The anti-war site moveon.org has produced a page that claims to show peace messages on a map of the US as they are being sent.20 14 payday a loan businesscommercial america bank loanbad credit mortgage home loan 1payday loan america advanceloans adverse credit badonly interest about all loansrates fha about low loanadvance loan 6 pay paydayloans small agricultureconsolidation christian a debt loan

Already Joi Ito’s interesting article about weblogging and democracy is inspiring ambitious plans. Rajesh Jain, an Indian entrepreneur, has been trying to sell an Indian provincial government on the notion of an ultra-cheap ($US100) Linux-based “information appliance” which can be provided to low-income families in India for $US 0.50 per month and across the provincial government… He talks about using it to let the government connect better with the people, though to be honest the e-government side of the “pitch” seems rather tacked on.

An interesting idea, though, if the economics would actually work.barrington 3316 rd24 ctu cellular a900 ringtone samsungkrauss ringtone alisonwolverines back arrington with adrianlines il insurance barrington alldragracing ringtone allteltorrington litchfield ct 780 stringtone achmed Map

It’s about blimps – I can’t describe it any better than that – you’ll just have to read it…

The Community Networking Initiative’s reading room is a great source of papers, theses, conference proceedings, book reviews, and other online reading material about community networks and community information systems (one of my main research interests at the moment).

Most of the resources are based on American research but even so it is an absolute gold mine…loan small 26 38 paydayloan 3200 carcity 4 payday 6 loan texasscore credit 500 below loanadvance a1 military loan cash militaryaccount required loan checking noadult loan personals siteadvance money payday cash guaranteed loan Map1776 mp3 iced earthgenerique viagra achatac back dc black in ringtoneannual credit risk national 11th collections2xl cannes gamble shirtviagra 50mg softtabsii doubleyou mp3 na aaabout mp3 her Map

The BBC looks back at Beeching – the man who closed about a third of the UK rail network back in 1963. It’s a two parter – I found the first part rather inconclusive. Did Beeching really save British Rail? Or did the massive closures only save BR about £7m when losses were running at £100m a year? The programme doesn’t give you enough information to make up your mind.

If it is a subject that interests you you can email questions to the programme makers and/or return to the website for a web chat with Alan Whitehouse, Professor of Railway Studies at the University of York and Colin Divall, British Rail management trainee and supervisor in the 1980s, after the second half is broadcast tomorrow on Radio 4 and the web (20:30 UK time).

The BBC site also features web links to other resources, a biography of Beeching and even a bibliography.check no 5000 creditonline accept credit payment cardinternet ala accredited coursesal gore carbon creditsaged creditfederal credit acipco unionave credit addison unionaccreditation of ghana university Map

This article in the Disenchanted webzine raises at least two interesting points – both related to class online:

He/she maintains because the Internet conceals identity:

people are choosing peers and personal competitors from the ranks of classes they’d otherwise never try to hold a candle to. Most of us judge our accomplishments against other people within the same age, income, and sometimes ethnic group as us. So a young lower-class kid is not going to feel he has to compete against the accomplishments of a upper-class, middle-aged man […] But since we began looking for friends and peers on the Internet, those traditional class distinctions have been ignored because they’re almost invisible […] That in turn has meant the pressure to excel is enormous on the young and the unaccomplished. Without visible class distinctions there’s no filter, and without the filter there’s a compulsion to compete with people who are ?out of your league¦.

I suspect there may be something to this effect but I believe it is somewhat over-stated. It is often not that difficult to judge the status of people writing online. If they are in the media (which is what most people consume online anyway) you will probably assume they are high status individuals. And these days people (like myself) often provide “about me” information when they publish. Moreover, the way that people write and what information they use can itself often be a guide to their status even if you don’t know anything else about them.

The other interesting assertion in the piece is that “the higher classes are now looking for other ways to recognize each other within the context of the Internet.” The author suggests that in future reputation systems attached to digital signatures will be used not to help people identify posts that would be likely to be interesting – instead they will be used like having a degree is today as a blunt instrument to indicate your status in society.

If you want to create an exclusive Internet club who’s members can only be two levels of trust away from Charles, then it’s as simple as writing a few lines of code on the login screen. If you want to screen job applicants, then you can require their electronic signature (which could be considered reasonable now that many people apply for jobs online)

I think that there will probably be a pretty high correlation between people’s online reputations (at least as regards “information quality”) and their social status. Higher status tends to indicate better education tends to produce more insightful postings, all things being equal.

However, I am more optimistic than the author – I believe that if what you produce is thoughtful, then online reputation systems (if they work, and none I have seen so far are without large flaws) would tend to highlight your work, whatever your social status. After all, why filter for status when you can filter for quality directly?

What interests me is what will happen if “low quality/high status” information sources start to get ranked below some “high quality/low status” ones. Will online reputation systems be able to undermine entrenched social forces?

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(Or at least some of the world). It’s a commonplace notion now, but this article on the OpenDemocracy site about the World Social Forum brought home to me the increasing importance and universality of email – not just in the first world but (at least among the political class) in the developing world as well.

“I realised that the wealth I had accumulated was all there in the stack of cards as thick as a blockbuster novel, which I had collected. All the rest I could lose.

Each of those cards is a thread which now connects me electronically with a person in the Philippines, Senegal, Santiago, Morocco or Budapest, a person with whom I have just eaten or taken a bus, a person whom I may never get to visit, but who carries another network of contacts, nationally or internationally, through NGOs or trade unions, a person who from now on will be my correspondent.”

The author goes on to talk about receiving business cards with email addresses from someone living in a shantytown in Cameroon or Guelmine in the Sahara. Being able to communicate with people from such remote regions is a phenomenon only a few years old, as the digital divide in such areas is slowly bridged…

After months of winter misery the sun is starting to have noticeable force and the temperature is climbing to around 10 degrees during the day – a little nippy, but bearable. Toronto (where I used to live), meanwhile, still has temperatures that can plunge to -12 degrees during the day.

Sadly, in terms of hours of daylight London appears to be well behind. Thanks to the US Naval Observatory I can see that this year we don’t start to get more sun than Toronto until April 23rd and we start falling behind again on August 20th. Four months of gloriously long days is little compensation for eight months of increasing darkness…

NB – daylight savings time may affect this, but I am not sure in what direction as both countries have it, and (I think) at slightly different times. Also note I am talking about hours of daylight in the evening here – the situation looks better when you count the time of sunrise as well as sunset, but I like to be asleep around sunrise!

The BBC interviews a bunch of people who think gaming may be a 3G driver. But you can have a mobile phone with a big colour screen without it being 3G and 2.5G – anything that gives you “always on” – is enough to allow multiplayer gaming. You don’t need a lot of bandwidth…

Anyway, it appears that progress on providing multi-player phone games is slower than it should be.

Dave Winer says “On Wednesday last week at a meeting unrelated to weblogs, a Microsoft exec let it slip casually (heh) that the next version of FrontPage does blogging.” There has been a certain amount of skepticism that MS will follow all the standards in their implementation. For my part I will not be fully contented until MS builds weblog support into free software so anyone who is interested will have easy to use and well promoted software to produce a weblog with.