The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce, (RSA) in partnership with Canon Europe, have unveiled a seven-meter tall robot next to London’s City Hall. This project attempts to encourage the technology industry to take more environmental responsibility.

The so-called WEEE man, is made of electronic waste such as lighting, medical and household appliances, and symbolises the amount of electronic waste an average UK citizen discards in a lifetime – 90% of which currently goes to landfill.

In 2006 the EU will introduce WEEE (Waste, Electrical and Electronic Equipment) legislation, to put the financial responsibility upon manufacturers to recycle their electronic products. The WEEE man is part of a campaign to highlight this legislation. It also aims to make people more conscious of the environmental damage that electronic waste could have in the long run.

I went to the City Hall for a closer look this morning and had a chance to talk to some of the people passing by.

“I had absolutely no idea that one person could generate such amount of waste. I think this initiative will truly make a difference. We ought look after our planet” Shelia Dez, said.

“Interesting project, but I have my doubts to whether or not it will change the way big companies deal with electronic waste and environmental schemes. I sadly believe that is not in the companies’ interest to protect the world.” Carl Turner said.

“I saw it on TV and came straight down from Kent, I think the statue is actually quite dangerous and fragile, it looks as if it could fall on our heads any minute. I really don’t like it,” Alan Ramsy commented.

Today the RSA, also launched an educational WEEE man website where you can learn more about the benefits of recycling and gain advice on what you can do to help. The WEEE man will be standing at the South Bank for a month.

This is a curious note. Today, Ladbrokes.com will launch the Big Bird Race, highlighting the plight of the near extinct Albatross. The eighteen tagged birds Albatrosses; The Ecologist, The Ancient Marine, and Ocean Spirit, among others, will be released from the southern coast of Tasmania and will race to South Africa while being tracked with satellite technology. The birds are expected to arrive at the Cape of Good Hope around the 5th of August.

You will be able to watch the race from Ladbrokes.com ‘Grandstand’. Alternatively the event can be watched live at Frankie’s Italian Bar & Grill, 3 Yeoman’s Row, London. All raised profits will go to future seabird conservation projects.

In the chaotic and fast experience of urban living, we may fail to look carefully to our surroundings. Creativity is certainly all around and proof of this is the overwhelming amount of inner city art.

A New York based, Wooster Collective website, funded in 2001, allows users to look at street art and graffiti from Bangkok to Madrid, without having to leave home. It also contains updated events, books and bars listings. All the pictures and comments are posted by artists or anyone who finds something eye-catching on the streets. The site is not comercial, rather it aims exclusively to be a space for sharing and showcasing art from all over the world.

In going through the site today, I found it interesting to see how people express themselves in different ways. Today’s homepage page, for instance, features an artists from Prague, Australia and Barcelona who all use different colours, materials and shapes in their art- highlighting that cities affect people’s creativity and the way they perceive the world.

Other exciting places to look for street art and graffiti are www.graffiti.org and www.ekosystem.org.

Continuing on from our earlier post we decided to have a quick look a more in-depth look at what the party are up to online. to find out what you may have been missing over the last few weeks. . .

After looking at each of the three main party web sites full marks go to the Liberal Democrats, for their kennedycampaign.org weblog (although we’ll keep schtum about their main site). Whilst not written by Charles Kennedy himself, the site makes no claim to be. A small team, led by James, the “Battlebus blogger”, keep the site updated with posts and photographs. There’s an informal tone to the proceedings (with some great candid photographs that offer an alternative view on the campaign), and as well as allowing comments on their posts, the site staff have made an effort to engage with them and answer questions. It is updated practically daily, so if you fancy a slightly different look at a campaign on the move, we can highly recommend kennedycampaign.org.

The Conservatives fair less well; there is no mention of how their own campaign is going on their website apart from a few press photographs and non-specific news updates. They do show their slight digital awareness by having a page of blog links, but there is no personal flavour to the site other than this.

The Labour site is a little better (once you’ve got past the hideous “election pledge” splash screen), with a link to “Tony Blair’s campaign diary”. Unfortunately, the last person that seems to have had any contribution to the diary is Tony himself - the prose is curiously detached and reads much like a press release. There’s also a tendency to put up “video diaries” when, as anyone who’s actually used the internet knows, plain text would be a lot better.

If this is the best the parties can do between them in 2005, though, it does make you wonder how well they will all do in 2009.

Just in case you missed it yesterday, the Usability Company revealed the results of the best party political website. The study, which considered usability, accessibility and content of the sites, positioned the Labour website first, followed by the Tory’s, the Liberal Democrats in third, and finally, the Green Party fourth.

The study showed, disappointingly, that all the party websites were a case of ‘style over substance.’ For instance, they found that the Conservative site showed the picture of Tony Blair more often than the one of Michael Howard, which made the site confusing for users. Moreover, the survey found the Liberal Democrat website not well structured and difficult to navigate.

In going to each of these today, I felt that the difference between the sites is actually minimal. They are all simply designed and, with the exemption of Liberal Democrats site, not visually appealing. As regards content all of them practically offer the same information, tend to show the images of rival candidates and feature a similar structure.

I was strangely pleased to note this morning that my home town of Cardiff, specifically the constituencies of Cardiff Central and Cardiff North, has the highest percentage of broadband take-up in the England and Wales.

