We think of the United States as so technologically advanced that everyone must at least have an Internet connection even if they don't have super fast broadband. In fact, according to this latest research, a quarter of adult American are not on the Net.
If American policymakers want to tackle the issue of the digital divide, they will need initiatives on digital inclusion like those now being developed in Britain which I've described in this article.
This week, two of my favourite objects came together: the "Guardian" newspaper and the iPhone. The combination is the new "Guardian" apps for the iPhone priced at £2.39. There are some really neat features including the ability to customise the presentation of news stories so that one has in effect a personal virtual 24/7 newspaper wherever one has a mobile signal (and you can download content to read when you don't have a signal).
Read more about the app here.
This year's "Guardian" list.
My attention has been drawn to Hunch. I particularly liked the page entitled What things should I do before I die?.
I used to do a lot of media interviews for the Internet Watch Foundation and Postwatch, but these days I do very little indeed. However, this morning, I did a live radio interview for about 15 minutes on City Talk 105.9.
I was interviewed by Roy Basnett on regulation of the Internet. I drew on essays on my web site discussing whether we should regulate the Net and how we could regulate the Net.
Are you a social networker on the Net? I'm not. My web site, my blogs and my "Thought For The Week" - plus, of course, e-mail - do it for me.
It seems that most social networks have more women users than male users. Check out the figures here.
The answer might surprise you.
It all started when about 20 people gathered in the laboratory of Len Kleinrock at the University of California, Los Angeles, to watch as two bulky computers passed meaningless test data through a 15-foot gray cable.
That was 2 September 1969 - exactly 40 years ago today.
Further information here.
I've never used an Internet cafe in the UK. I've always had a PC at home or at work. And, as for the coffee, it's awful and most such so-called cafes don't actually serve coffee these days.
Of course, 30% of UK homes still don't have Net access. Surprisingly, however, it seems that even people with a PC at home chose to use Net cafes.
BBC online offers some answers.
Has anyone noticed? Wikipedia now has over 3 million articles in English.
In October 2007, I wrote a column entitled "Is Wikipedia the best site on the web?". At the time, there were almost 2 million articles in English.
It is one of the few web sites that I use every day and it's remarkable to note that it is created and edited entirely by volunteers all around the world. It's the web at its very best.
In today's "Guardian", there's an article about how some bloggers have become so popular that they have been able to make money from their writing.
I've been blogging now for more than six years and thoroughly enjoy the opportunity to express myself on different issues. However, I've never seen or wanted a commercial dimension to my blogging and don't even use Google Adsense.
Reading the "Guardian" article though, made me think when I saw that one blogger who signed a book deal won the contract on the basis that her blog at one point was receiving 4,000 visits a day. Now my web site and two blogs regularly receive 5,000 visits a day and, in the busiest months of the year, hit 6,000.
My blogging is too personal and eclectic to be publishable but, if someone was interested in publishing the life skills section of my web site or my collection of short stories, I'd be happy to talk.
If this is true, it's a classic. Even if it's a spoof, it's making an excellent point.
Since the last day of Postwatch when I did three media interviews (see my blog posting here), I've not done any media interviews (Consumer Focus staff take them for the organisation). However, I did a short live interview this morning for BBC Radio Somerset.
The issue was the regulation of the Internet, a topic on which I have pronounced here. A group on Facebook has been encouraging people to fish in an area of Bridgewater where it is not allowed. Also a local party advertised on Facebook was shut down purely on the basis of comments posted by kids responding which stated that they ‘couldn’t wait to get drunk’.
Regulation of the Internet is not really within the remit of either Consumer Focus or the Communications Consumer Panel - the two bodies on which I currently sit - so I spoke to the BBC in a personal capacity and amusingly was billed as "an Internet expert".
The @artinloo blog asks people to 'express on a piece of toilet paper what you are thinking about at that moment' and then send the picture in to the site. Check it out here.
As I explained in this posting, I first tried Twitter two years ago. I soon decided that it was not for me.
Frankly, I've been surprised that two years later so many people - and much of the media - seem to have suddenly discovered Twitter and decided that it's a powerful communications tool. For some it has worked well (Stephen Fry and Demi Moore, for instance) but, for most, I suspect it's just a passing fad.
So who is doing all this Twittering. According to this piece, an examination of 300,000 Twitter users that 10% of Twitter users generated more than 90% of the content, while more than half of all Twitter users post messages on the site less than once every 74 days.
Do you use Twitter?
I don't know the exact answer.
