If you want to be updated by email when something new is posted here
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008I have just found this service which should do it:
Please let me know via the comments if you have any trouble with it.
I have just found this service which should do it:
Please let me know via the comments if you have any trouble with it.
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…