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April 25, 2005

Internet As Public Sphere

The New York Times has an interesting article today on another aspect of the Internet: as that of an underground public sphere, an illicit community of political dissension. Following the China-Japan uproar over the content of Japanese school textbooks, China's government is apparently starting to get worried about the rapid spread of information and nationalist sentiment over the Internet and cellphones. An excerpt:

"Yet many analysts agree that screening the Internet and cellphones is far more difficult than the practice of simply ordering state-controlled newspapers or television stations to censor a subject.

One reason is that a growing number of young Chinese have multiple e-mail accounts, including some with providers based outside China that are not filtered.

In an informal test last week, the words "anti-Japanese protest" were typed into an online messaging service. The response was: "Your message contains sensitive or uncivilized words. It cannot be sent. We are sorry." Similar problems arose with Chinese e-mail accounts. Yet the same phrase went uninterrupted via cellphone text messaging.

About 27 percent of China's 1.3 billion people own a cellphone, a rate that is far higher in big cities, particularly among the young. Indeed, for upwardly mobile young urbanites, cellphones and the Internet are the primary means of communication.

'If people can mobilize in cyberspace in such a short time on this subject,' said Wenran Jiang, a scholar with a specialty in China-Japan relations, 'what prevents them from being mobilized on another topic, any topic, in the near future?'"

Posted by chan at 08:20 PM

April 22, 2005

Google Personal Search

The latest development in the "Google: Good or Evil?" debate is Google's launch of My Search History, a new tracking tool that keeps a detailed history of a person's web search. All you have to do is to create a custom account (Gmail users automatically have access) to search over your personal query history. People using the new tracker can search their own history of web pages found on Google, use a calendar to navigate to any day in their search history, and get additional information from search results, such as when they last viewed a page and how often they've seen it.

More information on privacy concerns here:
Google Personal-Search Tracker Raises Privacy Concerns

And on the flip side, a more balanced article about the pros and cons of My Search History on ZDNet:
Google search gets personal

Posted by chan at 02:49 PM

April 19, 2005

Which Search Engine Is Better?

This site allows you to compare the first 100 hits of any search term in Google and Yahoo. The dots on the top and bottom end represent links to the first 100 hits in Google and Yahoo respectively, and the blue connecting lines link the same hits. What I found interesting was the fact that you seldom get parallel lines, regardless of how common the search term is (for example, try "sex" and "microsoft"). This means that depending on what search engine you predominantly use, your online experience can vary dramatically. There hasn't been a lot of emphasis on this phenomenon, as far as I know; people tend to assume that as long as you're on the Internet, you're having more or less the same experiences as most other web surfers, i.e. you come across the same sites and you refer to the same sources of information. But apparently that's not really true!

Posted by chan at 12:50 AM

April 17, 2005

More On The Dangers Of Blogging

Remember how I mentioned in class that I had to take down my personal blog because my future employers found it on the Internet and warned me about it? Well, yesterday, its replacement (the URL can be found in twiki, if anyone's interested) was named blog of the week in the entertainment section of my country's national newspaper. It's a completely bizarre occurrence because my blog is the most boring thing on the web; I only talk about school and clothes. Anyway so I had to go through my blog for the second time in six months and take out all potentially hazardous references (e.g. complaints about my future job, any identifying information). I am now convinced that nothing is private on the Internet.

In research news, I've received three interview responses so far... hopefully the rest will come in within a week or so and I can start putting things together and doing followups if necessary. I sent out the questionnaire over the weekend (I wish I'd managed to get it out by Friday afternoon instead of Saturday though) and hoped that maybe that would encourage people to fill it out more quickly. We'll see how that goes...

Posted by chan at 08:04 PM | Comments (1)

April 16, 2005

Appeal Tactics

As of today, I've received 16 responses from people willing to help me out with my project, and I'm extremely grateful to all of them. I took Dionne's advice from class and capitalized on the fact that I was a pitiful overworked graduate student desperate for respondents (uncomfortably close to the truth), and I think that definitely earned me sympathy points, as did my decision to personalize each email to describe what I found most commendable about each of my subjects' blogs. One of my respondents even called me on it, saying:

"Excellent mix of flattery, salesmanship, bonding (via Singapore) and appeal to my sympathy for penurious graduate students. And, as a former penurious graduate student, I can sympathize."

I think it also helped that I gave them my full name and Professor Norvell's email contact information for verification purposes. I have a stat counter on this site that allows me to see how people get to my site, and after I sent out my preliminary emails I found that a lot of people had googled "fiona chan harvard" and this blog came up as one of the hits, so hopefully it helped allay any fears that I might be some random spammer struck with the brilliant idea of posing as a student researcher.

So I finalized the questionnaire today and sent it out to all of the 16 respondents, and hopefully I'll be getting answers soon. I foresee the need to conduct some follow-up interviews because I was forced to make the first questionnaire as broad as I could in order to cover all the bases. At least it's progress, though!

Posted by chan at 10:56 PM

April 13, 2005

Research Progress!!

I spent the last few hours composing and sending out responses to the rest of the blog authors on my list (I've pasted my emails and blog comments on the twiki) and within 20 minutes I received four email responses from people who are willing to participate in the research! It's all a bit overwhelming, but I'd feel irresponsible if I waited until tomorrow to reply to these emails, so I'm typing individually-tailored responses to each of the emails despite my midnight hunger pangs.

Posted by chan at 12:34 AM | Comments (2)

April 08, 2005

Bayraider

If you're an eBay user (or if you just need some amusement), check out Bayraider, a blog about weird eBay listings ranging from a fake George W. Bush Drivers License to a bizarre Ugly Stick. Brought to you by UK blog network Shiny Media.

Posted by chan at 10:49 PM

Research On The TWiki

I've put some stuff about my research on the twiki at long last, including the list of blogs on the left. The list is longer than it used to be and I've taken out a few blogs that haven't been updated for a while. The criteria I used to select these 20 blogs out of the hundreds out there is also listed on the twiki. I figure that even if I get only a 50% response rate, that will be plenty to work off (after all, Annette Markham only wrote about her experiences in one chatroom). One thing that worries me a bit, though, is the demographic bias in my sample. About 75% of the blogs are written by white Americans and I think only about 10-15% of the blogs have a female author. I'll start with these first and keep looking for other blogs written by non-American-white-males.

I'm also thinking of splitting the blogs into two categories: those that have primarily political/news content, and those that are more social/cultural/personal. I'm not sure if this will be a significant divide or not, though, so we'll see as the project progresses.

Next up: a finalized list of questions I'll be asking my interviewees over email. So far I've contacted a few of them to see if they'd be interested in being interviewed in the first place (with all the requisite disclaimers and warnings as stated in the Human Subjects Approval). Haven't heard back yet... but hopefully there'll be some responses over the weekend.

Posted by chan at 04:26 PM

April 07, 2005

The Thing About Blogs

... is that real life often gets in their way. Just back from spring break and recovering from a cold, but I just sent out some emails for my project and hopefully there'll be responses to put up here and on the wiki soon!

Posted by chan at 01:01 AM | Comments (2)