But I've been running my personal blog NightHawk for six years and my professional blog CommsWatch for five and half years. I have precise figures for the past three years when I moved to my current hosting location and I can make a fairly good estimate for the entire period of my blogging experience.
I reckon that I've now done around 4,000 postings.
The organisation Reporters Without Borders has named 12 “Internet Enemies”: Saudi Arabia, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
According to the organisation: "All of these countries mark themselves out not just for their capacity to censor news and information online but also for their almost systematic repression of Internet users."
You can read the report here.
"Social Networking has been the global consumer phenomenon of 2008. Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit a social network or blogging site and the sector now accounts for almost 10% of all internet time. ‘Member Communities’ has overtaken personal Email to become the world’s fourth most popular online sector after search, portals and PC software applications."Who say's so? Nielson in this report.
In the last few weeks, the Internet Watch Foundation - which I chaired for the six years 2000-2005 - has been in the centre of a storm over its decision to put on a blacklist a page on Wikipedia which contained an image which it judged to be potentially illegal. The most thoughtful piece that I have read on the subject is here.
I support the blacklist approach and the blocking by Internet Service Providers of access to child abuse images on that list - a process introduced during my time at IWF. Knowing what I do of the IWF's procedures, I can understand why it took the decision it did to place that particular image on the blacklist. However, in all the circumstances, I think that, given the long-standing accessibility of the image, its lowest level on the scale of potential illegality and the reputable nature of the web site in question, the IWF Board was right to remove the page from the list.
These are though very difficult judgment calls and it doesn't help when the word 'censorship' is casually thrown around. The more public and policymakers understand the processes of the IWF and the more transparency that we can exhibit around the conduct of the IWF and ISPs in this area the better. But this will never be an easy or uncontroversial matter.
I recently had occasion to visit the London Head Office of the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) as a result of an invitation from a colleague of mine on the new Communications Consumer Panel (formerly known as the Ofcom Consumer Panel). Leen Petre works for the RNIB as Principal Manager: Media and Culture.
I was shown the use of two pieces of software in particular that enable a partially sighted or a blind person to make full use of a computer and the Web.
The first piece of software is called ZoomText and was demonstrated to me by Tim. This software enables large print users to magnify the contents of their computer screen and listen to it read out in synthetic speech at the same time. It costs £535.
The second piece of software is called JAWS and was demonstrated to me by Paul. This software works with a PC to provide access to software applications and the Internet by using a speech synthesiser and a sound card. The user can alter the tone and speed of the voice or choose the language of the speech. It costs £704.
I was impressed by how useful these software packages are but surprised at how much they cost - effectively doubling the cost of a PC to a partially sighted or blind person.
The RNIB sells a range of other ICT equipment specially designed for blind or partially sighted persons such as talking watches and mobiles with large keys. You can check out their shop here.
More generally, I have a short essay on my web site entitled "Access For All: Computing And Those With Special Needs".
One way of looking at the evolution of the Internet is to see it in three stages: first, a fixed Net essentially connecting desktop PCs; second, a mobile Net connecting hand-held mobiles; third, what we call the Internet of things.
I've explained this next stage in my latest monthly column on Internet issues here.
The traffic figures for my web site (which embraces my two blogs NightHawk & CommsWatch) follows a couple of cyclical patterns.
On a weekly basis, traffic usually peaks on a Tuesday (when people have got on top of the new week's e-mails?), slowly falls down to Saturday, and starts rising again on the Sunday (when I send out my "Thought For The Week"). On an annual basis, traffic grows each month until June, falls back in the summer months when people go on holiday, and starts to climb again in September.
So this week I am back where I was in April when I blogged that traffic was up to 6,000 visits a day. Thank you so much for your interest and support. Please spread the word.
"Thinking about launching your own blog? Here's some friendly advice: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug. Writing a weblog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge."This is how an article in the current issue of "Wired" magazine opens. It's led to quite a discussion.
The suggestion in the article is that blogs are being replaced by the likes of Twitter. I did try Twitter when it first became popular but it wasn't for me. I need more words to express my thoughts and ideas and I want a larger audience that I would have with Twitter.
The fact that you - and so many others - visit NightHawk so often is proof enough for me that I'm doing something worthwhile as well as enjoyable.
Apparently new research suggests that, for middle-aged and older people at least, using the internet helps boost brain power. A University of California Los Angeles team found searching the web stimulated centres in the brain that controlled decision-making and complex reasoning. More information here.
So looking through my web site would actually be good for you!
The ToUCstone blog is a new on-line forum for policy people at the Trades Union Congress (TUC). The organisation has some really excellent people covering different policy areas, but you only tend to hear from them whenever they've finished a huge new report, which isn't so often, so they've created a blog where they can put their comments on current affairs.
