cybersoc.com

blogging software and services

This morning I came across a fairly comprehensive list of hosted blogging services and blog (server) software. If you think of any that aren't on the list, please post them as a comment below.

BBC Backstage - a developers network

Following the lead of Technorati, Flickr and Yahoo, the BBC recently launched backstage, a site where developers can share ideas and prototypes demonstrating how BBC content can be used in different, and often quite interesting, ways.

Reported by BBC News Online: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4538111.stm

podcasting information, how to's and legal info

On monday I gave a guest lecture to a group of first year radio students at the University of Westminster. One of the topics that came up during my presentation was podcasting, a great way for people to make their first (low or no-cost) steps into audio content production and broadcasting. Below I've put together some links that might be useful for anyone wanting to know more about podcasting - please add your own links as comments:

general information about podcasting and directories

ex-MTV "VJ" Adam Curry's iPodder (directory, software, info): http://www.ipodder.org

Podcast Directory: http://www.podcast.net

Podcast Directory: http://www.podcastalley.com

KYOURADIO is the first radio station in the world to get all of its programming from podcasts: http://www.kyouradio.com/

Podscope (searches the content of podcasts): http://www.podscope.com/

How many people are listening to podcasts?: http://odeo.com/blog/2005/04/how-many-podcast-listeners-are-there.html

New Media Public Lecture Series (UC Berkeley) presentation on audio blogging and podcasting (quicktime): http://journalism.berkeley.edu/events/video/include/newmedia_2005/glass_audioblog.mov.qtl

podcasting at the BBC

The BBC's Podcasting trial: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/downloadtrial/podcast.shtml

Article about the BBC's Podcasting trial: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4447557.stm

how to create a podcast

How to create a podcast from a recorded skype interview: http://www.rogueamoeba.com/

Mobcasting [creating an audio file and getting it online using a mobile phone (and voice mail software?)]: http://mobcasting.blogspot.com/

podcasting and the law

Podcasting Licensed Music - is it legal?: http://www.bestkungfu.com/archive/date/2005/02/podcasting-music-and-the-law

Tod Maffin looks at many of the issues raised about copyright, etc for podcasts: http://radio.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2005/2/19/331661.html

PodCastingNews reports new ASCAP podcasting licenses: http://www.podcastingnews.com/archives/2005/02/ascap_posts_pod.html

The ASCAP experimental web licenses covering online streaming, podcasting, etc: http://www.ascap.com/weblicense/

Blogging and Photo-Sharing for Activists

Quite a few charities and NGO's, for example Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, have recognised that using blogs can help them to get their message across to a new audience.

One of the problems that ordinary websites have is that they often times can't reach an audience wider than the people who already know about their organisation and agree with their aims already. In other words, many websites simply preach to the converted. Blogging might offer a useful route around this particular problem.

Most blogging platforms offer RSS feeds as standard. These feeds can, and often are, picked up by users of social bookmarking sites such as de.lic.ious or Technocrati. Bloggers can also use services such as Ping-o-Matic to alert users of a whole range of blog content aggretators to new content. Because of social bookmarking and blog aggregators, blog content can be distributed to a much wider audience, almost automatically, than the content of a traditional (ie. non-blog) website.

So what next? The other day I started to wonder whether there might be a way to use flickr, myspace, and other photo sharing sites to promote the causes of activists. On flickr, my favourite, users uploading photos assign tags describing the subject of the photo. For example:

• Urban Decay: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/urbandecay/
• Iraq: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/iraq/
• Pollution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/pollution/

I've noticed that some of these photos have actually been posted by individual campaigners and I think this, like blogs, could be a useful way for campaigning organisations and activists to promote their cause to a wider audience. Not everyone looking for photos of manatees, for example, will know that this large creature, sometimes confused as a mermaid by early European sailors sailing up the Gulf Coast of Florida, is currently being endangered by the increasing numbers of recreational boaters in the area. They might just think it's a big beautiful creature, or have heard about manatees but don't know what they look like. By posting photos on a photo sharing site, then linking back to a campaign blog or website, activists might be able to reach a wider audience. You could also post your photos copyright free, or with a url watermarked on them, so that others could distribute your photos to an even wider audience than you could alone (this is a tactic that some media organisations, record companies, etc have done with fan sites).

