Hi all,

The flow of articles has continued over the summer. We were delighted to publish:

Courts, communities and the 'big society'

Murder in Notting Hill

Riots, aggravated shopping and 30 years of opportunism

Observaciones de la Comisión Asesora para el Diseño de la Política Criminal del Estado Colombiano: a la Iniciativa Sobre la Imposición de Cadena Perpetua a Ciertos Delitos Realizados contra Menores

and we put out these two new articles in our new Education section:

Closing down creativity and standardising knowledge in education

Crime, anti-social behaviour and schools in Britain: are all schools 'at risk'?

This summer was a strong phase in the development of CrimeTalk as an educational resource and e-zine for people interested in crime and social justice. Why? How?

1 We now have Correspondents and Commissioning Editors for the USA, Germany, Brazil and Colombia - Curtis Jackson-Jacobs, Bex Houghton, Fernanda Fonseca Rosenblatt and Sergio Angel - all distinguished and talented people voluntarily bringing news, information, articles and reports from their countries to our global educational network in criminology.

2 Our format is more effective now we have reorganized the front page to carry more indications of the content linked into it or 'behind' it. The new highlight modules across the top, under the painting, all contain links to articles 'inside' CrimeTalk.

3 We are a technological pioneer in embedding a video search engine into the site. Accessible from the front page, you specify a topic to search and within seconds you will be offered a list of hundreds of clips from Blinkx's massive video library, including major news channels. All students and scholars can now get used to having customized, focussed, visual information at their fingertips.

4a Our use of Twitter, as a means of information dissemination and retrieval, has worked well in bringing us and of course useful information to the attention of many people. CrimeTalk articles now are not only publicized through my tweets but also by our 'followers' re-tweeting them to their 'followers'. In this way, recent CrimeTalk articles have been brought to the attention of nearly 2,000 people or institutions. Our own followers reached 499 today.

4b Our daily Press Cuttings and Tweets convey huge amounts of information and are adding up to a great resource for scholars and students. If you check in daily, you will be able to pick up on some piece of news/info somewhere. All these items are stored in the Library.

5 We improved the sign-up and log-in procedure so that it is now much simpler for new users and all integrated with the Forums and CrimSoc.

6 We installed a BlogRoll, which highlights our favourite blogs and provides you with digests of their recent content. Under the Research menu we now also provide digests of the latest articlesin selected academic journals! Do tell us if there are blogs or journals you'd like available to you this way.

7 We now have our first research diary, from Josh Freistadt, and like any grad student he would welcome all comments: Research Diary: Anti-panhandling: Criminalizing poverty and governing generosity? The opportunities for research and graduate students on CrimeTalk are good and increasing. For example, the WikiLeaks project by Gregg Barak's grad students at Eastern Michigan U. was a huge success: GradProjects: WikiLeaks: will the public remember?

We are building a sustainable platform for strong growth before maximizing our marketing, but we have hugely improved our SEO, search engine optimization, increasing our accessibility and improve the help we give users to get round and use the site, see: Navigating the site.

In the pipeline: our first e-book publication will definitely happen next month, and I hope we will develop our new Education section. CrimeTalk will aim to be of more direct use to students of criminology, criminal justice, law etc through this section.

While this is a labour of love, it would be nice to cover my costs. To that end, I have installedDonation buttons in various places - if all regular users donated as little as £5 a year that would halve my costs. I will apply for grants for CrimeTalk and we will soon become a publisher selling our own e-books, but we may not succeed and the costs do not stop. The more you donate the less we have to use advertising.

Remember: please buy your books through CrimeTalk if you are in the UK. That's a great way to support us. If you can encourage your students to do the same that would be fantastic! Again, it would help cover my costs.

As always, many thanks for your support and interest!

Colin Sumner, Editor

Other published items this summer

In the new In Brief section:

Punishing juveniles in the USA: the death penalty and life without parole

800,000 Americans kicked out of their homes by bankers and speculators

Homelessness and offending

US Drones kill 54 as insane US foreign policy acts as recruiting agent for "terrorists"

Cops fatally shoot another young black man in San Francisco

Protesters drive back riot cops in Woolwich

Riots in UK - No Surprise!

Unauthorized riot photos

London riots: the limits of Left and Right

Top 50 Criminal Justice Blogs

We archived a range of articles published elsewhere, such as:

The Economic Argument for Legalization

Moral welfare: the addicts on welfare benefits debate

Criminality and Colonial Anthropology

Capturing the faces of the drug trade in Afghanistan

Colleges of Crime

Limited Education Behind Bars

Finally, I put many new Press Cuttings in the Library, such as:

London's rioters are Thatcher's grandchildren

Behind the riots: what young people think about the 2011 summer unrest

CIA shifts focus to killing targets

Getting away with murder

Neo-Nazi mobilization in Dortmund on anti-war day

Purists Gone Wild

Fear of chaos and crime dogs Brazil's 2014 carnival

Why is crime in the US at a historic low?

Southfields dad committed suicide after housing benefit cut

The Hackney Heroine tells why she confronted rioters

Jon Snow: One law for the rich and another for the poor?

UK banks fund deadly cluster-bomb industry

How America criminalised poverty

Riot girls: "showing the rich we can do what we want"

Public perception of crime higher despite falling figures

Judge gets 28 years for 'kids for cash' scandal