Check it out here.
My web site and this blog seek to promote an inclusive and tolerant world view - but not everyone shares my vision.
This recent "Economist" article gives many examples of hatred on the Net and what it calls cyber-nationalism and I have a section on my site which examines "Extremism On The Net".
All the more reason for me to keep up my work - and for you to keep visiting.
According to IDC's Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast, a quarter of the global population - that's 1.4 billion people - will regularly use the internet during 2008. So it looks like that Internet thingy is here to say.
Looking at growth prospects, it is suggested that the number of Net users is set to jump to 1.9 billion over the next four years, bringing access to roughly 30% of the world's population.
Net-enabled mobile devices will help drive the global online trend, surpassing the desktop PC as the primary means of accessing the internet by 2012 (I'm already accessing the Net on my iPhone as well as PC).
More information here.
The British trade union Unison is running a campaign on behalf of 600,000 local government workers who are taking action because employers are asking them to take a pay cut. The union's web site provides six ways to use the Net to contribute to the campaign. Check out the campaign here.
I'm delighted to see this sort of development. Eight years ago, I started writing and speaking about how trade unions could make better use of the Internet - see here and here.
I've just returned from an overnight visit to Nottingham to participate in a forum organised by the telecommunications trade union Connect. Together with my good friend and Internet guru Eric Lee, I spoke at workshops yesterday afternoon and this morning on e-campaigning.
I addressed e-campaigning generally and used three web sites as case studies:
Eric spoke specifically about e-campaigning by trade unions and the web site LabourStart.
You'll find an excellent and very current example of a trade union e-campaign here.
"I blog because I find it a form of community and am obsessed with daily writing. It helps me separate what is important, versus the same old stuff I do every day. I actually learn more about the world through the research I do in order to post a blog entry. Also, down deep, part of me doesn't believe I actually have a life. I prove to myself with a blog that I do indeed have a life - a rich and full one."This quote - from a 70-year old female blogger in the USA - captures some of the reason why i blog. It comes from an article about older women who blog written by Natalie d'Arbeloff who blogs here.
I regularly receive e-mails circulating a warning - usually about some health or safety situation - and urging me to pass on the message to all my friends. From experience, I know that virtually all of these e-mails are hoaxes, although the sender does not realise this and is acting with the best of intentions.
How do I know that they are hoaxes? The content - often improbable - and the style - usually overly dramatic - frequently make this obvious to someone with a questioning mind.
But I often check them out on Snopers.com or Google by simply cutting and pasting into the search box the title of the e-mail or a key bit of text. I do this because I'm fascinating by how the e-mail originated and what basis, if any, the advice or warning has. It tells us a lot about human nature and the role of the Net.
I was reminded of these hoax e-mails today by this article which makes the interesting point that many of these e-mails are targeted at women. Why is this? Because women are vulnerable, they are caring, and (sadly) they are often gullible.
"Those gazing towards the sunlit digital uplands must not forget those among our citizens - including three-quarters of socially excluded people and a half of people on low incomes - who have no access to the internet or do not use it. They must not be left behind as the government's use of the internet gathers pace."This is an extract from a media release to mark the publication of a not altogether complimentary report on government websites and their use from the Public Accounts Committee.
This is the title of a new book by Charles Leadbeater.
There's a clip on YouTube which illustrates the main themes of the book:
The new DCMS/BERR Convergence Think Tank holds its first seminar today. The subject is : Why does convergence matter? This seminar will seek to set the scene for the CTT programme and establish the key challenges and goals.
In its submission, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) expresses concerns about user generated content (UGC):
"While the NUJ welcomes the access to online media afforded by Web 2.0, we do have concerns about the effect on standards of unlimited and unedited contributions. Publishers welcome the availability of “user-generated content” – or “citizen journalism” as it is known in the context of news – principally because it comes free of charge. Some commentators like to dress it up as a great advance in democracy and pronounce that professionally produced news will become a thing of the past.I write a monthly column on Internet matters and devoted one article to the issue of user generated content.
However, Peter Horrocks, head of the multimedia news department within BBC News, recently talked about the fact that only one per cent of the audience engage with the BBC in any way, whether through traditional audience feedback or via text, phone or email and that people should remember that the BBC is for everyone, not just the participative 1%."
Weeks go by and my Internet connection works like a dream. Then one day - like this morning - it takes ages to obtain a connection. And I never know why.
