Just how big is social media? Watch this

Gary Hayes from personalizemedia.com put together this very neat little widget which visualises the hyper-growth in usage of social media.

Scrapbook clips catch up

Wait a while and the clips pile up ...



The Berlin gay holocaust memorial is unveiled and among the participants was 95-year-old Rudolf Brazda, who survived incarceration in Buchenwald concentration camp from 1941 to 1945. "It was a terrible time," Brazda said. Asked how he felt now, he responded: "I must say that I feel as though I were in paradise in this democratic society."

What is happening in the Italian blogosphere? I check viral videos regularly and a lot are suddenly Italian. And this is in a list previously 100% dominated by America with occasional Sarkozy interruptions.

Viral, political video on the whole is becoming more international. I've seen (as well as French) some Malaysian and Canadian video pop up with serious numbers of blog postings.

Another, positive, view of the impact of the internet on China:

The Chinese public sphere has become a more freewheeling, interesting and chaotic arena for expressions of opinion than it was. This isn't all due to the Internet (crusading print journalists and activists have also done their part), but bloggers calling attention to official corruption or mocking government policies have definitely helped alter the political landscape.

The politically significant things happening online involve forms of communication, such as efforts to call attention to corrupt acts by local officials, that dovetail with policies that are promoted or at least given lip service by the central authorities.

After racist hiring, another negative against Google Inc: their Daycare arrangements.

The Itch: Its mysterious power may be a clue to a new theory about brains and bodies.

Really recommended science feature from the New Yorker:

The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.

...

Researchers at the University of Manchester, in England, have gone a step beyond mirrors and fashioned an immersive virtual-reality system for treating patients with phantom-limb pain. Detectors transpose movement of real limbs into a virtual world where patients feel they are actually moving, stretching, even playing a ballgame. So far, five patients have tried the system, and they have all experienced a reduction in pain. Whether those results will last has yet to be established. But the approach raises the possibility of designing similar systems to help patients with other sensor syndromes. How, one wonders, would someone with chronic back pain fare in a virtual world? The Manchester study suggests that there may be many ways to fight our phantoms.

How social networking saved New Orleans: Powered by community, New Orleans residents exposed city hall and the power of social software

Using blogs with names like Fix the Pumps and Squandered Heritage, citizens took up "beats," lending their professional expertise, ingenuity and gumshoe efforts to create a citizens' voice to counter city government rhetoric.

Via David Wilcox: Community networking to tackle climate change

That’s not all, though - I have also been drafted in by Tracey Todhunter to help develop her ideas for a ‘communiversity’ for low carbon communities. She writes about it here. We’re going to start off in my session, so Tracey and her colleagues can develop a strategy using the game; and then take the results into her session to drum up support and refine things.

All about the CivilSerf project:

A global virtual community for teenagers has teamed up with the Matthew Shepard Foundation to educate young online users about dignity and respect.

From next Monday foundation staff will lead discussions twice a week in Habbo.com's InfoBus, which is a virtual room designed to look like the inside of a high-end bus.

Good new resource: The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008

Zugby's blog post about being forced to the ground by armed police in Bournemouth.

I oblige. I'm shocked, confused, scared and embarrassed all at the same time. Most of the bystanders have vacated the platform by now, by police order. And I'm not talking about normal police either. This is the Specialist Firearms Unit, about 8 of them, machine guns, bulletproof vests, police dogs and all. And they're here to arrest ME!

AP feature on Web 2.0 - censoring the right to rant

With online services becoming greater conduits than shopping malls for public communications, however, some advocacy groups believe the federal government needs to guarantee open access to speech. That, of course, could also invite meddling by the government, the way broadcasters now face indecency and other restrictions that are criticised as vague.

Others believe companies shouldn't police content at all, and if they do, they should at least make clearer the rules and the mechanisms for appeal.

Where's Web 2.0 at in the US government?

Local government officials had mixed views about how they see Web 2.0 meshing with their needs, however. Mary Benner, CIO of the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, called it "something that we need to pursue, but it is not an immediate priority".

While Web 2.0 can help residents communicate better with their governments, she says, offering those kinds of features is becoming a key way to lure younger IT workers to take jobs in government where they can build innovative Web 2.0 applications.

