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Tools that map weblogs by geographic location can enhance communication as bloggers see the real-world connections between themselves, according to “Get caught mapping” in Guardian Unlimited. A London bloggers tube map shows bloggers in relation to the nearest subway stop.

The Bloggers’ tube map puts a sense of place back into cyberspace. By doing so, it has the potential to help a group of people doing things online recognise themselves as a real world community and build closer links.

. . . When the net first went mainstream, people talked up cyberspace as some sort of alternative global space . . . . Where you were in the real world wasn’t supposed to be that important.

Now, things are beginning to move in the opposite direction. People are beginning to see that location is important . . . . A location-enhanced web will get people out of the house and give them new ways to interact with the world around them. The net might be a tool for localisation as much as for globalisation. . . .

“The revenge of geography” from The Economist mentions weblogs only in a paragraph but offers a comprehensive list of new technologies that create connections through geography - geocaching, location-based encryption (very interesting) and location-based information services delivered through cell phones.

Google’s Sergey Brin talked Blogger AdWords in an interview with Esther Dyson reported on by Jeremy Allaire. Excerpt (via Scripting News):

The major focus now is getting Blogger into their [Google's] infrastructure, including their ad infrastructure, which can really improve both the user experience of ads in Blogger as well as the contextual linking of blog content to ad content.

I’ve been watching the AdWords posted atop ThesisBlog to determine whether keywords in my posts drive Google’s AdWords selection. Right now the AdWords are . . .

Visual Log File Analyzer
Easy log file analysis in minutes. See your site’s traffic. Free trial

Your Turn On The Soapbox
Come blog with us on just about any topic. We’re open 24 hours a day.

. . . which is interesting because just a few moments ago I was checking the deservedly low Extreme Tracking usage statistics on my infrequently updated Fulwider’s Food and Travel blog.
I’m heading toward the conclusion that it may be my surfing habits, not my blog posts, that are determining the AdWords atop ThesisBlog.

Blogger Bias Research on Chemical Weapons Stories
Andrew Baio just posted a short study on how bias affects news story link selection on weblogs.

Recently, I noticed that several webloggers that discussed the suspected chemical weapons plant found in southern Iraq on March 24 weren’t mentioning those claims turned out to be false, even after the story was retracted . . . .

I thought this particular example would be an interesting case study to study how bias affects story selection on weblogs. So I searched Technorati for weblogs that linked to the four most popular URLs . . . about the chemical plant. Starting with a list of 148 weblogs spanning the socio-political spectrum, I located the relevant entry on each site and searched for followups or updates.

In brief, here are my findings. 113 weblogs linked to the original story, but didn’t follow up with another entry or correct their existing entry in any way. 28 weblogs linked to the original story, and later posted a correction or other addendum. 7 weblogs only linked to the story after it proved to be false, but didn’t link to it when the news originally broke.

If you look at the sites, it appears that conservative weblogs tended to only link the original report, liberal weblogs tended to only link to the correction, and mixed and group weblogs linked to both.

More interesting reading is found in the comments added to the post, written by some of the bloggers Andrew studied.
Andrew is the son of a fellow student in my Mass Communications Theory class at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She (Andrew’s mom) has her own weblog, but didn’t tell me about it even though it’s quite interesting. Promoting her son ahead of herself: You’ve got to respect that.

Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society has an interesting project going. Among other things, they’re going to host weblogs for anyone with a harvard.edu e-mail address and host weekly in-person discussiong meetings about blogging.

I hope someone blogtranscribes the weekly meetings.
(Via Scripting News)

The Kern County (Calif.) schools superintendent uses Manila weblog software to power a beautifully designed and full-featured site. (via Scripting News)

Bryan Bell designed the site and has this to say: “This completes the transition to Manila we started 2 years ago. The homepage was last on the list, because we decided to do it back to front. We converted every department in the organizations and nearly all of our client schools. I must have trained 300 people on how to manage their Manila site.”

The AdWords now above BlogSpot-hosted ThesisBlog are (topic background here):

Hosting
Business Web Hosting Solutions for Small Businesses. 24/7 Support!

No Limit Hosting $9.95
8 years in biz, own our own data center, control panel, no usage cap

Please let me know which AdWords you see. E-mail jmfulwider at hotmail dot com.

There’s interesting blog talk, upon which I may comment later, in Cory Doctorow’s transcript of the Social Software panel discussion at PC Forum 2003.

Blogger (and Traditional Journalism columnist and frequently misspelled last name owner) Dan Gillmor got the new “guaranteed spam free” e-mail provider Mailblocks to change its terms of service, which allowed the company to spam its customers (!). Founder Phil Goldman responded and acted roughly two days after Gillmor’s first post appeared.
Mailblocks’ updated privacy policy still looks a little spam-friendly to this legal layman.

Technorati proves its uber-goodness every day. The latest example: Technorati’s link cosmos for ThesisBlog shows inbound links from my restaurant reviews and travel stories blog, Fulwider’s Food and Travel. This is not, as one might suspect, intentional shameless self-promotion. It’s shameless stupidity; I’ve been accidentally posting ThesisBlog entries to Food and Travel. Didn’t pay close enough attention to my w.bloggar editing window. I’ll delete the erroneous entries soon, which should bring ThesisBlog’s inbound links rating down to an accurate two. (Thanks for the links, Doc Searls and Newsisfree.)

Some new developments on the BlogSpot AdWords front (topic background here):