Spare a thought then for the tens of million in the Middle East and Asia who are having trouble now connecting to the Net because of a faulty undersea cable somewhere on the bottom of the Mediterranean. More information here.
The Storm botnet, or Storm worm botnet, is a massive network of computers linked by the Storm worm Trojan horse in a botnet, a group of "zombie" computers controlled remotely. It is estimated to run on anything between 1M and 50M computers and those who've put it together clearly have nefarious purposes in mind.
You can read more about it here.
In today's "Observer" newspaper, John Naughton writes of 2008:
"we may finally discover what the Storm 'botnet' - the colossal network of compromised Windows machines someone has been covertly building over the past year - is for. My hunch is that the net is headed for its own version of 9/11. So enjoy it while it lasts. Happy New Year."
In this article, it is suggested that political blogging is strongest on the Left in the United States but more vigorous on the Right in Britain.
"Paul is in his late 30s and has recently come out of a painful divorce. The idea of dating again was, in many respects, an uncomfortable one. He recognised that he had a fair bit of emotional baggage and that meeting someone who understood him and shared his interests was not going to be easy.He joined an Internet agency and eventually struck up an on-line friendship with a woman living at the other end of the country whom he who would never have met in the physical world. They got to know each other well through the Internet and phone calls before actually meeting and they now live together at what was her place."
This is a quote from one of my monthly Internet columns which I wrote four years ago. This week, I had lunch with Paul (not his real name) and his relationship is still going strong.
I suspect that more than ever people are making new friends and even meeting new partners by initially making contact on-line. Has this happened to you?
The very earliest days of blogging were a decade ago. I've been blogging for almost five years now and usually blog every day.
A full-page feature in today's "Guardian" news paper claims that, of Britain's 26 million Internet users, 15% run a blog and that almost one in five of them blog at least once a day. So there are some 4 million British bloggers out there keeping me company in the blogosphere.
I've just contributed my 40th column on Internet issues for the communications trade union Connect. This one looks at the outstanding growth and success of Wikipedia. You can read it here.
Fed up of all those silly e-mails with advice or exhortations that finish up demanding that you forward the message to everyone you know? Well, you'll enjoy this.
One of the oldest YouTubers in the UK is Peter aged 79. So far, he has posted 80 videos which you can check out here. This is one example called "Telling it all part 1":
As I explained in an earlier posting, I'm trying out the micro-blogging site called Twitter with some Dutch friends.
To get some idea of the scale of the enterprise, have a look at Twitter Faces.
The father of missing four-year old Madelaene McCann is blogging here. This is a terribly heart-rending case and all the publicity - including this web site - are clearly totally well-intentioned. I'm just not sure about the efficacy of it all.
My friend in Hanoi tells me in a recent e-mail of a major reduction in access to the Internet for the citizens of Vietnam:
"My worst news about the Internet is that Vietnam has just lose half of its Internet connections because of some uneducated fishermen in Ca Mau (the south-east point of Vietnam). They dived down the sea water and cut off about 98km of optical Internet cable in order to sell it for money. It'll take us 4 million USD and nearly 4 months from now to repair the line. From this morning, it's very difficult for us to load international web pages. The Internet turns very slow and idle. That's really a disaster to me. Hope that things will be OK soon and those fishermen should be punished for their actions. "
"The trouble is I don't understand the language. I don't really understand what a website is."Judge Peter Openshaw, presiding over a trail of three men accused of Internet terror offences - more information here.
Heard of Twitter? Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates via SMS, instant messaging, the Twitter website or 3rd party applications.
I recently wrote an article about these kinds of technique for being connected and I've just been persuaded by my Dutch friend and IT guru Oskar van Rijswijk - who got me started as a blogger - to try Twitter with him.
Apparently Alan Johnson - my preferred candidate for the election for Labour Party Deputy Leader - is the first politician in the UK to become a twitterer - more information here. Good to see a former postman being so Net-savvy.
Want to know more about Twitter? There's an FAQ section.
Although I sit on two statutory consumer bodies - the Ofcom Consumer Panel and the Postwatch Council - I'm not a very active consumerist myself. I guess I value my time more than my money. But even I had come to the conclusion that it was ridiculous that I was still spending £23.44 a month for a broadband connection of 1.1 Mbps.
So I made a phonecall, said that I was thinking of switching to another Internet service provider, and asked what they could offer me to stay with them. My subscription is now down to £10 a month and my connection speed is up to 3.7 Mbps. It was sure worth the call.
This week has seen up to 5,000 visitors a day to my combined web site and two weblogs. This has happened before but then it coincided with a surge of spam to the comment sections of the blogs.
