Flog of the Prokonsul

Wikipedia ban for disruptive professor

2007-12-16T00:00:00.001-05:00

Some interesting stuff to read:

Wikipedia ban for disruptive professor

Here’s why teachers who ban Wikipedia are misguided

Rebuttal against ban by librarians

2007-12-04T13:59:00.000-05:00

From Wikipedia's Signpost.

Ban Wikipedia? No Way! - In response to one of the articles that we covered last week, a parent has expressed concern that librarians have banned Wikipedia in schools. The author is a self-proclaimed "Wikipedia junkie", and notes that printed works are not absolute truths. He suggests that the teachers and librarians could have their students improve Wikipedia instead.

On librarians and... (suprise) Wikipedia

2007-11-28T17:35:00.000-05:00

I don't think many will be suprised when I say that the most interesting chapter in Courtney's book was for me the chapter on Wikis by Boeninger.

Interestingly, Boeninger doesn't focus on Wikipedia - something I would like to address here.

Librarians 2.0 should certainly be familiar with Wikipedia. It is, after all, the largest encyclopedia, coming up top in most Google searchers, and something their patrons will often turn to for information. They need to know whether its reliable or not; how to efficiently research on it; and also - how to tie Wikipedia with their profession, communities and individual libraries.

The librarian at Great Meadows Middle School in New Jersey has blocked access to Wikipedia from computer; she has put up signs all over the library that declare "Just say no to Wikipedia" (read news story here). Yet I believe that we should heed historian Roy Rosenberg who wrote that in the end - it is just an encyclopedia (read his article here). You should not end your research with one - and you should never trust one source to be perfect - but to expect people not to use the mostly correct, free and user friendly resource is akin telling people that printed press allows dissemination of errors and they should only trust hand written manuscripts. Wikipedia is as correct as Britannica (read Nature's study here), and should be no more banned than it.

Of course, it is important to know how to use those tools widely. Librarians should be aware that Wikipedia has has useful guides - ex. Researching with Wikipedia or project such as Wikipedia:WikiProject Librarians. I would expect librarians 2.0 to have a Wikipedia account, and contribute to Wikipedia articles on individual books (ex. Wikinomics), their libraries (ex. Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh) - or concepts related to their job (ex. Library catalog). With such tool as Catalog 2.0, linking books in library catalogue to their Wikipedia's entries, blog reviews and such, and librarians monitoring the quality of that content - helped by the vast masses of good-willed amateurs - I am looking forward to library 2.0 experience.

Further reading:

Chad F. Boeninger, The Wonderful World of Wikis: Application for Librarise, in Nancy Courtney (ed.), Library 2.0 and beyond.

Wikipedia fundraiser and digital divide

2007-11-27T13:06:00.001-05:00

Turning the Digital Divide Into Digital Dividends

Digital divide article on Wikipedia - what we need to do

2007-11-25T21:35:00.000-05:00

Origin of the term, current usage, digital divide, e-democracy and e-governance, and criticism are acceptable - although they could benefit from expansion.

Overcoming the digital divide and global digital divide sections have some references, but need more, and need rewriting and expansion - they are very rough drafts.

Digital divide in education has not a single reference.

National interest and social benefit and challenges and social detriments sections are missing references, and besides, they are lists that could as well be somebody's original research, which has no place on Wikipedia. Unless they can be referenced to a single publication, they need to be broken and incorporated into existing sections.

All things considered, the article has made considerable progress since we begun working on it, but it still needs more work before it can be considered for a Good Article review. So don't hesitate to spend an hour of two of your service learning in improving this article. We can create an informative page that will benefit the world - and learn how wikis and Wikipedia operate. Tantek Celik, Technocrati's Chief Technologist, said recently that in five years "knowledge of wikis will be a required job skill". Treat this as an opportunity, not as an assignment. This is, after all, a big part of what service learning is about.

Digital divide: Zambia

2007-11-23T23:20:00.000-05:00

Recently one of the members of Wikimedia Foundation board travelled to Zambia. I found a part of an interview with her, where she mentions her visit to a Zambian village, very interesting; and her photos - even more so.

If your school is a hut, and your dreams are a bicycle or a camera, you really are on the other side of the divide...

Wikipedia digital divide project update

2007-11-16T14:18:00.000-05:00

Since my last update was on Nov 6, time for another one. Here's what happening with the digital divide article on Wikipedia:
* on Nov 8, an anonymous editor (IP 80.194.68.162 traced to London) did a minor edit removing a superflous word. It's a good example of a very common type of contribution - minor style/grammar fixes. You don't have to do much work to edit Wikipedia - if you see a single tiny error, correcting it is quite easy and very helpful, too! Interestingly, the minor edits can be controversial too - although it is not vandalism, it was reverted few days later by Tedickey with the edit summary "rm spurious change" (the anon editor failed to provide his edit summary)
* on November 12 vandalism by IP 189.140.188.31 traced to Osaka, Japan and on November 13 vandalism from IP 204.96.143.230 (IU8-9-10 Regional Wan Consortium in Smethport, Pennsylvania) occurred and where promptly reverted by Technobadger.
* on November 14 an anonymous editor (from Santa Clara, California) added a paragraph on cooperation between US and Egypt (accidentally, one of biggest recipients of US foreign aid) aimed at reducing digital divide in Egypt
* Nov 15 -vandalism from Belfast, Northern Ireland, reverted by Technobadger and from New Jersey Higher Education Network reverted by a bot (piece of semi-automatic software designed to spot and revert obvious vandalism)
* Nov 16 - a minor edit by user Corky842 creating an internal link to a notable term
* Nov 17 - more vandalism reverted by a bot and a few edits by me

PS. Also, remember that our project is not limited to digital divide; if you want to contribute to other articles (such as on service learning) - go right ahead!

On free culture, copyright and ebooks

2007-11-12T13:20:00.000-05:00

Last time in class I mentioned how free ebooks are changing the traditional way printed media are distributed. On one level, it's strange. Why would you want to give away your works for free?

The answer is: to avoid obscurity. To turn the 'free riders' into viral marketers. And to attract people to other stuff you don't give away for free. Check out Baen's Books publishing strategy or the rationale for why Cory Doctorow, a popular sci-fi writer, is giving away his books for free. Finally, there is also a great series of essays by another sci-fi writer, a driving force behind Bean's Books strategy, Eric Flint - Salvos Against Big Brother.

Another thing worth reading are the great 19th century speeches by Macaulay on copyright law.

All things considered, I believe that the war between proprietary and free culture is one of the most important struggles of today. If we lose it, the world of tomorrow will be little better than the totalitarian world of Soviet or Nazi victories. If you think I am exaggerating... watch Blade Runner. Or read a Shadowrun novel. Yes, it's fiction. Scary fiction. Do you want our future to look like that?

Fourth time the charm & wiki update

2007-11-07T12:12:00.000-05:00

As I hoped, the fourth scheduled meeting with the ACLA people actually took place. We had a really pleasant conversation - they are quite interested in increasing their tech-savviness, which is not small to start with. We agreed that I will hold 2 or more workshops for librarians about wikis and Wikipedia; the first one will take place early December, the second one around January-February (so it is outside the class commitment but as those who know me I certainly don't mind talking about wikis... :>).

That actually reminds me - if any of you think the people you work with may be interested in a workshop/discussion on wikis and Wikipedia, don't hesitate to let me know.

As for the digital divide, I thought I'd update you on the recent activity in the article since our FastTrack meeting. I am skipping vandalism, its reverting or bot technical edits.
* on 28 October a new user - Technobadger - appeared and carried out a big edit. The user had edited Wikipedia before so I don't think he is one of us, unfortunately.
* on 1 November an anonymous user (one who had not created an account) has added a new section to the article ("Challenges and social detrements"); unfortunatly it is unreferenced. IP 71.117.93.160 has been traced to Reston, Virginia, which is close enough for me to believe it may be somebody from our course. Thanks for contributions, and consider those two hints: 1) register 2) cite your sources.
* a few minor edits traced to University of Michigan occurred on November 2
* on November 3 a new user, Jaded.snowflake, has made his or her first and only edit (so far) to Wikipedia, adding a sentence that "The digital divide network, is the internet's largest community for citizens working to bridge the digital divide."
* on November 4 Technobadger carried out several other relatively minor edits
* on November 5 registered user Grosscha carried out several other minor edits. That user hails from Michigan Univerisity, which likely makes the anon November 2 edits his.
* finally, on November 6 Technobadger returns with a single minor fix

On the other note - tying this with Lessig's discussion about privacy - consider that while non-registered users are identified by their IP and can thus be traced to their point of origin (sometimes, IP tracing is always a gamble), registered users have their IP hidden and only few selected administrators (me not being one of them) can see them. Personally I wish this would not be so - seeing editors location would allow to determine bias and catch some users who 'cheat' by having multiplie accounts (for example, vote stacking; we call this "sock puppeting" on Wiki). But the majority is opposed to this, apparently valuing privacy over information. Similarly, there is no requirement to provide any - or true - information about oneself on your Wikipedia user page (which everybody gets after registering). Considering Wikipedia's Conflict of Interest policy, and events such as Essjay controversy and the revelations of WikiScanner, I wonder - would you agree or disagree with motions that
1) all Wikipedia's editors should have publicly visible IP address and
2) all Wikipedia's editors should provide a rough biography (at least age, nationality, education and employment) on their user page?

PS. Do you know Wikipedia is having a fundraiser? LOL.

ACLA meeting saga

2007-11-01T12:15:00.000-04:00

So I am seeting in the Kiva Han, waitingfor the ACLA person I am supposed to be meeting right now. Checking my mail. See a mail from the person I am supposed to be meeting - apparently they did a mistake and they scheduled it for Friday, not Thursday.

Oh well. I guess 4th time the charm, right? :)

Good start on the Wikipedia's digital dividepage

2007-10-28T13:02:00.000-04:00

In recent days we have done some nice work on the digital divide page. Chrislems has updated some references, and worked on some other issues - thank you - and our leader (Stustu12) has greatly improved the introduction to the article (lead).