Have you, or a campaigning organisation you work for, tried this? Please post a link and any thoughts you have in the comments box below.

Blog Law

What legal rights, if any, do bloggers have? This has been quite a hot topic in the blogosphere the past few months.

By now just about everyone, including the non-bloggers amongst us, have heard about the Queen of the Sky, the trolly dolly who was fired by her airline after publishing photos of herself posing provacatively onboard an airplane. I can't help but think that, had she just worked for RyanAir, who famously promoted itself on the back of one of their staff members appearing in a reality television programme, that the Queen would not only still be employed but would probably have her likeness on the side of a whole fleet of 727's!

Many will also be aware of the Apple case in which 3 bloggers were forced to disclose the names of Apple employees who had leaked them information on new product launches.

In response to these and other recent incidents and court cases involving bloggers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has issued some guidelines for bloggers in the workplace. Unfortunately, the first guideline, that bloggers should try to maintain their anonymity, simply isn't practical for many of us. As Larry E. Ribstein from the University of Illinois (USA) College of Law recognises in his interesting paper, Initial Reflections on the Law and Economics of Blogging one of the benefits of blogging is that it can be used for marketting one's services, expertise, and knowledge. Ribstein notes that those providing professional services, for example a lawyer, might give away free advice in their blog as a sort of "loss leader" to secure new business. Ribstein also gives the example of blogging academics who my wish to use their blog to further disseminate their work, something of value both to them as individuals and for the institutions they work for. Indeed, Ribstein initially published early versions of the above article on his blog and used the comments of readers to help refine his ideas.

Obviously, if you're a blogger you should avoid libel, contempt of court, and copyright infringement. If you blog from work you might want to check your employment contract, or the terms and use of your employer's computer network, to see if you are allowed to use their equipment/network for personal use. If you are writing about your work, you might want to look at any confidentiality and intellectual property clauses in your contract. If you are making money off your blog you might want to see if there is an exclusivity clause in your contract prohibiting you from self-employment. It's a lot to think about and, I suppose, you could always follow the EFF's advice and remain anonymous - but doesn't that somewhat defeat the purpose of having a viewpoint?!

Always connected, but how steep is the downside?

Like many readers of this blog, I'm always online. Always connected. Well, most of the time anyway.

As I write this, I’ve got my iPod on, playing music that I discovered browsing the playlists of other people using the iTunes “legal music download” service. The train I’m on doesn’t have wireless internet access. It probably should. I’m sure that at least a handful of the many other commuters I can see using their laptops would pay a small supplement on top of their annual rail pass to be able to access the internet from the train. It wouldn’t be difficult to do either.

About three years ago, whilst I was working at Granada Media, we came up with the idea of launching a broadband wireless services that would give users access to a walled garden of Granada Television content such as regional news, sport highlights, and the popular evening soaps like Coronation Street and Emmerdale. The route we had in mind was Virgin’s West Coast Mainline services between Manchester and London and, perhaps, Liverpool to London. The journeys are approximately three hours station-to-station and, for those of us who are used to being connected to the internet much of the time it would have been worth paying an extra few pounds to have access to our email, web content, etc on the train. So instead of spending hours chit-chatting to Tom the motorway maintenance guy from Ormskirk, we could bury our head in our laptops.

We never pitched our idea to Virgin or any other train service. The closest we got to even trialling the idea was sort-of-pitching (ie. tossing into a conversation about something else) a location based wireless service was when we told the design company behind the Arsenal Football Club website that we’d be interested in doing some concept work on a wireless match programme guide that users could access via PDA’s that they’d hire (or bring themselves) at the souvenir stand at Highbury. I was told, at the time, that a laptop with a good wireless router, could probably cover 25% of the stadium. Fans could, through the multi-media programme guide, watch goals over and over from the stands – an idea that would have worked great that particular year as Arsenal were in top form. They could also order a slice of pizza, the team strip to take home to their kids, or whatever right from their handheld device. It’s an interesting idea and no doubt one that someone somewhere will make a lot of money out of, particularly media companies and gambling sites.