This week is the first 'normal' week that traffic has hit 5,000 visits a day. This equates to around 150,000 a month or approaching 2 million a year.
This is all thanks to you. So thanks so much for your interest and support. Please keep visiting and encourage friends to do the same.
In my last posting, I talked about my four years of blogging. Of course, blogging is a worldwide phenomenon and there are now over 70 million blogs although many do not seem to last long.
The Muslim world is desperately in need of the freedom of speech and expression that blogging tends to encourage. But it is not easy being a blogger in the world of Islam as this online article from Der Spiegel makes clear.
I had been reading about weblogs or blogs for months before I actually met someone who was running one. At a London seminar on trade union use of the Internet, held in December 2002, I came across an enthusiastic Dutchman called Oskar van Rijswijk who had been operating a blog since October and was really keen on the idea. Subsequently we e-mailed each other regularly and Oskar really fired my interest in blogs. Indeed I was moved to write an article on blogging for the trade union Connect.
Oskar continued to encourage me to start my own blog and offered to design one for me so, on 18 April 2003, I launched a blog called NightHawk - the media's name for my father-in-law who was a Czech night fighter pilot in World War Two. In January 2004, I was appointed a member of the Ofcom Consumer Panel, so I decided to spin off my professional interests into a second weblog - called CommsWatch - devoted to communications issues with a particular emphasis on regulation.
So today marks my fourth anniversary as a blogger. In that time, I reckon that I have posted around 3,300 items on the two blogs. In many ways this personal blog is complementary to my web site - the former is a chronological account of my activities and thoughts, while the latter is a thematic collection of my writings and ideas. Also the two are closely integrated - the web site lists the most recent blog entries and the blog frequently refers to material on the site.
Many thanks for visiting.
The Internet Watch Foundation - which I chaired for six years - continues to do great work and today publishes its latest annual report with some sobering messages. New figures show the severity of online child abuse content is increasing, with a four-fold rise in images depicting the most severe abuse, such as penetrative and sadistic sexual activity.
This trend reflects an apparent growing demand for purchasing more severe images with nearly 60 per cent of commercial child abuse websites selling child rape images. 29 per cent of all potentially illegal child abuse URLs known to the IWF contain level four and five images.
28 per cent of commercial child abuse domains were hosted in Russia which is perhaps not too surprising given the law enforcement problems of that country. Very disturbing, however, is the continued dominance of the USA in the hosting of this terrible material. 62 per cent of commercial child abuse domains are hosted in US. It is time that Americans acted to change this.
A couple of days ago, I did a posting about how I might have become a Labour Member of Parliament but instead Austin Mitchell was chosen as the candidate for Grimsby. In researching that story, I came across Austin's blog and I was stunned at the blinking text. Nobody - I mean nobody - does this any more. To show how easy it is though, here is . Terrible, isn't it?
No - neither would I. But Justin Kan of San Francisco does.
It's a webcam of a round of cheddar cheese sitting on a shelf at a Somerset farm beside a clock ticking off the days, hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds as the cheese matures. So far, it's had almost 700,000 visits.
You can check it out here. Hope that the excitement is not too much for you ...
As will be evident from NightHawk, I'm a big fan of blogging - but the blogosphere is a problematic space.
Firstly, it is not unknown for bloggers to be dismissed by their employers because they blog. But the good news is that one such blogger has just won a court case in which her employer was found to have acted illegally in dismissing her. Catherine Sanderson was dismissed from her job as a secretary with the Paris branch of British accountancy firm Dixon Wilson last summer after bosses discovered her popular blog. You can read more about the case here.
Secondly, blogs - and other on-line fora - can attract highly abuse comments. The bad news is that Kathy Sierra cancelled her scheduled appearance at San Diego's ETech conference because of violently abuse material postedon-line about her. You can read her account on her own blog.
I agree with her totally when she writes:
"... do not tolerate the kind of abuse that includes threats or even suggestions of violence (especially sexual violence). Do not put these people on a pedestal. Do not let them get away with calling this "social commentary", "protected speech", or simply "criticism". I would never be for censoring speech--these people can say all the misogynistic, vile, tasteless things they like--but we must preserve that line where words and images become threats of violence. Freedom of speech--however distasteful and rude the speech may be, is crucial. But when those words contain threats of harm or death, they can destroy a life."
I only learned abou the Kathy Sierra case when I was contacted about it by a journalist on "Scotland on Sunday" (Scotland's biggest national Sunday broadsheet). I wondered how the journalist came across me, but it seems that she sees the issue as one of Internet ethics - two words not often associated with one another - and an interesting thing happens if you type the words "Internet ethics" into Google (try it).
