The Net Data directory

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society announced the launch of the Net Data Directory - a free, publicly available database of data about the Internet that covers topics such as cyber-security, civil and human rights, social media and many more. The directory currently contains about 150 data source records and includes many types of sources, including website rankings, opinion surveys, maps of activities and so on.

The press release says that records are maintained by researchers at the Berkman Center, which means that keeping the directory current, relevant and error-free will be a challenge. As the number of sources grows, it will also be harder to navigate the directory through search and browse, without more sophisticated tools of filtering, recommendations, and visualizations.

Predatory journal invitation

A few days ago I received an invitation to join an editorial board of a journal:

Dear Dr. Inna Kouper,
Wishes from The Scientific Pages!
We are glad to announce the successful launch of The Scientific Pages of Information Science. It is my great pleasure inviting you to join our editorial board.
...
You have been invited because of your contribution and recognized works in this field. Upon acceptance, we request you to send your recent photograph, CV, short biography and research interests. The details are requested in order to create your profile page in our journal.

Newspaper 2.0

10 suggestions for newspapers to adapt to the digital world from Doc Searls' post "A newspaper progress report, sort of" can essentially be summarized as "link, link, link". The suggestions may be good, but they don't seem to be justified:

1. Open up archives, don't charge for access to archived news. This one makes sense, unless the newspapers come up with a lot of added value in archive browsing (e.g., tools for mapping, tracing, or otherwise researching events and issues).
2. Link to archived news on the paper's website. The suggestion should be "link to archived news only if you understand the purpose of such linking". Multiple links to archived news add to information overload, clutter the text, and make the reading more difficult.
3. Link to relevant content on the web. Why and what for? The newspapers want their readers to read their content, not the web. If they link outside, readers will go away from their pages and advertisers.
4. Link to local bloggers and competing papers. Again to encourage readers to go away? While I can see this being of benefit to the reader, I can't understand why newspapers would want to do it.
5. Hire good bloggers. Hiring based on one's work rather than degrees, etc makes sense.
6. Engage citizen journalists. OK, using others without paying them also makes sense.
7. Treat your writing with respect and don't use the word "content". This is a personal preference. There is no argument why the word "content" is more offensive than "news", "text", or anything else except its coming from a non-journalistic environment and blurring the boundaries between journalists and other producers of digital information.
8. Simplify your website. Good one, but needs to be more specific. And it contradicts #2,3,4.
9. Make your web dynamic, in other words twitter and facebook. This is a hype, everybody now calls for using twitter and facebook. Does it mean to reach certain populations or disseminate news in various (shorter, etc.) formats? This suggestion needs "unpacking" as some humanities professors like to say.
10. Make news friendly to mobile devices. See #8.

Difficulties of cross-country comparisons

A paper in the last issue of The Information Society analyzes popular searches in Google and Yahoo across multiple countries ("Popular Searches in Google and Yahoo!: A “Digital Divide” in Information Uses?", by Elad Segev and Niv Ahituv, N26(1)). The authors show that users from Russia make more queries regarding economics and politics and offer some explanations of why users from the US and some other Western countries focus more on entertainment, while users from other countries are more interested in the issues of economic and political value.

With cross-country comparisons it is very difficult to develop a common ground. Google and yahoo as international search engines seem to be good candidates to provide such a ground. But how many people in non-English countries use google and yahoo? As far as I know one of the most popular search engines in Russia is yandex.ru (a service that has many services similar to google). So it could be that those who use google in Russia are on the much more advanced side in terms of education, information skills, etc. Then the conclusions about digital divide based on the analysis of google and yahoo become less valid.

According to yandex statistics "Runet content" (http://clck.yandex.ru/redir/dtype=stred/pid=39/cid=2948/*download.yandex.ru/company/yandex_on_content_autumn_2009.pdf) the most popular searches fall into the categories of "download something", "games", "weather", and "dating". Far from the issues of economical and political values. To be convinced by the results of the research published in The Information Society one would have to look at the statistics of search engine preferences in each country.

The Internet and social movements

How can the Internet shape a social movement? One possible explanation is the so called long tail effect. The Internet-based modes of communication allow for distributed participation of multiple individuals. Before the Internet the communication was one-to-many, similar to mass media. Mobilizing activities were limited in variety and channels, so they had to affect as many people as possible the same kind of message. For example, a leaflet would be produced, copied, and distributed among people.

With the Internet and ICTs that facilitate easy production and dissemination of materials there can be multiple messages with multiple meanings distributed by multiple actors. These multiple networking points create an aggregate effect and mobilize people. To verify whether it works this way, one would have to compare a movement before and after the Internet use. Would the Pareto 80-20 principle hold in the age of the Internet?