Wholesale broadband prices to be 14.75 pounds per month from April 1, BT said. That's more like it. A retail price of £20 pm is within reach of many more people. I'll predict that the wholesale price will drop to £10 and the retail to £15 before the end of the year, at which point demand will explode. Now the big question is whether BT can deliver to meet that demand.

Dan Gillmor : My readers know more than I do. And if we can all take advantage of that, in the best sense of the expression, we will all be better informed. Now there's a scary thought for a mainstream journalist.

A Blogger Manifesto, Dvorak, Another ass-backwards story on blogging, help johhny get a clue, bloggers never criticize one another,  Boy, There's a Whole Lotta Meta-Blogging Going Down today.

When search engines roamed the Earth

"Hi! I'm from Google. I'm a Googlebot! I will not kill you."
"I know what you are."
"I'm indexing your apartment." [LOL and thanks again, bOing bOing]

The MIT Tech Review discovers blogging. So blog this, please. You want it? You got it!

Adbusters: The Zen TV Experiment : For 10 minutes simply count the technical events that occur while you are watching any show.

Interesting. The Nokia D211 combines 802.11b and GPRS in a single PCMCIA card. [thanks, Hack the Planet] Hedging their bets or providing realistic alternatives? You use 802.11 in the city and GPRS at reduced speed when you're out of town?

AlterNet -- CORN: Office of Strategic Lying? :
"So the goal is to maintain a level of doubt regarding all Pentagon statements. It confuses the enemy."

"Doesn't it confuse the American people?"

"We're not at war with the American people, sir."

A judge has ordered the RIAA's members to prove that they own the digital copyrights to the music that circulated in Napster's network. If they can't prove it, they won't have standing in court. Ha ha [thanks, bOing bOing] Seems entirely logical to me. But how hard is it to prove that "Birtney Spews - Whoops, I got pregnant" is actually a rip off from the song and not some satirical dance floor mix?

NTK... answering the age-old question: who was Playmate Of The Month when you were born? Except I'm too old

RICO! There was a interesting rant about standards yesterday on the De-centralization mailing list. Someone was suggesting (only partly in jest) that there really ought to be a RICO racketeering suit brought against the major standards bodies. I think there's a white paper or thesis to be written here on the life cycle of standards and standards bodies. Maybe something like The Hype Curve or The Chasm.

It's been fascinating watching and contrasting the developments of XML-RPC, SOAP/WSDL/UDDI, RSS, ICE/NITF, Jabber, Gnutella, Rosettanet and a few others over the last couple of years. There's a lot of similarities here with the life cycle of online communities. Although that's something of a truism as an active community is a pretty basic requirement for success in a standard. But we still haven't really worked out how to kick start a community to order. And similarly there doesn't seem to be a clear roadmap on what it takes to kick start a standard to order.

There's another couple of truisms here that "standards are useless without implementations" and so "There are only de-facto standards". Everything else is just academic (mutual) mind games. Way too many of the standards that Todd was ranting against have no reference implementations or code, let alone an active community of developers pushing implementations forward and in the process validating the standard.

I'm still amazed by the clarity, precision and elegance of the early RFCs. They feel like polished and cut diamonds that have had everything extraneous stripped away. Just enough to get the job done and *no more*. I think we could do worse than go back and review the RFC process and style and apply it to the current efforts.

Don't you just love it when the Net throws this sort of thing up?

Is the Web Services hype curve reaching the tipping point? It certainly seems to be for MS. We get Steve Gillmore in Infoworld;  the media hounds crying wolf again, and again, and IBM releasing WoW (Web Services on WebSphere). And now Verisign want to own Web Services security. You'd think there'd be a third way between MS and Java? But when even Bruce Schneier (who is definitely not stupid) starts talking in the Cryptogram Newsletter about "Microsoft's SOAP" and how tunneling SOAP through firewalls on port 80 is BAD, BAD, BAD, you realize that it's all just noise and there is no reasonable analysis out there. And that's all just a sample from three days. I guess it's time to just put your head down and write some code.

This all seems horribly familiar to me. In the dot-boom (boom) years, you couldn't move for pundits telling everyone about how B2B would be revolutionized by auctions. Or was it procurement. Or maybe private netmarkets. Or that dealing with the last yard delivery problem was the only thing holding back B2C. Or portals, push and P2P. And that stuff was pretty easy to understand technology. This time around we're pumping a technology path that very few people understand.

It's like Burningbird says. Just Deja Vu, all over again!

I woke up this morning wondering what the Internet sounds like.

I started with an Orchestra. The mainstream media are the massed strings playing basically the same melody. The weblogs and private news sites in the woodwind section play a counterpoint. The tech sites in the brass section keep butting in. The analysts are playing the timpani and keep trying to change the tune.

What's strange about the music is that although it plays continuously, musicians keep coming and going. Through the day, the whole orchestra changes as daylight circles the globe. At 6pm GMT it's almost exclusively Californian, but at 6am, it's a glorious mishmash of US nightbirds, Australians and European early risers. At the weekends it plays sotto voce and takes on a more left field, jazzy feel.

Curiously, there are several orchestras playing in adjacent halls, but they can hardly hear each other. Just occasionally somebody opens an adjoining door and a burst of foreign sounds (Samba, Gamelan, The Marseilles or an Oompah Band) breaks through.

But I can't hear a heart beat.

Are The Illuminati watching your computer, and you need to use morse code to blink out your PGP messages on the numlock key LED? Then get Tinfoil Hat Linux, a bootable floppy for accessing your PGP keys on an untrusted PC.

Worried that your next door neighbour is beaming Psychotronic Mind Control Rays at you? Then you need an Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie

The Secret Lives Of Numbers Delightfully cool Java Applet that lets you scan the relative popularity of particular integers in text from a large sample of the web.

There's a way of thinking that's developing in the media that to do Web Services you must fall into either the Sun or the MS camp with Java or
.NET. or maybe IBM. The media loves "Battles" between "Titans" as it makes good copy. But does it actually have any relation to the real world?

This totally ignores, Perl, PHP, Python, Apache-SOAP, PocketSoap, Glue, BEA, Borland, Mozilla, and on and on and on. See http://www.soapware.org/directory/4/implementations for a listing of ~70 toolkit implementations.

While the Titans Clash, us mice are getting on with writing code.

What is XWT -- The XML Windowing Toolkit? Great quote on the website. "I mainly think people should stop wasting time pontificating and philosophizing about open source and just write some good code."