There have, of course, always been urban myths - stories that seemed plausible but, upon examination or even a little thought, prove to have little or no foundation in fact. However, the advent of the Internet has given a powerful medium for the rapid and easy and cost-free transmission of such nonsense. Often such urban myths betray a prejudice and are most likely to be believed by those sharing that prejudice.
I mention this because of a message I received today purporting to list various misdemeanours and even crimes of an organisation which at first is not identified. The message begins: "Can you imagine working for a company that has a little more than 600 employees and has the following statistics?" It concludes: "Which organisation is this? It's the 635 members of the House of Commons, the same group that cranks out hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep the rest of us in line."
The give-away here is the reference to the 635 MPs. In fact, the Commons has not had 635 members since 1983. The number varies with the redrawing of boundaries and the impact of devolution and is currently 645. If the most public fact about the Commons is not understood by the author, how can one give any credence to all the other so-called statistics, especially when the members concerned are not named and no sources or dates are given
As explained here, this particular myth started at least a decade ago when it was originally focused on members of the United States Congress. Later versions changed the reference from the US Congress to members of the parliaments of Canada, Britain and India. The prejudice is obvious: all politicians are corrupt and therefore we should have no respect for them or the legislative process - a dangerously corrosive stance for those of us who believe in democracy.
It is the willingness of so many to believe urban myths and conspiracy theories and paranormal phenomena that led me to create a web page on "How To Think Critically".
An American blogger has come up with a meme called "Five blogs that make me think". I only know this because one of the bloggers who's picked up on the meme - an American teacher who has been a cyber-buddy for some time - has chosen NighHawk as one of her five. Thanks, Dana.
It seems that Ii am now entitled to display this Thinking Blogger Award:
To continue the meme, I need to nominate my five thinking blogs - so check out these:
From the very earliest days of the web, browsers had something called a 'home page'. This was the default web page that would come up when you'd launch your browser and connect to the Net.
Most people never change their home pages; they use whatever they were given. This could be the home page of their employer, or their Internet Service Provider, or even the home page of the browser itself.
Yet the idea of a home page remains a potent one. You can easily create a customised home page with various small boxes. One might be today's weather for your locality. Another might includes top news stories from the BBC or CNN. You could even have a box with your most frequently called phone numbers, a short to-do list, a large clock, and a calculator.
To create such a customised home page, one which includes the things Iyou want to see when you look at your computer in the morning, you can use a tool like Netvibes.
Netvibes had five million users by last summer and is still growing. It was hailed last week by "The Economist "as being one of the very few examples of a major new web innovation coming from France.
And it's not alone -- competitors for individually-crafted personal home pages include Google's homepage, Microsoft's Windows Live, PageFlakes, Webwag and the very attractive Yourminis.
Customised home pages are not new. Back in the 1990s, search engines like Yahoo pioneered personalised home pages. But new technologies known collectively as Web 2.0 have made it easier than ever before to create a home page that really does give you - in an instant - the information you need to start your day on the web.
Many thanks to Eric Lee for the information in this posting.
From time to time, I'm approached by individuals and organisations who wish to use material from my web site, usually for educational purposes - and, of course, I always agree. The latest request comes from a UK organisation called Taecanet Springboard.
This service was founded in October 2003, to provide teachers with a easy to use web environment, where they can build and share with other teachers, “Learning journeys” directed at enabling pupils to achieve high levels of attainment in meeting core curriculum objectives. By October 2006, the Taecanet service had 330 schools subscribing, which is forecast to rise to 900 over the next 12 months.
And, of all the sections on my web site, which one do you think Taecanet Springboard wishes to use?
Theer's a neat little video on YouTube here.
Early this morning, I battled through the London snow to go into the city centre for a seminar at the international law firm Denton Wilde Sapte. The speaker was Professor Paul Maharg of the Glasgow Graduate School of Law. The title of his presentation was "Blogging, podcasting and beyond: from real life to second life".
There was a lot of good stuff here in an excellent talk and one of the many things I learned was the top 20 web sites on which Americans spend their time.
The full presentation can be accessed here, but be aware that it's 12MB.
... that the alleged plot to kidnap, torture and behead a British Muslim soldier and then to post film footage of the atrocity on the Internet was both true and carried out. Would British Internet service providers knowingly have provided access to such material? I hope not.
But, if they blocked access, how would they justify denying access to this material but not to similarly vile images? Sooner or later we have to have this debate and come up with workable and acceptable - if imperfect - solutions. It would be better to do this now in a calm amd measured manner rather than be stampeded into emergency measures because of a particular public outrage.
