I came across this review of Superfreakonomics and was pleased for a few moments. I learned that the authors had ill-advisedly chosen to use a chapter of their book to call into question the importance of global warming and that an “extensive uproar” ensued online, causing the book’s “public demise” and providing “a huge victory for democracy and common sense”. The article was full of links to the book’s detractors online but I have to say I had not heard of the criticism of the book before now so I checked out Amazon to see how it had fared.

Well if being the sixth most popular book on Amazon makes it a failure I hope my books do as poorly! Perhaps however this reception was in spite of a visible storm of protest and controversy around the book? Well I did find mentions of there being a controversy but when I Googled for “superfreakonomics global warming” I found a sympathetic review by Kevin Kelly in the Mercury News, the authors’ own “global warming fact quiz” and only then a short Atlantic Monthly piece which takes a moderately hostile line.

Alas, what Sahil Kapur the author of the piece I found in CampusProgress seems to fail to appreciate is that just because criticism of Superfreakonomics is filling up his RSS reader it doesn’t mean that those views are being encountered directly or indirectly by the public. The power of the mainstream media and of old-fashioned tools to influence public opinion like book promotion tours cannot be easily undermined by blogging alone.

One of the intriguing things about the BBC’s recently broadcast docudrama Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution is that in order to balance the liberal perspective they invited Slavoj Zizek on as an apologist for Robespierre. It’s not often you find calls for revolution on mainstream TV programming (well OK it is on BBC2 not BBC1 but in a high profile time slot). I wasn’t convinced in the end by Slavoj’s “no omelette without eggs” argument but I was struck that the BBC seemed incapable of leaving the audience in any doubt that the revolutionary terror was a Bad Thing. Why provide the appearance of balance then have a voiceover ending which leaves the viewer with the ‘author’s message’ that the French revolutionary terror was the precursor to bloodthirsty dictators like Pol Pot and Stalin? I suppose the BBC’s explanatory blurb said it all:

during the 365 days that Robespierre sat on the Committee of Public Safety, the French Republic descended into a bloodbath … [this documentary] looks at how Robespierre’s revolutionary idealism so quickly became an excuse for tyranny.

Still the programme is well worth watching if only for the chilling reconstructions of the committee’s own deliberations, based on contemporary sources.

Tom Steinberg, leader of the group of policy wonks and e-government/e-democracy hackers-for-good best known for their sterling work under the MySociety label has come together with a group of individuals from government, Cisco, Ofcom, Google and others (working in their personal capacities) to form a Power of Information Taskforce which has just released a draft of its Power of Information Taskforce Report. The remit of the taskforce is here, but briefly it is intended to help the government help the public using web 2.0 and better use of citizen- and state-generated information.

Consistent with the overall approach of the taskforce, the report will be available in a comment-able form for two weeks, after which it will be handed officially to the Cabinet Office.

From what I’ve seen from a brief view of the report it makes a useful contribution to encouraging the UK government to open up its data and practices to public deliberation and scrutiny. It does however appear to be missing a strategy to formally integrate participation in relevant social media sites as part of the normal activity of (selected) civil servants. On the one hand, many might see such outreach activity as an optional extra they can easily forego given their already busy workloads dealing with phone calls, emails and the post. On the other hand, it may be necessary to provide rules outlining how to judge how much engagement with social media is “sufficient” and which social media is strategic, since it would be possible for an enthusiastic civil servant to spend all of his or her time intervening in this way at the expense of other work.

I am a little surprised I haven’t seen more published by researchers re-analysing datasets about US Internet use provided by Pew. The reports issued by Pew are great but they don’t always include analyses that I would have made. Here are a few such observations about bloggers which I have made and which will (probably) be in my upcoming thesis:

• 46.4% of bloggers posted every few weeks or less often. 42.1% believed they blogged an hour (or less) a week. (late 2005 survey of bloggers)
• 59% of those who created (self-defined) political blogs in the US were college educated (N=16), no political bloggers had less than a high school education. 63% of blogs that got media attention were by the college educated (N=12), again none were by those with less than a high school education. (Late 2006 survey). Note that 27.7% of the US population had less than a high school education in the 2005 US census.

It’s great that Pew is one of the few organizations that makes its data available in this way, and if anyone else has done interesting re-analyses of Pew survey data please let me know.

The New York Times summarises its findings and legislator reactions though the NYT’s summary of its summary rather overstates matters - the report does not say, “the sexual solicitation of children online is not a significant problem” but it does conclude it is a problem for a small minority of children who are likely already to be exhibiting other risky behaviours.

The full text of the report (and the executive summary etc) is here.

Hal Roberts at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society has made a startling discovery:

Three of the circumvention tools — DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix — used most widely to get around China’s Great Firewall are tracking and selling the individual web browsing histories of their users.

(further details here)

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?

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.