In a previous entry to this blog I wrote about “dating through the network”. One thing I didn’t mention is that, despite the fact that millions of people are using online dating services, most of us still meet our romantic and sexual partners in an offline environment. For many that’s at work, through friends, or at an academic institutions. For others it’s quite ramdomly – I, for example, met my girlfriend on a plane between London and Warsaw where I was going for a speaking engagement. We got to know each other better via text message and phone calls before meeting up again for a coffee but the fact remains that, had my iPod battery not failed me and had I had the laptop I’m writing this on right now with me, much less the ability to connect to the internet from the plane as some carriers are now offering their passengers, I never would have met the girl of my dreams on that plane that day.

My point in all this is simple. We live in a World where it is increasingly easy to go online from just about anywhere – accessing services via SMS, WAP, x-box, refridgerator, iDTV, handheld PDA, or laptop. Don’t get me wrong, there are HUGE benefits to this, but I also find myself wondering how steep the downside is. I’m sure that, in future blog entries, I’ll write about how great wireless technology is, how the iPod has added a soundtrack to my life, how convenient it is to be able to send a photo to my blog or to a friend via email – but hopefully I'll always remember to link back here, to the question I’ve asked, and not answered, about the downside of being so densely connected to the internet.

"This train is now arriving at St. Albans Thameslink..."

Finding trustworthy information in the blogosphere?

My recent mistake in a blog entry, which was fairly minor but clearly my own fault, got me thinking about the scholarship of blogs.

Blogs, and to a lesser extent personal broadcasting (using streaming video and/or podcasting), are clearly becoming an important source of information and news for many internet users and the mainstream (ie. Traditional print and broadcast media) is picking up on that.

I've read a number of places that last year, 2004, was the "year of the blog" - that is, the year when blogging became something that many people, perhaps even the majority of people in Western countries at least, had heard of. Eszter Hargittai, an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, has created a nice graph analysing the number of references to ""weblog" and "blog" in mainstream print media since 1997.

Jason Gallo, also at Northwestern, writes on Blogosphere, a site containing various academic studies of blogging, that "they are helping to usher in a new form of hybrid journalism that merges traditional newsroom practices with the decentralized intelligence of individuals and groups spread across the Internet."

But how do blog readers know what blogs they can trust? For me personally it's a matter of reading a little bit about the author as well as looking to see what, if any, sites are linking that the blog I happen to be reading. Is the author a respected person in the field they are writing about? Have they published articles or research somewhere there is a peer review system or editor checking their contributions? Are important sites linking to them?

When writing the above paragraph, there was a part of me that kept saying "but that goes completely against the whole idea of self publishing on the internet". Back in the mid-90's, when I first became interested in social uses of internet technology, a lot of people, myself included, we're extremely interested in the idea that self publishing online would reverse the trend of a few large media owners to control the news and viewpoints we read, hear, and see. Online publishing was a way to bi-pass the normal gatekeepers of ideas and, if an idea was good enough, to gain an audience for one's views. But has internet self publishing really done that anyway? Most internet users use search sites like Google or Yahoo to find content. If you've ever tried to get one of these sites to list your site you'll know that, following submission, it can often take weeks or months for your site be crawled and added to their database. Sometimes it doesn't happen at all. So you publish something online and no one notices. Is that really any different from having not published your work at all? Well, it IS different, but it's still not exactly suberting the usual media <--> media consumer relationship.

So what's the answer? How can blog readers filter out the good information from the bad, the signal from the noise, whilst at the same time avoiding giving the traditional gatekeepers of information (including web search sites, academic institutions, the traditional media, etc) veto power over what information we see and how we use it?

One way forward might be services like del.icio.us, Furl and StumbleUpon which allow multiple users to create and share sets of bookmarks. Adam Bosworth has posted some interesting thoughts on group tagging. Group tagging makes a lot of sense to me - if you trust the people you use such a service with it can act as a group filter for content that might be of interest to you. I've yet to really explore these services myself but would love to hear what current users think. Is this part of the answer to finding useful information, from trustworthy sources, online?

[Want to know more? Reuters is hosting an event about Blogging and the Media in New York City, Tuesday 05 April 2005. For details, see the Blog Herald.]