A year ago, I spoke at a meeting of Ofcom staff and put forward my proposals for discussion and debate.
See those keys on the top row of the keyboard in front of you? F1 through to F12. Do you have any idea what they do? I confess that I never use them.
But Bill Gates was on "The Daliy Show With Jon Stewart" this wek to talk about the launch of Microsoft's new Vista software and Stewart made a joke with Gates by asking him about the F12 key - and this set me thinking ...
So, if you want to know what those F keys do, here's the answer.
Of the 600 million computers currently connected to the Internet, between 100 and 150 million are already part of botnets. Botnets are made up of large numbers of computers that malicious hackers have brought under their control after infecting them with so-called Trojan virus programs.
This alarming picture was described by no less than Vint Cerf, often called the 'Father of the Internet', speaking today at the World Economic Forum in Davos. More information here.
When I first went on-line in 1995, the Internet was dominated by English speakers but, over the years, this has changed dramatically. Although all the material on my web site and blogs are in English, I've always endeavoured to address subjects covering a wide range of countries and cultures. Indeed the latest additions to the circulation list for my "Thought For The Week" e-mail are three Russians and three Ukranians.
Today there are over a billion Net users worldwide. The break-down by language is as follows:
The growth of Chinese users is especially rapid and, according to this article, Chinese users (currently 137M) could overtake US users (now 210M) in the next two years.
"Time" magazine's "Man of the Year" for 1982 was not a man at all but a machine - the computer. In those days, computers were in very few homes, hardly anyone had heard of the Internet, and the World Wide Web did not exist.In 1999, “Time” magazine's “Person of the Year” (notice the gender change) was Jeff Bezos, the founder of the e-commerce web site Amazon. By then, PCs were ubiquitous and the web commonplace but dominated by major commercial interests.
In 2006, “Time” made its “Person of the Year” choice as “You. Yes, you. You control the Information Age.” For this edition of the magazine, seven million pieces of reflective Mylar were ordered for sticking on the front cover, so that you saw yourself on the page.
So, what was all this about? Why did the magazine then devote no less than 27 pages to examining how you and me are now shaping the Net?
This is the start of my latest monthly Internet column which I've titled "How you became the web"
I write a monthly column on Internet developments and I've decided to devote the latest one to the concept of Web 2.0. I explain what I understandi by the term. You can read the piece here.
The British creator of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has told BBC News he fears that, if the way the Internet is used is left to develop unchecked, "bad things" could happen. So he wants set up a web science research project to study the social implications of the web's development.
The Web Science Research Initiative will chart out a research agenda aimed at understanding the scientific, technical and social challenges underlying the growth of the web. The US-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton, here in the UK, will launch the long-term research collaboration that will have a direct influence on the future development of the Web.
This sounds like an excellent intiative and I have a long-standing interest in the social implications of the Net as illustrated in these articles.
According to my traffic statistics, in October there were a total of 98,134 visits to my web site which includes my two blogs. That's over 3,000 a day. Many thanks for your support. Please encourage friends to have a look. Together we can change how people look at the world and how they behave towards its citizens.
On my other blog CommsWatch, a few weeks ago I did a posting titled "Who are the users generating content?" In that posting, I stated:
" ... most Net users are still overwhelmingly consumers rather than producers - although this is obviously changing. My website and two weblogs between them average around 3,000 visitors a day but typically the comments posted to the blogs average a mere one a day. Over the time I have been blogging, I have made a total of 2,823 postings but, over the same period, the number of comments posted has only been 667. That is an average of only one comment for every four or so postings."
It seems that my experience is actually typical of the Net. In this article, it points out that for online communities as a whole:
"User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:
- 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don't contribute).
- 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
- 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions."
The article goes on to argue:
"There are about 1.1 billion Internet users, yet only 55 million users (5%) have weblogs according to Technorati. Worse, there are only 1.6 million postings per day; because some people post multiple times per day, only 0.1% of users post daily. Blogs have even worse participation inequality than is evident in the 90-9-1 rule that characterizes most online communities. With blogs, the rule is more like 95-5-0.1."
Please don't feel obliged to comment!
I don't know how I've managed this, but somehow NightHawk has appeared - at position 40 - in a list of Top 100 Labour Blogs. Actually, while I am happy to acknowledge my membership of the Labour Party (37 years now). I don't regard my blog as a specifically Labour platform. but more as a voice for social awareness and justice at home and internationally. The list of top Labour blogs was in fact drawn up by Iain Dale who is a Conservative blogger.
