What wikileaks has shown us

Julian Assange, the man brave enough to be the public face of wikileaks.org

The unfolding Wikileaks story has been fascinating to watch, not so much for the 'secrets' which it revealed in the recent batch of leaked documents but in the other things its shown or confirmed to us:

(1) When the establishment wish to undermine a man they will try to attack his 'sexual reputation'. I suspect a similar tactic has been employed, in an even more disgusting way, with the case of Gareth Williams (ie the speculation around his sexuality and the way such speculations were then used in the press to deflect from the possibility that he had been murdered.)

(2) Equally, its confirmed - rather depressingly - how the public interest, or at least the interest of the media, is more easily captured and held by personal speculations about one man, than about vast potential injustices, such as misconduct by governments and the military. The public is willing to overlook deaths of thousands of innocent civilians in favour of lurid tittle-tattle about one man's sex life.

(3) Vast amounts of sensitive American diplomatic communication are insecurely available to thousands who have access to a particular intranet.

(4) Various huge companies like Amazon, Mastercard and Paypal will bend to the wishes of the US Government.

(5) The web group 'Anonymous' demonstrated that large numbers of disaffected techno-savy boys and men (I think its safe to say that they have a majority male composition) are able to co-ordinate to attack powerful groups when they feel it necessary. This, perhaps, hints at future struggles for Internet freedom between the class of techno-savy ordinary men around the world, and governments and multi-national corporations.

All of which is not to say that I have unreserved support for Wikileaks. I wonder whether they should perhaps stick to exposing true injustice, as opposed to also publishing a wider range of diplomatic 'gossip' type material, which, through embarrassing governments like the US may have the unintended consequence of creating even more secretive and draconian governments. Equally, I feel a lot of sympathy for Bradley Manning, the 23 year old who is alleged to have leaked the latest documents and who has been held in solitary confinement for weeks and weeks, facing, effectively, a possible life imprisonment if found guilty.

3 new web tools: Wolfram Alpha, Google Wave, and Bing

Wolfram Alpha (mostly) well liked so far 

Wolfram Alpha is a 'computational knowledge engine'. A lot of people got confused and compared it to Google. But its not a search engine. Instead, it compares and contrasts (mainly) numerical data in novel ways, according to questions that you can write in plain English. In other words, as long as your question is phrased in the right way, Wolfram Alpha will understand it and pull together information from disparate sources in order to answer it. 

Google Wave is set to replace email

But won't be released until later this year. I'm pretty excited about this new service as I love Gmail.

Microsoft Bing: Much better than expected

A direct competitor to google, it seems. Fully launching on June 3rd. 

101 most useful websites

101 most useful websites

The 'Anonymous' activists

A group of activist hackers called 'Anonymous' have declared war against the church of scientology. Is this group and their activities a good model for the men's movement? Indeed, given that they are almost certainly all men, can we, in a way, consider them as part of the men's movement? Perhaps the psychology of these men is not a million miles away from the psychology of the typical men's rights activist?

2 new sites for men

Renegade's Rant: A man fed up with the misandry that has become common and accepted practice in Western society

Happy Bachelors: Bachelors going their own way

Talent or sex appeal?

Two million YouTube hits for girl who pokes fun at Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears

Whilst her targets are worthy ones, I don't find her funny at all. Has she enjoyed so many hits because shes genuinely talented, or just because videos of young, attractive girls in their bedrooms will always get people to click on them?

Get this free note-taking software today only!

No catch!:

EverNote, which probably is the best note taking software after Microsoft OneNote, is available for free if you download it within 24 hours.

Become a web genius

I don't often do this, but I feel compelled to recommend something to you. Last week I bought an ebook online called 'The web genius handbook'. I found out about it because I'd already purchased a product from it's author last year (a piece of software called 'Search automator', which is a kind of very powerful search engine tool, and is also pretty good) and had signed up to his mailing list.

Basically the web genius handbook is a PDF ebook with nothing else but tips for little-known tricks and tools to use online. I use the Internet a LOT, but I didn't know most of these tips, and a lot of them I'm going to put into practice and should be very useful to me.

Recently I happened to be in Oxford street and went into the big 'Borders' bookshop to look at some computer books (I ended up buying the 'missing manual' for Powerpoint - 'The missing manual' is a pretty good computer/tech. book series), and I decided to look through the 'Internet guide' type books, and, I must say, they were all pretty bad. Not one of them was as good as the Web Genius Handbook.

