TakeAway - ‘the Festival of do it yourself Media’ is on in W London. This sounds like a great idea and I hope events like this one take off across the country. So much of government policy about the digital divide is about enabling people to consume Internet media - little effort seems to be going into helping people produce their own. My only concern is that the programme does look a little ‘art world’ inward-looking. I wonder whether it will manage to reach out to people not already integrated in the art and techie communities…

BoingBoing recently published an extraordinary allegation - a reader claims Yahoo’s new web ad publishing network tries to insist that non-US web surfers must not see their ads. Of course this is very difficult if not impossible for a potential content publisher to guarantee - but imagine if it was? If successful, Yahoo would be responsible for ghettoising the Internet just in order to make their ad network more efficient. I’m a little disappointed the media hasn’t picked this up yet - I can imagine the furore if some French ad network did the same thing to American content…
This is not a new problem, by the way. There have been repeated attempts to produce artificial national restrictions to Internet-distributed content. The BBC’s Creative Archive License for example appears only to allow UK residents to re-use their material.

Jan Schmidt brought my attention to the recently-launched International Journal of Internet Science which will publish twice a year online, readable by anyone, with 5-7 papers in each ‘issue’. It’s not clear yet how it will differ from First Monday, JCMC and Gnovis among others, but perhaps the first sample issue will give a clue. And certainly any new entrant to publishing is to be welcomed - particularly one that is open access.

This weblog posting by Lilia Efimova about the difficulty of categorising data during analysis tickled me since I am experiencing some of the same difficulties at this point in my own research, particularly as she refers in her post to Borges’ own musings on the subject. I am half tempted to group my bloggers using the ‘ancient Chinese’ method including:

• Bloggers that are included in this classification
• Innumerable ones
• Others
• Those that resemble flies from a distance

Nicholas Carr hits the nail on the head with this recent posting about how new economic forces unleashed by the web threaten good journalism.

The web unbundles the [old media content] bundle - each story becomes a separate entity that lives or dies, economically, on its own. It’s naked in the marketplace, its commercial existence meticulously measured, click by click.

And worse:

investigative journalism is really expensive for newspapers. You’ve got to assign talented reporters to a long-term reporting effort that may or may not even end in a story. And you’ve got to pay their salaries and benefits during that whole time. And their expenses. God forbid the story requires original reporting in some distant place like Africa.

On the other hand, if you could get some cheap freelancer to hack together a story on new developments in high-definition televisions, that could really be a bonanza. Manufacturers, retailers and programmers bid a lot for clickthroughs on HDTV-related ads. And the readers attracted to a story on developments in HDTV are likely to be considering some kind of purchase - and thus in the mood to click. Ka-ching, ka-ching.

I think pandora’s box is open and the classified ads funding model for newspaper journalism will slowly but surely die. And heaven knows newspapers were not doing enough investigative journalism even before all this started happening. But this does not bode well for the future…

Update: The New Yorker points out that US newspapers are actually thriving economically… at the moment. But from what little I know I don’t think the same could be said for the national broadsheet UK dailies for example.

A fellow blog researcher has provided a handy list of her own favourite Internet and software productivity tools and has invited me (and some colleagues) to respond (one has already given her own list).To be honest though I think of myself as a near-compulsive collector of this kind of stuff, almost everything I use is already on one or the other of the two lists already. To their collection I would add:

• Netvouz, a more feature-packed way to share and store bookmarks than any of the others I have looked at including del.icio.us - my collection now numbers 6540 - the public version is here and my collection of bookmarks tagged “academic” may be worth browsing.
• Scopus from Elsevier is a better journal searching tool than Web of Knowledge with a much easier to use interface (though you need a subscription to be able to use either)
• A9 from Amazon is a handy way to access the ‘read inside the book’ features offered by Amazon with fewer clicks.
• I find Bloglines’ search seems to find links to blogs on a given subject area that other blog search engines miss but in truth I haven’t experimented extensively with the wide range of blog search tools available.
• I did the survey that formed part of my thesis work using QuestionPro which has lots of handy features and offers academics one free unlimited use survey (though eventually your access to the results will expire so don’t forget to download them to SPSS!).
• Go Digital and other “techtalk” podcasts (see the podcast section of the extensive resources along the right side of my personal blog). Primarily because they enable me to keep up with the tech news including blog-related stuff while I am doing the dishes or cycling around town rather than reading until my eyeballs bleed (though actually I do both!).
• On that resources list you will also find a number of free PC software tools like anti-virus software and a link to a blog posting I made, gathering all the useful cheap and free Mac software I use (academic and otherwise).
• Update: If you want to manage your thesis like you would a business project, you could use a web based project management tool like Basecamp or open source software like GanttProject 2
• Not strictly a research tool but something absolutely necessary to the future of my research nonetheless - Synk - a piece of Mac software which helps me back my entire hard drive to a separate drive which I keep at the LSE so if our flat burns to the ground with my laptop in it I will still have a thesis to complete!

I hope this collection of goodies helps someone out there…

One of the cliches of weblogging advocates is that webloggers are disinterested ordinary people whereas journalists are biased and prey to PR ’spin’. Well it turns out that PR agencies are increasingly targetting bloggers as well - with some success. This NYT story about Walmart feeding bloggers stories shows bloggers doing the kind of things “MSM” journalists are often accused of - copying and pasting press releases.

You can see some of the early reaction to the story already on the blog of one of the bloggers named in the story.

And one aspect of the story the NYT didn’t concentrate on - the PR agency in question, Edelman, has written a report last year (Ironically entitled Trust ‘Media’: How Real People Are Finally Being Heard) urging just this kind of active engagement with selected bloggers.