Princeton University Press has a new book out by Darrell West on Digital Government. I’ll let my quote on the book jacket convey my take on it:
Click on the image to see the other book jacket quotes.
I have finally started a del.icio.us page. I don’t know why it took me so long. Social bookmarking is a neat idea. It is helpful to browse the bookmarks of others. It is especially interesting to see who else has linked to the pages you choose as worthy of marking for future reference. Let me know if you’re an E-BLOG reader and have one of your own, I’d be curious to see the interests of those reading this blog.
This weekend I’ll be at the annual meetings of the International Communication Association meetings in New York. All of the members from my research group will be participating in the conference and we’ll be reporting on several of our projects. Sunday midday we will present a poster summarizing some preliminary findings from our project on cross-ideological conversations among bloggers. I thought I would give a little preview here.
Cass Sunstein in his book Republic.com talks about the potential for IT to fragment citizens’ political discussions into isolated conversations. Borrowing from Negroponte, he discusses the potential for people to construct a “Daily Me” of news readings that excludes opposing perspectives. Sunstein argues that for democracy to flourish, it is important that people continue to have conversations with those in disagreement with their positions. However, he is concerned that with the help of filtering out unwanted content people will fragment into enclaves and won’t be exposed to opinions that challenge their positions. The book is an interesting read, but it does not offer any systematic empirical evidence of the claims.
I have been working on a project this past year with Jason Gallo and Sean Zehnder on empirically testing Sunstein’s thesis. We are doing so by analyzing cross-linkages among liberal and political blogs. You may recall that about two months ago Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance came out with a report on “The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election”. My first reaction was one of panic. Here we had been working on our project for months and someone else came out with the results first. However, a closer read made me realize that our project has some unique elements. And if nothing else, seeing that project has made us more careful and critical in our work showing that more research in an area can be fruitful, because hopefully it inspires the agenda to move forward in a productive manner.
[I updated this image on June 1 when I realized the right graph wasn’t displaying exactly what I had described it as.]
Our work has focused on addressing two questions. First, we are interested in seeing the extent to which liberal and conservative bloggers interlink. Second, we want to see what kind of changes we may be able to observe over time. Sunstein’s thesis suggests that we would see very little if any cross-linking among liberal and conservative blogs and the cross-linking would diminish over time. We go about answering these questions using multiple methodologies. We counted links and calculated some measures to see how insular the conversations are within groups of blogs. We also did a content analysis of some of the posts in our sample. We continue to work on this project so these are just preliminary findings.
Read the rest of this entry »
Google arrives at Yahoo! 1999.
I spent last weekend at Dartmouth participating and giving a talk at the Cyber-Disciplinary Conference hosted by the Center for the Humanities. Panelists explored topics on how digital technologies are influencing the political process, concerns about privacy and surveillance and how the humanities can contribute to the study of culture in a digital age.
Kudos to Mark Williams for organizing and hosting a great meeting! In addition to bringing together a diverse group of interesting people, Mark also did an exceptional job with the various logistics of the conference. The panels were well spaced out and there was always plenty of time for discussion. We also had several occasions to socialize and continue conversations in more informal settings.
You can see a list of participants here. I have also posted some photos.
I have started a new blog.. haha, because I don’t have enough online endeavors already.:-) It is for my research group. In addition to covering research updates, we will also post general IT-related news items. That’s the plan for now. It’s called the Web Use Project Blog. We cover more than “Web use” in a strict sense, but that name still works for much of my work and for lack of a better name I will continue to use it for now.
I was reading this article in Wired when I came upon the claim that “Google: Accounts for almost four out of five internet searches (which includes sites that license Google’s search technology), and 75 percent of all referrals to websites.” No references are offered for these figures. The rest of the piece is filled with other supposed facts without one link to or mention of a source.
Having followed the search engine market for a while the numbers in the quote above sound suspicious to me. I have never seen figures suggesting that Google (with or without affiliates) accounts for 80 percent of all searches. I contacted the author for his sources. To his credit, he got back to me very promptly. However, he did not point me to a source that can verify the information. (I do not quote from personal communication in public unless I indicated to the author that I would – which I did not – so I will not give you his exact words, but there is no source with the above figure that I can pass on to you or a collection of sources whose aggregated information leads to the above number.)