While we are finishing our writing exams, here's a thought: lots of what you write now and what you have written few weeks ago can be added to the article with only a minor changes. I was always annoyed how such exams were 'wasted' after submitting them to the teacher, but now you can reuse that work to benefit wikipedia and fulfill part of our service learning. Isn't this a nifty idea?

PS. In an unrelated thought, I am wondering what would you think about shortening our Halloween class to about 5 p.m. and extending the next one (or few of them) a little bit to cover the material we lost?

Ten things you may not know about images on Wikipedia

2007-10-26T18:56:00.000-04:00

Since one of the things our digital divide article on Wikipedia is missing are images (and graphs, and charts, and so on), I thought this will make an interesting reading: Ten things you may not know about images on Wikipedia

Wikipedia project update

2007-10-19T14:35:00.000-04:00

There have been two new strange editors involved in editing the article; since they did not post anything on their userpages, nor on article's talk page, I have no idea if they are part of our little group. If you are them, please identify yourself on the user page - at the very least by stating that you are part of our "Digital Citzenship" course. Personally, I have no problem with telling people I am who I am - I am proud of my contributions - but of course I respect your desire to be anonymous (although note that prof. Shulman may have trouble recognizing the input of anonymous students ;p).

The editors in question:
* Babym1424 edited the article on 16 October
** good job on labeling your edits with the edit summary and minor edit; very good job on deciphering how to use citation template (personally I think it's too complex and I don't use it myself :))
* Boo2989 edited the article on 17 October
** good job on using the edit summary

On a side note, consider that Wikipedia is here to stay and you may find yourself editing it in the future for various reasons. Hence if selecting a nickname, are you sure you want a random combination of letters or numbers?

I am looking forward to more people joining this project; I have pruned the external links from spam and irrelevance, but as I wrote on discussion page, they may well be important links we should now add that are not there. There is still plenty of work to do!

Wikipedia activity as part of our service learning

2007-10-07T18:54:00.000-04:00

Per your suggestion, I raised the issue in our last class, and it met with quite positive reception from Prof. Shulman - he encouraged us to try this, and noted that time we dedicate to it will count toward our service learning. Thus I am going to illustrate what I had in mind below - feel free to ask questions, offer suggestions and critique - and of course, participate in the project :)

As we all know (I hope!), Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia whose content is created by volunteers. It is now in Top 10 most popular sites online, comes up in many Google searches and as such, understanding and even familiarity with the site are increasingly becoming a basic requirements for any 'digital citizen'. If we can improve the coverage and quality of Wikipedia's topics, we will succeed in several basic tenants of service learning:
* we will create content useful for others; hence benefiting the online community (and I don't mean only the Wikipedia community of editors, but the online community of all people using Internet, who increasingly rely on Wikipedia for being their primary source of information)
* we will become more familiar with Wikipedia ourselves, thus gaining some important skills and knowledge

I suggest we target the digital divide article - a core concept in our course, and certainly an important concept overall. Unfortunately, the article is in sad shape:
* as far as I can tell, based on our readings, it is hardly comprehensive - it doesn't mention many key arguments or concepts
* it lacks inline citations
* it doesn't follow Wikipedia Manual of Style
And this is just a tip of the iceberg of the problems this article suffers from.

How can we improve it? It's easy. You can learn how to edit Wikipedia - which is hardly more difficult than learning how to use a text editor - by spending a few minutes following the Wikipedia Tutorial. Next, create an account - it takes only few seconds - and add yourself to the list here. What next? Well, you can review the current article; list 'to do' tasks, discuss it on its talk page, or just be bold and start editing the main article.

I hope we will be able to cross two important milestones in the next few weeks:
* reach the status of a Good Article
* reach the status of a Featured Article

For now, I have done a few technical tasks, such as creation of the 'to do' list and submission for the peer review. I have also used a script to generate some suggestions for improvement - see the peer review. So, let's waste no more time and start editing!

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me - by email, Wikipedia message system, replies to the blog or via one of many instant messengers I use (see my Wikipedia user page for my contact info).

The Economist debate on digital divide

2007-10-05T23:18:00.000-04:00

I think this should be of interest to many of us: The Economist is hosting a moderated debate on, among other things, digital divide. I certainly intend to follow it, not only because it touches on the dd, but because it certainly seems like a very interesting exercise in online democratic discourse. I particularly wonder if policymakers could, in theory, benefit from such discussions, or even more, if such discussions could generate useful policies themselves.

PS. I plan to post details on Wikipedia project this weekend, so those of you interested in this form of online volunteering - stay tuned!

On digital fluency: how some things stay the same

2007-10-03T20:45:00.000-04:00

Inspired by a few comments today, I looked back through some of my old blogs for a digital fluency tidbit that is just as relevant now as it was two years ago. Yes, the web evolves quickly, but some tricks for making your life online easier haven't changed. So, if you have a few minutes, check out how to easily manage your files. A few times recently I was forced to use Windows Explorer and I was so annoyed at its inefficiency, that I added Total Commander to my pendrive. TE is to WE what Firefox is to Internet Exploder. One I calculated I save 12h a year by using Fire; I probably save more using TE. And people ask me why I have so much time... :)

Consider using SeaMonkey instead of Firefox if you don't use other dedicated email software. Another fluency tidbit is that html email service (i.e. accessing your email via browser) is very bad compared to software solutions. I find it hard to imagine how people can live without years of their emails (I have access to 99% of my emails since 1997, searchable), without autosort assigning my incoming mail into one of several folders (friends, family, work, etc.), or without good junk mail filter (although I think I need to look for some better solution, SeaMonkey build-in one still lets some through, to be honest).

Seriously: knowing the good software and teaching others about it is certainly part of lessening the digital divide. If one is teaching people to use inefficient software like IE or WE, one is doing them almost a disservice. Many of those folks will have little time or will to search for better softs themselves, and we owe it to them to teach them what is best.

Wikipedia Weekly on Digital Citizenship

2007-09-27T12:15:00.000-04:00

A recent inteview (#29) at Wikipedia Weekly raises some interesting points about what it is to be a 'Digital Citizen'. I think its worth listening to.

And the following inteview (#30) is with yours truly :)

Update on ACLA

2007-09-20T16:44:00.000-04:00

While I am still waiting for any word from Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, I have scheduled a meeting with people from Allegheny County Library Association for Monday, October 1st. I will keep you updated; let me know if any of you would like to volunteer to do something for them (and what would that something be).

How to use our knowledge

2007-09-18T15:08:00.000-04:00

I would like to propose that we use our online discussions as an opportunity to share our knowledge with the outside world. There is a Wikipedia article on digital divide, but it is not very good - it needs more references, and it is also tagged with "This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject.". It doesn't even acknowledge the main topic of our recent Blackboard discussion - the concept of 'have now' vs. 'have later' is not mentioned at all in it (!). What do you say we try to improve it, with knowledge gained from our books and articles? I think it would be great if as one of the 'digital artifacts' of our class we can leave a vastly improved Wikipedia article on digital divide. And from a certain perspective, working on Wikipedia in such a way is a community activity, and 'service learning', too.

Library Update

2007-09-12T13:13:00.000-04:00

Well, it's time for an update on my Carnegie visit. Which is "not much" - but here's the full story.

I approached one of the librarians, introducing myself and the concept of our class (i.e. that there is a group of grad students willing to help them in teaching computer literacy skills, and that some of us can also lecture/offer aid to the librarians on topics of our particular interest, such as Wikipedia). The librarian noted that they don't need courses, as they are already experts on things like Wikipedia (I wonder if any of them actually edited it), and suggested that I go upstairs and talk to people from "Job something Center" to see if they would need extra help in the courses they run for visitors.

People upstairs were polite but they firmly stated that their courses are run by paid employees and they see little need for volunteers. They promised to pass my contact info to a person who may be interested in our help (I am still waiting for any sign of life since last Wednesday...).

So overall, I am a little disappointed with the librarians at Carnegie. Of course, maybe I just talked to the wrong people - but the presumption that they know all and we cannot teach them anything, and that they have no need for free volunteers to assist them with teaching others, is rather... surprising. I wonder if any of you tried approaching the Carnegie library yet? It's such a big place, close to were we are, that it would be a shame to let it 'pass' so easily. We could do much good there - even if they don't realize it :)

PS. I did get one possibly useful piece of info: apparently somebody at Allegheny County Library Association may be interested in our help...

PPS. I tried Carnegie again on Thursday. If we don't try... again, I am waiting for them to contact me.

Flog reactivation

2007-09-06T17:11:00.001-04:00

Have you seen Wikipedia's article on service learning?

Today I've asked Carnegie Library if they are interested in volunteers. The responce was lukewarm but somebody is supposed to contact me; I'll keep you updated on details. If you go there yourself, look for training centre, 3rd floor, to the right and far end.

Session ten

2007-03-27T15:26:00.000-04:00

Work on good title and good abstract.

Title should be informative both for reader and computer keyword-based databases. Same with abstract (100-300 words, usually).

TTags: Liveblogging, Writing

Sessions eight and nine

2007-03-13T14:08:00.000-04:00

Continuing the class in the summer? Sounds good. And even if one is not here, we can always participate online...

Convey a relationship: first show a pattern, than an example, thirdly discuss the exceptions. Example(s) should be clearly illustrated by graphs/tables.

General advice: forest first, then the trees: start with basic findings, then move to details.

Present and elaborate on numbers in the middle of paragraphs, end with a summary.

TTags: Liveblogging, Writing

Session seven

2007-02-27T14:10:00.000-05:00

How to translate non-English text into English? Use free online machine translation. Babel Fish is the most popular. Google for 'online translation from x to English' if it's not on Babelfish. Those tools usually can translate copy'n'paste text as well as websites. Quality is poor, but usually you can get a gist of whether it's useful or not.

Hourglass paper: broad introduction, specific study, method, results, discussion broadens again.

