I missed this when it first came around in April – according to Bowker who owns ‘Books in Print’, the publisher in the US which published the most titles – 272,930 – very close to the number of new titles published by all traditional publishers – is Bibliobazaar, which was then written up by Publisher’s Weekly. Turns out they specialise in packaging and reselling out of print books via print on demand. More evidence of the long tail in action, though of course each book probably only gets a few new readers and it is not clear if the figures for these new publishers mixes new titles with newly reissued titles and with any title from their back catalogues which makes comparison difficult. It would be interesting to know more about what sells well and to whom in that market if there are discernable patterns and how this differs from mainstream publishing.

Interesting – I just stumbled across a blog post about the demographics of contributors to Global Voices – the source I know best of news and information in blog form from a non-Western perspective. The post reveals among other things that “the Global Voices community is highly educated. Over 85% of respondents indicated they have completed a university degree, and more than 40% have a post-graduate or doctoral degree.” This does suggest alas that while groups like Global Voices have a valuable role to play in making voices heard that might not otherwise have a platform, blogging to and for a wider public still remains an elite activity.

There has been much concern about people selecting only news and information they already know they are interested in and that agrees with their point of view via the internet. I have found that increasingly the “omnivore” blog from bookforum.com has been fulfilling that role for me, bringing me articles every week on the future of books, of journalism or of academia. Unfortunately, I am starting to suffer from punditry fatigue. Read too much on the same subject from newspapers and magazines – even if the subject is important to you – and it all starts to blur together after a while. In truth, it shows up the problems even with good journalism as compared to academic work. There is copious opinion but often little reference or only selective reference to new data or even to new arguments or approaches to the issues. Yet I feel I still need to read or at least skim it all in case I miss some new piece of information. Perhaps I would be better off just relying on the stuff that my peers circulate via the blogosphere and twittersphere?

The NYT just ran a piece on how various high profile US newsrooms use web traffic figures to inform their judgement about the news. Most seem to claim that low traffic stats don’t cause them to withdraw resources from stories that aren’t getting traffic but interestingly there is buried in there some evidence from the NYT itself that its blogs don’t have the same status as that paper’s traditional product. According to its executive editor, Bill Keller, “we don’t let metrics dictate our assignments and play because we believe readers come to us for our judgment” but “Mr. Keller added that the paper would, for example, use the data to determine which blogs to expand, eliminate or tweak.”

After adding most of what reviewers and friends asked for and subtracting the policy implications part that paid a significant role in motivating me to do this research in the first place, I still find my paper is 15% too long. It’s hard to believe as an ex-journalist used to turning out work in 1-2,000 word chunks that I am finding 7,000 words is too constraining these days! Of course it doesn’t help that this particular paper contains the work I am most pleased with from my thesis so is in a sense a distillation of one of the key findings from a 100,000 word work.

And just to discourage me further I wouldn’t be surprised if it took the resulting paper a year or two to see the light of day…

I have long known one of the UN’s key prerequisites to help reach the target Millennium Development Goals is that developed countries should donate a paltry .7% of their GNP to aid projects (at present nearly all fall well short of this). I just found out (via the Economist) that there’s another even more ambitious but contrasting target. It seems that poor old NATO is suffering because most of its member nations are not spending up to the 2% of GDP target it has set for military expenditure. Would it be too much to ask that countries reach the .7% aid target first?

I thought Inception had the potential to be much more interesting than it was. Much has been made of its depth and complexity but (perhaps because it is after all a big budget Hollywood film) I seldom found myself working very hard to understand what was going on or why. None of the action sequences were at all engaging (at least for me) because there was no sense of reality and therefore of risk. Mind you I thought the scenes in the hotel corridor (which were not CGI as you may have already heard) were visually striking. I would recommend that if you are interested you go see Memento instead if you haven’t already.

Still, if it is successful and that success encourages mainstream Hollywood to be more ambitious in its storytelling that would be a good result.

I am working on a presentation for IAMCR 2010 about the need to adjust media literacy education to encompass new forms of online practice and I would value your help, fellow netizens and academics. I am looking for references to the potential benefits that can be derived by individuals from their social media use. So far I have come up with the following categories and key texts:

• Building and maintaining social capital (Steinfield, C., Ellison, N., & Lampe, C. (2008). Social capital, self-esteem, and use of online social network sites:A longitudinal analysis. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 29(6), 434-445.)
• Finding one’s voice politically (Rodríguez, C. (2001). Fissures in the mediascape: an international study of citizens’ media. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press.) (maybe also Couldry’s new “Why Voice Matters”? though I have not had the chance to read it yet)
• Finding one’s voice culturally/creatively
• Having a space to reflect on one’s self-identity (Stern, S. (2008). Producing Sites, Exploring Identities: Youth Online Authorship. In D. Buckingham (Ed.), Youth, Identity, and Digital Media (Vol. -, pp. 95-117). Chicago.
• Having the opportunity to reflect critically on media products through increased familiarity with media forms Jenkins, H. (2006). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.
• Learning employment-related content creation skills

Are there any important categories I have missed? And what are the best empirical and theoretical references you would suggest that could relate to each of these themes?

I’ll add a link to my presentation here as soon as I upload it after the conference.

I read a profile of Lu Xun (魯迅) in the Guardian which describes him as “China’s Dickens and Joyce rolled into one”. Surrounded as I am at the moment by Chinese students I was keen to learn more but I thought there might be little available in English – at least not for free. In an article I wrote ten years ago for Salon – The US-Wide Web I bemoaned the fact that the internet appeared to be dominated by the English language and by American content. Of course a lot has changed since then but I was still surprised to find that a free creative commons audiobook in English of some of his stories is available as well as some English translations as text online. Hurray for Creative Commons, the public domain and the internet!

PS if you are Chinese please comment and tell me what you think about Lu Xun and how his work and his place in China today have been described in the Guardian…

I found this in a study of underprivileged kids given the internet: “more visits to the following categories of websites predicted better academic performance in mathematics: technology, music, corporate, web services, downloads, MSN/Yahoo, pornography, search engines and information. More visits to these categories of websites predicted better academic performance in reading; technology, download, MSN/Yahoo and pornography.” Surprisingly, they didn’t advocate more porn access in schools…

From Jackson, L. A., Samona, R., Moomaw, J., Ramsay, L., Murray, C., Smith, A., et al. (2007). What Children Do on the Internet: Domains Visited and Their Relationship to Socio-Demographic Characteristics and Academic Performance. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 10(2), 182-190.