There’s a lot of blather in their John Kerry profile and the accompanying “editorial”:http://economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=2941610 but some interesting things came out as well. They claim that with him as leader:

pre-emption would remain a policy, Ariel Sharon would be backed unflinchingly. Reading between the lines a little, the Kyoto Protocol would remain unjoined; so in all likelihood would the International Criminal Court

I don’t support any of those policies and I didn’t think they were Kerry’s but I suppose I can overlook those in light of his main domestic plank – ‘rescinding a tax cut on people earning more than $200,000 and spending the proceeds on a goodish health-care plan’.

It would be nice to have a president who, as The Economist puts it,

…marshals material exhaustively, immerses himself in details, and forms judgments on a balance of competing evidence…

(they seem to see this as a weakness).

In passing I find it startling that according to an Economist poll they cite 60% of the American public finds Bush “intelligent” and 55% find him “knowledgeable” (Kerry’s numbers in these categories are at least higher on both ratings!)

The report on children’s Internet use I “mentioned earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/000905.html has now been made available in full.

UK Children Go Online is an excellent overview of kids’ online experiences in Britain and I am pleased to see it taking a very sensible balanced view of the risks and benefits of childrens’ online use. From the conclusion:

one cannot simply recommend greater monitoring of children by parents. From children’s point of view, some key benefits of the internet depend on maintaining some privacy and freedom from their parents, making them less favourable particularly to intrusive or hidden forms of parental regulation. Moreover, the internet must be perceived by children as an exciting and free space for play and experimentation if they are to become capable and creative actors in this new environment.

I am a little disappointed, however, that the press release leads on “parents underestimating risks”:http://personal.lse.ac.uk/bober/PressReleaseJuly04.pdf and lo and behold the “BBC’s coverage”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3910319.stm doesn’t mention anything about the possible benefits of childrens’ online use or the divide that was found in the ‘quality’ of their use.

It is true that, ’57 per cent have come into contact with pornography online (compared with 16
per cent of parents who say their children have seen porn online)’ but as “Josephine Fraser”:http://fraser.typepad.com/edtechuk/2004/07/lse_uk_children.html points out a large problem with this survey is that it’s investigating ‘children’ between the ages of 9 and 19 (of course the data is usually split by age in the body of the report but not often in the summaries).

If you are concerned mainly about under-12s exposed to porn (for example) the proportion drops to 21 percent and this doesn’t indicate how often this exposure happened or how ‘severe’ it is. Would a single exposure to the promotional front page of a porn site in a few years of a ten-year-old’s surfing really be traumatic? Doesn’t it depend on what kind of stuff is considered pornographic (the report does not provide a definition)? I presume such sites don’t normally display really hard-core stuff on their front page without payment and young kids are exposed to soft-core images like that in lots of other ways. It’s true that 20% of 12-19 year olds say they have seen porn on the Internet five or more times but 17% of the same kids say they have seen it that often on TV.

Likewise it may be true that, ‘8 per cent of young users who go online at least once a week say they have met face to face with someone they first met on the internet’ but of those only 1% – one person (!) age unknown – said they didn’t enjoy the experience.

I guess as the report concludes what you see in it depends on your prior expectations and I am a ‘glass half full’ person more keen to ensure that kids have the opportunity to become digitally literate without having parents and teachers excessively limiting their chance to explore. And of course I am not the parent of an Internet-surfing child – if I were my views might be different!

“Henry Farrell”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/ and “Daniel Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/blog/ have published a first draft of a paper on politics and blogs on Crooked Timber. It includes some analysis of the link distribution of such sites and also, crucially, acknowledges the importance of the early blogger journalists as a way to legitimise the blogosphere for ‘mainstream’ journalists to use it. It includes a survey of American journalists (including elite journalists) indicating which weblogs they read (more on that survey “here”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001321.html and raw data “here”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/research/Blogsurveypublic.xls.

It would be interesting to know what the power positions of the respondents were within their news organizations…

There were some minor nits I picked in a comment to the Crooked Timber posting but otherwise I think it’s shaping up to be a valuable contribution to the debate about political weblogs.

As I “posted earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/001126.html I would like to find a way to make a random sample of home pages from the UK. As it turns out if you search for “personal home page” and specify you are only interested in UK pages, Google and Yahoo will give you a selection that includes lots of home pages (the UK versions of both understand whether sites are UK or not though the algorithm is not perfect). But I worry a little that there are lots of home pages that do not include the text ‘home page’ prominently and that they might actually tend to be a different kind of home page (so excluding them tacitly might skew the results).

I also found that the two largest ISPs in the UK (I think) – “AOL UK”:http://hometown.aol.co.uk/mt.ssp?c=9011000 and “Wanadoo”:http://www.wanadoo.co.uk/sitebuilder/search.htm (was Freeserve) have pages where you can search home pages created by their members. If you search these for a common word like “the” you can also get a seemingly random sample but this might be tainted by any demographic skew in the kind of people who choose to use those tools. What do you think of using that as a method?

Are there other ways of sampling by keyword you could suggest? Any articles about web page sampling you can recommend?

P.S. I came across an “attempt at automating page classification”:http://students.iiit.ac.in/~kranthi/professional/papers/ieee_wpcds_1.shtml which the authors claimed works but unless I could somehow run it myself on a collection of UK URLs (and defend its reliability) it probably wouldn’t be of much help. I also ran across a second paper on “automated web page classification”:http://csdl.computer.org/comp/trans/tk/2004/01/k0070abs.htm but I couldn’t access it and it didn’t look as if it could help in any case unless I was trying to build my own search engine.

