Why do lots of blogs have little smileys in gif form? . But more to the point why are the gifs on their side? Is this some nostalgic longing for the good old days of ascii art and non-proportional fonts? ;-) Talking of which I need a better non-proportional font for reading email. I'm bored with Courier New. Can anyone recommend one in Truetype format (with a pointer?)

The total software, services and hardware opportunity derived from Web services will catapult from $1.6 billion in 2004 to $34 billion by 2007, according to research firm IDC. You know, there's something quite comforting to be working in an area that is right on the hype curve again. Go back 3 years, substitute "Netmarkets" for "Web Services" and we were awash in the same headdlines. It got so silly that I used to have a section in a newsletter I was doing that had a title "The X Market will be Y big in Z years". Let's hope we don't go down the same route and blow it all this time around.

Google News Google has a news search site (in beta). Link [thanks, bOing bOing] This is a sitter for RSS. Can we get Google to start producing RSS natively? 

Here's a little tip I picked up from the end of an article in The Register. When you can't be bothered to find the URL for a link, just add these words to the end of the article. (Google can be reached here). Or in other words, STFW, idiot.

Cool robot of the week from Nasa is just so cool! [thanks, bOing bOing]

Radio has an update to yesterday's update. New feature: Automatically Generated Links. This is the feature Julian Bond has been patiently waiting for.   In the documentation page, it says, "What if an item has a Title but no Link?". To which I have to reply. "What if an item has a permalink and no title?" Which is surely the general case. Now I'm not currently using Radio and maybe I've misunderstood and it already does this, but I'd like to see Radio users generate RSS with the permalink in the link tag by default and for them to have the option to do something different. And there not to be any linkage with whther there's a title or not. At the moment, it looks like this only happens if they also enter a title. Guess I'll just be patient for a little while longer.

Blogging your way to knowledge :: Dotcom Scoop : I am a promiscuous Internet tart that doesn't like being told what to read.

The readers reply to Orlowski's piece on bloggin in the Register. Blog almighty! Your take on the techno-utopians' triumphalism [thanks, The Register] One of the best comments asks where Orlowski's blog is, seeing as he says "we" a lot. Well have you got a blog, punk? Well have you? Maybe we should ask the same question of Dvorak?

New (Radio) Feature: Titles and Links in Radio-generated RSS.  It's good to see Radio now supporting the title and link tags in the RSS it generates. It would be even better to see Radio provide an optional setting to auto-fill the Link tag with the Permalink of the item. Exactly as CNet do in the example quoted on the description page for the new feature.

I read a number of Radio generated blogs in RSS. I'd like to be able to blog about posts I see without having to visit the site and wonder around trying to find the permalink, so I can point back to it. Curiously, Scripting News is one of the few that does include a permalink in the Description tag. It seems to me that most of them don't although I'm not sure if this is Radio's default behaviour.

At the end of last week, I went live with a new site for Ecademy at http://www.theecademy.com. The focus is on E-Commerce and Web Services, primarily in the UK. The site uses a number of our favourite technologies.

RSS News import from 60 or so feeds, grouped into topics

Slashdot style articles and comments on web services topics

RSS export of content generated on the site

Group Blogging, somewhat like O'Reilly

Blogger (& Drupal) API for blog input

Automatic Weblogs.com ping 

A link to WSindex, a directory of Web Services resources on the net

Needless to say, if anyone wants a similar niche portal for some other industry or market, I'd be happy to help set it up. For money! ;-)  

Following my rant last week, here's a Java-based Passport client. It lets a Java based web site put in Passport sign in support for their users.

BWahhaahhahahaha! MS refuse to ship a PERL interpreter with XP and IE6. Quick, sue them for...  ONE BILLION dollars! It's not fair they refused to ship a Python interpreter. Sue the bastards. There's no PHP interpreter shipped with XP. Call the lawyers. Back in the real world, they stopped shipping a JVM and licensing Java from SUN. So SUN sues them for 1 billion Dollars! So the poor consumer has to download a 10Mb install instead. Except that they haven't upgraded to the latest JDK this week, so it's another 10Mb download that leaves the old JDK still installed. And there's some Borland code on the machine which brought it's own JVM and JIT so that's another one. What's wrong with this picture? Can't SUN compete by just shipping better code, dammit? Macromedia seem to be able to manage this with Flash and Director, why not SUN?

But seriously now folks. There's a number of things that you just can't do in HTML with plain old Javascript especially when the document model[1] isn't common across all browsers and platforms. Like build a decent wysiwyg html editor to replace the brain dead TEXTAREA. Or use a tree control. Or have linked combo boxes. Or update some text without refreshing the whole page. Or embedding an IRC/Chat control. And the only safe, platform neutral technology we've got to do this sort of thing is Java. We do actually need a common solution to this, that's painless and generally pre-installed. But it seems that as long as SUN, MS and plenty of others insist on picking fights, we're not going to get it. Now how long is it since the whole Java vs ActiveX battle started? 7 years? Isn't it time these idiots worked out a solution or agreement?

[1]Can someone please explain to me why Opera, Netscape and Mozilla don't support the MS IE document model? As someone else said, is this a "penis size bragging" thing? If it is, then boy, have I got some spam for you.

TotL.net Human Virus Scanner : How infected with memes are you? Or are you just surfing the pulse of the zeitgeist and have a brain like a sponge?

Radio Community Server Userland are getting close to releasing their central cloud aggregator. So we have distributed Radio clients. That collect news. And then publish output and stats to a centralized community server. That is itself distributed, so that any group of users can run a server. What I haven't seen is if there's a layer above this. Can the Community Servers talk to each other and do the next level of aggregation?

From what can be seen of RCS at the moment, it could have been coded on many different platforms. The functionality could have been written in PHP, Python, PERL, as an Apache MOD in C++, Java, .NET and probably many others. Userland have made a virtue of building it in their own proprietary technology so that it can be run on their own client side codebase (ie Radio). But I would have a hard time justifying putting up a system that several users depended on, based on proprietary code on top of MS Windows or Apple desktop technology.

There's a pattern here of Desktop Client code, talking to private Server Aggregators talking to public Global Aggregators, where each player can choose to take on any one or more of the three roles. It's a very powerful pattern. The question that is left to the various implementors (and their market) to answer is which bits should be completely open source and free, which open source and charged and which closed source and charged.

O'Reilly Network: Stop the Copying, Start a Media Revolution [Mar. 08, 2002] : The only successes for old media moguls consist in holding back progress through laws and lawsuits. No comment. Because it's self evident.

ASPN : Web Services : Simple Web Services API : PHP Web Services Quickstart A library to work with SOAP4X that encapsulates WSDL support for PHP.

BombStickers from Way.Nu. Take little text ads, and combine them with Googlebombing, to create an automated way to do grass-roots google bomb campaigns.

	BombStickers Stickin' it to the man!

It seems that the Radio Web Bug system is not for public pinging (yet?) so I've taken it down again. Don't try this at home, kids.

Who needs banks anyway. : It is logically unnecessary, and very inefficient, to send all of our transactions through banks.

A couple of days ago I said I might code something up to get VoidStar to ping Userland's Radio Community Server Web Bug thing with the counts of new items on the feeds I'm collecting.

Well it's running.

So, Dave comes up with a new idea, publishes the interface and other people join in. Great!