I bet you didn't know that Microsoft makes Weblog Software! [from: JB Ecademy]

Two articles that have made me think this week. The first was Anatole Kaletsky in The Times. He was writing about democracy in the higher parts of the EU and comparing it with the USA. The EU is an extraordinary achievement in it's first 46 years but we have ended up with a situation where it is ultimately governed by an unnaccountable and unelected group of politicians each of which can go back to their populace and say "It's not my fault, it's all the others". This raises the question of where we can find the EU equivalent of the US Constitution and it's checks and balances. There's a huge difference here that the founding fathers were a bunch of revolutionaries who were trying to build something in stark contrast to the oppression they perceived of the previous system. The resulting constitution is a succinct model of clarity with a clear vision of a democratic future even if some of it has been whittled away by 200 years of case law and political double dealing. The EU though has been built by politicians with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and increasing their own power. And we've allowed them to do it, because we (the populace) were largely uninterested in what they were doing.

The second piece was Simon Jenkins bemoaning the strait jacket that central government (and specifically) Prescott puts on regional government and particularly local City government in the UK. Most countries in Europe (and the USA) have found some balance whereby City level groupings can enjoy significant self government. The net result is places such as Barcelona re-inventing themselves as vibrant and forward looking places, while equivalents in the UK such as Manchester or Newcastle ultimately fail to move forward. That's a simplistic view that ignores the great strides that these places have made in small areas. But there seems no doubt that the obession with central control and ring fencing of finances is holding back our second cities.

Which all re-inforces a political belief that I've had for some time. Increasingly I think we have to find ways of governing at an appropriate level. That means making the big decisions at the big level but allowing room for the local decisions to be made at the local level. Which then means having the structures in place for EU, Country, Region, County/State, City, Town/Street. If we can achieve this, it will have a side effect on people's sense of belonging. And they may well have more sense of belonging to the smaller levels than to their Country. In real terms this might mean, say the Welsh thinking of themselves as Welsh, European and only third, British. [from: JB Ecademy]

Interesting short article from Doc Searls What I Learned on Linux Lunacy. Among other things, Doc is a journalist for Linux Today so he's not exactly a disinterested observer. The report is about a cruise of the Caribbean for the alpha geeks of the Linux community.

What caught my eye was this piece. "I'll confess to something here: for the last year or more, I've been a bit worried that Linux' quiet success threatened to make its story less interesting. Now I'm convinced there's a new story in the works--a much bigger one, at least for those of us called "suits" (like, say, the IBM guy). It's about the end of the software business as we know it, and the beginning of whatever replaces it.

The business we knew wanted software to be expensive, high margin stuff. It wanted to lock customers into dependencies. And it wanted to hold on to its position as the paradigmatic hot business category, the kind of business high-rolling investors would help drive to huge successes in the stock market.

That's over, and it's not because a pile of overfunded dot-com fantasies crashed to the ground. It's over because the market doesn't want it any more. The market wants something more like professional services--architects, designers and builders. Good businesses all, but not the kind that are "venture scale", as they say.

The market wants generic $200 workstations that run generic operating systems and generic productivity applications. They don't want to pay more for the applications than they do for the workstations. In fact, they don't want to pay for anything other than expertise. And they don't want that expertise tied up in stuff that nobody else is in a position to understand."

Now I made a fair bit of money in the early 90s running a software company so I'm quite sad to see this if it's true. And it's an issue I've thought long and hard about since then as I tried to work out how to repeat it. I have to say I think I agree with him. Linux in particular seems to me to be the TCP/IP of operating systems (in the same sense that Football is the TCP/IP of team sports). The entry price is low, it's "good enough", it has relatively low hardware requirements and almost surprisingly there seems to be no limit on it's scalability at the top end. As Linux spreads outwards displacing proprietary OS at the top, other Unix in the middle and Microsoft / Apple at the low end, you have to wonder where it will end. Will we be looking back in 10 years time complaining that despite the fact that Linux is ubiquitous and gets the job done, it's still rubbish and limiting where we go next? [from: JB Ecademy]