Dave Briggs' review of Communities in Control, the new white paper by the Department for Communities and Local Government. It's pretty radical but I commented that if you want to address the 'digital divide', which it references, you could start by ramping up funding for UK Online Centres whose CEO has been screaming about underfunding. Not sexy and seemingly not on anyone's agenda.

Craig Tomley offers (tongue in cheek) 10 reasons government agencies should not advertise online

7) Because our senior executives haven't gotten the hang of email yet, and we know that our executives (who approve our ad design and spend) think and act exactly in the same way as our customers, even though they earn more, are degree-qualified, much older and live in Canberra.

Comment from Belgium about the YouTube/Viacon decision:

Obviously, European Youtube users didn’t ask for their youtube usage to be handed over to Viacom Inc.. Who knows what Viacom will do with this highly private data (which contains highly detailed information about people’s interests such as the videos they watch, the various topics they are interested in, and so on)?

I only hope that enough Europeans will formally protest at their country’s privacy agencies and/or at the European institutions. Although, I fear it won’t matter anymore as privacy nowadays has become far less important than Britney Spears or Paris Hilton.

Anyway, please find the contact details for Belgium here.

In the US, the right-wing Xstian preacher Hagee has through take-down been attempting to get off the viral video circuit, but it's backfired.

More on 'The War On Tourism' @ America's borders from Peter Tatchell:

After being held in custody in appalling conditions for over 26 hours by the department of homeland security, Mengal was refused entry to the US and deported. No reasons given. No right of appeal. This is Bush-style democracy in action.

Patricia Hewitt is Nigerian?

Before my retirement, I personally made an over estimation, and stacked the sum of Six Million Three Hundred Thousand Great Britain Pounds which I totally intend for the purpose of charity and none other which will be supervised Attorney as he will also be the one in charge of securing these funds into your custody.

The historic victory for UK bloggers of Alan Murray in Northern Ireland.

'During my testimony in court I said I was only trying to criticise those in power or those that would speak for us. That right has been upheld by the judge's decision. If the judge had ruled against me, then every blogger would have been vulnerable to charges of intimidation because those at the end of their criticism could claim they were being picked upon. A very bad precedent would have been set,' he said.

Revealed: The ten members of Web’s ‘500 million club’ - Via NetImperative: Only 10 websites and applications - led by MSN Messenger, eBay and Facebook – have averaged at least 500 million UK minutes per month over the last year, according to new research. Facebook, YouTube and Second Life are the fastest growing sites in terms of total UK minutes.

AP: Uncertainty aplenty as Web, media leaders convene

Both media and online leaders are grappling with the Internet's increasing fragmentation. And they're all looking for more advertising revenue online, where media companies have recouped only a small fraction of what they lost in print and where Web companies want to maximize their investments.

Bill Thompson on the reaction to copyright infringement by big corps:

EMI, Warner, V2, Sony BMG and the other four hundred or so members of the BPI want to cut people off from that network for copyright infringement.

Imagine if you had a child who was excluded from school for cheating in an exam, and you were told that they weren't allowed to watch TV, listen to music, read books, talk to their friends or go into any shop during the exclusion.

Oh, and you and your entire family were subject to the same restrictions.

Wal-Mart: Ethical retailing? Hmmm.

The company has been churning out dozens of white papers on sustainability, publicly available on its website, addressing everything from how to change eating and exercise habits to green charities; holding state-of-the art conferences on greening the supply chain; building environmentally efficient stores with open sky lighting and motion sensors to reduce energy consumption; rolling out green products in almost every department; and basing its promotion structure of its own employees, including senior staff, on how successful they are in convincing vendors to adopt measurable environmental standards.

Monbiot: Trawlermen cling on as oceans empty of fish - and the ecosystem is gasping

From PSF, this story made me think of numerous Fairy Tale analogies:, largely involving wolves

Ministers have declared another major sweeping 'new' pan-government efficiency drive aiming to cut down IT spending and slash back-office costs.

