screenshot of video interview with me and Morten by BSTV about facebookA journalist from Aftenposten’s jobs and education supplement is about to call me to interview me about Facebook, so I’m checking up on some stats and such. And I had a geek at the interview about Facebook Bergen Student TV did with me and Morten a couple of weeks ago (see March 11, 2007) – they did a great job of editing it down, it came out excellent.

Students have been telling me that Facebook has exploded in Norway in the last month or so. Internationally, Facebook has also grown a lot recently – they had 6.5 million users in June 2006, before they opened the site up to everyone (even Norwegians and people not affiliated with a university or college) and they had 18 million users by February 2007. Alexa’s traffic ranking for Norway shows that Facebook is now the 18th most popular site in Norway, behind Gule Sider (10th) (the yellow pages, which also provides a good map search), YouTube (7th) and Myspace (15th) but well ahead of NRK (21st) or the University of Oslo (52nd) or University of Bergen (63rd). I can’t find a more recent percentage of college students in the US who are members than this one from 2005: at that point, 85% were on Facebook, which is an amazingly high penetration.

Facebook staff can even track people’s television habits and the commercial breaks based on activity levels on Facebook. Here’s a graph showing how Facebooks watch Grey’s Anatomy on Thursday nights.

graph showing Facebook activity

I was lucky enough to attend a course on how to do a TV interview this morning, with a professional media advisor, hired by the University, who wants more of us to dare to say yes to doing television – I’m trying out some of her advice now on focussing what I want to say. I’ll tell you more about the TV course later, now I want to go out into the glorious sun!

[Update March 28: Facebook is now the 16th most popular site in Norway, by Alexa’s count.]
[Update April 18: And now Facebook is the 9th most popular site in Norway.]


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Academics in Norway: Sign this petition asking for research-based discussions of how to use AI in universities

I just signed a petition calling for Norwegian universities to use research expertise on AI when deciding how to implement it, rather than having decisions be made mostly administratively. ,  If you are a researcher in Norway, please read it and sign it if you agree – and share with anyone else who might be interested. The petition was written by three researchers at UiT: Maria Danielsen (a philosopher who completed her PhD in 2025 on AI and ethics, including discussions of art and working life), Knut Ørke (Norwegian as a second language), and Holger Pötzsch (a professor of media studies with many years of research on digital media, video games, disruption, and working life, among other topics).  This is not about preventing researchers from exploring AI methods in their research. It is about not uncritically accepting the hype that everyone must use AI everywhere without critical reflection. It is about not introducing Copilot as the default option in word processors, or training PhD candidates to believe they will fall behind if they do not use AI when writing articles, without proper academic discussion. Changes like these should be knowledge-based and discussed academically, not merely decided administratively, because they alter the epistemological foundations of research. Maria wrote to me a couple of months ago because she had read my opinion piece in Aftenposten in which I called for a strong brake on the use of language models in knowledge work. She was part of a committee tasked with developing UiT’s AI strategy and was concerned because there was so much hype and so few members of the committee with actual expertise in AI. I fully support the petition. There are probably some good uses for AI in research, but the uncritical, hype-driven insistence that we must simply adopt it everywhere is highly risky. There are many researchers in Norway with strong expertise in AI, language, ethics, working life, and culture. We must make use of this expertise. This is also partly about respect for research in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and law. Introducing AI at universities and university colleges is not merely a technical issue, and perhaps not even primarily a technical one. It concerns much more: philosophy of science, methodological reflection, epistemology, writing, publishing, the working environment, and more. […]

screenshot of Grammarly - main text in the middle, names of experts on the left with reccomendations and on the right more info about the expert review feature
AI and algorithmic culture Teaching

Grammarly generated fake expert reviews “by” real scholars

Grammarly is a full on AI plagiarism machine now, generating text, citations (often irrelevant), “humanizing” the text to avoid AI checkers and so on. If you’re an author or scholar, they also have been impersonating and offering “feedback” in your name. Until yesterday, when they discontinued the Expert Review feature due to a class action lawsuit. Here are screenshots of how it worked.