I’ve been listening to this podcast of a conference presentation by Anil Dash at MeshForum 2006 where he (one of the earliest weblog developers) makes a number of interesting statements including this snippet relevant to my upcoming thesis about personal weblogging, 4 minutes, 57 seconds in to his talk:

You have to know who the audience is that you care about. One of the assumptions that a lot of us that have been in technology make is that if we just let them everybody would want to talk to 100 people around the world and tell them how they feel. That’s actually not true and for most people they consider those of us that do that to be somewhere between strange and psychopathic.

Now how would you cite that? At the moment I guess that it should be treated as a conference proceeding:

Dash, A. (2005) “Scale Social Networks and Livejournal.Com “. in MeshForum, San Francisco, California,May 7, IT Conversations. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1069.html

But that doesn’t tell you it is a podcast and crucially it doesn’t tell you that the part you want to hear is around 5 minutes in. This useful guide to Harvard citation says BS:5605:1990 (whatever that is) doesn’t include recommendations for electronic sources. Is there an advanced Harvard Style Lab somewhere coming up with standards for this stuff? What would you do? Should I just make up my own style?

David Brake

Neighbornode is an interesting new project that encourages neighborhood-based virtual communities by providing messageboards that are associated with local wireless networks. Nobody who is not actually connected to that wireless node can read what is on that bulletin board, but ‘nodes’ that are adjacent to each other are linked together.

I often thought that one of the things standing in the way of neighborhood-based virtual communities was simply the problem of 1) getting a "critical mass" of people in a neighborhood online and 2) making a space online where there was a reasonable likelihood that your neighbors would also hang out. This new scheme seems to neatly solve both problems…

It’s an idea so obvious that it’s hard to believe it hasn’t been tried before - Open Source (from Public Radio International) puts together an hour-long daily show based on ideas for shows solicited from readers of their blog and includes online interaction from those readers throughout (and after) the show. The idea attracted some coverage in the New York Times but as yet they haven’t put anything out that I am interested in. Still, it’s early days yet…

At a recent presentation, the OII unveiled some data from its 2005 survey of UK Internet use (and put it in an international perspective). That data is on their site now. I found the slide below particularly interesting:

The choice to ‘go broadband’ in the UK doesn’t seem as income-constrained as I thought. Of course that is the percentage of UK Internet users with broadband so if you adjust for the fact that low earners are less likely to be online at all, it looks more stratified. But you can check out the presentation yourself…

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Just a few weeks after the launch of Ourmedia comes Google Video which also promises to archive video of any size (for free, so far) but in addition offers you the chance to sell the right to view clips. No sign that you will be able to make video clips only viewable by friends, though. And coming soon there is Vimeo which is like Flickr but for video clips instead of stills. This seems to me the most useful way to enable video sharing for most people (who only want or need to share their video with the people they know) but it is a small startup so it is not clear whether it will take off…

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The BBC brings an example from Austria where Telekom Austria’s Aon TV has enabled residents of a small town to create their own broadband news station.

Two things I wonder - how much training and promotion was necessary to get this off the ground and how long will it last (it started at the end of 2004).

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Ourmedia (a spin-off of the Internet Archive) has just launched. This is a hugely ambitious project that the brilliant head of the Archive, Brewster Kahle, alluded to a year ago in a Notcon talk I blogged about. It has been spearheaded by J D Lasica and Marc Canter.

Their intention is to provide a place for anyone who has any kind of digital content to post it publicly, have it indexed, stored and made available online forever, for free, no matter how much of it there is. The price of camcorders has declined steadily and it is reasonably easy to turn video footage into digital files on recently-bought computers. But until now there has been no easy way for people to get their video stored unless they have connections to some kind of digital art organizations or can afford to pay - this is because each minute of full-screen video takes roughly 8Mb of space to store and streaming video over the Internet is a costly business. (Several commercial companies have come and gone offering some kind of video streaming for consumers - Streamload is one of the few I have found still around with a good free offering).

Flickr (which has just been bought by Yahoo) has already demonstrated that providing an environment where people can share picture content and easily form communities around it can enable fascinating and stimulating creative and social activity. Ourmedia lacks Flickr’s interface slickness (it is still in alpha, despite launching today) but it adds audio and video storage to Flickr’s pictures and text and while Flickr has a free offering it is not as capable as their paid subscription features.

With this service, one of the last technical/economic barriers to widespread personal Internet video broadcasting has disappeared. But broadband is still vital for uploading video files and almost as essential for viewing them - and only around 150m households worldwide have broadband.

The biggest overall barrier, however, remains a knowledge barrier. While on the surface using a video camera is simple - just point and shoot - understanding how to do it well to tell a story remains an art. And the software tools for video production available on computers remain difficult to use and time consuming. My father just finished producing a short video of our wedding but it took him two years to complete and a lot of frustration.

I have made an account on Ourmedia but I don’t know what I will do with it yet.

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Did you know there are more Korean bloggers than American ones? That 90% of South Koreans in their 20s have a blog?! UsageWatch.org cites the makers of Cyworld and some market research to suggest that one in four of all South Koreans have a blog on that service alone. Makes the November figures for the US (7% of adult US internet users or 2.7% of the US population according to Pew) seem puny by comparison.

I will be studying UK weblogging for my thesis but this really makes me wish I spoke Korean and could do my research there… Also see:

• this International Herald Tribune article for the demographic and financial figures
• ‘I Was a Cyholic, a Cyworld Addict’ for a more personal view (from one of the ‘citizen reporters’ for OhMyNews - another S Korean phenomenon I blogged about earlier…
• and here for some suggestions about why S Korea has such high broadband penetration.
• Update: Blogcount cites sources suggesting even higher numbers of Korean bloggers and points out that the various blog monitoring services like Technorati don’t seem to be tracking them.

Russia Broadband Overview

the residential sector is dominated at present by the informal ‘Home Networks’ which use Ethernet LANs to link up buildings, housing developments and sometimes whole neighbourhoods to ‘broadband’ access (2 Mbps up to the buildings is considered the average by local observers). These operators account for some 75% residential users, or some 550,000 by end 2004, connected households throughout Russia, according to analysts. They are generally very low cost. These informal networks are expected to dominate for perhaps a further two years until DSL is more widespread. During this period the larger telcos are expected to try to buy up the small Home LAN companies and cooperatives.

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If you believe as I do that broadband Internet access is qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from dialup access (see this Pew report and this ethnographic report in the UK from iSociety for some examples) then this recent global suvey of broadband access gives pause for thought.

Of the 128m broadband users worldwide, 53m are Asian, 42m are in the Americas and 32.8m are in Europe. While user growth in Asia is a little slower than elsewhere it is still well ahead in overall numbers and it will be interesting to see what difference this makes to the domestication of Internet in those countries and perhaps to their power in Internet governance debates. Sadly Africa seems as ‘digitally divided’ as ever, no matter how you look at it. The report lumps the Middle East and Africa together with ‘nearly 1m’ subscribers. And I’d be prepared to bet most of them are either white South Africans or wealthy Arabs and Israelis.

As to Europe, to my surprise, France (which has historically lagged behind in overall Internet penetration - see ITU) has the largest number of broadband subscribers in Europe - 5.27m (though Germany has 5.26m and the UK has 5m). Broadband prices in Europe have apparently dropped by 23% since the beginning of 2004. I hope this year brings continuing falls to the point where it no longer makes financial sense for Internet users to stick to dial-up…