The 'Operational' Efficiency Programme kicked off last week with the launch of a series of 'cross-cutting' reviews headed up by a veritable host of business leaders. Each review will report back in March with news of where £££ billions of savings can be made across the public sector.

The first review, led by Martin Jay, chairman of technology and engineering group and former stock market darling Invensys.

Talk about desperation ... in Slate: the movie I'm rushing out to see, Wall-E, is allegedly fattist:

This stereotype of the "obese lifestyle" is simply false. How fat you are has a lot more to do with your genes than with your behavior. As much as 80 percent of the variation in human body weight can be explained by differences in our DNA.

Genius take on all those stories about science's quest to find the cause of gayness by David Ehrensten, merging a “feminized brain” with Plan 9 From Outer Space:

That’s because, Lord Saletan, we know full well who WILL be doing the controlling — Eros from Plan 9 !
Can’t you see him now explaining it all to us? Why is this happening, O Visitors From Another World?
“Because of death. Because all you of Earth are idiots! You see! You see! Your stupid female brains! Stupid! Stupid!”

Fabulous

If ever anything summed up that British "stiff upper lip", this Keep Calm And Carry On poster is it. During the early spring of 1939 and the war with Germany almost inevitable the British Government commissioned this poster to be displayed throughout the country upon the out-break of war. The plan for the poster was to relay a message from the King to his people that all capable measures to defend the country were being taken. This original World War II poster lay undiscovered and forgotten until a copy turned up over 50 years later within a pile of dusty old books bought from an auction, it's soothing message is still relevant today - it understands that you are a little bit stressed but knows you'll be ok. You can purchase heaps of great products that feature the Keep Calm and Carry On logo from this fab site. www.keepcalmandcarryon.com.au

The Onion has been celebrating Gay Pride march month (for want of a better word) by pulling together past posts, including this: New Dad Thinks Baby Might Be Gay.

The great Yossi Alpher falls for Sasha Baron-Cohen's latest creation:

"Vait, vait. Vat’s zee connection between a political movement and food. Vy hummus?”

Quote of the week
John Harris on Any Questions?, about the Islington Registrar being allowed to discriminate against gay couples:

It's about privileged beliefs. I'm a vegetarian. If I worked at Tesco and said I'm not going to put meat through the checkout they'd be quite justified in saying 'you're not right for the job'.

NASA's Second Life

Great cartoon from Federal Computer Week.

At least three agencies have property in Second Life: CDC, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NASA’s Ames Research Center has been particularly innovative in its use of Second Life, which gives the center a global tool for reaching and educating people they might not otherwise reach. NASA has even hired an intern in Second Life.

Still can't see the relevance for Borsetshire Council though ...

Second Life pisstake

Los Angeles Times: Virtual marketers have second thoughts about Second Life
Firms find that avatars created by participants in the online society aren't avid shoppers.

On its website, Second Life says the number of total residents is more than 8 million. But that counts people who signed in once and never returned, as well as multiple avatars for individual residents. Even at peak times, only about 30,000 to 40,000 users are logged on, said Brian Haven, an analyst with Forrester Research.

"You're talking about a much smaller audience than advertisers are used to reaching," Haven said.

Bytes · Smart kids - BBC3 satirised - Satisfaction is key

Way too busy to blog much so here's some clips:

• Tom Steinberg's 'Power of Information Review' is available in PDF here.

• Marc Andreessen (Netscape) has popped the idea that we're in another dotcom 'bubble' on his new blog.

• According to The Observer:
  

  Thousands of schoolchildren have made it their mission to break through internet filters in schools meant to stop them surfing 'social network' websites such as Bebo, MySpace and Facebook.

  
  More power to them.
  

• Privacy International says that Google has the worst privacy policies of any Web company. They have a "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy," it's claimed.
  
  The problem I have with this is that privacy campaigners don't seem to ever realise that the foundations of all Web businesses is consumer trust. This is why banks make special efforts. If Google is ever caught out seriously it will pay in lost business.
  

• Google Sightseeing have started a new site — already — for Street View Sightseeing.

• Media types are apparently on the hunt for an anonymous blogger making life hell for BBC3's young Controller, Danny Cohen. Thetvcontroller is great satire.