Newspaper and magazine articles do not require citations so unless the source is mentioned in the text as part of the article (e.g. “a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found…”) then the reader has no way of verifying the information (unless the reader decides to contact the author and the author responds). In academic writing, it is well understood that you have to cite your sources whether you are referencing ideas or specific facts. I realize that this may be tedious to do on the limited pages of newspapers and magazines. However, it seems that in online publications there should be less of a constraint to cite sources. If the reporter did his or her job and looked up relevant references for an article then why not link to them? Sure, if these are proprietary sources then that may be difficult. But I am sure that is not always the case. Yet we rarely see references to original sources in traditional newspaper and magazine pieces.
Now that the above article has appeared in Wired with the mentioned numbers stated as supposed fact, future writers (of blogs, newspaper articles, academic papers or what have you) can simply cite the Wired piece as the source of these figures and be done with it. And then we will have an unverified (and highly unlikely) figure taking on a life of its own.
PS. It is a whole other issue to figure out what it really means that a search engine accounts for x% of all searches. That may still just mean y% of all users (where y is a much smaller number than x). You can read more about this here. It would take a whole other post to get into why this may also be relevant here. I’ll leave that for another time.
I am happy to report that the Lansing, Michigan airport has free wireless.
I just finished a visit at the Quello Center at Michigan State. It was a great visit, the Center seems to be thriving. Also of note is that its Director Steven Wildman and Executive Director Johannes Bauer have assumed the editorship of the Journal of Media Economics with Stephen Lacy also of Michigan State.
A fellow user of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) has created a wonderful hack for Google Maps using Greasemonkey. By installing the script in Firefox, it is now possible to get addresses to overlay on the CTA system map. This was a feature seriously lacking on the Transit Authority’s own site and has caused many frustrations for me in the past. This is an awesome feature. [thanks]
Here are some step-by-step instructions on how to get this to work.
Using the Firefox browser go to http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/.
There’s a link called “Click Here to Install Greasemonkey” – click on that. Be sure you’re letting Firefox accept downloads. (If you are not then a warning message will come up right below the location bar of the browser letting you know and instructing you to click on a button to allow downloads from that site.)
Next, go to http://www.holovaty.com/code/firefox/greasemonkey/cta_google_maps.user.js
Once you’re on that page (it’ll just be script) then under the Tools menu of Firefox choose Install User Script.
That’s it. Next time when you go to http://maps.google.com/maps you’ll see a new link on the page: CTA map. You can click on it whenever you want to view your address on the CTA map.
Now that Meetup has decided to start charging for its services, I wonder if Upcoming.org is going to take off. It seems like a promising service and many new features are being added these days. It’s not clear why it’s been so slow to spread. It seems it’s still lacking the necessary critical mass. It’ll be interesting to see how the recent additions of features to it and the changes at Meetup may influence its future.
Hardly a week goes by without one of the major search engine companies – they are so much more than search engines at this point – announcing a nifty innovation. This article in Newsweek argues that the “winner in the search competition is you” and these days I would have to agree. Or in the least those of us who follow these innovations. The author summarizes some of them on page 2 of the piece. Some of the most intriguing recent innovations have been GMail with its threading of content and ever-increasing storage capacity, Yahoo!’s 360 community site, which recognizes that one may want to share certain blog posts and pictures with only a subset of one’s networks, and A9’s images of geographical locations. Google’s satellite photos are great, too, but seeing the actual storefront is even more helpful in some cases. It is also increasingly easy to get answers to common queries without having to click through to another page, e.g. weather info, calculations, dates of holidays that fall on different days every year.
For those who are in the know, these services offer more and more opportunities to save time while looking for information. I suspect the majority of users are not aware of many of them though and one challenge for these companies is to integrate the innovations in a way that less savvy users can take advantage of them as well.
I suspect by now many will have heard of the satellite maps available at the click of the button at Google Maps. When you look up an address in the U.S., you can click on the Satellite link located in the upper right hand corner of the page to get the satellite view of the area. Soon after this service went live, people started coming up with fun ways to use it: Google Sightseeing points out interesting locations on the satellite maps.