When I had to change the hosting arrangements of my web site and weblogs in July. I feared that I would lose visitors and for the first few weeks, the traffic statistcs were erractic, but they soon settled down. The number of visitors for the month of August was a record at just under 91,000, that is a daily average of almost 3,000. Many thanks for your interest and support. Please keep visiting and encourage others to do so.
This week the US news magazine "Time" gave a rundown of the 50 coolest sites on the web. Many attract a worldwide audience - but a lot appeal mainly to Americans. So here are 50 coolest websites that, according to the "Mirror" newspaper, us Brits could not live without.
You've probably never heard of the blog Girl with a one-track mind (I hadn't until today) - but you're going to ... Partly because the author has just had a book published based on her sexually explicit blog and partly because her anonymity has just been blown by the "Sunday Times" leading to her volunteering an interview in today's "Guardian".
At one level, I feel sorry that Zoe Margolis has had her privacy invaded. But, if one posts material on a medium like the Net that has up to a billion readers, one has to be ready for the consequences.
Apparently her blog receives 100,000 visitors a month. My site is approaching a simlar level of traffic, but nobody has offered me a book deal or photographed me on my doorstep. Might be something to do with our subject matter being a little different. ...
As regular visitors will know, I had to relocate the hosting of NightHawk a month or so ago - a process carried out by my good friend Eric Lee. However, transfering the huge archive proved more problematic, but has now been achieved thanks to the kind efforts of the Dutch Victor Gevers who is webmaster for the trade union AbvaKabo. Since I've never met Victor - he is a friend of a friend - this is an example of Net solidarity at its best. Many thanks, Victor!
You can access all the old postings by clicking on 'Earlier entries' under the 'Archives' section to the right.
The World Wide Web is 15 years old today. BBC online provides the timeline. The early part of this remarkable story was told by inventor Tim Berners-Lee in his book "Weaving The Web".
Since I started my website in July 1999, that means that effectively I've had a Web presence for the half the lifetime of the technology. It has truly transformed my life - and so many others.
It's now around one month since I had to relocate the hosting of my web site and two weblogs because of growing problems with the previous hosting arrangements. Many thanks to my good friend Eric Lee for all his help on this which saved both my sanity and my material. If you need web support, Eric is available for a reasonable fee.
I was afraid that, because my site was down for a while and then relocated, I would lose some visitors. In fact, this has not happened and indeed I am receiving a record number of visitors, averaging around 3,000 each weekday.
This is a mark of how loyal and supportive are my readers. Many thanks for sticking with me during this changeover. Please keep visiting and recommend the site to others.
YouTube is a successful example of a site based totally on user-generated content - in this case, video clips. The site is now the 18th most popular in the world with 20 million visitors last month downloading 2.5 billion clips. Recently US television networks have changed their attitude to the site from hostility to co-operation.
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by over 345,000 people from around the globe. Currently it is growing at 12% a month and it is one of the most exciting social networking developments on the Net.
It is clear from this article that Victor Keegan is keen. He explains: "When you join at secondlife.com you choose a name and an atavar (a 3D representation of yourself) and you are ready to go. It costs nothing to join and explore until you want to build houses, buy an island for $1,200 (£656) or products from the shops that are springing up."
He points out:"The demographics are fascinating: the average age is 33, half of users are women and a very large number haven't played online games before. .. 60% of users create their own content compared with less than 1% of readers of the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia."
For most of the last week, you have not been able to access my web site or weblogs and I've not been able to share with you information and thoughts. Other than when I've been on holiday (when even I forget the Net), this is the first time in three years of blogging almost daily that this has happened and, believe me, I found it a strange and disorienting experience.
I really get a buzz from knowing that every day I can share my thinking with thousands of people around the world. It's encouraging to see the traffic statistics clicking away and great when readers post comments or even e-mail me. I've missed you and it's wonderful to be back.
NightHawk - the personal blog named after my father-in-law - has been down for a week, the worst interruption since I started it over three years ago. I'm really sorry for this.
The problem has been the hosting company I've used. Its old server was being hacked, increasingly causing problems for my web site and two blogs. I was assured that moving everything to a new server would solve all the problems, but instead it had the effect of making everything totally inaccessible to both you and me.
So, with enormous help from my good friend Eric Lee, I've moved everything to a new hosting organisation. In the process, my blogs have ceased to use pmachine and gone over to Movabletype. It will probably take a little time for things to settle down to normal, but meanwhile many thanks for your patience and support.
Please keep visiting regularly and encourage friends to do so too.