Good book: Jane E. Miller, The Chicago Guide to Writing About Numbers, University of Chicago Press

Interviews (or generally, qualitative data): look how you are using the words: quotes, others? See if you can improve it, use it 'better'.

TTags: Liveblogging, Writing

Session six

2007-02-20T14:08:00.000-05:00

A thought: why not try peer review our peer reviews? I.e. can the reviewer expect some comments on whether his/her comments where useful?

It seems like I am running out of things to write about. One more thought, however: a problem with data analysis in some of our research is that we rely on doing it alone. Since we are already peer reviewing each other articles, why not extend it to peer reviewing each others data? What I mean, specifically, is that it may be beneficial for some to have another person look try to collect data from some conten (document), to see if reliability is not a problem, or to offer some tips on the formating finding in Excel or such... a long shot, and I am still working on it, but it may be something to talk about in the class.

TTags: Liveblogging, Writing

Session five

2007-02-13T14:25:00.000-05:00

Literature review (check external links for more material). General tips: make it yours. Don't just repeat what others did, say why is it important for the readers of your work.

TTags: Liveblogging, Writing

Sessions Three and Four

2007-01-30T14:08:00.000-05:00

Seems like I saved the Session Three as a draft and forgot to publish it. So now - two sessions in one post, for your reading pleasure.

Session Three

After a major revision, save your paper under a different name - so you can go back and see past revisions if needed.

When the paper is ready? Ask a friend to judge - or if you have no deadline, take breaks and after a week or two 'take a fresh look' at it.

Consider reading your text aloud to yourself. You can hear some akward phares and correct them then.

Coauthors are great reviewers. Try getting one :)

Make your sentences flow logicaly. Don't repeat yourself, consider where to place important information. Don't put it where nobody expects it.

Look at articles you like in a journal you'd like to publish in. How can you make your article look similar to those?

PS. Few interesting things that came in various discussions recently. If you have a video to share and want to reach people, consider video sharing services like YouTube or Google Video. Similarly, consider sharing pictures - for example Flickr or Wikimedia Commons. Important thing to consider: free licences. If you want your contributions to have large impact, I strongly recommend sharing them under free licences; most popular one are the Creative Commons. Highly recommend reading: open access. If you quickly want to build a webpage, consider Google Page Creator (or any wiki farm, for course).

Session Four

Not strictly related to writing, but I have to say that teaching through games is one of my favourite strategies. Interesting sites to visit to share and discuss such ideas: Wikiversity, Open Content Teaching Educational Games Resources.

If you have a statement that you are unsure about but may be important, consider doing a quick look for references (citations) to support your point. My favourite tools for that: Google Book Search and Google Scholar.

TTags: Liveblogging, Writing

Session Two

2007-01-23T14:28:00.000-05:00

We were discussing Google Documents. As it's a new feature of Google, few people have heard about it: it's quite interesting tool for collaborative editing, you can read more about it here. Other popular proposal included posting docs to our Courseweb and replying in the internal forum.

Has anybody used Web of Science?

Politics and the English Language: read it here from anywhere.

Good tip about 'where to publish your work': look through your bibliography.

Freewriting seems to be popular... or freecharting :)

This week's idea #1: try not to use passive at all. #2 Look at your current writing. Normalize it. See if somebody outside the discipline can understand your writing.

Task: Introductions and conclusions. Find journals you'd like to submit your work to. Look through some articles and find intro's and conclusions you like. Bulletpoint what's nice about them. How can we incorporate them into our work?

Quote of the week: "What's scary about being a writer?" How can be deal with this fear?

PS. Discussed last time: Steven E. Gump, Writing Successful Covering Letters for Unsolicited Submissions to Academic Journals, Journal of Scholarly Publishing 35.2 (2004) 92-102

PS2. Send comments about a paper to the author..

PS3. You can post comments to this blog, you know - just click 'comments' below.

TTags: Liveblogging, Writing

Reactivation?

2007-01-16T14:06:00.000-05:00

I am reactivating the flog (fluency blog) in order to try some liveblogging (Damien should be proud of me) in a Workshop on Research Proposal & Products class (read: we are learning how to write).

Useful tool: works by Howard S. Becker. Check his homepage.

We are talking about writing projects we are working on. People are working on a combination of paper and thesis. We will be looking at samples of each other's writing and discussing them. Every week two persons will email their 'stuff' by Friday, and by Monday they will receive comments. Peer review is useful, from my experience. Be open to criticism. Even more, invite it.

Scary thought: IRB. Nobody really feels comfortable with it... so we are likely to schedule a class to discuss it.

We discussed two articles as examples of good writing. Night as Frontier by Murray Melbin and Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors by Susan Sontag. They are *nice*. They tell stories. You read them like novels... like literature. And it's surprising - and scary, again. We have this subconscious feeling that reading academic stuff (and writing is...) is painful. We know we like such articles. But can we - starting our adventure in the world of science - afford to write nice? The strategy of hiding behind lots of complex-sounding words is so tempting... 'Look, I use all of those phrases that nobody understands but I am sure you do and so I am 'one of you', too'.

If we have something to say, be brave. Don't write from the perspective that 'I am worthless student and this issue has been researched throughly....'. We can have important stuff to say - don't prostrate yourself in your writing.

When not to cite? Where general knowledge which doesn't need to be cited stops and specialized ones starts? How to avoid block quotes? Rule of thumb: you should be able to take all quotes, tables and similar stuff out and the paper needs to make sense.

Practical exercise: seek and destroy useless words. Avoid jargon, write simply. Avoid passive voice.

Freewriting activity: 10 minuts on: a) what am I trying to say? b) what bothers me about that? and c) why is my project important? Then go back see how much is usefu, mark gems. Finally, one paragraph 'clean, finished' summary of those - what is it that you are investigating?

PS. Don't forget to check Piled Higher and Deeper!

TTags: Liveblogging, Writing

The ending

2005-12-15T21:41:00.000-05:00

First, the list of nuggets for the convinience of our dear squad...I mean, course leader, and then some closing remarks for you all.

I was unable to sort my various flogs into 10 specific milestones. During the period of the course I committed somewhat over 50 flog posts, ranging from flapers, through status updates on my Wiki project, to various digital nuggets ranging in size size from few sentences to, well, more :) I didn't really think in term of 10 things - I posted useful stuff as I stumbled upon it, instead of holding it over and mergining it into a larger milestone.

Here is the chronological list of what I consider to be my most useful flog posts - milestones for us all, if you will:

0911: Hyperlinks: how to use them
0926: Advanced Googling it's easy and it's so useful
1019: BitTorrent introduction to p2p, or how to download (legal) stuff from the net
1115: File managers: why not to use Windows Exploder
1119: OpenID how to log in with your special username into services you don't want to register with
1120: Wikipedia Governance about wiki policeman, judges and lawyers :)
1122: Gmail or why it isn't as cool as many think
1123: Skype or why your phone will soon be a museum piece
1128: Wikis other then Wikipedia believe it or not, the world doesn't end with Wikipedia (yet)
1130: Firefox the mythical beast the obligatory milestone to cross for all of us (see also the 1204 update)
1202: Creative Commons: license your blog (or chant: I love to be greedy, I love to be useless)
1215: Media alternatives or how to replace Windows Media Can'tplaye(r) with something that works

I'll close this list with the reference to the most useful thing I have learned this course: Bloglines, brought to us by Luke's 5th milestone. This tool has greatly revolutionised my news gathering habits. I think I am speaking for us all when I say: Luke, you have been the most oustanding member of our class. Power to the podcasts!

With our course ending, I will be migrating back to my main blog, Voice of the Prokonsul (which somehow I was able to update during this term as well). To me the Flog was not much diffferent from my Voice: here and there I posted various 'digital nuggets' about technology and governance. Although my Voice is and will be somewhat more diverse, with some posts on a wider range of topics, if you found my Flog useful, feel free to to check the Voice for all that was here and more. As a rule, though, I avoid blogging information related to my personal life, because 'who cares?' :> I will, however, keep the Voice updated with news on my Wikipedia project.

I hope you guys keep your flogs, or if you change to some other blogs - please let me know so I can sub your blogs with the awesome tool that Luke blogged us about, the Bloglines.

And among the last things connected with the course, I think we should correct the anti-Stu bias on RateMyProfessor.com page. So go ahead and rate Stu there :)

Last but not least: remember our discussion about the system of education being the relic of Industrial Revolution? Well, this course is an indicator how *to do* things. It was a privilege to be in the same class as every one of you. I think it was the best class I have ever taken - and that it should be obligatory class for all students. A list of my Instant Messangers can be found at my Wiki homepage (look at the boxes to the left, scroll down). Looking forward to meeting you again, online of offline - I hope to hear from you!

Signing off, Prokonsul

Last flog - the alternatives

2005-12-15T20:39:00.000-05:00

All good things come to an end, and so does this flog (I will write a summary shortly). For now, the last digital nugget for the flog readers: the alternatives.

There are many alternatives for the popular software on the web. Everybody has heard about Linux being an alternative to Windows, and I have already blogged about Mozilla/Firefox being the alternative for IE, and Open Office being the alternative for M$ Office.

Inspired by what we have seen in class today, I'd like to tell you about small, user-friendly, add-free and open source alternatives for viewing RealMedia and QuickTime files (*ram, *qt, and such). Instead of downloading the large, cumbersome, ad-and-spyware-filled offical softs, go for the alternatives, appopriatly named Real Alternative and Quick Alternative. Instalation takes just a few seconds, and your computer will get the ability of playing those formats without the need to install/load the offical large monstrosities.

And of course if you are still using the deamoninc invention that is the Windows Media Player, do yourself a favour and get something that works. I personally use Winamp (which is not open source, but I still like it :p) for music and mplayer for video. Remember: the only reason so many people use the M$oft soft is beacuse 'it's there'. It doesn't mean that is the good choice, especially when you can get better alternatives completly free and legal. Go ahead and try them. Once you try them, you won't even think of going back to M$oft virus-friendly, user-antagonistic crapware.