A European pundit, Thierry Chervel, complains that key European newspapers and ‘cultural journals’ are not available online and suggests this impoverishes Europe’s public sphere. To prove his point he cites the failure of an initiative by Jurgen Habermas, who wanted to launch his “Kerneuropa -initiative” against the Iraq war and the “new Europe” via various European newspapers:

He published his own article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and assigned his colleagues to the Suddeutsche Zeitung , to the El Pais and in the Corriere della Serra. None of these papers however published the articles online. An interested intellectual in Madrid, Paris or Berlin would have had to go the main train station and purchase four newspapers from three different countries. A few days later, the debate was quickly forgotten.

Had Habermas invested a few thousand Euros to build his small website, had he published his article and those of his colleagues simultaneously in English, the sensation would have been big.

Well, it is not clear that this would have happened (and it seems that Habermas’ statement “actually is available online”:http://www.faz.net/s/Rub117C535CDF414415BB243B181B8B60AE/Doc~ECBE3F8FCE2D049AE808A3C8DBD3B2763~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html), but the general point is an interesting one. It would certainly be nice if the major non-English=language European newspapers and magazines published their articles online for free and translated them into English – it would give a much broader perspective to the online audience but is unlikely to happen, alas.

Mark Liberman “posted”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001168.html his own interesting comment and critique about this article asserting (correctly I suspect) that the root cause of this problem is not so much economic conservatism on the part of European newspapers but a larger “Internet illiteracy” on the part of many mainstream European intellectuals (including Thierry Chervel who does not have a website of his own). Hopefully this will change over time…

The Cybergypsies : A True Tale of Lust, War, & Betrayal on the Electronic Frontier by Indra Sinha is yet another book about unusual experiences online but with several key points of interest. Many such books were written by over-excited US journalists who just dipped into that world. This was written by someone based in the UK who had a life outside the online world (a responsible job, wife and child) but who got very involved in online communities. It’s also of some historical interest because he was writing about the pre-Internet online world where being online 24/7 wouldn’t just cost you time but a considerable amount of money.

He gives an interesting, colourful and personal glimpse of what life online was like back then for some but though the book appears to be an autobiography it is written in a deliberately poetical/impressionistic style leaving the reader uncertain how much of what they’ve read they can believe.

If there is someone out there reading this blog who was around online in the UK back in the early to mid 90s, hung out on Shades or the Vortex, met ‘bear’ there and has read the book I would be interested in your comments (public or private). How was he seen in those communities after he published? I have a feeling I have met one or two people who were there…

Thanks in part to the lobbying of the “Newington Green Action Group”:http://ngag.org/ which I helped to run for several years the council has given my local park and its surroundings a “substantial facelift”:http://community.webshots.com/album/164183779IQuNzm.

In the seven years since I moved in the neighborhood has already changed significantly – we have gained a “genuine French patisserie”:http://www.n16mag.com/issue20/p13i20.htm, a several restaurants and a “vegetarian deli”:http://www.myhackney.co.uk/hackney/restaurants-newingtongreen.htm) among other amenities. With the boost that the newly laid-out park will give, I hope what was once a neglected traffic roundabout will become the neighborhood focus it always should have been and the benefits will be felt by all who live here for generations to come.

“David Huffaker”:http://www.eyec.com/’s masters thesis, “Gender Similarities and Differences in Online Identity and Language Use among Teenage Bloggers”:http://cct.georgetown.edu/thesis/DavidHuffaker.pdf has received some attention from BBC news because of its findings that (surprise surprise) teens tended to reveal more personal details on blogs than in chatrooms and forums. This chimes immediately with the Daily Mail-reader paranoia about cyber-stalkers…

My supervisors have been active in the “CRIS”:http://www.crisinfo.org/ ( Communication Rights in the Information Society) programme and have called my attention to its work. On this year’s CRIS agenda is:

The CRIS Global Governance Project, sponsored by the Ford Foundation. The project’s aim is to support the emergence at national level of the concept of communication rights … advocacy on governance issues including civil society participation in governance structures… and in various global governance fora.

If you’re an academic interested in the connection between media participation and civil society take a look and join in!

As a Canadian (generally big-housian) living in the UK (generally small-housian) I have been struck by the different attitudes toward space in different countries and (I believe) through that towards possessions. “Donella H. Meadows”:http://www.pcdf.org/meadows/ (now deceased) of the “Sustainability Institute”:http://www.sustainer.org/ wrote about a calendar showing the “lifestyles of people around the world”:http://www.menzelphoto.com/gallery/mw.htm including their homes. She notes that on the calendar the number of family members living together varies between 4 and 13 and the houses ranged in size from 200 square feet (a six person yurt in Mongolia) to 4850 sq ft for eight people (in Kuwait City).

Bhutanese family with all their possessions in front of their house from the book “Material World”:http://www.menzelphoto.com/gallery/mw.htm

Our ‘two bedroom’ flat is tiny by Canadian standards but a moderate size for Londoners (something like 600sq feet?). It has become apparent to me that we don’t have room for any more things (whether in storage or in active use) but it doesn’t bother me all that much yet – it helps us to keep our lives simple. Thank goodness I have almost limitless digital storage available at least!

Has anyone tried the experiment where you put a sticker on anything you use in the course of a year and at the end of the year you throw away anything without a sticker?