It was interesting to see so many bloggers f2f though it wasn’t exactly a random sample either of the population or even (I suspect) of bloggers. The “gathering”:http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki/LoicLondonMay04 was about 90% male and mostly in the Internet/IT industries.

One of the interesting things about blogging that I was aware of but this brought into focus is the existence of an important group of blog enablers – people who aren’t prominent bloggers themselves but who develop the services or support others’ services without payment because they can. Public-spirited people like “Bruce”:http://www.growf.org/ who helps out the “NTK”:http://ntk.net/ gang and Tom who set up and runs “bbCity”:http://www.bbcity.co.uk/. I also met “Anders”:http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/ (who will have more pictures from the event on his “photo blog”:http://www.extrospection.com/) and Annie who runs a weblog (and a site) all about “London Underground”:http://london-underground.blogspot.com/ but not from a trainspottery perspective.

See “here”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fjoi.ito.com%2Fjoiwiki%2FLoicLondonMay04&sub=Go%21 for more postings from other London bloggers about the gathering as they happen.

I have a few (very poor quality) pix “here”:http://community.webshots.com/album/142686002dtOLws.

“Stephen Newton”:http://www.stephennewton.com/ was kind enough to comment on the previous posting and tell me about a very easy way for blog owners to “convert their Atom feeds to RSS feeds”:http://www.2rss.com/software.php?page=atom2rss which are at the moment more compatible with RSS reading software and services. Thanks, Stephen!

You’d think from all the discussion about blogging being a highly interactive community activity from “Joi Ito”:http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html, “Jim Moore”:http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jmoore/secondsuperpower.html, “Ross Mayfield”:http://www.socialtext.net/mayfield/index.cgi?social_network_dynamics_and_participatory_politics and others that “Blogger”:http://www.blogger.com/, one of the most popular weblog services, would have been supporting the ability to comment for a long time now. But of course it hasn’t been – until now.

Of course a dedicated blogger could always add the facility to comment to their site using an external add-on but how many would? Well, apparently not many. Overall, “less than half”:http://www.ics.uci.edu/%7Ejpd/classes/ics234cw04/herring.pdf of people have comments turned on in their weblogs and this largely depends on what the default setting for the software provided is (and the number of comments actually made on most weblogs is low to none).

Anyhow, let’s not be too churlish – the latest revision of Blogger does add some good features – it even adds one or two things I can’t get through Moveable Type (as standard) yet – the ability to email a posting to your blog for example, and the creation of a standardised ‘blogger profile’ page. It’s just a pity it only offers Atom, not RSS feeds, and doesn’t support the absolutely vital feature of categories (see below this post and the list of categories I provide on the right).

How is it that American troops in Iraq (and British ones?) have been shown to be “acting like thugs”:http://news.google.com/news?num=30&hl=en&edition=us&q=cluster:www%2esundaytimes%2enews%2ecom%2eau%2fcommon%2fstory%5fpage%2f0%2c7034%2c9504783%25255E950%2c00%2ehtml? Conservatives in the US blame women, feminists, Muslims, and the academic left. Our own home-grown conservative rag, “The Spectator”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/ weighs in “as well”:http://www.lewrockwell.com/spectator/spec294.html

the female reluctance to embrace the horrors of war can help to preserve peace. This could not be achieved by a feminised military, which might have the reverse consequence, as de-natured women degrade their sex… by feminising their forces, the Americans may also have brutalised them.

I recently decided to download Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville from “Project Gutenberg”:http://promo.net/pg/index.html to read on my Palm T3 in spare moments so I was intrigued to stumble across L’Amérique, Mon Amour – a summary of de Toqueville’s thought and life which reveals him to be a rather conservative democratic thinker (he opposed the extension of suffrage in France for example) and suggests that he is mainly popular in the US because he is so enamoured of the American way.

If you read this and have a) some money and b) the ability to get to Oakville, Ontario, Canada it might be worth your while to check out of the this exhibition of the works of “David Blackwood”:http://www.davidblackwood.com/. There was an exhibition of other Blackwood works I saw earlier this year and I found them curiously fascinating.

I note that the exhibition’s site features a few image scans that are large enough to serve as desktop images if you like the look of them.

There are a lot of software engineers with too much time on their hands. First (in 1990) there was “RFC1149”:http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt – ‘A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers’. Then there was “RFC2549”:http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2549.txt which added quality of service to the protocol. Two years later in Norway it was “tested for the first time”:http://news.com.com/2100-1001-257064.html but took an hour and 42 minutes to transfer a 64-byte packet of information. Finally, in March 2004, by strapping 4Gb of memory cards to each pigeon, researchers managed to transfer data 100 Km using Wi-Fly – pigeon-empowered wireless internet and managed to achieve effective speeds of 2.27 Mbps.

Personally I would rather receive my email in a barrel strapped to a St Bernard dog…

I can’t improve on the Berkman Centre’s blog entry:

An international team of researchers has launched a new program to map censorship of the Internet.  The Open Net Initiative — a partnership of the Berkman Center, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Toronto — has formally begun tracking international filtering of the Internet.  As the Berkman Center’s Jonathan Zittrain explains, “The aim of the ONI is to excavate, analyze, and report censorship and surveillance practices in a rigorous, ongoing fashion.”  Read more about the project in this News Release.

Fundrace.org Brings together registered information about US political donors with geographic databases to calculate interesting things like “who is getting more contributions from wealthier neighborhoods”?

Eric Lee makes an interesting argument – he suggests virus writers are targetting working class people (because they don’t have the money for anti-virus software and are less lilely to have the time to develop the experience or skills to avoid viruses). I can’t see that virus writers actually bear working class people any ill will but I do think it is worth pointing out viruses as one more reason why use of the Internet is less likely among the working class.

I disagree with his suggestion following on from this that unions and other service organizations should be promoting open source software to the working class as a way for them to avoid vulnerability to viruses. As I have “said earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_open_source.html#000215 because it is still not fully user-friendly it may be difficult to train non-computer literate (or indeed semi-literate) people to use. I also worry about whether the basic skills Linux users learn will be useful if they enter the world of work where the environment is Windows.