To utilse the full potential of the web, you need the right tools!

Media gives, media takes away

2005-12-15T00:32:00.000-05:00

Some good publicity for a change:

Wikipedia still just as effective as normal encyclopedia. "Nature" has run a formal comparison of the science coverage of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica. From the article: 'The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, around three.'"

A little digging reveals the list of errors. And guess what: we are correcting the mistakes and should be done in a few days. Wanna guess how long it takes Britannica? ;p Btw, isn't this template nifty?

In related news, I was suprised to find out that Nature has not only a blog, but a podcast as well. My opnion of this magazine has now improved a lot.

Update: Nature's editorial actually "encourages readers to edit Wikipedia". Now that's a nice and positive attitude. They also call us the "grand experiment" and " free, high-quality global resource". :)

The forces of evil

2005-12-12T18:02:00.000-05:00

Check my other blog for an interesting development on the Wikipedia front: will somebody sue Wikipedia out of existence? Here's hoping it won't happen...

And here is a pretty good summary of the whole Wiki bashing affair.

Wiki bashing - epilogue

2005-12-11T01:10:00.000-05:00

NYT seems to be one of the first to have a story on how the prankster who entered the false entry was located, how he apologised to mr Seigenthaler and was forgiven. How nice. I just wonder: will the prankster apologise to Wiki? And will mr Seigenthaler comment on how quickly Wikipedia reacted to his request?

Btw, the entire affair has it's own Wiki article now :)

Wiki bashing - and look who threw the stone...

2005-12-07T23:33:00.000-05:00

In case you wonder what this is about, just go to Google news, type Wikipedia and read some of the stories.

So this guy discovered his Wikipedia biografic article contained false (and offending) information, and decided its 'character assassination' which prives Wikipedia (or at least universe in general :>) is populated with 'populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects'.

Well, my first impression is - so what? Wikipedia has many errors. Nobody is denying this. In fact, we have a disclaimer, accessible from any page (look at the very, very bottom) which sais in the huge letters: WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY

By our very nature, we cannot make such guarantees. Still, it seems like the press is having a field day discovering America. Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar. A Wicked-pedia. And so on. Well, I wonder if they know that our disclaimer is no different from that of other encyclopedias or newsite:

The britannica.com disclaimer (from the site hosting the Encyclopedia Britannica Online):
"YOUR USE OF BRITANNICA.COM IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK."
The MSN.com disclaimer (from the site hosting Microsoft's Encarta Encyclopedia)
"...AND THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO SATISFACTORY QUALITY, PERFORMANCE, ACCURACY, AND EFFORT IS WITH YOU."
The bartleby.com disclaimer (from the site hosting the Columbia Encyclopedia)
"YOU EXPRESSLY AGREE THAT USE OF THE SERVICE IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK."
New York Times (disclaimer) "Neither NYTD nor NYTimes.com represent or endorse the accuracy or reliability of any advice, opinion, statement, or other information displayed, uploaded, or distributed through the Service by any user, information provider or any other person or entity. You acknowledge that any reliance upon any such opinion, advice, statement, memorandum, or information shall be at your sole risk."
CNN (disclaimer) "SUBSCRIBER EXPRESSLY AGREES THAT USE OF CNN INTERACTIVE IS AT SUBSCRIBER'S SOLE RISK. NEITHER CNN, ITS AFFILIATES NOR ANY OF THEIR RESPECTIVE EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, THIRD PARTY CONTENT PROVIDERS OR LICENSORS WARRANT THAT CNN INTERACTIVE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR FREE; NOR DO THEY MAKE ANY WARRANTY AS TO THE RESULTS THAT MAY BE OBTAINED FROM USE OF CNN INTERACTIVE, OR AS TO THE ACCURACY, RELIABILITY OR CONTENT OF ANY INFORMATION, SERVICE, OR MERCHANDISE PROVIDED THROUGH CNN INTERACTIVE.

And similar. Yet once they fact is printed in their services, it's very hard to correct it. In print it's impossible. Online - you have to write a letter to the editor and hope they read it. But on Wiki you can simply correct the error by rewriting the page in one minute. This is why we have a page on errors in Britannica. They still haven't fixed some. Honestly, if a 12-year old can find errors in Britannica, can you honestly say it's a more trusted resource then Wiki? Sure, Britannica is peer reviewed, CNN or NYT employ professional journalists. So what? Many more professionals come to Wikipedia and write/correct relevant articles in their spare time.

It's promising that after a series of 'Wikipedia is evil' articles the journals, having apparently gotten their share of blood, are now taking a much more reasonable tone. And if some misguided souls, like the NYT staff, are now forbidden from using Wikipedia - well, pity them. The world is moving forward, whether all of their policy making guys understand it or not. They will have to retract this ban, if not tommorow, then in few weeks or months, as they came to understand what Wiki is (and see that everybody is doing it anyway).

Nonetheless this whole affair has some positive results. First, Wikipedia has finally put some restriction on anon users - they cannot create pages (they can still edit at will though). Since pages can be deleted only by admins, it is a good move, restoring some balance and making admin workload smaller. If you want to create a new article, really, is 15-second register process too much for you? Maybe - if you want to spam Wiki with a hundred pages about 'X sucks' :> Second, you know the saying about thriving on controversy. Wikipedia has now breached the Top 30 most popular Alexa ranking, and number of registering editors per day has more then doubled since last week :) Keep those controversies coming - more eyeballs for Wiki is just what we need.

The dark side of blogging

2005-12-06T19:37:00.000-05:00

Do you know what a deathtrap we might have walked into with our f-blogs?

Marquette Dental Student Suspended For Blogging

Should we censor our blogs? What do you think?

Why are some of you still using IE?

2005-12-04T14:46:00.000-05:00

Hardly a week goes by without another security flow discovered in this crap'o'ware. Now IE flaw lets intruders into Google Desktop. Now you can visit a Web page that--when viewed in IE on a computer with Google Desktop installed--uses the search tool and returns results for the query "password". And while IE is vulnerable, Firefox and Opera are not. For protection, Internet users could use one of those browsers. It has been a busy week on the Microsoft security front. Four examples of attack code were released for flaws in the Windows operating system, and a Trojan horse is finding its way onto PCs through another yet-unpatched flaw in IE.

But I guess some people will learn only the hard way. I just hope none of you, my fellow fluencly readers, belong to those people.

Meantime, in the news: the avalanche has started:

NASA ditches IE in favor of Firefox

License your blog!

2005-12-02T21:01:00.000-05:00

The least we can do after reading Lessig is to licence our blogs under his Creative Commons license, wouldn't you agree?

Luke, can you tell me how to display code on the bloges, like you did with your Digital Citizen blogger? I cannot figure this out, even looking at the source code :/

For this effect:

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.

Firefox 1.5 released

2005-11-30T08:57:00.000-05:00

I hope there are no mascochists among our class who persist on using the Internet Exploder? Definetly ditching the IE is an important step in becoming more fluent with the net.

Get the Fox. Or read about it. 'Nuff said.

There is more to wiki then Wikipedia

2005-11-28T20:18:00.000-05:00

Wikipedia is by no means the only Wiki project there is. There are many wikis - some more important, some less, some closely affiliated with Wikipedia, others completly different. Here is one of Wikipedia sister projects, very closely related to my 'Wikipedia as a teaching tool' project:

Wikibooks

Wikibooks is a collection of open-content textbooks - where a textbook is a book which is actually usable in an existing class. In other words, it is a project for collaboratively writing textbooks and related non-fiction books (with supporting books and booklets; such as annotated literary and other classics) about different subjects.

Wikibooks's goal is to create a free instructional resource—indeed, the largest instructional resource in history, both in terms of breadth and depth, to become a reliable resource. It's an ambitious goal which will probably take many years to achieve - but in the wiki world, we don't think small :) Currently the project, started in July 2003, has over 12,000 books and although it is not close to Wikipedia 800,000-something articles, this number is growing exponentialy just as Wikipedia was - so imagine that in 4 years it will have 800,000 free online textbooks...feel the ramifications?

"The big one is to get students involved in producing materials (and) also vetting materials (and) also adding elaboration to materials." Steven Brewer writes. He envisions teachers--at any level--asking students to examine existing Wikibooks entries for accuracy and relevancy and then appending their findings to those entries. That would allow the project to become a teaching tool and a work in progress all at once. "Increasingly, we're going to see classes where students do that kind of work," Brewer said, "and I think that at that point we're going to see Wikibooks really take off."

Reading is simple. Go to the Main Page, find a Wikibook that looks interesting, and start exploring. There's also a search box at the top of every page.

f you read something, and you like it, why not drop a note on the module's talk page? First select the discussion tab, to get to the talk page, and then select the edit tab on the talk page. We always love to get a bit of positive feedback.

If there's something we don't cover, or you're having difficulty finding what you're after, just ask the school librarian, or add the topic to our list of requested Wikibooks.

And of coure you can edit any textbook or start a new one, just as with articles on Wikipedia.

Wiki revolution is coming.

Presentation on Wikipedia

2005-11-27T18:29:00.000-05:00

I will definetly list 'not realising someobody has done this before' among the top 10 most stupid things I have thought :>

Ah, scavenging bonanza :) I am now trying to browse through this material and put together a deluxe version of my presentation. They are licenced under GDFL, in case you are wondering.

The presentation for CIDDE will be on Thursday, noon. Keep your fingers crossed!

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

2005-11-26T00:10:00.000-05:00

See how Ecnarta is trying to be, well, wiki.

Quoting from Jimbo Wales' blog:

Hmm, now people have a choice. They can donate their time and energy to a nonprofit effort to make the world a better place by giving away an encyclopedia under a free license. Or they can go to work for free, enriching Microsoft.

