WHEN Pam Spaulding heard from two contributors to her blog, Pam’s House Blend, that they couldn’t afford to attend the Democratic National Convention, she knew that historic times called for creative measures.

Getting convention credentials for her blog, a news site for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, was the easy part. As air fare, lodging and incidentals began piling up, paying for the trip to Denver became the bigger obstacle.

For Ms. Spaulding, 45, who works full time as an IT manager at Duke University Press in Durham, N.C., blogging is her passion, an unpaid hobby she pursues at nights and on weekends. So she called on her 5,500 daily readers to help raise funds: “Send the Blend to Denver” reads the ChipIn widget on her blog’s home page that tracks donations from readers; so far they have pledged more than $5,000 to transport Ms. Spaulding and three other bloggers to the convention.

Beginning Monday, hundreds of bloggers will descend on Denver to see Barack Obama accept his party’s nomination. Next week, hundreds more will travel to St. Paul to witness John McCain’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. But now these online partisans, many of whom are self-financed, must contend with all the logistical and financial hurdles just to get there ”” not to mention the party politics happening behind the scenes.

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Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” Sound familiar? Describing, in The Atlantic Monthly, his own struggles to keep his attention span from contracting like the wild ass’s skin in Balzac’s novel, Nicholas Carr cites a British study of research habits among visitors to two serious scholarly websites which suggests a more general problem: that “users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of ”˜reading’ are emerging as users ”˜power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

Almost seems? I don’t know about Mr. Carr, but I have no doubt that I go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense. The question is, how guilty do I need to feel about this? In his view, presumably, quite a lot guilty, since by reading online as much as I do I am depriving myself of the ability to read offline. He takes this insight to an even more alarming conclusion in the end, writing that “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” And if that’s the case for veteran readers, think how much worse it must be for the jeunesse dorée of the information age, if they never developed the habits that accompany “deep reading” in the first place.
It is these poor cultural orphans, for whom “information retrieval” online is the only kind of reading they know, who are the main concern of Mark Bauerlein in his new book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. One would think that a whole future in jeopardy would be too serious a matter for the flippancy of the rest of the subtitle: Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30. But Professor Bauerlein, who teaches English at Emory University and is a former director of research and analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, is not always sure just how much a matter of mirth “the dumbest generation” is, or isn’t. After all, it is not really their fault if, as he says, they have been “betrayed” by the mentors who should have taught them better. Yet he seems to agree with Nicholas Carr that what we are witnessing is not just an educational breakdown but a deformation of the very idea of intelligence.

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Firstly, accept my thanks for your wonderful website. I check it daily for the news and the frequently insightful comments. Although I am not an Anglican (I’m a Roman Catholic), I am deeply grieved by what is happening to the Anglican Communion. It must be bewildering to the faithful.

I have frequently visualized you at your desk assembling the daily blog. It must take a considerable amount of time, more than I probably realize. I know that I, and I’m sure many others, would be very interested to learn how you compile the stories, how much time it takes, how do you get permission to reproduce the entries, do you have any help, any problems, do you need funding, etc. etc.

This is a dire time for your church and you have much more important things to occupy your time than to respond to such a request. But, if you ever find the time, it would certainly interest me at least. Thanks.

Bishop [Sue] Moxley liked blogging so much she’s considering keeping one up full-time. “It was a good experience,” she said. “It meant that I had that time to reflect on what went on in that day.” During the busy conference schedule this meant blogging late at night, after others had gone to bed and before morning prayer at 6:30 a.m.

But what to blog about? Most bishops were writing to keep in touch with their dioceses and the details of the jam-packed conference were enough to keep them busy, including stories from the Eucharists, encounters with Archbishop Williams, and the best place to get a latte in Canterbury.

Some topics were more sensitive to blog about, however: not only the current tensions over homosexuality within the Anglican Communion, but personal details that bishops shared in discussion, including stories of persecution in their home countries.

“There was an agreement in my Bible study and indaba [mid-sized discussion] group that people would not share stories that people said could not be shared,” said Bishop Moxley. She also said she trod carefully around more volatile topics: “My strategy was to have [my blog audience] get a sense of what the day was like and the kind of topics we were dealing with, rather than give my own viewpoint on what should and should not have been said.”