New Wi-Fi security would do little for public 'hot spots' Improved Wi-Fi security will do little to protect users of public access WLAN hot spots. Analysts recommend an extra VPN layer and personal firewalls. [thanks, Computerworld Mobile/Wireless News] It's good to see that the analysts and journalists are beginning to recognise some of the issues involved in using a public hotspot. You should:-
- Use a firewall like zonealarm
- Use a VPN to any private corporate systems
- Use SSL and authentication for collecting and sending email
That last one is quite problematic. Many people use their ISPs mailbox and SMTP server to deal with email but very very few ISPs support SSL and smtp auth. This has to change.

Meanwhile the proposal for a replacement for WEP is a real problem for the industry. WEP is broken, but it's also hardwired into all the hardware. Any short term changes have to work with existing systems with minimal updates. It looks like WPA may do the trick, but it still requires peer review. Until we have proper military grade encryption commonly available and implemented in a high proportion of hardware, I'd recommend leaving WEP off and using end to end encryption such as SSL which we do understand. Basically regard anything that goes over the WLAN as insecure. From that point of view WEP is a distraction and gives a false sense of security. Which brings us back to the start of this entry and the importance of securing your PC and securing the important applications. [from: JB Wifi]

Reiter's Wireless Data Web Log : has an analysis of US vs UK pricing particularly comparing T-Mobile and Wayport with Openzone. BT Openzone WiFi prices: Better and worse than the U.S... ...(With relatively few hotspots, BT is ripping off subscribers with its charge for unlimited use.)... On that last point, BT's recent deal with Costa will help, but they really need to move faster. If they are being held back by the effort involved in implementing prestige sites, this may mean developing a low end solution that is more like a self install franchise model for smaller outlets. [from: JB Wifi]

Boing Boing hits the jackpot again. I know I shouldn't just copy the post, but it's too good and doesn't need any commentary.
Spooky Web Zen: 10 urls for Halloween heebiejeebies Put down the kandy korn, fool, and hold on to your Aeron. Ten stupid, silly urls guaranteed to induce Web Zen satori long after that sugar high you're nursing wears off. Click 'em and cringe. Boo.
1. pumpkin music
2. candy dildos?
3. creepy eye game
4. satan's little helpers
5. satan's little helpers, part two
6. scary cats do japanese dress-up
7. pelorian cats
8. cat in a shell
9. i love you more than kittens
10. angry, scary, rock-n-roll kittens Discuss Thanks, Frank ! [thanks, Boing Boing Blog]

An amazing collection of blogging tools for the blogging fool at Weblogs Compendium [from: JB Ecademy]

I was just searching Google for WiFi weblogs and found this. Nuzee: Julian Bond's Blog What's that all about? There's my words from Ecademy collected via RSS and displayed on somebody else's website with my name on it! But with all the links in place pointing back to Ecademy.

I don't mind, but I don't ever recall being asked... [from: JB Ecademy]

News: Tech's newest trend--decentralization : COMMENTARY--What's the connection between Wi-Fi wireless networks, Weblogs and Web services? They are among the few technologies thriving amid the industrywide downturn. What's more, they are examples of the trend toward decentralization.

In the coming decade, decentralization will be the critical challenge for the technology, media and telecommunications industries. Each has developed with the assumption that powerful central forces will manage development. Enterprise IT has "big iron" servers and monolithic software applications; communications has carriers investing in huge infrastructure build-outs; and media has content owners controlling distributions channels.

