The BBC’s director general has announced “plans to give the public full access to all the corporation’s programme archives… everyone would in future be able to download BBC radio and TV programmes from the internet.”

Well, the announcement certainly sounds huge, but as Danny O’Brien reflects, “Sorting out the contractual issues with anything but completely internally produced content will be difficult ” – a huge understatement! And who will pay the cost to digitise and index all that content? Who will decide when enough has been digitised? Will it be seen as a waste of license fee payments to “super-serve” the broadband-using public? Will the BBC actually encourage the use of file sharing applications in order to reduce its bandwidth charges? The list of questions goes on and on…

But even if a fraction of what is possible is achieved, this is a great step forward and it will open a number of important debates.movies blonde free sexfree throat deep moviemovies pussy eating freefacial movies gay freeporn gay movies men freefree samples movie gaymovies free gay postporn movies free granny Map

Bathtime in Clerkenwell is an entertaining short animated video for all ages wherein a man tries to stop a relentless assault of cuckoos from his cuckoo clock in time to an infectious jazz melody.

Thanks to the Guardian’s cybercinema roundup for the link.

At a forum about spam in May, NTT in Japan warned that, “the company’s 38 million customers still receive up to 30 wireless spam messages per day” and American wireless carriers are concerned the US could be next.

“…Federal law prohibits most telemarketers from dialing cell phones, but no such regulations prevent spammers from sending messages to addresses like 2025551212@cellphonecarrier.com. Because many text services carry a per-message charge, costs to consumers could mount quickly.”

Here in Europe cellphone spam does not seem to be too bad so far a) because we have better privacy protection anyway and b) because the sender pays for each message sent instead of the receiver paying to receive so truly bulk spams would be uneconomic.

Do you Nordics have problems with cell spam?

Foreign Policy and the Centre for Global Development have produced an interesting “generosity league table” which balances rich countries’ aid, trade, investment and environmental policies to measure their overall effect on poorer nations. (I think it’s a mistake to put in a measure of environmental impact alongside the other straight economic measures, but let that pass).

Japan, which I always thought of as one of the good guys (it was until recently the largest foreign aid donor) turns out to be at the bottom of their league table because they don’t welcome foreign goods or workers and the large past aid loans are balanced by large debt repayments by poor countries.

Turns out the most generous countries are Denmark and the Netherlands and (to my surprise) Portugal, New Zealand and Switzerland. The UK is, “Consistently middling across categories, and dead center—11th—in the overall standings” while Canada’s extensive participation in peacekeeping operations is undercut by low aid and high greenhouse gas emissions – it ends up just 18th out of the 21 countries surveyed. The US is second lowest of developed countries – only Japan scores worse.

Of course you could change the weightings and come up with a different league table but still I think this table is thought provoking.one monitoring 3 in creditscore one 3 credit inneed credit american consumerstax 2007 federal creditaccreditation healthand credit services education americaneducation accounting credit5 card credit start Maptechnician psychiatric in schools california accreditedonline aba degree accredited lawcredit affinity in mn unionsunion utah america ogden credit firstchase aarp card credit bankarea cosmetic accredited in bay dentistveterinarian at-home degrees accreditedcredit american personal card express Map

Not only is the idea of missile defense unworkable (and irrelevant, since missles are not nearly as worrying as other nuke delivery means, and destabilising if other countries become afraid that it might work) but it is emerging that even the Pentagon admits the program is in trouble according to this article in Slate.

Apparently, the Missile Defense Agency has suspended the space-based kinetic-energy boost-phase interceptor (one of the program’s most crucial components) on the grounds that the technology it involves is “not mature enough” to fund.

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I was wondering when this issue would start receiving some attention. A recent survey discovered that on average 17 percent of “permission-based” marketing messages are “erroneously” tagged as spam by ISP spam filters and are therefore never seen by their intended recipients. I would imagine that at least some of that is due to large numbers of people tagging email as spam that comes to them because of dubious definitions of “permission” (where companies have passed on details of their addresses to other “partners” for example). It’s noteable that 46 percent of email from “catalogers” (whoever they are?) is bounced on average compared to less than 1% of non-profit email so I expect some of the email bounced arguably deserved to be.

Nonetheless this is a serious problem and may become more so over time if spam volumes continue to rise and more people start to rely increasingly on technical “fixes”. The problem is, of course, that people who really do want to receive some bulk-delivered email – notifications of special offers they requested, for example, or even political communications – will end up missing it and won’t even know it happened. That’s why I believe carefully-phrased legal solutions to spam will in the end be better solutions to the problem than technical “fixes”.