Some of the topics it covers are:

Communications tools
Understanding and using RSS
Making full use of Google's range of free services (I didn't know about many of these tips)
Productivity tools
Search tools
Mapping tools
Etc

Take a look: The web genius handbook

A useful instant messaging tool

If you use instant messaging, I highly recommend the site Meboo, as it allows you to sign in to your accounts and chat to people without downloading the software. Perfect if you are using someone else's computer, or a work computer.

Gender Guesser

In 2003, a team of researchers from the Illinois Institute of Technology and Bar-Ilan University in Israel (Shlomo Argamon, Moshe Koppel, Jonathan Fine, and Anat Rachel Shimoni) developed a method to estimate gender from word usage. Their paper described a Bayesian network where weighted word frequencies and parts of speech could be used to estimate the gender of an author. Their approach made a distinction between fiction and non-fiction writing styles.

Thanks to 'yga' for bringing this to my attention.

Feminists don't give you the full truth on porn

Some feminists are pro-porn, some are violently anti-porn. About the only thing that tells you is that feminism is incoherent and basically stands for nothing except a woman's right to do whatever she wants and to condemn or praise things randomly and expecting the taxpayer to ask "how high?" whenever she shouts "Jump!"

The thing that annoys me with the anti-porn fembots is the way that they use such violent and hateful language to attack men who look at porn images of women, yet they stay silent on the subject of photos of men and teenage boys in gay porn, or on the subject of femdom porn.

I wanted to find some way to get an over-view measurement of what is popular in the world of online porn. I found a site called 'Clips4Sale', which claims to be "The number one downloadable clip site on the net", featuring over 100,000 downloadable clips. This is where the real consumption of porn is going on these days, not some little seedy shop selling DVDs, which made such a soft-target for the harassment feminists in my previous post. Looking through the site there are a bewildering array of different genres and fetishes. Including some as strange as just videos of women's feet on car pedals. Not even naked feet, feet with shoes on.

If we take Clips4Sale's claim of popularity to be true, then it gives a very interesting picture of what genres of porn are most popular online. They maintain a list of their 50 top stores - and it seems that by this they mean their most popular stores. Around 40 of these top 50 are some variation of female domination, including sites where the man is being hurt, worshipping the woman's feet, being tied up and controlled by a woman (sometimes with the guy being naked while the woman is clothed), naked men having their genetalia kicked or trampled, and so on.

Only 1 of these sites featured the domination running in the other way. It was a site featuring women tied up by men. And was actually pretty tame.

If this site is any measure of porn popularity online then around 80% of the video porn consumed online is some form of femdom or features the man in the weaker position sexually, either being forced to worship the woman or being sexually degraded/humiliated.

Isn't this radically different from the picture that feminists paint of porn?

Blogger as an information management tool

Google's free blogging system (www.Blogger.com) is a great way to not only run a traditional style blog - and hence communicate your ideas to an audience online - but also to manage information for yourself while your surfing the Web. I, for example, now have about 6 blogs on my Google Blogger account (and they make it very easy for you to manage them all from one central 'dashboard'). There's better blogging software out there, but Blogger is just nice and convenient to use, and the fact you can access all your blogs from one dashboard - and from any computer in the world (that has 'Net access) just simplifies things enormously. If you use multiple computers, such as a computer at work and one at home, or a desktop and a laptop, this makes things particularly convenient for you. Also, some new features have been added to Blogger recently that make it even better, such as being able to specify categories of posts, and to be able to customise the design and colours of the template you are using.

If you are anything like me then you probably not only surf online a lot but have lots of bits and pieces of information (links, ideas, photos etc) that you want to be able to save and access from anywhere, or to share with others. This is where blogs are so useful. I think of them as a sort of online notepad. And as blogger is free to use, there's no limit on how many you can create, or how much information you can upload. And whilst real notepads are easily lost, forgotten, and only viewable if you are physically present in front of them, blogs suffer from none of these limitations.

I think many people still see blogs as a sort of unsophisticated-man's version of a website. But they can be so much more. For example, one of my blogs is only viewable by me (a great feature on blogger is you can limit who can see your blog - another way you might like to use this is just create one particular blog that can only be viewed by your friends or family members). I use this as a sort of homepage for myself, with my favourite links, a sort of private diary, notes, lists of goals, and products I want to get at some point in the future. If you created a personal blog like this, you could even set it as your browser's start-up page.

