Category: Internet Culture and Technology

According to a BBC story, Global digital divide ‘narrowing’, the World Bank is reporting that the developing world is catching up in usage and access to tehnologies. The World Bank doesn’t feel we need a World Summit on the Information Society. WSIS is going on anyway. WSIS has two summits, Geneva 2003 and Tunis 2005. Check out their WSIS: Declaration of Principles; Building the Information Society: a global challenge in the new Millennium. This presents a vision of the importance of the Information Society connected to freedom of expression (and opinion) and human rights.
WSIS was endorsed by the UN General Assembly (Resolution 56/183)
Continue reading Digital Divide

InSafe is a Council of Europe sponsored organization promoting Internet safety information. Did you know about Safer Internet Day? One is tempted to mock such earnestness. Or you could,

Write about your journey with friends from all over the world in the exciting and sometimes dangerous cyber world of Internet and mobile technology. Take along a magical helper from the Kingdom of Internet safety.

I’m taking Alpha Dog who is good at “digging down spam”.
But seriously, what makes this site so bizarre is that it is written for children, but designed for adults. I can’t imagine any child reading pages of this stuff without any graphics and I find it hard to imagine adults reading this without cringing. Perhaps the graphical version is coming. Compare with the Canadian Media Awareness Network (MNet) to see what I mean.
Continue reading Internet Safety Day

Ray Siemens pointed out to me a new journal Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular being launched by Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communication.

In addition to creating a venue for academic research and modes of expression that go well beyond traditional text to incorporate still and moving images, sound, and interactivity, Vectors seeks to significantly redefine the parameters of scholarly publication.

The subtitle for the journal seems a strange … what is a “dynamic vernacular”? Do they mean the journal will be “interactive” in an everyday fashion?
I am excited to see a journal the recognizes the importance of publishing multimedia works, but that raises the interesting question of how they hope to mount and preserve complex interactive works. Perhaps they won’t bother trying to preserve new media work they publish and will instead focus on using the medium.
Continue reading Vectors: Online journal for digital media

The Globe and Mail has a story by Dr. Jean Marmoreo, “You can speed up love” (Saturday, Feb. 12, 2005, page F7) about older newly single women who are “slicing time” and using lavalife.com to meet other singles. The article and the web site claims that 8 million Canadians have accounts on lavalife, an extraordinary number. Dr. Marmoreo talks about slicing time – not having the time to mess around when you are a professional with children and therefore using web dating services.

Google Local is a new Google service in beta where you search for What and Where. It will remember your “Where” as in “Hamilton, Ontario”. It then presents the results in a list with a map to the right which tries to locate a particular result.
So, for example, if I search for my name I get a result “A” for McMaster (actually for the McMaster Floral Design in the Hospital) that appears on the map where McMaster is in Hamilton. A mixed result that is sort of right, but not right enough.

SandBox(sm). WikiBibliography is a bibliography of research and writing about wikis. Good place to start thinking about wikis. This is put together by Gerry McKiernan, Science and Technology Librarian and Bibliographer, Science and Technology Department, Iowa State University Library.

StumbleUpon is an interesting social web tool where you get a tool bar that lets you rate sites for friends or stumble to a site that others think you might like. It encourages serindipitous stumbling across things – something people have felt was missing from the IT world. Of course, there is commercial side to StumbleUpon – for a fee people can promote their sites, see the “Sponsors” page,

2. Purchase Promotion
StumbleUpon can deliver your site directly to interested stumblers. If you have a high quality site and would like to increase your traffic and get community feedback, you may Request Promotion of your content.

The Google Zeitgeist which summarizes the most popular queries for the year is up now. There is also and Interactive Edition that uses Flash to show you the most popular queries and images by month.

While it has a long name, the Pew Internet & American Life Project seems to be conducting interesting and relevant surveys of Internet usage. In particular they have a report on Artists, Musicians and the Internet and a new one on the The state of blogging. The reports are in PDF format.

The Table of Contents and the Highlights PDF of the OECD Information Technology Outlook 2004 is now available. The Highlights document mentions that spam is now estimated to be about 60% of e-mail and the OECD is now coordinating a Task Force on spam (see OECD Work on Spam: Department), they have a “Toolkit” (which you can’t download!) and there are some reports online that nicely summarize things. (See OECD Work on Spam: Publications & Documents: Reports – the Background Paper in particular provides an overview of the growth in spam.) Maybe the OECD will do something about spam. This came to me from a post by Lachance on Humanist.