Monday, December 20, 2004

Welcome to the Participatory Politics foundation Another new organisation on participatory issues. RSS feed here. 9:53:28 PM    comment []

Pious parishes are in rural retreats Apparently where I am, out in rural Sussex, there's likely to be far more churchgoing than where I used to live. 9:49:39 PM    comment []

MUMMEEEE! The Scared of Santa photo gallery. (via MeFi) 9:45:18 PM    comment []

Rights? Who needs them? From the 'only the guilty have anything to fear' department: almost 1/2 of Americans polled for MSNBC believe that Muslims living in the US should have their rights restricted. Interestingly, the (to me) less atrocious idea of infiltrating of civic and voluntary groups (something I'm sure MI5 do over here right now) was much less popular - only 29%. 9:41:43 PM    comment []

Feedster claim, please ignore. 9:38:30 PM    comment []

The OSCE's media freedom guide The OSCE have published a Media Freedom Cookbook. 9:33:44 PM    comment []

Advice for the budding writer John Scalzi's 'Utterly Useless Writing Advice' isn't. 9:23:37 PM    comment []

Academic journals - why so expensive The people at MeFi are rightly complaining at the o450 ticket on a subscription to the International Journal of Web-Based Communities. I can recommend the Journal of Democracy at $32 a year for individuals. 7:51:40 PM    comment []

The wisdom of markets Crooked Timber looks to squash a spreading error - the idea that electronic markets predicted the US election better than the polls did. The actuality - that the markets were as inaccurate as the polls - indicates to me both the reliance of markets on available information and common wisdom, rather than anything more ethereal; and the primacy of polling data in the US political newsline. Are there alternative means of sampling public views than opinion polling? How reliable is it? Where is the political bias? 7:33:46 PM    comment []

Citizen journalism - Dan Gillmor speaks An interview on OhMyNews International with Dan Gillmor, who recently quit regular journalism to start a citizen journalism venture. (via Power of Many) 7:19:11 PM    comment []