What not to sell on eBay...

Ooops

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7581540.stm

Internet Penetration Stats in UK

The Office for National Statistics has just published its report on Internet penetration. It has almost plateaued now, with significant digital divide discrepancies. See Mossberger et al for a discussion of the digital divide, and particularly how to define it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7582081.stm

Interesting Hacking Article

The Democrats aren't the only people having a convention this week. There's a nice little piece in The Times about hacking that is well worth a read.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4606524.ece

Scott

"Poor earning virtual gaming gold"

Research from Manchester University has found that 500,000 "poor" people (this is how they are described by the BBC - mainly from China) are earning money by developing virtual gold. Basically a player can pay someone to boost their character rating, their virtual clothes, or in the development of property etc in second life.

The report is here: http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/idpm/research/publications/wp/di/documents/di_wp32.pdf

The BBC story is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7575902.stm

Scott

Copyright and Internet Regulation: Scrabulous

The popular facebook app Scrabulous appears to be dead - the owners of scrabble having taken legal action for breach of copyright... this raises lots of interesting questions. Can you blame the owners, or is it all hot water? I would think it might have helped the sales of scrabble... If you are interested in such issues, please look at the work of Lawrence Lessig.

Scott

Encouraging Young People to Vote?

Xbox will shortly allow people to register to vote and a forum will be used to elicit players opinions which will then be passed onto the candidates. Will this make any difference? Or is it a clever bit of marketing?

Meanwhile, WWF/WWE is running a "Smackdown Your Vote" campaign: http://vote.wwe.com/. The Dems had previously recorded speeches - complete with wrestling puns.... http://www.wwe.com/content/media/video/vms/raw/2008/april22-28/6927230

Scott

Downing Street website

As some of you may know, thousands of people have signed a petition to make Jeremy Clarkson PM via the e-petitions website. Someone within Downing Street decided to make a "joke" response (is that worse than tokenism, or are they right to interpret it in this way?)

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1184614595/bctid1743114113

Is this a waste of taxpayers money, or a sign of a sense of humour? A C4 news piece (link above)discusses this and notes that the Downing Street websites fails to meet the government's own guidelines on website accessibility. I've previously published a couple of articles about the Downing Street site that you might want to look as well if interested.

The telegraph article below has the video in full:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/2590109/Downing-Street-wastes-money-on-anti-Jeremy-Clarkson-video.html

http://www.youtube.com/DowningSt