British Group Calls for Internet-Free day. Today, heh-heh! Already I'm getting flack from the wife...

Serious work getting done on SOAP toolkit interoperability including WSDL interop. SOAPBuilders Interoperability Lab

Excellent .Net for newbies article written from the POV of Mac programmers. wiltgen.net | articles | A .NET primer for Mac users :

it includes this piece from IBM.

Web services
The best definition of web services that I could find was written by Doug Tidwell of IBM:
Web services are a new breed of web application. They are self-contained, self-describing, modular applications that can be published, located, and invoked across the web.
Web services perform functions, which can be anything from simple requests to complicated business processes. A simple web service might provide stock quotes or process credit card transactions.
Once a web service is deployed, other applications (and other web services) can discover and invoke the deployed service.

For lovers of conspiracy theories everywhere, There is no Bovine Illuminati  Fnord.

An alternative weblog update ping serviceblo.gs. Similar to weblogs.com

BlogRolling.com A Blog Index.

Blogger Pro - The detail.

The End of Free : Perhaps not was the right answer. As far as I can tell, it's no longer even an option to have an ad-free Yahoo! Group. It seems I'm not the only one to be getting irritated by YahooGroups.

More little teeny robots. Unfortunately these are still in the design phase. Nanowalkers are "fully autonomous and are being designed to make nearly 10,000 movements per second. They will be able to move in three dimensions, with precision as much as 10 million times better than current assembly robots. [thanks, bOing bOing]

Davd Rogers also points us to an article by Lawrence Lessig that argues that the legal strictures on copyrighted material are holding up broadband acceptance. Much as I'd like to see changes in the copyright law, I'm not convinced that that's what's stopping customer demand for broadband. [thanks, JOHO the Blog]

The only thing holding back broadband is price.
- It's too expensive for the users
- It's too expensive for the providers.
This *will* change.

All this talk about content and other factors is just hot air designed to deflect people from the two core issues above.

Geeknews : I don't wanna be on any plane with some terrorist who gets himself root to the planes navagational system.

You have till Sunday night (Jan 27) to make your voice heard about the MS Anti-trust settlement. There's a good description of what to do, here.

Last mile Broadband via the Sewers This one had me giggling. I started imaging this sort of Mission Impossible crossed with Cronenberg scene where a fiber optic umbilical comes out of the toilet bowl or out of the sink. However I guess they have a point. London's sewers are fine pieces of Victorian engineering, they're everywhere, and almost every building already has a connection.

The good Doc suggests I think it's reasonable to want the stuff of infrastructure to be transparent. Note that I'm not talking about the stuff that depends on infrastructure, such as the entire commercial software business upwards of operating systems. I'm talking about infrastructure. [thanks, Doc Searls Weblog] I tend to agree. But there's a problem. As we talk more and more about connected applications and toolkits, where do we draw the line of what is infrastructure and what is not? OS and TCP/IP stacks seem easy. How about Browsers? How about Email readers? IM clients? Personal web servers? As it becomes routine for every app to expose a TCP port and listen on it, does this mean that all of it should be transparent?

Lord of the Rings, by Gene Roddenbury (and others) "The Halflings, cap'n, they will na take the strain"

ReadMe : Crisis of the (Virtual) Commons
Despite the common wisdom that interactivity is one thing the Net does well, some mainstream news sites treat their public forums like bastard children. What are they afraid of?

Community is Dead; Long Live Mega-Collaboration (Alertbox August 1997) Another rather superficial and rather outdated analysis from Jakob Nielsen.

I must not post about that blog. I must check my spelling. I must not post about that blog. I must check my spelling. I must not post about that blog. I must check my spelling. I must not post about that blog. I must check my spelling. I must not post about that blog. I must check my spelling.

It's time to talk about Yahoogroups. YG is the largest of a number of hosted mailing lists systems. Between them they've successfully taken all the pain out of starting and running an email mailing list. They handle subscriptions; bounces; they have a searchable web archive and so on. They've added some extra features like calendar, shared file store, a simple dbms. All the things that you can cobble together with Majordomo, Listserv, Mailman. But done moderately well in one place.

This has been so successful that there are a vast number of mailing lists hosted in these places. For many of us the first thing we do on starting a new project is to start another YG.

The price we paid for all this was a small amount of advertizing. And in the past you could pay a little ($50?) per year to have this removed. but in the last couple of months, Yahoo have bumped up the advertizing levels to the point where it's getting really intrusive. There are pop-under windows and adverts inserted every 5th page refresh when viewing messages. The advert appear at the top on send only lists. And as far as I can tell, you are no longer able to pay to have them removed from the emails.

Then there's the question of archives. Already there are archives for the old eGroups that have been lost as the list folded before the Yahoo merger. There is no mechanism now for backing up a YG list. And there is a vast amount of knowledge and thought wrapped up in these archives. If YG ever disappeared (not that there's any suggestion that it's going to, tomorrow) this would all be lost. Do we think that YG will last 20 years? How about 10 or 5? Will Google step in and rescue all the data, as they did for Usenet?

What to do? Is it time to push for a GPL set of code to replicate Yahoogroups and deliberately force them out of business by de-centralizing? Is it time to at least write a YG scraper that can archive a list to a dbms?

This has all been prompted by a recent post to another mailing list (not on YG!).
http://www.drop.org/node.php?id=763
http://kakkune.com/base/post.php?post_id=34
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndic8/message/1255
It's also prompted by a bunch of code I've written to mirror a mailing list to a module in Drupal.