I wonder what the most talented and dedicated people will choose. :-)

Wikipedia is not a democracy

2005-11-24T19:28:00.000-05:00

For all our discussions about eGovernance, and how new technologies may shape the government, it is important to remember that Wikipedia is not a democracy. Perhaps this is why it works so well... :)

Phone revolution is here

2005-11-23T10:48:00.000-05:00

Radio Shack to sell Skype Internet communications products

I wonder how can I ditch my Virgin mobile pay-as-you go now. Skype is so much better, obviously.
Do you have a Skype account? Feel free to give me a call at prokonsul_piotrus (just send me a message explaining who you are, because I ignore all unknown callers by default).

What is Skype? It's a free software that allows you to call any other Skype user (just like an instant messanger soft) for free. And for a small fee, you can call fixed/mobile phones, and receive calls for them. And you are not limited to your computer: as described above, you can now have fixed or mobile phones using Skype tech. Small wonder that recently (September) The Economist predicted that Skype and it's other VoIP friends are spelling death to the traditional phones: soon, all calls will be free.

Update: from late November, videophones are here: Skype 2.0 has added video support. I have tested it and it works! So if you want to see yours truly...now you can :)

Check also this Slashdot story aboyt skypecasting.

Rant alert: My fight with Gmail

2005-11-22T10:18:00.000-05:00

So I want to send a 150mb SPSS file to my professor. Well, I thought, this is why I have gmail and this is why I convinced her to use that account, right?

Wrong.

Grrr. Gmail does not allow to send or receive attachments larger then 10mb.

Grumble. What do I need the famous x-giga size account if not for attachments? Heck, my 7 years total email in my mozilla is less then 1 gig (granted, I do delete large attachments). Oh well, maybe they got abused by some movie sending pirates or something (though it kind of means that they lost, as the most appealing function of gmail - handling of large files - is crippled). Oh, remember their excuse for invitation only? 'We are safe from spammers'? Bah.

OK. So I splitt the file with WinZip into 8mb (maximum compression with new WinZip 10 did it in 5 files - less then 40mbs total. Score one for the zip tech).

And guess what. 'This attachment contains an executable file. Gmail will not send such attachments due to security reasons'.

Aaaaaargh. Now this is just plain stupid. What, I ask, executable file? Zip self-extractor? If I wanted to be nasty, I could wonder if scanning my files is not a privacy violation. And if they can scan files (including zips) cannot they tell a SPSS file from movie, mp3 or a virus?

Just in case you wonder, when I send this from my another account, I got a bounce:
Remote host said: 552 5.7.0 Illegal Attachment d7si869528wra

1 hour wasted.

If I want a restriction-full smarter-then-me software, I will go get a hotmail or yahoo crappaccount. Google just lost BIG in my eyes.

Good for me that several years ago for about 50$ I bought a 'for life' email account at home.pl - I never had problems with large attachments (although sometimes with the fools sending them...).

So, Gmail sucks. End of rant.

Update: no piece of crappy junk will beat me (easily). Since all files except the first zip (i.e. z01 to z04) passed through, I renamed zip to z00, and apparently it passed the Google filter (at least I did not got a reject yet).

And if it wont work I can always upload it to my ftp and give my prof a simple download link. Sometimes classic solutions are the best.

In the news

2005-11-21T10:43:00.000-05:00

From weekly KurzweilAI.net newsletter:

Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes

Linux Journal, Nov. 16, 2005

"Are you ready to see the Net privatized from the bottom to the top? Are you ready to see the Net's free and open marketplace sucked into a pit of pipes built and fitted by the phone and cable companies and run according to rules lobbied by the carrier and content industries?

"Do you believe a free and open market should be 'Your choice of walled garden' or 'Your choice of silo'? That's what the big carrier and content companies believe. That's why they're getting ready to fence off the frontiers....

Read Original Article>>

Googling Your Genes

Washington Post, November 14, 2005

"Sergey Brin and Larry Page have ambitious long-term plans for Google's expansion into the fields of biology and genetics through the fusion of science, medicine, and technology.... 'Too few people in computer science are aware of some of the informational challenges in biology and their implications for the world,' Brin says....," in The Google Story by David A. Vise.

"'The ultimate search engine,' says Page, 'would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.'

"The critical path inside the Googleplex includes experimentation with artificial intelligence techniques and new methods of language translation. Brin and Page are hopeful that these efforts will eventually make it possible for people to have access to better information and knowledge without the limitations and barriers imposed by differences in language, location, Internet access, and the availability of electrical power."

Read Original Article>>

Wiki online voting - take two

2005-11-20T12:29:00.000-05:00

presents the Arbitration Report. What it is, you ask? Well, it is basically a short review of the latest Wikicourt cases.

Suprised? You see, Wikipedia has its own juridical system. Disputes are common and definetly not avoided on Wiki. Remeber how some of the authors we have read recently raised the issue that people tend to avoid any discussions that may led to disagreements? Well, as true as it may be, there is still enough of those on Wiki that we needed to develop a policy for resolving disputes. Begining with a set of good avice about civil conduct, through unbinding mediation, to binding arbitration, we have evolved our own legal system. We even have advocates. And remember, this is all done by volunteers.

I wonder if this can be called eRulemaking? Or online civil society?

One of the things that really makes me wonder is that if it works on Wiki, can this be applied to the real government? In other words - can you imagine a real world government run by volunteers?

All things considered, I am pretty sure that we are much better on transparency then any real gov.

Don't be a stranger!

2005-11-19T13:41:00.000-05:00

Use OpenID! It's an open source identity system, allowing you to log in with a profiled avatar to various sites, without the need to create an account there.

It looks like a great idea to me: no need to register account just to leave a message somewhere saves you time, and in the future I hope this will allow a merger of existing profiles on various boards and networks.

Your rights online at Slashdot

2005-11-18T10:30:00.000-05:00

It seems like one of the Slashdot newstags is 'your rights online', and that you can sort the news by tag. I have not used Slashdot much, but this spiked my interest.

Bridging the digital divide: the $100 laptop

2005-11-17T19:24:00.000-05:00

MIT unveils $100 laptop to the world

Wiki of course knows much more.

Is $100 in range of every citizen? In US, perhaps. In the 'Third World', not yet. But it is much closer then anything before.

Power to that initative!

Online voting in practice

2005-11-17T11:18:00.000-05:00

Check this current vote on Wiki for an example of how voting in a Wiki community looks like.

Fluency Time: Command your files!

2005-11-15T20:17:00.000-05:00

Graphical interface is to text interface like tabbed browsing is to windows (lower case...) and Total Commander is to Windows Explorer :)

Two windows are simply better then one. You may be used to dealing with Windows Explorer, but believe me - it is a giant waste of time. You will spend a few minutes getting used to the efficienty of the Total Commander, and then you will start saving time by managing your files quicker.

Favourite folders? Last-visited folders? Folder comparison? Much faster copying and moving? One click size information on selected files or folders? All this and much more in this great shareware soft. And the shareware is very friendly - it only reminds you to pay for the soft if you like it when you start it, and takes no functionality away.

Can it gen any better? Well, it could with open source, but I still love the Commander series :)

And I wonder if anybody remember the good old days of the Norton Commaner?

Feel free to see if there is another file manager that you would like to try: anything is better then Windows Exploder...

Come to the PolishFest

2005-11-10T12:39:00.000-05:00

Granted, it's not the most thematic subject with regards to digital governance, but's the food is much better :)

Pitt’s Nationality Rooms Programs will host “Polishfest”—a free public festival of all things Polish from noon to 5 p.m. Nov. 12 in the Cathedral of Learning’s Commons Room.

The event will feature food (stuffed cabbage, Polish sausage with sauerkraut, noodles and cabbage, pierogi, and baked goods), music, song, dance, art, and crafts.

The Transparent Wiki

2005-11-06T13:12:00.000-05:00

Regarding our discussion of funding and transparency, check out Wikimedia budget for 2005 for information how the Wikimedia Fundation (the fundation supporting Wikipedia) is spending its money - the money which comes from you (donations). It is not that difficult to tell citizens where their money is going - even in details (see Wikimedia servers/hardware orders for details of the hardware we ordered after our last fundraising drive). It would be even more preferct if we had scans of receipts and such, but I think it is definetly a good sign how funding should be dealt with - not only by NGOs, but by government as well.

Speaking of wikipedia, wouldn't you just love to own a nifty Wikipedia t-shirt, cup or mug? Sure you would! :) 20% of each listed price goes to Wikimedia - check out our nifty shop!

PS. If you want a 5$ off coupon on your first purchase, let me know (with an email) and I'll send you a refferal thingy.

Bloglines fluency nugget

2005-11-05T17:13:00.000-05:00

Finally taking Luke's advice to hear, I decided to give Bloglines a try. While I am not sure how useful this will be in the future, I definetly see it's advantages for those who try to keep up with several blogs (and that means us all, right? :).

It is really very simple: sign up for an account (no need to give any personal info, only email for confirmation), then drag the bloglines button to your browser bar, and whenever you visit a blog you want to know was updated, click the bloglines button - and presto: whenever you go to bloglines page you will see what blogs out of those you marked were updated - no need to check them all, one by one.

Nifty. Give it a try.

News

2005-11-04T11:07:00.000-05:00

Related to our last reading: Justice John Gomery releases his first report on corruption in the Liberal Party of Canada and the sponsorship scandal. Being internet-savvy is no safeguard from being corrupted. But transparency helps - at least, helps spot the problem.

About Wikipedia project: a second, larger meeting with CIDDE is scheduled for December 1. Not as soon as I would have hoped, but great news nonetheless.

A sign of things to come?

2005-11-02T09:12:00.000-05:00

Oregon State University Technical Writing class used Wikipedia as a collaboration writing tool; the result is at Visual_literacy. Read more on this blog.

Political parties, Part 2

2005-11-01T19:33:00.000-05:00

The key point of this article is that political parties need and could benefit enormously from e-democracy strategies that would deepen the relationships between party organizers and rank-of-file members.

Article argues that Internet is the tool that parties should use to boost the dwindling numbers of their supporters, preferably by duplicating the daring leaps taken by the business world (hence the authors coin an intereseting phrase, the 'Citizen Relationship Managers' - the software for politicians).