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Type “buttermilk pancakes” into Google, and among the top three or four search results you will find a link to a detailed recipe complete with a photo of a scrumptious stack from a site called Knol, which is owned by Google.

Google envisions Knol as a place where experts can share their knowledge on a variety of topics. It hopes to create a sort of online encyclopedia built from the contributions of scores of individuals. But while Wikipedia is collectively edited and ad-free, Knol contributors sign their articles and retain editing control over the content. They can choose to place ads, sold by Google, on their pages.

While Knol is only three weeks old and still relatively obscure, it has already rekindled fears among some media companies that Google is increasingly becoming a competitor. They foresee Google’s becoming a powerful rival that not only owns a growing number of content properties, including YouTube, the top online video site, and Blogger, a leading blogging service, but also holds the keys to directing users around the Web.

“If in fact a Google property is taking money away from Google’s partners, that is a real problem,” said Wenda Harris Millard, the co-chief executive of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

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Some food for thought.

A hit tip in the blogosphere is an acknowledgement of the source where you got something. Blogs and websites that honor the unwritten code of the blogosphere, like Thinking Anglicans or Stand Firm or Episcopal Cafe, will occasionally give T19 a hat tip and we appreciate it. We try very hard to do the same (and to all those who email an idea and are terrified and say–please no hat tip!– we will never use your name without permission, the most you will see is initials in that case). There are, however, certain other websites that consistently borrow material from here and do not acknowledge it. Be aware that we know who you are and no–it is not impressive–KSH.

he Chinese government confirmed Wednesday what journalists arriving at the lavishly outfitted media center here had suspected: Contrary to previous assurances by Olympic and government officials, the Internet would be censored during the upcoming games.

Since the Olympic Village press center opened Friday, reporters have been unable to access scores of Web pages – politically sensitive ones that discuss Tibetan succession, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown of the protests in Tiananmen Square and the sites of Amnesty International, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers known for their freewheeling political discourse.

On Wednesday – two weeks after its most recent proclamation of an uncensored Internet during the Summer Games – the International Olympic Committee quietly agreed to some of the limitations, according to Kevan Gosper, chairman of the IOC press commission, Reuters reported.

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Check out both entries.

China said the number of Internet users in the country reached about 253 million last month, putting it ahead of the United States as the world’s biggest Internet market.

The estimate, based on a national phone survey and released on Thursday by the China Internet Network Information Center in Beijing, showed a powerful surge in Internet adoption in this country over the last few years, particularly among teenagers.

The number of Internet users jumped more than 50 percent, or by about 90 million people, during the last year, said the center, which operates under the government-controlled Chinese Academy of Sciences. The new estimate represents only about 19 percent of China’s population, underscoring the potential for growth.

By contrast, about 220 million Americans are online, or 70 percent of the population, according to the Nielsen Company. Japan and South Korea have similarly high percentages.

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Is there any question that as the first blogged Lambeth Conference this one is more interesting as a result? I commend the bishops for their blogging, and for the time and sacrifice they are putting in to doing it–KSH.

Yet another example–as if one was needed–of the importance and value of blogging. Watch it all.

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Ah…errr, gee, not one reasserter site on the list. Hmmm.

Since we are quickly approaching all-Lambeth-all-the-time mode, and since there were two notable rumors just having to do (broadly speaking) with American participation in Lambeth today (one being the item immediately below this one and the other spoken to by Jim Naughton on Episcopal Cafe) can I please remind everyone that when you come across information like this anywhere (and, yes, that includes this site) you learn to check it with at least three reliable witnesses before considering it true–thanks, KSH.

These are the 50 names who will play a key role in this historic period in the life of the Anglican communion, many of whom will feature prominently at this summer’s conference, which happens only once every 10 years and has never been so eagerly anticipated.

The panel [who selected the 50 names] includes: the Rt Rev Nicholas Baines, Bishop of Croydon; Giles Fraser, vicar of Putney; Rachel Boulding, deputy editor, Church Times; Jim Naughton, communications officer for the Diocese of Washington; the Rev Canon Dr Jane Shaw, Fellow and Dean of Divinity of New College, Oxford; Andrew Carey, columnist, Church of England Newspaper.

Check out the list and see what you make of itl.

