Demme”:http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001129/ is producing “his own version of The Manchurian Candidate”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368008/ (the director is “interviewed on NPR”:http://www.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.php?prgDate=29-Jul-2004&prgId=2).

Danah Boyd says she’ll double her contribution to Kerry if ten readers contribute by tomorrow.

I’m not crazy about Kerry (as a “recent posting”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_us.html#001180 might indicate) but I don’t think he’d be a bad president and I think it would be catastrophic for the US and for the world if we had another four years of Bush in the White House.

I am one of those who has decided to donate as a result (and I already donated once earlier). If Bush does get in I don’t want to have thought I could have done more to stop him. It depresses me that my most important vote is the one I make with my wallet but that seems to be the way American politics has gone.

If you are at all motivated to join me please do so and let her know. And do it soon – tomorrow is the last day you can donate!

P.S. It’s annoying that the Kerry site seems to believe you have to be a US resident to donate (the online form insists on a zip code). Don’t they want my money? There is no legal reason I can’t donate as far as I know (I am an American citizen, though I don’t boast much about it these days).

Microsoft Watch has created a Web ranking tool which brings together various publicly-available ways of assessing the popularity of a given page – Google’s PageRank, Alexa’s traffic rank and a count of total external backlinks from Yahoo (which reports these much better than Google apparently).

None of these are very precise measures but they are the only ones available for sites that are not big enough to turn up in commercial surveys of web popularity as far as I know – anyone got any better ones? Come to that are there any easy ways to get at some of the site popularity data produced by people like “Comscore”:http://www.comscore.com/ without paying them commercial rates?

O’Reilly’s Digital Democracy Teach-In at the “O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference”:http://www.oreillynet.com/et2004/ is available in a “variety of audio formats”:http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collectionid=digidemo2004-gatekeepers&collection=conference_proceedings via “Archive.org”:http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php along with a few other conferences (mostly to do with technology).

I must confess the main reason I found it useful to listen to is that it renewed my passion for my subject by reminding me how much of what is said about (for example) the democratic importance of blogging I disagree with and would like to properly test empirically.

On the other hand the keynote speech at ETech by “Marc Smith”:http://research.microsoft.com/~masmith/ (a sociologist at Microsoft best known for “studying usenet”:http://netscan.research.microsoft.com/Static/Default.asp was “fascinating”:http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2004/02/11/etech_keynotes.html – “audio here”:http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=conference_proceedings&collectionid=etech2004-smith.

As pointed out on Crooked Timber at last there is a study on UK political weblogs (downloadable “here”:http://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/assets/Final_Blog_Report_.pdf). Political weblogging really isn’t well established here in the UK though and it shows. The Hansard Society chose eight weblogs to focus on and even then “one of them was from overseas (Blog for America)”:http://www.blogforamerica.com/ and another, “VoxPolitics”:http://www.voxpolitics.com/, while often interesting, is also pretty much dormant at the moment.

Because the Hansard Society is mostly interested in building interest in political participation their emphasis – unusually – was not on the weblog creators but on what people who read them thought. They chose a (fairly) random jury of eight readers and made them comment on what they read, whether they found it interesting and whether it made them want to write a weblog themselves.

Perhaps not surprisingly, few of the readers found the weblogs they were assigned interesting (they might have been more enthusiastic if their local MP or councillor had a weblog but of course that would be pretty unlikely). Also unsurprisingly, only one of the eight actually expressed an interest in producing a weblog of their own after reading them.

It seems to me that at least in the early to middle stages the main importance of political weblogs (To the extent that they are important) would be in the way that they enable policy wonks to talk to other policy wonks as observed in the “paper I remarked on earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_academia.html#001178 about US political weblogs.

Thanks also to “Harry”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ (one of the bloggers mentioned who told “Chris Bertram”:http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~plcdib/ at Crooked Timber about it)

“Chris Bertram”:http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~plcdib/ posts on Crooked Timber about the “UN’s Human Development Report 2004”:http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2004/ which has produced (inter alia) a “human poverty index”. Predictably the fact that the UK, Ireland and the US are numbers 15, 16 and 17 among developed countries on that index has been remarked upon and just as predictably the low placement of the Anglo-Saxon countries is blamed by some on fiddling of statistics. If you are interested in inequality (as I am) you could do worse than read the long thread of mostly thoughtful comments after the Crooked Timber posting.