Here is another neat use of Google Maps, unfortunately this one has not been integrated with the satellite feature. This service merges information from the real-estate section of Craig’s list (limited to US metro areas) and Google Maps. You can browse apartments for rent or units for sale on the map directly with pictures of the units available for immediate viewing while still browsing the map. To browse the neighborhood through the satellite images, you will have to type in the address of the property and click on the Satellite link.
Yahoo! recently announced that they will increase the size of their free email accounts to 1 GB likely as a response to Google’s GMail, which gives users that much space. But GMail seems to be ahead of the game even as Yahoo! is still just preparing for the increase. Today, on the first anniversary of the launch of GMail, Google announced that they will continue to grow the size of GMail accounts beyond 2GBs. They have a nifty little counter on the GMail homepage that shows the increase of the mailbox size. (If you’re a GMail user and are always logged in, you’ll have to log out to see the number.) There’s also a cute little infinite-plus-one figure. As you watch the number grow, you can quench your thirst with some Google Gulp (in beta, of course).
UPDATE (3/17/05): In light of the recent troubles CT is experiencing due to Dreamhost, I should add that the following recommendation only holds for sites with modest traffic (i.e. less than thousands of visitors/day).
Recently several people have asked me whether I have recommendations for a hosting service. I have blogged about this before, but am happy to post another note. (No, I don’t expect all of my friends to be reading this blog religiously, really.) I use Dreamhost and have been quite happy with it. (Truth in advertising, if you sign up through that link I get rewarded. So if you do sign up with them after doing your bit of research, please consider using that link.)
Dreamhost offers three hosting plans. Their basic plan should meet most people’s needs. (People whose needs would not be met by their basic plan would not be asking me for hosting recommendations, that’s all I’m saying.) The basic plan comes with a free domain registration, which is nice. I speak from experience when I say that Dreamhost is quite good about domain registration and domain transfers. This is relevant in case one day you decide to change registrars.
Regarding their hosting services, they offer more goodies than most people – again people who would be asking me for hosting recommendations – will ever need. But it’s nice to have the options, and they still charge less than many other companies that provide fewer services. Their responses to customer support questions are quite good and usually within 24 hours. They offer one-click installation of WordPress (the blogging software this site uses) and phpBBForum plus some others.
With the basic plan, you can get up to 600 (!) POP/IMAP email accounts. You can also create an unlimited number of email aliases. (The latter is great for controlling spam.) You can also create an unlimited number of mailing lists and announcement lists. (The former is for discussions, the latter is for one-way communication with a list of people.)
They have a St.Patrick’s Day sale right now, which triples the amount of disk space and bandwidth you get. (The former has to do with how much space you have to store material, the latter involves the amount of traffic on your account.) This comes down to 2400MB of storage space and 120GB of bandwidth. Although it’s true that we can never have enough space, 2400MB is a LOT of space.
For the geeks in the audience, I am also happy to say that Dreamhost is one of the few hosting services that gives you shell access and supports Pine. Yes! It’s awesome (I know, I’m such a geek).
I suspect many of you reading this are thinking: “That’s all very nice, but I don’t need such a fancy plan.” I understand. However, as I said above, simpler plans are rarely cheaper, in fact, they are often more expensive. I did a lot of research last Spring to figure out where to host my sites and Dreamhost came out on top.
I should add that if you just want to reserve some names and redirect a URL, Active Domains is a somewhat cheaper option at $10/name. However, since a basic plan at Dreamhost comes with a free registration and most people who are not quite at my geek level are fine with that, this may not be very helpful. Also, I once experienced a significant outage with Active Domains so I’ve shifted all of my important domains over to Dreamhost. There are probably options even cheaper than this, but that’s really only for reserving a name without much else.
For the Eastern Sociological Society meetings next week, I organized a mini-conference on Sociology & the Internet. The following three panels are part of this mini-conference.
Friday, March 18, 2005
8:30am
Can Blogs Influence Public Policy?