Thousands of westerners are about to converge on China for the 2008 Olympics. When they log on to the Internet there, they may discover that connections ”” especially to certain foreign news sites ”” won’t work. They’ll be bumping up against what protesters have called the “Great Firewall of China.”

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Alex Payne, a 24-year-old Internet engineer here, has devised a way to answer a commonly asked question of the digital age: Is my favorite Web site working today?

In March, Mr. Payne created downforeveryoneorjustme.com, as in, “Down for everyone, or just me?” It lets visitors type in a Web address and see whether a site is generally inaccessible or whether the problem is with their own connection.

“I had seen that question posed so often,” said Mr. Payne, who perhaps not coincidentally works at Twitter, a Web messaging and social networking site that is itself known for frequent downtime. “Technology companies have branded the Internet as a place that is always on and where information is always available. People are disappointed and looking for answers when it turns out not to be true.”

There is plenty of disappointment to go around these days. Such technology stalwarts as Yahoo, Amazon.com and Research in Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry, have all suffered embarrassing technical problems in the last few months.

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The man who is credited with the invention of the world wide web is now looking ahead to a new and more sophisticated way of using the internet known as the semantic web. Sir Tim Berners-Lee explains.

Go here and scroll down to the segment at 0832 and listen to it all (about 8 1/2 minutes).

(ENS) Easier navigation, better search functionality, and a more modern style are a few of the changes visitors will see upon entering the newly redesigned Episcopal Church website.

To be launched on July 8, episcopalchurch.org highlights the four Mission Centers that now encapsulate much of the staff of the Episcopal Church Center as they continue to achieve new levels of service and collaboration.

“With the change to the organizational structure here at the Church Center we felt that the website needed to reflect that,” said Michael Collins, director of Digital Communication. “We’ve changed the entire look and feel of the home page and we’ve also created new pages for each of the four mission centers including their areas of mission and their staff.”

According to Wade Hampton, art director, visitors will immediately notice how the style of the website has changed and incorporates “a broader color palette.” He also said that the work, which began in late March, was aimed at making the site “more inviting and welcoming.”

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Unfortunately, the authoritarian governments of the Middle East are doing their best to hobble Web 2.0. By blocking the Internet, they are leaving the field open to Al Qaeda and its recruiters. The American military’s statistics and jihadists’ own online postings show that among the most common countries of origin for foreign fighters in Iraq are Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen. It’s no coincidence that Reporters Without Borders lists Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria as “Internet enemies,” and Libya and Yemen as countries where the Web is “under surveillance.” There is a simple lesson here: unfettered access to a free Internet is not merely a goal to which we should aspire on principle, but also a very practical means of countering Al Qaeda. As users increasingly make themselves heard, the ensuing chaos will not be to everyone’s liking, but it may shake the online edifice of Al Qaeda’s totalitarian ideology.

It would be premature to declare Al Qaeda’s marketing strategy hopelessly anachronistic. The group has shown remarkable resilience and will find ways to adapt to new trends.

But Al Qaeda’s online media network is also vulnerable to disruption. Technology-literate intelligence services that understand how the Qaeda media nexus works will do some of the job. The most damaging disruptions to the nexus, however, will come from millions of ordinary users in the communities that Al Qaeda aims for with its propaganda. We should do everything we can to empower them.

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Beyond e-mail, there are ever more ways to connect and communicate: text messages, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, IM and, for the old fashioned, phone calls. Help! How many connections can one person manage? How do people decide what is the best way to keep in touch?

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U.S. Cellular Vice President and COO Jay Ellison says his ban on Friday e-mails at the Chicago-based company came after he heard complaints from employees. But it wasn’t a cakewalk.

“I got a lot of push-back from a lot of people that I was nuts they’d have to operate that way, and I pushed back on them,” Ellison said. “I respect that push-back,” he told them. “But I heard the associates; we’re going to try this.”

Ellison says the company tried it for two and a half months, and everyone loved it ”” even those who didn’t like the idea at first.

“I think people would outright just freak out if we started e-mails back up on Friday,” Ellison said. “I know the front-line leadership would scream; I’d have a mutiny on my hands.”

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“Today a young person graduating from law school and joining a large firm in one of our major cities can look forward to perhaps three or four years of doing nothing but sitting in front of a computer screen reviewing e-mail and other electronic documents for litigation,” Withers says.