Message Board Law: 1 - Libel

Defamation law, which essentially protects people and companies from damage to their reputation caused by untrue statements (libel = publication/broadcast; slander = spoken) in the UK is often said to be more strict than in other countries. For more information on UK defamation law as it applies to the media see http://www.media-solicitors.co.uk/ and, if you are interested in UK law and blogging, see http://www.bigblogcompany.net/index.php/weblog/category/C20/

The main case sited by online community professionals in the UK is Godfrey v Demon Internet. The following two Guardian articles, both published on 18 December 2002, explain the case.

Report backs ISP libel law claims by Owen Gibson: http://media.guardian.co.uk/medialaw/story/0,11614,862227,00.html

Internet libel laws 'stifling freedom of expression'  by Clare Dyer: http://media.guardian.co.uk/medialaw/story/0,11614,862088,00.html

A more recent case in Scotland was settled out of court so doesn't set a legal precedent but is still informative:

Payout for newspaper online talkboard libel, by Claire Cozen, 9/9/04, The Guardian (see http://media.guardian.co.uk/medialaw/story/0,11614,1301056,00.html

It's not internet related, but the Times has been sued for libel by the Conservatives campaign director.

In what I originally (and mistakenly - thanks George for the correction and a few more links) blogged as an American case but which was, in fact, a UK case, the Motley Fool website was compelled by court order to reveal the registration details of a user who posted libellous comments on a UK message board at the site. According to Lucy Sherriff, in an article for The Register,

Benjamin was unmasked by a court order compelling Motley Fool to reveal the details it held on the poster known as "analyser71". The IP address associated with his postings was then traced back to a computer at his then employers, Kyte Fund Management.

The Motley Fool case, thought to be the first where a user posting anonymously has been successfully sued for damages in the UK, has also been covered by The Guardian and The Sunday Times. Motley Fool has published it's own press release about the case.

Apple, similarly, has compelled the US courts to force blog service providers to reveal the registration details of users and has used this information to force bloggers to reveal the sources of "insider" information at Apple.

In the UK we have the protection of the Data Protection Act which means, without a court order, ISP's and internet publishers CAN'T reveal personal registration information without a court order having been issued forcing them to do so. But it's likely (as was seen in the Motley Fool case) that the courts would supply such an order if a claimant in a civil libel case requested one. What seems unclear, based on the Demon Internet case, is whether ISP's and internet publishers who were notified of libellous message board posts, and who took expedient action to remove those posts (Demon didn't, and was criticised in the judgement for this), could still be found guilty under UK libel law.

In Reynolds v Times Newspapers Ltd (1999) . In the his judgement, Lord Nichols of Birkenhead outlines the current position of UK defamation law then proceeds to list ten considerations which might help publishers to form a defense. This has become known as the "Reynolds Defense". Lord Nichols writes:

Depending on the circumstances, the matters to be taken into account include the following. The comments are illustrative only.

1. The seriousness of the allegation. The more serious the charge, the more the public is misinformed and the individual harmed, if the allegation is not true.
2. The nature of the information, and the extent to which the subject-matter is a matter of public concern.
3. The source of the information. Some informants have no direct knowledge of the events. Some have their own axes to grind, or are being paid for their stories.
4. The steps taken to verify the information.
5. The status of the information. The allegation may have already been the subject of an investigation which commands respect.
6. The urgency of the matter. News is often a perishable commodity.
7. Whether comment was sought from the plaintiff. He may have information others do not possess or have not disclosed. An approach to the plaintiff will not always be necessary.
8. Whether the article contained the gist of the plaintiff's side of the story.
9. The tone of the article. A newspaper can raise queries or call for an investigation. It need not adopt allegations as statements of fact.
10. The circumstances of the publication, including the timing.

(PS. I'm not a lawyer. The information above is published to help readers understand the current issues within UK libel law, not to provide legal advice or advice which can be acted upon. Please consult a legal professional.)
 

31 March 2005: Miranda Mowbray has written an excellent paper discussing the "Philosphically Based Limitations to Freedom of Speech in Virtual Communities" that some readers might find to be useful background for this blog entry.