Some suggest spammers (who are mostly in the US – and apparently mostly in Florida) will simply move overseas to avoid regulation but I believe only a hard core will be willing to live with the disruption to their lives and businesses that moving overseas to a country without anti-spam laws would cause. Anyway it has to be worth at least trying to lessen irresponsible bulk emailing using the law.

Thanks to this Techdirt thread for the heads-up

Take a look at this BusinessWeek article about The Digital Divide That Wasn’t.

1) It concentrates on the digital divide within the US – outside the west there’s still a huge digital divide.

2) Internet access at a public school terminal or in a community centre is not comparable to Internet access at your convenience at home.

3) Digital divide isn’t mainly a race question – it’s an income and education issue – “When he controlled for education and income, he found that broadband had been deployed more rapidly in minority areas than in white neighborhoods over the past two years.” Sure – but if minorities are predominantly poorer and less educated the effect is the same.

4) It correctly identifies that 42% of Americans don’t go online but states (without showing any statistical evidence) that “the divide that does exist between the Web and non-Web proficient is no longer defined simply by income, gender, race, or education.” Well, not simply by those factors – but they are still important factors. The key factor they miss is that choosing not to be interested in the Internet is probably itself a choice linked to lower education.

Take a look at this table:

and you can see clearly that all kinds of divides still exist even in the US.henati moviesholes movie soundtrack thehollywood rentals movieporno homemade moviesfigures horror movie actionwavs horror moviehsu jade moviesjameson jenna lesbian galleries movies andmovie jennifer nude connellynude jill movies schoelen

Yesterday I handed in my dissertation – my MSc in New Media, Information and Society is now officially over and in a month and a half I return to the LSE to start a PhD in Media and Communications. Here’s the abstract of my dissertation, which I hope to turn into a published paper later. I am also keen to summarise the results for a non-academic audience for a thinktank or newspaper so if it sounds interesting, give me a call!

Civil society campaigning organizations have an important role to play in the public sphere according to deliberative democratic theory. The new communicative capabilities offered to such organizations by the Internet in recent years must be evaluated in the light of a digital divide that has persisted even in developed countries. This study measures and attempts to explain patterns of Internet usage among activists, and examines the possible implications of these choices for the public sphere and political participation.

Drawing on a postal survey of 109 London-based activists and open-ended interviews with four of those surveyed, respondents were found to have predominantly high levels of education, higher than average incomes and high levels of access to the Internet consistent with those factors. However, high levels of access did not translate into high levels of use in all contexts.
While email was extensively employed, other uses like participation in open online discussion or web-based publishing were much less prevalent than traditional campaigning activity. Some access and skill barriers were noted but the principal barrier to greater use of the web in campaigning appeared to be a perceived lack of its relevance or importance in that context. The fact that much Internet use by activists is via email and therefore tends to be “invisible” except to participants in the dialogue might contribute to that perceived lack of relevance.

The study also suggests that the existing socio-economic divide between the “core” activists surveyed and the broader public could be accentuated if, for reasons of efficiency, those activists moved their attention away from traditional activities like meetings and newsletters towards email-mediated dialogue or if the Internet does make it easier for the relatively privileged who are already online to become more involved at the expense of those who continue to fall on the wrong side of the digital divide.

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Another gem from my “blog this one day” archive – Sir Clive Sinclair, who created one of the first attempts at a mass market electric transport – the ill-fated C5 – has told the BBC he plans a successor – details as yet un-specified. Good to see someone still plugging away at alternative transport solutions. I don’t suppose it could be much less practical than the Segway!rugby accrington leaguenokia verizon ringtone free 6015ibasketball adam harringtongirls 21st century ringtone2way ringtoneabsolutely country free ringtones wireless cingularfree 3595 ringtone nokia logocingular a split second ringtone Mapand credit consumer of disadvantages advantagesbarbados in agency accreditationrealtor accredited professional stagingexpress american card credit travel rewardsteam credit agricole cycling 2006accredited reo home loanscredit express earning true card americanpersonal acredited training certifications Map

The new version of ICQ Lite can now also send messages to AOL and AIM users. Pity it’s the “lite” version and not the “Pro” version. I hope they update “Pro” to do that too – it might be what I need to make me ditch Trillian.