* Tyler Cowen, George Mason University
* Henry Farrell, George Washington University
* Eszter Hargittai, Northwestern University
* Amy Sullivan, The Washington Monthly, Princeton University
Discussant: Jeff Weintraub, Lehigh University and University of Pennsylvania
Friday, March 18, 3005
11:50am
Information Technology and Public Policy
* Regulating E-Commerce: Domestic Sources of State Power and the Role of State-Private Actor Relations, Henry Farrell, George Washington University
* Sociological Impacts on Web Site Accessibility: Why won’t it help to build a better software tool?, Jonathan Lazar, Towson University
* The Impact of Technology on Work-Life Balance, Leslie Cintron, Washington and Lee University
* Worldwide Data Documentation Standards and the Future of Social Science Research, Grant Blank, American University
Discussant: Timothy Shortell, Brooklyn College
Saturday, March 19, 2005
8:30am
Digital Inequality
* Does The Digital Divide Explain Racial Differences in School Achievement? Caroline Persell, New York University
* Explaining the Diffusion of Broadband among Internet Users, John Horrigan, Pew Internet and American Life Project
* Media Use and Inequality in Access to Information: Does the Internet Level the Playing Field? Steven Shafer, Princeton University and Paul DiMaggio, Princeton University
* New Dimensions of the Digital Divide: Differences in Young Adults’ Use of the Internet, Eszter Hargittai, Northwestern University and Amanda Hinnant, Northwestern University
There is one more Internet-related panel at the meetings:
Sunday, March 20, 2005
8:30am
Social Interaction via the Internet
* Harnessing Social Interaction: How We Use the Internet to Shape and Control Interpersonal Contact, Mary Chayko, College of Saint Elizabeth
* Ethical Dilemmas in Web-based Qualitative Research: The Case of Online Message Board Communities, Laura West Steck, University of Connecticut and Tamara Smith, University at Albany, State University of New York
* “Rupert Rocks and Ali’s Awful”: Analysis of Viewers’ Favorite Players on Survivor and Big Brother, Beth Montemurro, Penn State University and Colleen Bloom, Rutgers University; Sharon Gerczyk, Penn State University
This blog has a fun design. You can tell I used to be a Mac user way back when. I am afraid my undergrad students probably would not appreciate the design as much as I do. When I presented to them the New Yorker “On the Internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog” cartoon in my Internet & Society class, I asked how many recognized it. At most one or two students raised their hands. I thought it was almost a clich&eeacute;.. but no, to them it was a novelty.
The new service Wists brings us the option of creating a public list of bookmarks with tags. The tagging feature resembles tags in Flickr. I guess it all sounds a lot like del.icio.us although I have never used that service so I can’t really say. Wists certainly looks better though.
I’ve started putting up a few links. I’ll be curious to see if it’s a service I end up using much. (There are so many things I have sort of tried over the years only to abandon them usually sooner rather than later.) Browsing others’ links is one way of finding potentially interesting sites. The service allows creating private bookmarks as well (handy for all those private baby blogs I started following lately). Unfortunately, it looks like the site is already attracting a type of spam. After all, what are the chances that someone would post bookmarks to so many individual items at one particular online store?
UPDATE: I’m told the many links to individual store items are on purpose.
[via Nick Denton]
Gizmodo reports on a security flaw with T-Mobile voicemail. It’s a bit of a nuisance to have to add a password to accessing voicemail from your own device, but may well be worth it regardless.
A propos T-Mobile security flaws, Blackberry must be quite frustrated that Jon Stewart kept referring to Paris Hilton’s hacked gadget as a “Blackberry” on The Daily Show the other night even though her gadget was a Sidekick II. Another reference to such a mix-up is on FoxNews.com. So who’s getting their news from whom?
I am editing a special issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication on The Social, Political, Economic and Cultural Dimensions of Search Engines. I hope to receive submissions from people in a variety of disciplines. Details below the fold.
Last week Gawker Media launched Lifehacker, a site I have gotten addicted to quite quickly. It’s a great resource for any geek or geek-wannabe. One of today’s finds is the most recent service launched by Google: Google Maps. They offer very nice clean maps that allow searches for more than just addresses. For example, see chocolate in evanston. Click on the red pointers and get the exact addresses. With another quick click you can add an address for directions. By clicking on “Link to this page” you get a static link you can share with others. (Note that the arrows for navigating are in the upper left hand corner not on the sides of the map as with some other services.)
The results to searches are far from exhaustive though. I’m afraid the above search misses my favorite chocolate store in town. In fact, curiously, it misses relevant stores that a regular Google search will bring up and Google Local doesn’t seem to be using Google Maps yet either. Since they’re still in beta, hopefully we’ll see some improvements. Regardless, it looks like a very nice new service worth checking out.