• ZDNet interviews Sir Tim Berner-Lee [VIDEO], the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium at the MITX (Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange) Technology Awards. He sounds terribly mid-Atlantic and talks about the (drumroll) 'semantic web'. He doesn't like APIs, he wants you to think SPARQL.
  

• The LibDems put down a motion in the Commons on Friday on the 53rd Anniversary of the death of Alan Turing.
  
  Every programmer or web person should know Turing's name.
  
  I was shamefully corrected (thanks Seb) and, as I've a mo, here's Alan's lifestory from Andrew Hodges tribute website (my emphases):
  
  

  Who was Alan Turing?
  Founder of computer science, mathematician, philosopher,
  codebreaker, strange visionary and a gay man before his time:
  
  1912 (23 June): Birth, Paddington, London
  1926-31: Sherborne School
  1930: Death of friend Christopher Morcom
  1931-34: Undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge University
  1932-35: Quantum mechanics, probability, logic
  1935: Elected fellow of King's College, Cambridge
  1936: The Turing machine, computability, universal machine
  1936-38: Princeton University. Ph.D. Logic, algebra, number theory
  1938-39: Return to Cambridge. Introduced to German Enigma cipher machine
  1939-40: The Bombe, machine for Enigma decryption
  1939-42: Breaking of U-boat Enigma, saving battle of the Atlantic
  1943-45: Chief Anglo-American crypto consultant. Electronic work.
  1945: National Physical Laboratory, London
  1946: Computer and software design leading the world.
  1947-48: Programming, neural nets, and artificial intelligence
  1948: Manchester University
  1949: First serious mathematical use of a computer
  1950: The Turing Test for machine intelligence
  1951: Elected FRS. Non-linear theory of biological growth
  1952: Arrested as a homosexual, loss of security clearance
  1953-54: Unfinished work in biology and physics
  1954 (7 June): Death (suicide) by cyanide poisoning, Wilmslow, Cheshire.
  

  
  

• Worrying statement in a report about a survey on what people want from DirectGov:
  

  "With 60% of respondents saying they want more government services in one place online, all of the insights we gained will be taken into consideration as we plan the future of Directgov."

  
  Sounds like a leading question to me. I hadn't noticed the public clamouring to have their services all just through DirectGov.

• Customer satisfaction is now the most important issue for websites, according to new research by ForeSee Results.
  

  Consumers look at more factors than price, according to the study. Offering the lowest price isn't always the best strategy; it increased overall satisfaction for only 5 percent of the top 100 online retail sites. "Site experience and brand, if improved, will have the biggest payback to retailers," said [Larry] Freed, ForeSee CEO. "On the opposite side we have price, generally the lowest of any other elements."
  
  Retailers that don't allow consumer ratings and reviews, or editorial reviews, on their sites risk letting consumers go elsewhere for the information and transacting with another commerce site, according to Freed. "Those that get reviews are generally more satisfied and apt to purchase than those who did not," he said.
  
  

• SpyBlog seems to be moving around the web (ahem). But it is one of only a few places watching the Government's "vague plans to try to censor the internet".

• New York Times covers Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play
  
  
• Newsnight ran another MSM hit-job on the Web's trustfulness [VIDEO] as a source this week.
  
  First up in their 'argument', Wikipedia. Listen, Newsnight, not only does the MSM NEVER admit it's mistakes but scientific study has demolished many of your arguments. Just look at this Nature story from 2005 comparing Wikipedia with Brittanica (the BBC covered it). Guess who's winning? It's not the MSM.
  
  BBC News job cuts are obviously already affecting Gavin Esler's research assistance.
  
  
• UofC psychology researchers have found another use for Second Life: improving understanding of Schizophrenia. According to The Big Issue, they've set up a Virtual Hallucinations building which will simulate the world as a schizophrenic experiences it. Examples include: voices, changing reflections in a mirror and a bookshop which appears to have fascist literature.
  
  
• For one week only. First (yawnsome) full-length film available on youTube.

Web 2.0 - the year ahead?

14th World Editors Forum in Cape Town, South Africa yesterday.

