Over on almost a diary, I’ve recently mentionend a survey of German blogging called “Weblogs 2005 – Bloggen im deutschsprachigen Raum”, conducted by Jan Schmidt at the University of Bamberg. While the German blogger himself is a relatively unknown species to date, the relatively small size of the German blogosphere as a whole has been observed with some interest for a while now, particularly when compared to the French blogosphere, and the amount of attention blogs have suddenly gained in the so called German mainstream media. It’s one of the eternal questions of humanity asked a new variant: Does size matter?
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Category Archives: Websites
Show your love
You will all remember the Satin Pajama awards with great fondness, I trust. Lots of new blogs for everybody, staggeringly opulent prizes for the favoured few, and a juicy whiff of scandal into the bargain — good clean fun for the whole family.
Well, if you like that sort of thing, you’ll want to check out this year’s Koufax awards at the Wampum website. Unlike the Satin Pajamas, the Koufax awards are American, and unabashedly leftist1. But they will introduce you to some terrific writing, and your blogroll will be the better for it.
Here’s the thing, though: in America, bandwidth (like quality health care or influence over Republican politicians) apparently costs money. And because they are feckless socialist layabouts, the Wampumites aren’t showered with bushels of sweet, sweet cash from Richard Mellon Scaife and his like. So if you want to help them spread embittered Marxist-Leninist falsehoods, you should send them some money. PayPal and Amazon make this easy and painless. Or, if you prefer, you can send big chests stuffed with pirate gold to their snail mail address.
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Troubled Waters And No Bridge
Global Voices has a story (Hat Tip Financial Times and Simon World) about how China dissident Shi Tao has more than a little cause to be angry with Yahoo. Reporters Sans Frontiers, on analysing the text of the verdict in Shi Tao’s case (he was sentenced to 10 years in April for “divulging state secrets abroad”) , found that details supplied by Yahoo Holdings (Hong King) Ltd helped identify and convict him.
As Global Voices indicates Yahoo “provided the Chinese investigating organs with detailed information that apparently enabled them to link Shi’s personal e-mail account (on the Chinese Yahoo! service at yahoo.com.cn) and the specific message containing information treated as a “state secret” to the IP address of his computer”.
Now this raises a number of interesting issues.
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The IRA is still at war
This Slate article on what the IRA statement means by our own Scott MacMillan is quite excellent.
America On The Move
Drat! Comments still aren’t working. This may be part of the story. And just when the Economist has one of its most interesting supplements in ages.
London Terror Photos
Flickr.com’s hugely popular photo-sharing servers appear to have a hard time today. But if you’re patient you may get a glimpse at the the most recent shared images tagged with “London”.
London bombings Kinja digest
I’ve created a kinja digest with bloggers who cover the situation. It works half-decently. Possibly useful.
And I’ll recommend the Wikipedia coverage once again.
A Few Euros More
Just to inform everyone that our sisterblog – A Few Euros More – is continuing, and now has a more permanent URL. You can also find a latest posts thread near the top of the sidebar on Afoe.
Freedom Blog Awards
The results of the Freedom Blog Awards organised by Reporters Without Borders are in.
Reporters Without Borders selected around 60 blogs that, each in their own way, defend freedom of expression. The organisation then asked Internet-users to vote for the prize-winners – one in each geographical category.
Go see. There are also a couple of European winners in this competition that reaches beyond the English-language blogosphere.
Online Music Revolution?
I don’t know if this thing actually works, whether it will become the next big thing, or whether it is simply just another load of hype. It certainly looks interesting and do-able. What I do know is that this is the kind of thing we need here in Europe, and much, much more of it. I also know that half of these people are working just round the corner from me, here on the outskirts of Barcelona.
A Spanish Internet start-up that tracks how people listen to music on computers and other devices hopes to profit from enhancing the success of the online music business, its chairman said on Tuesday.
MusicStrands aims to grow by using its exclusive new technology to delve into listeners’ computers, mobile phones or i-Pods to help determine their preferences, not just what they purchase, and make recommendations. “You can have fairly crude forms of recommendation technology, which is just if someone picks A then you recommend B,” Chairman Derek Reisfield told Reuters. “We are going to the next level. We can personalize the recommendation.
Whilst we are on internet topics, this is what I am anxiously waiting for, cheap mobile broadband, and whilst we are on Spain, this promises to be hilarious.