Blogging has its narcissistic side, as any honest blogger will tell you, as does writing in general. Upon seeing that a Word Counter might illuminate my poor writing style and repetitious use of certain words, I ran the Ubiwar posts and comments through this neat bit of software. The top 20 or so words reveal certain fixations once the usual guff is stripped out from the results of this unscientific exercise in egotism:

1. virtual - 65 occurrences

2. information - 55

3. war - 47

4. terrorism - 44

5. internet - 43

6. world - 41

7= blog - 39

7= cyberspace - 39

9.  al-Qaeda - 38

10. here - 36

11. links - 34

12. Second Life - 33

13= new - 31

13= image - 31

13= article - 31

16= media - 29

16= wikipedia - 29

18= military - 28

18= law - 28

18= time - 28

18= net - 28

18= speed - 28

Can’t say I’m surprised by any of them, except that the presence of ’speed’ probably reveals a latent preoccupation with Paul Virilio. I was expecting a couple of horrible adverbs, like ‘actually’ (2) or ‘probably’ (3) to crop up more, but ’tis not the case.

Last year, a similar test by a fellow blogger revealed a correspondent obsession with information technology, and it appears nothing has changed. In response to the previous exercise, I wrote: ‘I actually have very little interest in the geeky minutiae of computers and the internet, but a great deal of interest in the significance of the technology.’ That view persists.

Quick announcement: in a couple of weeks I’ll be starting my new position as Research Assistant for the Countering Online Radicalisation project at the International Centre for Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College London. This is the project outline:

Violent extremists have become skilful at using the Internet to spread propaganda, radicalise and recruit. According to some estimates, there are thousands of extremist web sites on the net, with countless web forums and blogs through which ‘online jihadists’ and other extremists (for example, neo-Nazis) meet, communicate, and promote the use of terrorism and political violence.

Thus far, governments and law enforcement agencies have done little to stop the rise of ‘online radicalisation’ - partly because there seem to be no good solutions. Blocking sites may be regarded as censorship, and there are doubts as to whether such ‘hard’ approaches can ever be effective. Conversely, ‘soft’ approaches (for example, creating web sites to promote tolerance and cultural understanding) take time until they deliver tangible results, and it is not clear how they would deter those determined to ‘seek out’ extremist material.

How feasible are ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ approaches? What are the problems with each, and how could they be overcome? What are the most innovative solutions developed by entrepreneurs and grassroots initiatives?

The research will be carried out in 2008 and involve interviews and a series of stakeholder events, especially with internet innovators, entrepreneurs, grassroots initiatives, industry representatives, and officials.

Our conclusions will be presented to governments, the media and the industry, and be disseminated widely.

That’s a bundle of questions and issues to get to grips with and I’m very much looking forward to doing so. I’ll undoubtedly be bringing the research to bear on what appears here, and vice versa, and by the end of the year we’ll have a policy document to show for it. All feedback and suggestions gratefully received at all stages of the process.

In the meantime, I’ve got to go to hospital tomorrow, so I may be out of action for a couple of days - expect posting to be light, if at all. A good weekend to all.

For anyone who’d noticed that this blog wasn’t displaying properly in Internet Explorer, I can tell you that the problem is now fixed. I had issues with a widget … To ensure this doesn’t happen again, I prescribe Firefox. Why does anyone bother with IE? Alternatively, buy a Mac.

Anyone visiting this site and using Internet Explorer may have noticed some kind of serious rendering problem. I haven’t a clue how to fix this. Can anyone help? I’m running IE7 (v.7.0.5730.11) on Windows XP SP2. The site seems OK in Firefox and Safari but never using IE I hadn’t noticed the bug before it was pointed out to me …

The title says it all …