Other things you can do with blogs are: use one as a photograph archive, use one to pass on information/tips to your best customers, use one to archive posts you make on Internet forums, use one to save your favourite articles.

(Note: If you DO use blogger to create a range of blogs for yourself, I recommend taking off the 'profile' section from the top of the sidebar as this allows anyone who is viewing ANY of your blogs to see the whole list of all your other blogs, and you might not want that.)

Also see: Great time to start a blog

New search tools

Observant readers of CT4M will have noticed that I've added a 'Categories' feature to the site. What this enables you to do is click on a particular category title (either at the end of any particular post, or for the full list of categories see the side-bar to the right) and find posts on the same subject.

I hope this increases the usefulness of the site as it enables you to browse and search on the categories which are of most interest to you.

I still haven't added labels to all my previous posts, but I'm getting there. Also, in the near future I hope to add a lot of the pre-April-2006 material to this blog section of the site, so that will become searchable too. This will include my interviews and older articles. In the meantime, if you wish to read through that material, simply click on the 'Links and archive' link under 'pages' on the right side-bar.

Co-incidentally, here are a couple of new online search tools:

Online image searching: Polar Rose, a tech firm based in Sweden, Tuesday unveiled a new image search tool that it plans officially to launch early next year. The company said that its image search technology is different from others since it relies on 3D mapping techniques to recognize facial patterns.

I've been looking for something like this for ages.

Online audio searching: Pluggd has found a way to index podcasts, talk shows and other spoken-word content. The company's service then allows users to search the audio files for specific words.

NextGenCode

A series of ads have been appearing on YouTube for a genetic engineering company called NextGenCode. For example, this one:



But its all a hoax, to promote the new Michael Crichton novel, out next week, called 'Next'.

YouTube and the death of TV

YouTube and the decline of traditional TV: Without being overly simplistic or melodramatic, the state of the Old Commercial Broadcasting Model can be summarized like this: a spiraling vortex of ruin. Fragmentation has decimated audiences, viewers who do watch are skipping commercials, advertisers are therefore fleeing, the revenue for underwriting new content is therefore flatlining, program quality is therefore suffering (Dancing With the Stars. QED), which will lead to ever more viewer defection, which will lead to ever more advertiser defection, and so on.

Also see:

How a 19-year-old actress and a few struggling Web filmmakers took on TV.

Great time to start a blog

Its a great time to start a blog now. Not only is Blogger extremely easy and convenient to use, but the new version of it is gradually coming online, adding additional features, such as the ability to add category tags to your posts, and far greater control over the design of your template. I personally have run some test blogs on their new system and I loved it! Why haven't I switched over CT4M to the new system yet? Well, unfortunately because I host this site on my own domain, rather than an address at blogger.com they haven't yet been able to switch me over. But its going to be pretty soon now.

Also, if you do start a blog, you may want to try to make a little bit of money with it. I don't think its easy, but like anything, the more effort you put in the more likely you are to succeed. Anyway, you might like to check out this article.

The other good thing about blogger is that it enables you to very easily put up Google Adsense ads. You'll need to test these on your own particular blog to see whether they are worthwhile, but they could be a good way to earn a bit of money from your blogging. My impression is that they work best with a reasonably high traffic site on a niche subject area.

Anyway, there are plenty of benefits to having your own blog, such as being empowered by having an audience to express your ideas to, and also just having a way to regularly get things off your chest. I'm sure other 'men's issues' bloggers will agree that sometimes just typing out your frustration about the latest episode of misandry can be of great help in dealing with your anger!

Are forums a waste of time?

In general Internet forums seem to be a royal waste of time, and remind me of the proverbial myriad monkeys at keyboards: occasionally random pieces of intelligence appear, but mostly producing drivel.

The men's forums are often a little better than other forums, and there are some which can be interesting to read. Nevertheless, even at their best, I can't escape the feeling that they waste the time and energy of men who could otherwise be working away at things that would have a bigger impact.