Adam Pasick, Reuters virtual journalist in Second Life; Dave Panos, chief executive officer, Pluck; Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder, Global Voices; Facebook afficionado Richard Sambrook, director, BBC Global News; and Didier Pillet, director of information, Ouest-France (speaking in French with English translation overdubbed).

Bytes · Older people e-vote - eCommunity + disabilities - DiscoSarko

• One of the e-voting pilots in the local election is happening in Shrewsbury and they are reporting that the most use is by older people.
  
  By April 25, over eight hundred people had voted using the telephone or internet. This is a local election, remember. So that's a lot.
  

  Gareth Owens, deputy returning officer, said, "Many people believe that electronic voting will appeal more to younger people."
  
  "This time around we have been asking people for their date of birth as part of the security arrangements, and we have found that it is actually older voters who are using the system most. Indeed on one day we had three octogenarians visit the polling station in the Pride Hill shopping centre."

• Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) is a quarterly journal that publishes refereed articles addressing issues of computing as it impacts the lives of people with disabilities. It provides a technical forum for disseminating innovative research that covers either:
  

  applications of computing and information technologies to provide assistive systems to persons with disabilities, or
  investigations of computing technologies and their use by persons with disabilities.
  

  They have a current call for papers: Special Issue of ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) on“Online Communities and People with Disabilities”.
  
  
• The high turnout in the French Presidential elections is being sourced in part to the web.
  
  Headstar comments that the Sarkozy campaign created a satirical site Disco Sarko — you can put him on a dancefloor, give him a range of moves. As a method for generating a viral buzz, it's hard to better. Genius.
  
  

  Meanwhile Segolene Royal has a brilliant feature on her site inviting people to help create campaign graphics and videos — a way to harness the creativity of her support base, much as Cadbury’s has invited people to send in video clips with their own homemade ads for Creme egg.
  
  Addressing: 'e-créateurs'
  

  En tant que e-créateur, vous êtes en charge d'illustrer la campagne. Vous avez la charge de créer et d'"alimenter" les différents médias Internet qui nous soutiennent. La forme est multiple : création graphique, animations ou vidéos, conception de petits programmes pratiques et utiles, mise en forme de tracts.
  
  [This is translated by Google to: ' As a E-creator, you are in responsibility of illustrate the countryside. You have the responsibility of create and “to feed” the various media Internet which support us. The form is multiple: graphic creation, animations or vidéos, design of small practical and useful programs, formatted of leaflets.']

  It tells you how to 'Ouvrir un compte gratuit sur un serveur blog', showing excellent usability if I can find that with my crap French.
  
  

  There's a Jose Bove game where you have to destroy GM maize and mad cows in honour of the campaigner against McDonalds and globalisation .
  
  All the main candidates’ supporters have also constructed ‘islands’ on second life.
  
  
  

Finally, a use for Second Life

GCN
03/19/07
DHS ponders foray into Second Life

By Trudy Walsh, GCN Staff

The Homeland Security Department is considering setting up an outpost in Second Life, the virtual Sims-like world that has attracted 3 million registered users since 2003.

DHS is just at the point of having informal discussions with one company about setting up a virtual island for its Safecom program, said Tony Frater, DHS’ deputy director of the Office for Interoperability and Compatibility. “But we haven’t taken the plunge,” he said.

<>

Most public-safety agencies don’t have the resources to conduct “tabletop exercises,” which typically are simulations of first-responder events such as a pandemic or a biochemical attack, Frater said. One of these exercises usually requires public-safety workers to spend an entire weekend working at the event. And a tabletop exercise can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In Second Life, however, “we could build training exercises around chemical spills, hurricanes or tornadoes,” Frater said. “It’s fairly realistic. We could mock up things that happen in real life.” Public safety agencies could upload their standard operating procedures and get 30 or so avatars to conduct a simulation exercise.

<>

“Just like the Internet, Second Life has both appropriate and inappropriate sections,” Frater said. “DHS will take appropriate steps to protect its information. We also talked about setting up meeting spaces that can be conducted in private,” which require invitations. “I think a lot of seminars would be in a closed setting,” he said.

This makes way more sense than anyone trying to make money or attract customers through Second Life. Because the numbers of actual users is a mirage.