Category Archives: Blogging

Indians don’t blog, apparently

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So Foreign Policy magazine claims:

India is known for its vibrant public discourse on everything from politics to Bollywood. But in this nation of 42 million Internet users, those conversations aren’t happening online. Recent research suggests India has just 1.2 million bloggers. By comparison, China has around 30 million. One northern India-based blog-hosting company, Ibibo, has even resorted to offering cash prizes to entice people to blog regularly. Indians’ tendency to be bashful about blogging appears to stem in part from a problem of perception. “The perception [is] that blogging is for people possessing superior writing skills,” says Ibibo executive Rahul Razdan. In a country where nearly 40 percent of people are illiterate, that perception spells trouble. Before blogs can burgeon, Indians may need to learn their ABCs.

Thomas Friedman

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Sitting next to Michael at dinner tonight we talked about Thomas Friedman, the celebrated NYT columnist. I argued that one of the reasons for F’s publishing successes (both The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat have been best-sellers) is that they contain just the right number of half-truths. (This is also the secret to successful business books btw.)

Then I came home and found this on Dave Winer’s Blog. It skewers Friedman very economically.

“I did a good job of stifling while listening to NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman”, Dave writes, “although at times I did gasp out loud at his arrogance and disregard for us, the audience…Friedman told an old story about how the Internet out of control would turn everyone into a public figure, like Friedman, who suffers from slander and exposure”.

Friedman told the story of an Indonesian woman who thought Al Gore is Jewish, something she heard on the Internet, which Friedman says is untrustworthy. But we remember when Friedman warned of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, who explained to us in his audience why we had to go to war. If I had time to ask a question, I might have asked him what regrets he has about the mistakes he’s made, the lies he told that caused more death than the lies the Indonesian woman who thought Gore is a Jew. The mistake we make is when we blindly trust any source, including the NY Times.

Spot on!

Quote of the day

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Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.

John Milton: Areopagitica

The case for the blogosphere, in a nutshell.

Blog forking

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Code forking is something that often happens in Open Source software development. Perhaps it will also become common in blogging. At any rate, I know of several people who maintain different blogs for different purposes. For example, Ed Felten, in addition to his impressive Freedom to Tinker maintains a Links blog. And the amazing Jon Crowcroft maintains no fewer than four — and manages to have interesting stuff in each one. But then he’s a law unto himself.

(Aside: Quentin used Yahoo! Pipes to funnel the entire Crowcroft output into a single channel.)

Following some conversations with my OU colleagues Tony Hirst and Martin Weller, I’ve decided to spin off a blog where I can post stuff likely to be of interest only to edu-geeks. There will be some duplication between it and Memex, but the two will gradually diverge over time. It has the stunningly unoriginal title Thinking aloud.

Memex 1.1 will continue on its traditional eclectic (i.e. scatty) way.

Incidentally, Ed Felten uses Dashlog for his Links Blog.

For serious masochists I’ve rigged up a combined feed (via Yahoo Pipes). Find it here.

Is the stampede to go online slowing up?

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Peter Preston thinks so, and quotes some findings from Ipsos Mori’s quarterly technology tracking poll.

This time last year, 60 per cent of British adults had online access. Now it’s 62 per cent, a relatively tiny shift. Three in four people over 65 have no access at all. Only one in 11 pensioners in the DE category – those most dependent on state support – can log on. Meanwhile, at the other end of the age and education range – ABs between 18 and 34 – internet penetration is actually falling back a little. Park Associates’ latest US survey may show two thirds of all adults online there, but, of those not hooked up, 44 per cent are just not interested in surfing their lives away.

We are not either on the internet or in print, but somewhere in between, and likely to stay there for years. We must commit millions to the digital future, but still cut down forests and drive distribution lorries along motorways at midnight. We must watch one pot of gold empty, but another fill up somewhat more slowly than we’d hoped…

Murphy’s Law

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This morning’s Observer column…

Collapse of stout conspiracy theory, then? Well, yes. But also a striking illustration of the collective intelligence embodied in the blogosphere. Memo to traditional journalists: there’s always someone out there who knows more than you…

Blogging and journalism

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Nice post by Dave Winer on the symbiotic relationship between blogging and mainstream journalism.

By now it should be obvious that bloggers are part of the landscape of investigative journalism. If you doubt this, do a little investigation yourself into how the story about Alberto Gonzalez and the US Attorneys is being managed. You’ll find that this time it’s a group of bloggers playing the role of Woodward and Bernstein — the Talking Point Memo people, doing really kickass work. I’ve been reading Josh Marshall every day as the scandal has been developing. And he’s getting credit from some of the professional reporters I respect. Paul Kiel from TPM was a guest on this week’s On The Media, and Josh was a guest on Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

I was proud of the Powerline guys when they brought down Dan Rather, not because I agree with their politics (I don’t!) or because I dislike Rather (ditto!) but because the pros had gotten sloppy and careless, and they need the help we bloggers get from the communities we’re part of, they need someone watching over their shoulders asking how they know this or that, or if maybe this reporter has a conflict of some sort. They often do.

The mathematics of opinion formation

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Here’s something to drive innumerate spin-doctors wild: a mathematical theory of opinion formation by Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs. Abstract reads:

We present a dynamical theory of opinion formation that takes explicitly into account the structure of the social network in which individuals are embedded. The theory predicts the evolution of a set of opinions through the social network and establishes the existence of a martingale property, i.e. that the expected weighted fraction of the population that holds a given opinion is constant in time. Most importantly, this weighted fraction is not either zero or one, but corresponds to a non-trivial distribution of opinions in thelong time limit. This coexistence of opinions within a social network is in agreement with the often observed locality effect, in which an opinion or a fad is localized to given groups without infecting the whole society. We verified these predictions, as well as those concerning the fragility of opinions and the importance of highly connected individuals in opinion formation, by performing computer experiments on a number of social networks.

So now you know. The paper has lots of nice equations of the kind that make some people’s eyeballs revolve. But, at heart, it reaches reassuringly obvious conclusions. For example,

Our theory further predicts that a relatively small number of individuals with high social ranks can have a larger effect on opinion formation than individuals with low rank. By high rank we mean people with a large number of social connections. This explains naturally a fragility phenomenon frequently noted within societies, whereby an opinion that seems to be held by a rather large group of people can become nearly extinct in a very short time, a mechanism that is at the heart of fads.

These predictions, which apply to general classes of social networks, including power-law and exponential networks, were verified by computer experiments and extended to the case when some individuals hold fixed opinions throughout the dynamical process. Furthermore, we dealt with the case of information asymmetries, which are characterized by the fact that some individuals are often influenced by other people’s opinions while being unable to reciprocate and change their counterpart’s views.