The analysis carried out by Point Topic aimed to discover the realities of the digital divide in England and Wales. The results show that although Wales’ two largest urban areas, Cardiff and Swansea, have the greatest take up, the rural constituencies of Wales, such as Meirionnydd Nant Conwy, have the least.

None too startlingly, the report concludes that there are two forms of divide: geographic and socio-economic. Stating: “As geographical availability improves, concerns about the socio-economic divide are starting to increase. Broadband lines and Internet access are much more likely to be found in more prosperous homes. Usage falls off sharply in older and less well-educated families - less than 10% of households headed by people over 75 have Internet access compared with well over 50% for the country as a whole. Low take-up by some groups prevents society from taking full advantage of the benefits of the Internet. Children in poor families, for example, will be even more disadvantaged in their education without proper access to the Internet.”

For more indepth reporting on broadband in the UK regions visit the New Statesman’s dedicated website on the topic.

A quick update on last Friday’s entry . . .

Over the weekend the Irish chancer, as he describes himself, who bought popebenedictxvi@hotmail.it launched his own weblog: cyber-pope.blogspot.com. He claims that his misadventures on eBay led him to form a new religion - Confusionism - and will be using the site (amonst other things) to develop his new found faith.

Newly elected Pope Benedict XVI may have trouble checking his e-mail, as people are quickly snatching up e-mail addresses and URLs in the pope’s name, reports the BBC News website. In an act of generoisty, the New Statesman has offered the new pope his very own New Statesman e-mail acount, should he want it. After reading this week’s Leader, however, we doubt the pope will be keen on associating himself with the magazine.

The race to cash in on the papal election gained attention when Vincent Flood, 27, a journalism student from Dublin, put popebenedictxvi@hotmail.it up for sale on the online auction website eBay.com. Flood, who is a non-practising Catholic studying in London, said he just did it for a laugh. “I wasn’t really thinking about it. I definitely wasn’t sitting by my computer waiting for the announcement,” he said. The current high bid for his auction item is £80.

Flood is not the only one trying to make money off of the pope’s name. A Canadian seller is asking $100,000 for popebenedictxvi.com, and another eBay listing is offering two for the price of one - popebenedictxvi@catholicemail.com with popebenedictXVI@usa.net at a starting bid of $4.99. Popebenedict.de, popebenedict16th.de, and www.popebenedict-16.com are also up for sale.

Tuesday’s election of the new pope has also seen a slew of memorabilia put up for sale on eBay, reports cnn.com. EBay already has at least 68 items up for sale, including fridge magnets, prayer cards and clocks bearing the likeness of Pope Benedict XVI. One seller is asking $2,499 for an autographed photo of Ratzinger taken in 1978.

“It was almost immediate that we started to see Pope Benedict items and memorabilia come onto the site,” said Hani Durzy, a spokesman for eBay, which is located in San Jose, California. “Right now, much of the world’s attention is on Pope Benedict and so it is not a surprise for us to see numerous Pope Benedict listings on the site.”

In the general election of 2001 voter turnout reached an all-time low of 59%, and some think that number could fall below 55% this year. A recent poll of 3,000 O2 active users, aged 18-24, revealed that only 38% intend to vote. In an attempt to boost voting, 02 has launched a site on its mobile portal to promote involvement in the democratic process, reports PublicTechnology.net.

The Electoral Commission sponsored site aims to raise awareness and understanding about the electoral process by providing O2’s 3.8 million active users with a comprehensive information resource for anyone with questions about the elections, especially first-time voters. This includes a complete guide to the election, with information on how to find your polling station, how to vote, how to obtain a postal vote and a host of frequently asked questions.

Becky Lloyd, Campaigns Manager at the Electoral Commission commented, “It’s enormously important that we try to reach the electorate through a variety of communication platforms. It’s important that we communicate with the younger electorate in particular through a medium with which they are comfortable and familiar and mobile phones are a good way of doing this.”

Unfortunately, this service can only be accessed via the active O2 web portal, which limits its influence. The new service can be accessed here.

The BBC’s “Creative Archive” project - which will offer BBC material to the public to use, non-commercially, as they see fit - has gathered many mentions in the press and around the web in previous months, although there’s been relatively little to show for all the talk. That’s all changed, with the launch of the Creative Archive Licence Group site.

The site’s main purpose is “to keep you up to date with how the BBC and the other partners in the Creative Archive Licence Group will make programmes available under the licence“. A “roadmap” for future development is currently available from the site. It shows how the archive will take shape and roll out to the public in slowly growing stages. The pilot scheme is scheduled to take 18 months.

The project’s primary goal for now is to develop and refine a licence under which Creative Archive content (to be supplied by organisations including: the BBC, Channel 4, the British Film Institute, and the Open University) can be distributed. This may not sound very exciting, but it is key in the provision of such archive material; the licence material is offered under needs to limit potential use of the material (so that the creator’s copyright is still of value) but also legally allow use of the material by third parties. The scheme is similar to Creative Commons, and the License Group acknowledge the influence of the CC licenses on their own.

It may seem a slow start, but already material is emerging. The BFI have now launched their own Creative Archive site that will host any material they release under the licence. Currently, a few silent films from the early twentieth century are available.

The team are treading carefully, as they are still learning and considering how best to implement the project. After all, there’s never been a scheme quite like the Creative Archive. If successful, the Creative Archive could set a precedent for other projects worldwide. The pilot scheme launches soon; hopefully there will be even more exciting developments to report on in the coming weeks.