It is interesting to note that most political parties seem to lag behind even governments. This is a bit suprising - I'd have thought that government is alwyas the proverbial 'latecomer'. Alas, it seems like political parties are even worse in adopting new technologies. Authros give the number of Canadian politicans not aware (or caring?) about net possibilities as around 80%. Even if this correlates with age and thus means those are the 'dying breed' oldtimers, neither of this increases my confidence in the very institution of a political party.

Unfortunately, our article seems to skip over the important issue of ethics in politics, concentrating soley on the question how to give more power to the parties. While I will come back to it, let's consider for a moment what lies behind one of the pillars of today's political system: the political parties and why we need them.

Max Weber wrote that organizations tend to degenerate in time, and I think we can see this when we look at almost any political parties. What was invented in the early days of modern democracy as a helpful organisation uniting people with commons political goals, have over the next century or so degenerated into a set of 'mutual help' lobby sponsored organisations, dumbing down information and encouraging pointless (if colorful) party partisanship. In the end, as any student of the organisation theory can vouch for, parties are just a type of ogranisation - and all organisation have two primary goals: survive and grow. In terms of political parites, it means that they want votes and donations, and for them are willing to do almost anything that public will support, and a few things they probably wouldn't. That doesn't mean that parties are inherently evil, or that politicans are spineless liers - but neither are they the force for good. Bottom line is, they are just organisations formed by men with access to much power (and you know the proverb about power, do you?).

As you can see, I am not a great fan of any political party. Still, until we invent a better system, representation-based democracy is the system we have to live with, and instead of ranting (as pleasant as it is, from time to time), trying to fix it is a good alternative. Authors, as far as I can tell, advocate that funding for political parties should be increased and/or diverted to building online communities of party supporters and increasing the public awarness of party's goals. And while I am definelty opposed to any tax payer money going to the parties, I think that some legislation forcing parties to invest in online infrastructure would be a good thing. Authors are correct in pointing out that many online projects are long term, and long term planning is something that our governments (and parties) are definetly in need of. As our previous articles have shown, it is hard to be certain that any online community would be more civil and wise then the offline one, but there is definetly an advantage for everybody in forcing parties to go online and share information. A politician (or a party) that is more in touch with its voters will get more votes, and in exchange, people (us) get to have a little bit more control (information = power) over the people we elect.

Let me end this with links to some interesting sites I googled out when I looked for interesting sides dealing with political parties, funding and online communities:
* Opensecrets.org - formerly Disinfopedia, describes itself as "a collaborative project that aims to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests." Oh, and it's wiki-based :)
* Center for Public Integrity - is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, organization in the United States which is concerned with monitoring campaign finance laws in the U.S. and works for campaign finance reform. In pursuit of these goals, it sends out press releases and produces analysis of campaign finance issues.
* LobbyingInfo.org - A Public Citizen project with a motto 'Tracing the activities of special interests' :).

It is worth noting that those NGOs have much better sites then those of political parties (in terms of information content). My hope is that the pressure from such organisations will lead to increased competition between politicians and parties in terms of 'I am more honest then you and I am proving this online', with a complete transparency in the flow of money and in decision making process. Utopian? Maybe. But one can hope...

Political parties, Part 1

2005-10-31T17:25:00.000-05:00

In my third and last blaper™ I will write about the essay 'The Challenge of E-democracy for political parties' (available online as a pdf), by Grant Kippen and Gordon Jenkins.

Let's start with some interesting tidbits of info from 'who is who' analysis - a little hermeneutics never hurt anyoine :)

Mr. Kippen, unlike most of the contributors to Shane's 'Democracy Online' we are reading, is not an academic. He seems to be involved with the world of business (The Hillbrooke Group), political think tanks and NGOs (National Democratic Institute for International Affairs) and politics (being an organizer of an '93 electronic campaign fofor the Liberal Party of Canada).

Gordon Jenkins also doesn't seem like an academic. One of the editors of the Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce, he is involved with the International Institute of Business Technologies.

So we face an interesting question: how, if at all, will backgrounds of those authors influence the article? Stay tuned for the answer.

Breakthrough next door

2005-10-31T11:52:00.000-05:00

KurzweilAI.net, a technology breakthrough newsite I visit, has reported an interesting discovery next door (CMU):

Tribune-Review, October 28, 2005

Carnegie Mellon University and German scientists unveiled technology on Thursday that makes it possible to speak one language, yet be understood in another.

In a demonstration, sensors captured electrical signals from facial muscles; a computer recognized the words, translated them, displayed them on a screen, and spoke them in both languages.

"Translation goggles" also displayed the translated words on a miniature virtual screen on eyeglasses. And small ultrasound speakers delivered a narrow beam of sound in a foreign language to one person, while others nearby heard the same words in the language they were spoken.

Read Original Article>>

Blogger Nugget

2005-10-29T12:25:00.000-04:00

Blogger now offers a tool (backlinks) to track back people linking to your posts. Useful, although I'd like to see something that would track who links to the blog itself.

Google has this capability in theory: when you type in a website adress, it gives you options to see 'what links there'. However, it seems broken to me - I always get 0 results when I use this option. Possibly it is an error of syntax - does it work for you? Can you figure out how to make it work? If so, drop me a comment.

Project update 3

2005-10-28T12:41:00.000-04:00

Meeting with CIDDE went very well. Things should be speeding up soon. I'll add more details when I am not moving between classes :)

Update: I have talked with professor Laudato and I am happy to report he thinks this project has potential. In the coming week (or so) I will probably attend a larger CIDDE meeting and present the idea to more people.

The avalanche has started... hopefully :)

Controversial (?) nugget

2005-10-20T15:41:00.000-04:00

Since I feel like being non-wiki and controversial today, below is the link to the short movie I mentioned at the end of our class, as a slight counterpoint to the two other movies we watched. It is not a pro-conservative movie, since it is not a US production at all - it is actually a promo of a new Japaneese anime series, Full Metal Panic: Second Raid. But, whether one likes anime or not, I find it an excellent, graphic explanation of why military intervention in another country may be justified.

Opening this can of worms further, in order to download the movie you need to install (assuming you don't have it) a BitTorrent software, as the series has not been officialy translated into English and the only available and unofficial trailers with English subtitles are distributed that way. BitTorrent technology is actually a good subject for another digital fluency nugget. It represents one of the (in)famous peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution tool, is open sourced, and used to download not only the pirated stuff but for completly legal large files (like Linux distributions (i.e. operating system install files)).

BitTorrent can be used by software developers who want to ease the bandwidth strain on their servers. If a developer offers a large file for download, the bandwidth limit of their server may be exceeded if a large number of people download the file. By offering the file via BitTorrent, they transfer much of the bandwidth burden to downloaders of the file. For example, the demo of the flight sim X-Plane is offered via BitTorrent, as well as the World of Warcraft ingame patches. Another such example is PlaneShift, a free open-source MMORPG, which uses BitTorrent for its primary method of distribution. The fan-film Star Wars: Revelations is distributing two DVD images as well as the film by itself via BitTorrent, and Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, a feature-length film, was provided for download via the network besides a centralized server. The NetBSD operating system version 1.6.2 and later as well as most major Linux distributions use BitTorrent as an alternative way of distributing ISO images of their releases.

Following the success of the BitTorrent protocol, Bram Cohen, its creator, was hired in 2004 by Valve Software to develop a means of distributing patches and other content for online video games, proving that there are some less controversial reasons for the development of this technology. While many legal files, including Linux distributions, are available on other networks such as eDonkey2000 and Gnutella these are placed there by users and not generally part of the official distribution mechanism. So far, BitTorrent seems to be the most popular P2P protocol adopted officially for legal uses.

So, after this intro, here is the promised link. File (avi) needs to be opened with a BitTorrent application, and size is 45mb. I hope you enjoy it :)

PS. For a list of BitTorrent clients to chose from, see Wiki :)

Copyright nugget

2005-10-19T22:34:00.000-04:00

As a more academic companion to the copyright rant I posted recently on my main blog, I'd like to recommend this short article about the danger of non-commercial open source licences, written by a fellow Wikipedian.

Project update 2

2005-10-18T20:20:00.000-04:00

Some bad news: seems like there will be no presentation at i-fest - we were to late and they say their schedule is full :( Shame they cannot make room - I will be sure to contact them early next year (yes, I do plan to carry this after this term).

But on the bright side, there is a possibility of having a presentation for SIS dept - hopefully I will be hearing more from them soon. Any advice on whom to contact about other presenations would be great.

A technical issue: I think that a PowerPoint presentation may not be the best way to tell people about Wiki - I feel that a demonstration with a large computer screen (like the one we have in class) would be much more useful. I.e. instead of talking and showing slides, it may be better to demonstrate with mouse where are the tools/pages we will be talking about. What do you think about such an approach? Is there any software that may be helpful during such presentations (for example, enlarging mouse pointer may be useful)?

A back-up PP presentation in case of Wiki downtime may be useful. But again, an alternative may be a 'screencast software' - does anybody have any experience with that and could recommend the best soft I can download and play with?

In other digital fluency nugget related news, you may want to check this article:

All human life is indexed on the web
	Search engines are changing the face of business forever

Project update

2005-10-14T15:12:00.000-04:00

To people interesting in how the Wikipedia project is going along, some good news:
1) I got a word back from CIDDE, they are interested in hearing more. Hopefully I will meet with them f2f this month.
2) I am also working on Wikipedia front, trying to organize and expand tools available there. See Wikipedia resources for researchers for category listing various useful articles. Eventually, I hope to create a nice looking academic portal on Wiki. Any help with that would be as appreciated as real life / Pitt related efforts, so if you want to help with my project online, do let me know.

Online Deliberations, Part 2

2005-10-11T15:50:00.000-04:00

In the second and main part of my blog, I'd like to adress some key points raised in the article.

Witschge writes that "to understand the democratic possibilites of the Internet, we need to understand its users". That's a wise advice. Understanding technology itself is not enough - after all, it is not the technology (software) that votes or makes decisions. Two main issues she adresses are heterogeneity and anonymity.

