Typical - you wait ages for good journal articles about political blogging in a UK context and eight come along at once! I still would like to see an article which measures and assesses the (lack of) connection between independent UK political blogs and the UK political scene and explains why the impact of UK political blogs appears to be much less than that of US political blogs…

These three Google employees may be the world’s most powerful censors

The New York Times Magazine today featured Google’s Gatekeepers - a look at the small unaccountable team within Google who decide whether and to what extent they will comply with the wishes of governments around the world who wish to regulate its operations. Encouragingly, Andrew McLaughlin, global public-policy director, is a Berkman Fellow, which is about as good a place as I can imagine to start from if you want to appreciate Internet regulation issues.

More disturbingly, Nicole Wong describes her role as finding an approach which “will allow our products to move forward in a country” (which should come as no surprise - as a publicly-held company it is legally obliged to maximise its profits).

Unquestionably, blogging has encouraged greater political participation. Nonetheless, it appears that choosing to blog about politics remains socially stratified. I just did a quick and dirty re-analysis on some Pew figures from 2006 and found that not only is blogging in the US already skewed towards the college educated (39% of bloggers contacted had college degrees compared to 28% of the US population 25 and over at the time) but political blogging is even more so - 59% of those sampled who blogged primarily about politics (N=16) have college degrees. I believe the sample size makes it difficult to be definitive about this but the numbers are suggestive. Has anyone written up a ‘proper’ statistical study of how socio-economic status correlates with particular forms of weblogging use?

This week saw the launch of Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media - a collection of ethnographic studies in both white paper (58 pages) and book form - and the release of a draft literature review Online Threats to Youth: Solicitation, Harassment, and Problematic Content (87 pages) both of which arrived opportunely as Sonia Livingstone and I are busy trying to finish off a short paper “On the rapid rise of social networking sites: Emerging findings and policy implications”. There goes the day!

Google has long insisted that it wasn’t interested in or involved with news gathering that involved human intervention - “we just serve stuff up using algorithms”, they say. (Of course the algorithms at Google News are continually tweaked to ensure that people using them get the kind of results that Google believes that they want, and the selection of news sources themselves is done by humans…) But I just noticed a new programme off in a corner of Google - Power Readers in Politics - essentially a group blog run by a small and Google-selected set of politicians and journalists, attached to Google Reader. Also see their Canadian version.

Technorati (a service which indexes weblog postings) has produced its latest and most elaborate report to date on bloggers. Notable by its absence is what was a prominent (and dubious) feature of earlier reports - a graph showing a steady rise in the number of blogs and bloggers. Instead they are satisfied to remark that there are “widely disparate estimates of both the number of blogs and blog readership. All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.” Well, mainstream in terms of numbers of people who have ever read a blog perhaps but blog writing is still very much the act of a small minority, at least in the US and UK, according to representative surveys - Pew found in May 08 just 5% of US online users posted to blogs on a given day and 12% had ever done so.

Technorati have commissioned a survey (see their methodology description) of random Technorati customers (already, one should note, a skewed sample since only a fairly engaged weblog user would be interested in the services Technorati uses). They had 1,290 responses from 66 countries but give no data on how many people were contacted, so lacking a response rate it’s hard to know how this might further skew their information.

This caveat aside, their survey does contain one piece of information that is new - at least to me - a picture of the mean and median income bloggers get from advertising. Well, they find that 46% of bloggers don’t have ads on their blogs. Of those remaining, it’s striking (if not surprising) that income is highly skewed. Among European bloggers for example, the mean income is $9,040 a year, while the median is just $200. Personally I am skeptical that the actual median income from blog ads is even that high but would be interested to learn if anyone had come up with more reliable figures.

How Wikipedia Works, a free-to-access book (also available in print) about all aspects of Wikipedia by some Wikipedia ‘insiders’ and
Is something fundamentally wrong with Wikipedia’s governance processes, a roundup of concerns from someone who has been both participating in it and studying it (inspired by this list of concerns by another critic, but adding links to specific cases).

I have not researched the subject sufficiently to have a view on the accuracy of the claims of problems but I was dismayed at the sheer number of allegations…

At last an edited collection of articles about different aspects of digital storytelling has arrived at Amazon US and on the publisher’s site, Peter Lang (it will doubtless be available at Amazon UK soon).

Table of contents follows:
Knut Lundby: Introduction: Digital storytelling, mediatized stories
Ola Erstad/James V. Wertsch: Tales of mediation: Narrative and digital media as cultural tools
Nick Couldry: Digital storytelling, media research and democracy: Conceptual choices and alternative futures
Kirsten Drotner: Boundaries and bridges: Digital storytelling in education studies and media studies
Nancy Thumim: ‘It’s good for them to know my story’: Cultural mediation as tension
Birgit Hertzberg Kaare/Knut Lundby: Mediatized lives: Autobiography and assumed authenticity in digital storytelling
Mark Evan Nelson/Glynda A. Hull: Self-presentation through multimedia: A Bakhtinian perspective on digital storytelling
Kelly McWilliam: Digital storytelling as a ‘discursively ordered domain’
Lotte Nyboe/Kirsten Drotner: Identity, aesthetics, and digital narration
Larry Friedlander: Narrative strategies in a digital age: Authorship and authority
John Hartley: Problems of expertise and scalability in self-made media
Ola Erstad/Kenneth Silseth: Agency in digital storytelling: Challenging the educational context
Elisabeth Staksrud: Fairytale parenting: Contextual factors influencing children’s online self-representation
David Gauntlett: Creative brainwork: Building metaphors of identity for social science research
Tone Bratteteig: Does it matter that it is digital?
David Brake: Shaping the ‘me’ in MySpace: The framing of profiles on a social network site.

Comments on the book would be welcome - particularly on the last chapter mentioned which is my own!

You can find an assortment of papers delivered at Media, Communication and Humanity linked here (ordered by subject).

One of the questions that fascinates me is the relationship between Internet technologies and social norms - particularly those around privacy. Some suggest that as “Digital Natives” get older, their exposure to various tools for online self-disclosure may change their view of privacy norms. In today’s New York Times*, however, we see that this process is not always just an unintended consequence of technological change - it seems that the founder of Facebook wants his software to change people’s privacy norms:

When I spoke to him, Zuckerberg argued that News Feed is central to Facebook’s success. “Facebook has always tried to push the envelope,” he said. “And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”

Of course this makes sense commercially - the more happy we are to share information about ourselves with others, the more data about ourselves we provide for potential advertisers and the more we provide the content that brings people back to Facebook. But there are some un-addressed problems here.

Even if we get comfortable with this new attitude to self-disclosure is this a good thing for society? And what about the transitional difficulties when self-disclosing young people run into authorities who don’t understand or sympathise with this new attitude?

(Also see my earlier post “The Death of Privacy” or indeed any of the posts here categorised Privacy)

* I’ve highlighted just a small part of this article by Clive Thompson - it’s well worth reading the rest too if you want a quick and interesting overview of the issues around microblogging…