One way in which forums ARE useful is in generating a sense of camaraderie amongst men, who frequently claim that prior to their discovery of the men's sites, they thought that "I was the only one having these thoughts." Additionally, they are good for hammering out arguments and sharing information. Occasionally they have even been useful in co-ordinating assaults on our enemies on other forums. However, I have to say that just often, or more often, when someone suggests some REAL activism on a forum, the weight of other members falls down on him and smothers him with reasons why he SHOULDN'T. I feel fairly confident in saying that many an activist's energy has been eaten up in this way by the very forums that you would think would be supporting him. Also, just the shear amount of energy spent by many men on such forums represents a sort of pipe-leak in the system, bleeding away the pressure that could be directed more profitably.

Another reason why I think forums are a waste of time is that many of them are poorly designed, and have a revolving-door quality about them: new people constantly coming in and the same old arguments have to be made again and again for their benefit, whereas one argument posted prominently on a website would achieve the same effect at a fraction of the overall expenditure of energy. Essentially excessive forum posters are acting like foot soldiers when they could be pilots of their own jet aircraft carrier nuclear warheads!

Where this works best is where new men are coming into a forum regularly and get to discuss afresh the issues. This situation provides the sort of individualised interaction that a website cannot, and represents a sort of ministry. Where it becomes a drain of resources is on those forums that welcome the opposition, under some pretence of being balanced, and the men are forced to constantly use their energy to defend their position. This kind of defensive behaviour is probably the worst consequence of forums. Limited debate with the enemy has obviously been of benefit. Standing toe-to-toe with our foes and trading blows with them has taught us an enormous amount, particularly in terms of the locations of their weak spots, and indeed the fact that they have so many. But these benefits soon reach a point of diminishing returns at whose juncture compulsion takes over, and the man feels he has to go on defending his position, beyond learning anything new or contributing to any significant and lasting result.

And even when great posts are made on forums, they often soon get buried under the weight of new posts (a problem which is admittedly circumvented on those forums well designed enough to prominently 'file' good posts or reference-worthy information for rapid access).

Lastly, there is the problem common to most forums that unpleasant and often pointless conflicts break out, and you get the distasteful situation of one man often finding himself under attack from a mob of others, often unfairly. Such battles can get quite personal and are hard to simply walk away from. They are psychologically draining and hard to forget, making the man go back constantly to check what else has been posted.

Undoubtedly there have been some benefits to the men's forums, but I would say they have been vastly outweighed by the downsides, and overall, I believe, the men's forums have delayed progress that could have occurred if the same levels of energy had been funneled into creating and linking up many men's websites and blogs.

78 year old starts a blog

One of my favourite writers at the Times, William Rees-Mogg, now has a blog.

Do we surf too much?

The average person spends two and a half hours per day watching TV. I've written in the past about what a waste of time this is.

But have we swapped one time wasting activity with another...?

The average Internet user in the UK now spends, on average, 164 minutes online. How much of this is just idle surfing and constant checking of emails?

A few caveats are needed here: firstly, how do you actually calculate how much time you spend online? In theory you could say that I am online almost all the day, as I'm at the computer most of the day and the computer is always connected to the web. Equally, many activities like reading the news and listening to the radio can now be run through the web, so is it really sensible to see the web as something totally distinct? It seems to me that the web is going to become increasingly prevalent, and via media other than the desktop PC.

Nevertheless, much of our web-surfing is undoubtedly just habitual. Discipline is clearly called for. Us Humans do have a penchant for activities that put us in a trance state, with no need to THINK. Alcohol and drug consumption, TV, excessive meditation, excessive exercising. In particular, nightclubs, with their flashing lights, repetitive music and lack of conversation seem to return their patrons to the state of 'booming, buzzing confusion' of a baby or even a fetus in the womb.

Internet Dating

Internet Dating

Whilst Internet dating does offer a useful option for finding people who are intellectually compatible with oneself, it has severe limits in allowing one to judge whether the 'chemistry' of personal attraction is present and it also carries the risk of letting you imagine that the person is something that they are really not. In either case the solution is to look to meet local people and don't leave it too long before you actually meet up.

One thing I dislike about dating websites is that it applies the paradigm of 'internet shopping' to the world of personal relationships: allowing the women to search for the men who meet their criteria for high income, profession, height etc, as though he were a commercial product like a pair of shoes.

Nevertheless, while one instinctively recoils from the formalisation of relationships into some kind of digital algorithm that pairs people up, there is most certainly a need for an easier way for people to meet and join together to make stable families. Currently the dating system is very messy and tends to result in a small minority of socially-aware and extrovert 'bad boys' monopolising the majority of the young women for casual sex.