As was already raised in our discussions, there is substantial fear that Internet will do little to encourage people to engage in constructive debates about democracy or take part in decision making process. Some people (Cass Sunstein, author of Republic.com) had even argues that it may have an opposite, negative effect and actually increase the polarization. As Witschge points out, the current research is at best inconclusive. People are likely to search for like minded individuals, but much less likely to search for those different, that are likely to disagree with them (well, with the exception of those that actually like heated discussions, preaching and convincing others - I wonder what's the percentage of such people in general population, and how can we define them in psychological trait?). This is as true online as offline, and those who thought that technology will radically transform human nature have been (not for the first time...) brutally disappointed.

But I don't think it forms a reasonalble ground for pessimism. Majority of population is uniterested in political discource and decision making in offline world and is unlikely to change their behaviour online. Sad, but its the reality we have to deal with. My advice is to forget about them and concentrate on that segment of population that is active off and online. How does Internet affects the activists? I very much doubt it has the negative effect predicted by the author of Republic.com. Or, to be more correct - I doubt it it matter. We are likely to meet those 'different' when we engage in various activities. And this is where Internet shines: since it allows people to engage in so many various activities much easier then offline, the frequency of political discourse will increase because Internet has made easier to engage purposely in it and because people will find themselves meeting others more often. And from this increased frequency will come increasing understanding of others, and simply more chance meetings of people we want to talk with.

Yes, we are building 'our daily selves' (and why not?), when we visit the pages we like, read the stuff we are interested in - but at the same time we are also meeting other people and discussing various topics with them, commenting on articles, blogs, usenet, wikis, forums... Since all activities are easier and less time consuming then in real world, we can afford to do both more. Granted, most people won't bother - but they wouldn't bother in real life. And those who do can do so (I hope) much more effectively.

Witschge other point, on the dangers of anonymity, is one I wholeheartly agree with her. Anonymity is mostly negative. If you have something valuable to say, you should not be afraid of using your real name and I am more likely to pay attention to a post signed with a name (although it is always a matter of trust - who goes to the trouble of verify if it is real?). At least, that holds true in a society respecting free speach - I can completly understand why people in lets say China or Iran may want to remain anonymous on the net. It is interesting that Wiki (yes, you knew I'd mention it eventually :D) functions well with most of its users being anonymous - but I would wager a guess there are different levels of anonymosity. I.e. a person may not sign with their real name, but in time it comes to value its online anonymous avatar as much as its real world self, thus they are likely to act respectably and don't want to risk stigmatism for offensive behaviour to befall their online avatar. And since Wiki promotes civility, people who want to be respected there want to behave, no matter if they are anonymous or not.

Comments, as always, awaited and appreciated.

Online Deliberations, Part 1

2005-10-10T11:28:00.000-04:00

Starting with the review of 'Online Deliberations: Possibilities of the Internet for Deliberative Democracy) in Shane, I will again start with the note about author:

Tamara Witschge is a PhD student at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. Quoting from her homepage, her "research focuses on online discussions of contested issues. She aims to gain insight into the process of online discussions, specifically regarding the openness of the debates."

Quite a few of her publications seem to be scattered online, like the earlier version (2002) of the paper we are reading (pdf warning!).

No bow tie...

Unfortunately, it does not appear she is a blogger, so I wouldn't expect another prominent visitor.... but them, we can never be entire sure, can we?

Soon I will post my thoughts on the paper. For now I strongly advice you all to read it - it is short, nicely written, will only take a few minutes of your time, and is definetly worth it.

Deep web

2005-10-09T14:00:00.000-04:00

Time for a new fluency nugget. The topic for today is the 'deep web', also known as the 'invisible web'. To quote from Wiki article, which I have just finished updating:

The deep web (or invisible web or hidden web) is the name given to pages on the World Wide Web that are not part of the surface web that is indexed by common search engines.

Now, this would be just a trivia if not for the information on of how to access the deep web and the fairly extensive list of specialized search engines listed on Wiki page. Some of them are not very efficient, but others may prove to be quite useful when you want to find more information.

Of course, beware of the FUTON bias...

Technologies for Democracy, Part 3

2005-10-05T19:59:00.000-04:00

In this last blog about Froomkin's article, I'd like to raise an important issue for our discussion.

Scalability. The new tools we see on the net are pretty, but how scalable are they? 10 comments may be not enough, but 100 makes for a long reading. What about 10,000?

We have been hearing some interesting concepts on this from our recent guest, Peter Muhlberger, but unfortunately with our resident liveblogger stricken by flu it appears we don't have any notes online to go over the links he mentioned (a shame - can anybody fix this?).

And ideas are all well and good, but does anybody know of any projects being implemented and actually using such large scale digital governance projects?

One thing that struck me about all those projects we have been hearing about is that they are all about designing better software. Software is good, but aren't we forgetting the human factor?

There is one comforting thing I can tell you from personal experience with Wiki. With hundreds of thousands registerted editors and many anonymous, we are still far from being overloaded with comments. Even controversial, 'hot' subjects are under control, as with increased numbers of comments and edits we gain increased numbers of editors working together, keeping track of current discussion, updating the article with the evolving consensus, guarding against vandalism and if the subject is important and broad enough, even creating dedicated projects.

You see, people who edit Wiki do it for *fun* - I know of no Wikipedian who is bored editing. This means basically that we have managed to gather specialists (or hobbists) from area as diverse as Aa, Estonia to Złotów County (in other terms, we have now over 750,000 articles). And this is just a tip of the iceberg.

There are many tasks involved in our project beyond simple article writing. We have software developers. We have a police force. We have a detective agency. We have a cleanup crew. We have such strange organisations as the Arbitration Committee, Association of Members' Advocates , Welcoming Committee and even people taking care of BJAODN (don't ask). And as strange as this sounds, we even have people who even find administrative and bureaucratic tasks fun and carry them on efficiently and with passion. Come to think of it, we probably have people taking care of the proverbial kitchen sink as well. But unlike the classical bureaucracy, we don't allow ourselves to became overburdened with rules for the sake of rules - our encyclopedic conentent is growing almost expotentially, which I think is a good indicator that we are doing a fair job.

The point is that with the growth of a project, it doesn't have to collapse under its own weight - if it is flexible enough to utilize the full potential of its users. This leads me to a hypothesis that if we can delegate parts of governance related jobs to volunteers/hobbists, we can end up with the best sorting/analytical system this side of a strong AI.

Sometimes I have this vision of a government run by volunteers and hobbists. I am not sure if this is would be a utopia or dystopia, though :) Can they do a worse job then our current politicians? Often, I wonder. Seriously: sure they can. But - can they do better? If Wikipedia is any indicator, this is at least a subject meriting more study and discussion.

Well, that's all for today, folks. Awaiting your comments!

Oh. Sorry I didn't manage to cover the promised meaning of life topic. But don't worry, the answer is out there - go read the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is actually one of our Featured Articles on Wiki :)

And don't forget to check some previous commens - I think you will be suprised who found us already! (Stu, you may yet become quite (in)famous :D).

Technologies for Democracy, Part 2

2005-10-04T17:59:00.000-04:00

After the brief introduction to the author, it is time to dive into the proper article. What were the most important issues Michael Froomkin raises?

Internet provides tools for a better discourse.

Keep the above in mind because it is, really, what his article is about. It is a well known fact that most people tend to forget majority of what they read soon afterwards. I don't expect you to remember most of my blogs, and I am sure Froomkin doesn't expect his readers to remember much of his article. But if you can remember the above idea, I think both of us will be quite happy with the outcome :)

Now, its time for some details. There are some interesting issues Froomkin raises in his article that I plan to discuss today and tommorow (in the last, third part of 'Technologies for Democracy' series). They mostly resolve around the technologies for better discourse and their impact Those technologies mentioned by Froomkin are blogs, wikis, 'collaborative filtering tools' (like Slashdot) and 'community deliberation tools'.

The first two we are all (I hope...) fairly familiar by now. Froomkin, being a blogger himself, makes good points about the raising importance and benefits of blogs, especially as a form of cosmopolitan views exchange and political commentary (see also my recent blog about the P-blogs). However, I do think he undervaluates wikis (he doesn't mention Wikipedia at all! shame, I say!). I'd guess this stems from personal experience (or rather, lack of it) - he probably didn't spend much time in the wiki communities. I am perfectly willing to excuse it considering his valuable input on blogs and other projects - but let me adress a few wiki-related points that I think would benefit from further consideration in his article.

Froomkin mention some interesting wiki-based projects (like Openlaw), but I think he misses the important point about wikis: they are not only databases, but also a discussion forums. Blogs don't make for a good database - thus I think that for anything more complex then a news report, wikis are a much better choice (and even here I could argue with Wikinews). Besides, even as a discussion forum wiki offers a better functionality that a normal blog: headers allow the discussion of many topics on a same page, indents allow it to be as readable as the Usenet discussion, and interlinks allow users to move the discussion into completly new subpages and of course create a thematical pages on related concepts. I am not saying that blogs will die out or be replaced by wikis, but I am sure that most complex projects, wikis are better then blogs. And I think that virtually anything connected to some serious governance projects is complex.

The 'collaborative filtering tools' section is very interesting, but I have one problem with it: Froomking mentions Slashdot as the only example. Slashdot, being a very interesting cross between a website and a blog, with a dash of some fairly unique ideas of its own, is definetly a framework with lot of potential. Unfortunately, as far as I know, no other website has been able to use the 'slash' software to ovetake orginal Slashdot in popularity (see Alexa for the best comparison tools). News reporting and discussion, while worthwile, also limits the impact of this technology on the 'public sphere', just as with the blogs. I can see great potential in some elements of its software, like its 'karma', and I'd like to see it implemented in wikis (including *the Wiki*) and other 'community deliberation tools'. All this considered, I am not sure if Slashdot is really important enough to deserve its own section - but I have to admit I am fairly unfamiliar with the site, so maybe one of you, dear readers, more familiar with this subject would like to support Froomkin's POV?

