Variation in English Words and Phrases (VIEW) is a search engine for the British National Corpus of words. Among its many functions it lets you find out the kinds of words that are frequently associated with other words. The adjective most commonly found with "nerd" is "computer", for example. Unfortunately, it is a corpus of late 20th century words and does not contain the words that would be most interesting to me - "blog" or "blogger". It also turns out if you go to Google.com and type "define:yourword" it will offer you "related phrases" (the related phrase for "blogger" was "Baghdad Blogger".

25 American bloggers have been selected to go on a Dutch junket. They are required by the PRs to disclose the gift but will be interviewed by tourism officials who can use their comments for promotional material both on and offline. Such junkets are commonplace in trade publications at least here in the UK (who otherwise would not be able to pay to test cars, computers etc) but normally journalists here excuse themselves because they take presents equally from all sides… A furious debate has already begun in the blogosphere…

I can’t describe it better than Robin Hamman does:

The panel, chaired by Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the NUJ, includes:

Carol Hall, Rights Manager, BBC News
John Thompson, MD, Mousetrap Media
Kyle McRae, Scoopt.com
Fiona Brownsell, CEO, Youview
Eddie Gibb, Head of External Relations, DEMOS
Bill Hagerty, Editor, British Journalism Review
Vicky Taylor, Editor, Interactivity, BBC
Jemima Kiss, News Editor, journalism.co.uk
Simon Waldman, Guardian Unlimited

You can read and participate here

The US Department of Justice asked Google recently for a selection of the searches people made over a two month period, with the identities of the searchers removed. Google, to its credit, has resisted this while the other major US search engines have not. John Battelle and Danny Sullivan have further analysis of this issue.

There are four issues that arise from this which have not been prominently dealt with in discussions I’ve read:

1) If Google hadn’t resisted this request, would we have heard about the fact that AOL, Yahoo and MSN immediately complied?
2) How many people realise that Google (and others) frequently do keep track not just of what people search for but who searches for what?
3) Mightn’t there be some searches that tend to reveal the identity of the searcher even if the searcher’s IP address is concealed? Particularly if you examine them in time order? Update: Search Engine Watch just produced a lengthy analysis of this issue which suggests that this is probably not a big issue.
4) The DOJ doesn’t seem to have asked only for searches by Americans. Does it have any business looking at searches from international users who might (for whatever reason) have chosen to use yahoo.com instead of (for example) yahoo.co.uk?

Update: Tim Wu of Columbia Law School writes an excellent analysis of the whole issue on Slate, arguing that it’s simply excessive for search engines to collect these reams of personal data on what people are searching for.

An interesting and provocative (6000 word) piece on the openDemocracy site today - Democratisation, NGOs and "colour revolutions" by Sreeram Chaulia suggests that the recent revolutions in the Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan are not authentic democratic uprisings supported by NGOs but were largely brought into being by organizations substantially backed and led by the US. The author is clearly of the view that such great power meddling is inherently wicked.

Personally I prefer to look at the results - does it matter if the US "does good by stealth" in its own interests as long as it is in fact doing good? Is any governmental support for changing regimes bad, no matter how nasty the regime? The author states, "the orange and tulip revolutions are cases of ‘regime change’, not ‘regime-type change’, for they did not democratise Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan". I don’t know enough about what is going on on the ground to be able to judge but while Ukraine seems to be in a mess at least the electorate appears now to be an important element in the internal struggles in the Ukraine.

If there are readers out there who are political scientists or Eastern Europeans (or both) I would be curious to know what you think.

Update: Another cautionary voice - that of Prof. Mark Beissinger - is raised in Dissent Magazine.

One of my supervisors, Dr. Nick Couldry is joining myself, Prof. Sonia Livingstone, and media researchers from across the world in a research network run by the University of Oslo’s Intermedia Lab - Mediated Stories: Mediation perspectives on digital storytelling among youth. My particular contribution (alongside Couldry) will be on Weblogs as Self-representation. I am very much looking forward to my involvement in the project and if you’re interested in young people, new media and education I encourage you to keep an eye on the site in the years to come as it develops.

I bring your attention to a piece on Slate about browsing the net when you should be listening to your prof.

There are about 100 students in the Columbia University lecture I’m currently attending, and about 10 have laptops. (The lecture consists mostly of grad students in their late 20s, so the ratio is a bit low.) I can see four screens from here; only one person is actually taking notes. Another is looking at the registrar’s Web site. The other two keep checking their e-mail.

The LSE has wireless connections to many but by no means all classrooms and to my surprise even now laptops are fairly rare in the lecture halls here though certainly a higher ratio than one in ten - one professor I remember three years ago told off a student for typing on one!

ColdPlay’s new CD (reports boingboing and Digg) includes truly draconian digital rights management in an attempt to prevent piracy. I am more relaxed than some about DRM - if it is well-regulated but if record companies behave in this way they will certainly be shooting themselves in the foot (as some hope they will).

According to this report the disc won’t play on a wide variety of in-computer CD players and other devices that might enable you to turn the music into MP3s but the warning that this is the case is apparently only given inside the CD case (once you have bought it) and the company claims it will not accept returns except in the event of manufacturing-related problems.

This is unacceptable - what if (like me) you don’t listen to your CDs as CDs any more - you just turn them to MP3s so you can listen to them through your MP3 player? What if the only CD player you have is one of the long list of excluded players? This together with the Sony ‘root kit’ fiasco suggests that many entertainment companies are not being responsible in their self-regulation of DRM. If you are going to use DRM that is this restrictive you should be made to prominently label your discs so potential purchasers can know what they are getting.