Category: Internet Culture and Technology

The ESRC is running a Social Science Week Blog where there are invited talks online about research and learning online. In particular there are two papers around Social Sciences Online ª Research Methods. Neither of these papers deals with the topic I have previosly blogged, using blogs ethically, but they look at a parallel issue of online interviews and surveys.

Great Site Ranking in Google The Secret’s Out is an article on how Google ranks sites based on a reading of their US patent application which describes their approach to ranking and how they deal with spam. The article was suggested to me by Matt Patey and is worth reading. Darren Yates, the author, concludes with “Overall keep it ethical and you can’t go far wrong.” (Yates, 6/11/2005, in Buzzle.com)

Yahoo! Mindset is a search demo that lets you sort the results with a slider that lets you choose the weight of “commercial” against “research”. I assume they look at the source of the link. Thanks to Matt Patey for this.
Continue reading Yahoo Mindset

Google Homepage is a new service that lets you create a customized homepage with news, mail, weather and other stuff. So much for the simple google screen.

Thanks to Vika of words’ end for pointing me to unready.org. She pointed out that Ready.gov has been around for a while. (See my earlier post, The new cold-war: Ready.Gov.) I still wonder why they would be advertising so widely and in the Guardian of all places.

The BBC News has a story titled, ‘Infomania’ worse than marijuana (April 22, 2005.) A study for Hewlett Packard claims that some are getting addicted to messaging and that this reduced intelligence. The study was led by Dr Glenn Wilson, a psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King’s College, London.
This was from Geoff T.
Continue reading Infomania: research on the loss of IQ from IT

From Humanist, two interesting links on the “digital divide”. The first is a report from the Morino Institute, From Access to Outcomes: Digital Divide Report and Dialogue. The report has 10 sensible premises starting with the obvious, “Focus on narrowing social – not digital divides”.
The second is from an issue on “The Digital Divide” (Spring 2001, Vol. 1, No. 2) which has articles of interest on, TCLA:. The Digital Divide:. Politics & Education:. Framing the Digital Divide. In particular there is an article by Randall D. Pinkett, Redefining the Digital Divide.

Michael Geist, a law prof at the University of Ottawa, has a good summary of the copyright plans of Industry Canada and Canadian Heritage on his site, www.MichaelGeist.ca.

Unlike the US legislation there is no sign that anti-circumvention provisions will apply to devices. There is also a more fair ISP provision.

Geist concludes, “The devil will be in the details but this represents a major shift away from the embarrassingly one-sided Canadian Heritage Standing Committee recommendations issued last May. While that report clearly pushed the agenda forward, the governmentís response has certainly recognized the need for some balance.”
This is from Slashdot.org

Ourmedia.org is a new open service that lets users upload and make available multimedia works. With support from outfits like the Internet Archive, it aims to give anyone a place to post content. An open Lulu. Go for it!

Connotea, “a free online reference management service for scientists” is like CiteULike – providing an online shared reference tool. The idea is catching on!