Finally, we reach the governent-related 'community deliberation tools', a subject perhaps most important in terms of government digital governance and erulemaking. I do hope that tools like deliberative polls and others, drawing on experiences and innovations of community created sites like blogs, wikis, Slashdot and other more or less exotic sites out there, will lead us to a more efficient political system. From town meetings to country policy, those tools promise us a possibility of a major change - vastly increasing the power of our votes. Of course, as Froomkin himself mentions, a promise is just this - a promise. It is up to us to use it - or lose it.

Tune in tommorow for some ending comments on scaling, digital divide, Jürgen Habermas, human nature and the meaning of life.

A final thought for today: since I decided to blog my paper, I certainly hope to receive some comments here!

Technology for Democracy, Part 1

2005-10-03T21:35:00.000-04:00

Since we have those blogs, I think it would be a shame to not use them when doing the papers. Honestly, docs are so last century... OK, that may be a bit too far. But I fully intend to utilise the potential of blogs when talking about my scheduled paper for this week, about 'Technology for Democracy'. Besides, nobody said that those papers have to be docs, did they?

And I think it would be wise to start by doing a little hermeneutics and learning who is (A.) Micheal Froomkin.

Well, he is the guy who is not afraid of wearing a red bow tie, and even putting such a photo on his homepage. Further, he apparently likes anagrams, linking the first word on his page to one :) And last but not least, he is a serious blogger. All things considered, I think he would fit well into our class :)

With such an introduction, I think you will be more inclined to read his essay, if you haven't done so.

To be continued...

A good reading

2005-09-28T11:39:00.000-04:00

I wrote this post actually for another's course Blackboard, but I have a strong suspicion nobody else in that class is using it - so I though that I will post it here, for your benefit. It is somewhat OT as far as our DG course goes - but it's a good book, and we all need a break sometimes :)

There is short reading I'd like to recommend to all of you. It is not an academic article, far from it - it is an old (1959) short story by Stanisław Lem, a (fairly) famous Polish writer. It is a great story about statistics and academia. And it's a good mystery :)

What is the goal of scientific inquiry? What does the existence of competing explanations mean for that goal? To what extent is such a mathematical correspondence a satisfactory explanation? To what extent do we tolerate such explanations in science?

Related links:
* excerpts
* more exceprts
* Amazon entry/review

The book is available at the Hillman Library - General Collection:

Sledztwo. English
The investigation [by] Stanislaw Lem. Translated from the Polish by Adele Milch. New York, Seabury Press, 216p. Call Number: PG7158.L39 S4513, not checked out at the time I looked the record.

Enjoy!

Advanced Googling

2005-09-26T09:35:00.000-04:00

Hot of the press, released just 14th September:

And I assume you know

List of Google services and tools

For example, I think that all university studends (not to mention) staff should know

You do, don't you? ;p

I also find Google Earth, Froogle, Groups, Images and Maps. Earth and Maps combined are perfect for finding almost anything. Froogle sends you to the cheaper deal, Images gives nice pics for any article/essay/etc, and Groups is a quick way of reading the 'collective brain' of the net, the Usenet (unfortunately, sending messages via it is much more problematic). Oh, and I didn't mention Blogger for obvious reasons :) (yes, Blogger is google spin-off).

I almost forgot - Google News. But we talked about them last time, so I assume you know it.

What about you? Do you use other tools? I'd love to hear about them, and how. I hear Print is quite useful for academic research as well - anybody has hand-on experience?

PS. If you want a Gmail invitation, let me know - it is far superior to hotmail or yahoo, IMHO.

Voice: P-blogs revisited

2005-09-23T18:56:00.000-04:00

Having a second blog is kind of difficult when I have material that can be useful on both. From now on, whenever I blog something of possible interest to our course on my Voice of the Prokonsul blog, I will post a Voice: notice here, so you don't have to check both of my blogs for updates.

For now, I invite you to check out my post on P-blogs revisited. After this topic resurfaced during two of our recent class discussions, I finally decided to do some research on one of my favourite aspects of the direct democracy.

Lessig Blog

2005-09-23T18:12:00.000-04:00

Just so you know - Lawrence Lessig has a blog (Lessig blog). It's quite good, actually. And he manages to post new stuff every few days, unlike some of us... Not that I am the paragon of virtue here, as anybody reading my older blog can attest top ;p

And, of course, he has his own Wiki entry :)

Fight the Spammers!

2005-09-18T21:33:00.000-04:00

Building on my last post, here is another good advice and plus a simple excercise on how to add such pictures to your blog:

WWW Robots (also called wanderers, spiders, crawlers, or bots) are programs that crawl the Web continually retrieving linked pages. When a spammer's bot visits your website, blog, forum, etc, all pages and sites linked to it will be searched looking for email addresses. All you have to do is link to this page so that whenever a spammer's robot scans your page, it will be sucked into this one. These links will redirect email harvesting bots to trap sites that will feed it with an almost infinite loop of dynamically generated fake email addresses, mostly on known spammer owned domains! This will render their harvested lists pratically useless and of no commercial value.

Doesn't it sound just anti-spam'a'licous?

Oh, and here is an explanation on how to add stuff to the sidebar (next to the obligatory blogger.com link/ad). Click template, then find (CTRL-f) the text 'This is a paragraph of text that could go in the sidebar'. You can replace this text with something else, and add a picture by copying and pasting the text from SpamPoison site (linked above) above it, under or above the blogger add. Simple and efficient.

PS. If you have already replaced the text, you may want to search for Blogger add link (http://buttons.blogger.com/bloggerbutton1.gif) to find the right place. All things considered, there are not that many features in the Blogger template that can be adjusted. It is a fairly simple tool. Play with it, click preview and you are on good way to customize your blog. By such trial and error I customized my Voice... template some months ago. But that's something for another time.

One less annoyance. Or two.

2005-09-17T18:42:00.000-04:00

I am all for contributing and creating a better place, but handing my email to spammers is not something I enjoy. So, today's useful tip: don't register if you don't have to. And, quite often, you don't, thanks to this useful site: Bugmenot.com

Of course, no matter how hard you try to protect your email, in the end, you will get some spam. So, what to do? Well, learn to use the spam filters of your email soft. My Mozilla, after few weeks of training, has over 90% success rate. That really does save your time.

On benefits of hypertext

2005-09-11T18:49:00.000-04:00

Inspired by Damien's blog I decided to stress the importance of hypertext in writing one's post. It is something very simple, that can greately enhance the usefulness of your posts (including blog posts), but also something I find too few people do.

When writing a post in any markup language supporting hyperlinks (html or bbc being most common), try to link all important terms to related webpage. Technically, it is quite simple. Many user interfaces, like the one of Blogger I am using just now, have a button that allows you to insert link into highlightened text. The most icon of the button is similar to this:

If the button is not there, don't panic. In html, you can simply use the < a href="http://link/" > text you want to link < /a > syntax (important note: remove the spaces, I have to keep them so the blogger script will not convert it into hypertext), and in bbc, [url=]URL description[/url] will do the trick.

Sometimes off-Wiki webpage may be more relevant (just like when I linked Damien's blog above), but often Wiki is the best place to refer your readers (it has the definition and usually links the best off-Wiki pages, thus being the most informative single link there is).

I found (on my other, older blog, and on many 'net forums) that people like to have the ability to go from my post to relevant Wiki article in one click. Simply put, it saves them time to google for the relevant page. In addition, peoplequite often are willing to click once, but won't bother if they havr to click more and google (being afraid it will take too much time and/or deciding it's not worth the effort). So if you want to make sure your readers know what you are talking about - link the key word to where you want them to go.

The beginning

2005-09-08T11:46:00.000-04:00

Will bew edit. For now, feel free to visit Voice of the Prokonsul.

Flog of the Prokonsul

Wikipedia ban for disruptive professor

Rebuttal against ban by librarians

On librarians and... (suprise) Wikipedia

Wikipedia fundraiser and digital divide

Turning the Digital Divide Into Digital Dividends

Digital divide article on Wikipedia - what we need to do

Digital divide: Zambia

Wikipedia digital divide project update

On free culture, copyright and ebooks

Fourth time the charm & wiki update

ACLA meeting saga

Good start on the Wikipedia's digital dividepage

Ten things you may not know about images on Wikipedia

Wikipedia project update

Wikipedia activity as part of our service learning

The Economist debate on digital divide

On digital fluency: how some things stay the same

Wikipedia Weekly on Digital Citizenship

Update on ACLA

How to use our knowledge

Library Update

Flog reactivation

Session ten

Sessions eight and nine

Session seven

Session six

Session five

Sessions Three and Four

Session Two

Reactivation?

The ending

Last flog - the alternatives

Media gives, media takes away

The forces of evil

Wiki bashing - epilogue

Wiki bashing - and look who threw the stone...

The dark side of blogging

Marquette Dental Student Suspended For Blogging

Why are some of you still using IE?

NASA ditches IE in favor of Firefox

License your blog!

Firefox 1.5 released

There is more to wiki then Wikipedia

Presentation on Wikipedia

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

Wikipedia is not a democracy

Phone revolution is here

Radio Shack to sell Skype Internet communications products

Rant alert: My fight with Gmail

In the news

Wiki online voting - take two

Don't be a stranger!

Your rights online at Slashdot

Bridging the digital divide: the $100 laptop

Online voting in practice

Fluency Time: Command your files!

Come to the PolishFest

The Transparent Wiki

Bloglines fluency nugget

News

A sign of things to come?

Political parties, Part 2

Political parties, Part 1

Breakthrough next door

Blogger Nugget

Project update 3

Controversial (?) nugget

Copyright nugget

Project update 2

All human life is indexed on the web

Project update

Online Deliberations, Part 2

Online Deliberations, Part 1

Deep web

Technologies for Democracy, Part 3

Technologies for Democracy, Part 2

Technology for Democracy, Part 1

A good reading

Advanced Googling