I recently learned about “Keith Hampton”:http://web.mit.edu/knh/www/bio.html’s new “weblog”:http://e-neighbors.mit.edu/blog/index2.php and already it has turned up something useful. He just blogged about the release of “preliminary results”:http://www.eurescom.de/e-living/publications/e-living-update-Oct03.pdf from a major study of adoption and usage patterns of Internet use, testing the social and economic benefits of new ICTs.

The best part is that if you are interested in the information for non-commercial/academic reasons you can download the raw survey data and manipulate it yourself (once you have registered yourself at the “UK Social Science Data Archive”:http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/findingData/snDescription.asp?sn=4728).

Scott Burgess of The Daily Ablution has done “a little digging”:http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/2003/11/a_look_at_ican_.html about the people behind the “iCan project”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_egovernment.html#000899 and is unhappy with what he has found – one of the iCan ‘roving reporters’ “Stuart Ratcliffe”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ican/U517705 is backing an “anti-war group”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ican/club32 on the site, which he sees as problematic given the BBC’s claim to be impartial. Well, I would be surprised if any BBC reporter, particularly one with a political ‘beat’ had no political opinions at all, but it was pretty unwise of Stuart to back a group through the site – particularly since it will then make it pretty well impossible for him to report on the group and be taken seriously!

On the other hand, I think it is a legitimate point of view to suggest that it is better that all reporters should be open about any political views they may bring to their coverage, then strive to ensure that these don’t bias their actual reporting (which is after all the important point). It’s only possible to ‘adjust for’ a reporter’s views, after all, if we know what they are.

As for whether iCan is biased, I suggest we need to withold judgement and see if there is any evidence of preferential treatment in the way the site is run rather than rushing to judge the people who run it by their expressed private views.

The “London Health Commission”:http://www.londonshealth.gov.uk/ has launched a website survey on where people should be allowed to smoke in London. It seems someone has started a “campaign about this”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ican/Club146 over at the BBC’s new iCan site. Personally I would be delighted if smoking could be banned in pubs, though doubtless it would annoy many of my fellow Londoners.

Many is the time I have wanted to go out with friends but I have cried off when it emerges they want to go to a pub. If I do go I end up returning home with my clothes reeking of smoke and I dread to think of what it does to my lungs. Moreover sometimes I need to eat in pubs and having to eat with people smoking around me is just diabolical.

Here’s a recent magazine profile of my local area (I have helped to encourage some of the changes in my role as press officer of the “Newington Green Action Group”:http://ngag.org/). Just today a pizzeria is opening around the corner from us and when a nearby street is closed at one end (part of the council’s urban regeneration plans) patrons will be able to sit out in the sun (when there is some).

Also in the same magazine, a profile of local heroine “Mary Wollstonecraft”:http://www.n16mag.com/issue19/p18i19.htm and news of “plans for a multiplex cinema”:http://www.n16mag.com/issue19/p11i19.htm in Dalston, close enough for us to walk to.

I just ran across the website for “The Idea Channel”:http://www.ideachannel.com in the US which features wall to wall interviews with professors including several Nobel prize winners. As well as being able to download a few short interview excerpts you can access a transcript a month if you register on the site.

It’s a pity they have just two entries under Sociology but there are lots of economists, political scientists and historians to listen to as well. I don’t suppose my cable company will carry it though…

By a strange coincidence, “BBC4”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/ here in the UK is doing a “profile of Richard Rorty”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/listings/programme.shtml?day=today&filename=20031104/20031105_0140_4544_31367_30 tonight 1:40 – 2:10 AM. I’ll be programming my “recordable DVD player”:http://www.panasonic-europe.com/homecinema/main.asp?lang=en&nav=dvdrec …
Thanks to Follow Me Here for the Idea Channel link.
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I got talking recently to a guy who runs Internet hotel booking services for a living and naturally I had to ask him how to get cheap hotel rooms online. He suggested two services – Travelaxe (a downloadable app) and “SideStep”:http://www.sidestep.com/ which installs inside your browser (IE or Netscape only, apparently).

I tested these using London as an example over the weekend of Nov 15 to Nov 16 and trying to find the cheapest possible rooms. SideStep failed to find the “Atlantic Paddington”:http://www.newatlantic.co.uk/ hotel (really a hostel) which has some of the lowest prices and neither has many hostels or B & Bs – primarily because these are generally not yet ‘plugged in’ to the major reservation systems. As a result you may be better off going to (for example) “ase.net”:http://ase.net/servlet/HotelList?type=8%2C4&dist=2 and contacting the individual B & Bs and hostels listed individually.

Still, either may be worth a try if you travel on business and need/want to stay in hotels instead of B&Bs.

P.S. both apps are free of charge and the creators make their money via the commission they get from sending traffic to the hotels when you book through them. As far as I can tell this commission doesn’t raise the price to you…

What a good idea from “Tom Steinberg”:http://www.tomsteinberg.co.uk/ – mySociety.org. His recent “piece in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/chatroom/story/0,12529,1073754,00.html explains the idea better than I could, but basically the idea is to provide a way for private funders to pay for inexpensive but useful websites that are not commercial but which the UK government doesn’t feel it is able or willing to produce.

There are already a few interesting ideas on the site including mobile phone-based “car sharing”:http://mysociety.blogs.com/mysociety/2003/10/mobile_phone_lo.html and websites to facilitate “local swapping of power tools, lawn mowers etc”:http://mysociety.blogs.com/mysociety/2003/10/local_swap_shop.html I hope it will go on to be the start of something big.

Already he has something which other sites of this kind usually don’t – he has some money he can offer to kick-start these projects. It’s only £10,000 so far but it’s enough to get people to put in bids…

(Title for this posting was shamelessly pinched from “Tom Loosemore”:http://www.tomski.com/)

The machine it was hosted on had a hard disk crash and was last backed up on the 26th – at least that’s how it looks things happened. Thankfully I hadn’t done much in the meantime. Thanks, “Harald”:http://www.cfrq.net/~chk/, for bringing it back up so quickly and for having the foresight to back it up frequently! Service should be back to normal…

Some very useful-looking web tools to help UK citizens to hold their national representatives (MPs) to account and to organize offline and online campaigns for change. Public Whip takes publicly available information about all Westminister MPs and brings it together in an easy-to-view manner. You can see how often your MP votes, how often they vote with their party and, most importantly, how they voted on specific issues.

“iCan”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ican/ from the BBC is a long-awaited site (still in beta) designed to enable and encourage community activism. It includes advice from activists, tools to link grassroots campaigns to larger organizations, and roving reporters who will publicise success stories. If it is done right this could be big (but if it is too successful it could involve the BBC in some interesting rows!). One interesting thing I notice already – I don’t know yet whether this is crucial or a weakness – is that to register you are encouraged to give your real name. For most online communities this would be an advantage, but if I were starting a campaign on something controversial I might not want to do so in a way that could allow employers to identify me. Of course, there’s nothing in the BBC’s registration process to prevent you from lying…

Thanks to “NTK”:http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/10/ for the links.

I expressed worries about the new Outlook in an “earlier posting”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_email_discoveries.html#000904. It seems if you receive an email message using “Information Rights Management”:http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/editions/technologies/irm.asp but don’t have the latest version of Outlook there is still a way to read it – you have to download an “Internet Explorer plugin”:http://r.office.microsoft.com/r/rlidRestrictedPermissionViewer?clid=1033 (and be given the necessary rights of course). It’s still a bit clumsy, though.