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…

Inna Kouper pointed me to a report by a left wing think tank claiming that there are now more readers of left than right wing weblogs. It is a pretty partisan report making some bold and not substantiated claims - for example that the right wing blogosphere is "nurtured by institutions and is part of the conservative,
right‐wing media machine" while the left wing blogosphere is "introducing new actors into the political scene".

The most interesting claim which they support with some survey evidence (though without giving enough methodological detail) is that "as of 2003, the conservative blogosphere was between two and three times as large as the progressive blogosphere, and held a commanding lead in terms of overall traffic", but "In less than two years the progressive blogosphere had grown from less than as big as the conservative blogosphere, to nearly
double its size" [in terms of traffic].

I find it hard to get too excited about the stats until I read some more detail about how the statistics were collected (particularly because the organization they say did much of the research, MyDD, is a Democrat politics blog not a market research organization). But if they were true it would be an interesting springboard for future research…

Blog censorship gains support | CNET News.com

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The Institute for Public Policy Research (leading UK think-tank) has launched a 3-week consultation (on their blog) concerning Britain digital future.

Today we launch the first of three week-long online consultations, as a way of gathering opinion, ideas and recommendations for our Digital Manifesto. We will post questions under the following themes, over the following weeks:

• 7th-13th April: Innovating
• 14th-20th April: Reassuring
• 21st-27th April: Empowering

In each instance, we invite replies to our specific questions (added to this blog) from all sorts of perspectives, and all types of expertise. With authors’ permission, we would like to be able to use or quote these ideas in our final publication, and credit them accordingly.

I reckon that media and new media scholars should make their voice heard about their preferred direction of new media development in Britain (and elsewhere)? Top of my head: open source, in-house capacity, surveillance, digital inequality, etc, etc, and unfortunately etc. again.

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Finally someone from the mainstream media (Steven Levy) asks this obvious question. He gets part of the answer - bloggers tend to link to people like themselves - but tacitly assumes that there are a large number of (for example) black women blogging about the same kinds of things that the leading (white male) bloggers are and being excluded.

This misses the wider point that sociologists like Bourdieu have explored - that many people - particularly those of lower social status or women - may simply never think of political discussion as something ‘for them’ either because they don’t see politics as relevant to them or because they feel their opinions would not be listened to.

Needless to say this has touched off a lot of discussion including a spectacularly over the top and sociologically uninformed contribution from one A list blogger.

I logged onto BBC News this morning and found that an iCan story about a community centre had been picked up and featured on the front page - albeit at the bottom right hand corner. I always said that iCan (a BBC project to encourage and facilitate online activism) would only take off if the BBC used its media muscle to highlight cases drawn from it where ‘ordinary people’ made a difference. Looks like this is finally happening (on a small scale).

It will be interesting to see what they do with iCan as it gets close to the election and if people start using it for party political issues…

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I’m blogging this from the LSE itself today - I’m at an event about blogging and journalism. My comments in italics

Meta comment: The notes below may or may not turn into a ‘proper posting’ - as John Lloyd and Robin Mansell pointed out one of the problems with blogging as an alternative space for journalism is that good journalism requires time and time is money. I could spend several hours turning the comments that follow into a report on the event complete with my own thoroughly-thought-through comments but when I was a journalist that would cost you at least £200 to get. There are very few opportunities to make a reasonable income from blogging so it will always be dominated by people who have time to do it either because they have an income elsewhere and adequate spare time or because they have an axe to grind about some particular issue.

Time taken to improve this blog posting would come at the expense of my thesis and at the moment I can’t really afford it. Anyway, nobody said anything that sufficiently outraged me to make a counter-blast worth my while.

If I had spoken out at the meeting it would have been to suggest that what is needed now is some way to broaden the kinds of people who blog today. There are millions of people who might want some way to express themselves but who feel nobody would want to listen to them. Perhaps some kind of school blogging programme should be considered alongside other IT literacy items on the syllabus?

My notes on the event follow:
(more…)