Although the quantity of documents is daunting, an electronic paper trail does carry an advantage. E-mails are much more searchable than paper documents. In fact, some companies now have proactive filters that can catch troublesome e-mails before anyone files a lawsuit.

For example, financial firms might look for the word “guarantee” ”” as in “guarantee a return,” says Cyndy Launchbaugh, who works for ARMA International, a nonprofit records management group.

Companies often can’t uphold such a statement, she says, so if the word, “guarantee” pops up in a company e-mail, the firm might check to make sure employees aren’t promising something they can’t deliver.

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Would-be revellers are using satellite images on the internet to find houses with swimming pools – and then turning up uninvited for an impromptu dip. The craze involves using the Google Earth programme, which provides high-quality aerial photos of Britain and other countries.

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E-mail is at risk of killing its own usefulness. Daily e-mail volume is now at 210 billion a day worldwide and increasing, according to The Radicati Group, a market research firm.

The burden of managing all that e-mail has prompted a backlash. One extreme reaction is “e-mail bankruptcy,” where users throw up their hands and erase their entire inboxes. Many admit the distraction makes it near impossible to get work done, or even socialize normally.

Kelly Kirk, who works for a trade group in downtown Washington, D.C., says checking e-mail comes between her work and her personal life.

“I’m constantly ducking my head under tables during events to check my e-mail. I hid behind a tree once when my boyfriend said I wasn’t allowed to check my BlackBerry,” Kirk says. To get “real work” done, she says she now turns off the computer and her BlackBerry.

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The onslaught of cellphone calls and e-mail and instant messages is fracturing attention spans and hurting productivity. It is a common complaint. But now the very companies that helped create the flood are trying to mop it up.

Some of the biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload. Last week they formed a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers ”” theirs and others ”” cope with the digital deluge.

Their effort comes as statistical and anecdotal evidence mounts that the same technology tools that have led to improvements in productivity can be counterproductive if overused.

The big chip maker Intel found in an eight-month internal study that some employees who were encouraged to limit digital interruptions said they were more productive and creative as a result.

Intel and other companies are already experimenting with solutions. Small units at some companies are encouraging workers to check e-mail messages less frequently, to send group messages more judiciously and to avoid letting the drumbeat of digital missives constantly shake up and reorder to-do lists.

A Google software engineer last week introduced E-Mail Addict, an experimental feature for the company’s e-mail service that lets people cut themselves off from their in-boxes for 15 minutes.

I think there are few snap your fingers or wiggle your nose answers to this struggle. What helps me is to schedule when to read email and only to read it during scheduled times. Read the whole article–KSH.

“The best way to predict the future”, the US computer scientist Alan Kay remarked in 1971, “is to invent it.” Pre-emptive description, however, ranks second best. The chief identifying criterion of the future is that it continuously steps back from us, making nothing about it, strictly speaking, true or false.

That malleability constitutes a great attraction to an author. The future’s other broad appeal to a writer, particularly an ambitious one, is that he can actually influence it. Try as they might, historians can’t (responsibly) change what happened. Futurists, however, try all the time to change what might happen. While many “cyberphilosophy” volumes purport to describe how the digital revolution will alter such familiar areas of life as politics, religion, ethics, art, law and romance, one can often spot a finger on the scale attempting to affect the results.

It comes as no surprise, then, that two Professors of Law, Daniel J. Solove (author previously of The Digital Person: Technology and privacy in the information age, 2004) and Jonathan Zittrain, both see storm clouds in the future of the digital revolution, if not a reign of terror, or that both have a dog in this fight of how things should turn out. Both of their new books, excellent and ultimately upbeat in their separate but related missions, will increase our literacy in their complex yet still intelligible fields.

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Buying a research paper online or just recycling a friend’s work might have seemed like a good idea to stressed-out students who’ve been crunching to finish spring-semester projects in recent weeks.

But in the escalating the fight against academic fraud, the work of even high school students is being judged using anti-plagiarism software familiar to their college counterparts.

“It is something that all the high schools need to have,” said Christine Phenix, coordinator of the International Baccalaureate program at Bowie High School in Arlington. The $2,300 annual licensing fee for the Turnitin anti-plagiarism software used on the campus is money well-spent, she said. “The rationale is that plagiarism is a problem worldwide because students have access to everything. It has a great deterrent effect.”

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