These approaches are under siege--and not because there's a New Economy, or because information deserves to be free, or because of any fluctuation in the stock market. Centralized systems are failing for two simple reasons: They can't scale, and they don't reflect the real world of people. (my emphasis)

An unusually accurate and reasonable article from ZDNet and spot on. This is a drum (among many) that I've been banging for a while now. Perhaps we should be talking about the "End of Big" along with the "End of Free"! [from: JB Ecademy]

Some advice both for conference organisers and speakers for exploiting WiFi at conferences.Wireless LANs: Tips for Speakers

So has Olympia, Excel, and Earls Court got WiFi as part of the conference package? [from: JB Ecademy]

Nice example of convergence. NEC Ships New Wireless Projectors [thanks, 802.11 Planet] Still expensive but it solves a common problem where the projector lead isn't long enough to reach the laptop where you want to stand. [from: JB Wifi]

In reaction to the DCMA a Declaration of Rights - Digital Technology Users. This may also be a touchstone to see which side of the fence people sit on as some of the Rights are quite contentious. [from: JB Ecademy]

A bunch of people working on getting some Californian tree sitters online via WiFi. Anarchogeek: Getting Tree-Sit's online Some of them have been up a redwood for > 4 months. Once they're online, the plan is to start a Tree-sit blog.

The anarcho-geek site has a lot of other interesting stuff mostly about various anarchic ventures particularly involving recycling old computers for the third world. I found it via a new mailing list about Group-forming networks. The Anarchogeek himself has posted a long article that touches on many subjects but is largely about the issues of trust and credibility in community news sites from the perspective of his own experience with Indymedia. (see also Indymedia UK). [from: JB Ecademy]

The co-creator of MasterCard has created a micropayment system that support amounts down to $0.02. [thanks, Boing Boing Blog] [from: JB Ecademy]

The killer app for Broadband is...

Voice!

Check out Vonage DigitalVoice. Here's a service that provides a small ethernet to POTS box. Plug one side into your ADSL-Cable modem or local ethernet. Plug a bog standard phone into the other. And then make free, cheap or flat rate calls to anywhere. (Inevitably it's US only at present)

There's a convergence here that again is highly disruptive to the established order. We're seeing phones, cellphones, PDAs, IP, WiFi, Bluetooth and ubiquitous internet access converge into a classic TelHead vs Nethead battle where everything runs over IP and is available for a flat monthly subscription with no per minute, per Gb, per mile charges. [from: JB Ecademy]

Shannon Clark asked a series of questions so here's a quick FAQ that attempts to answer them. I guess the first answer is STFW, dude! The answers are all out there via Google, DMOZ and others. Anyway. On with the questions and answers.

What, exactly, is the purpose of having an RSS feed?
RSS is a really simple syndication XML format that provides Title, Link and Abstract for items on a website. This is so useful that Syndic8.com catalogues >10,000 sites that produce RSS. It typically has two uses on the client side. 1) Compiling a customized view of news in a website, such as DailENews at Ecademy. 2) making it easy for an individual to track and read large numbers of websites in a desktop application. See my (a bit old) RSS FAQ, The DMOZ RSS entry, all the little orange XML icons on this page and in DailENews, and for desktop readers: Radio, Amphetadesk, Newzcrawler  

Second, what does "Movable Type" do/not do that Blogger does/does not do?
If Blogs are a really easy way to publish on the web in a way that usually displays the results in reverse time sequence, then the next thing you need is a system to manage and enter the items. You could do it by handcoding html in notepad, but there are easier ways.

Blogger and Livejournal take a hosted centralized approach where the management system is a website, although the final blog might be hosted somewhere else and uploaded via ftp. Blogger also provides free web space in blogspot. Movable Type is a set of perl scripts that you put on your own website to provide the management system so it's abit more de-centralized. There are numerous alternatives that are more or less powerful in other languages including C++, Java, Python and PHP. Then we have desktop based management systems like Radio that then upload all the text somewhere else. The different systems give you different amounts of control and ease and are more or less dependent on other people. If you have no technical skill at all, then Blogger or Livejournal are probably easiest. If you can manage a perl based website, then Movable Type is probably your best bet. This is further confused because most of these have an XMLRPC web service interface and people have produced desktop applications that work with this.

Third, I see a lot of weblogs with links lists on the left and right elements
This is commonly called Blogrolling. The lists are of weblogs and websites you read regularly, websites that link to you, websites that people have clicked on to get to you (referrers), Websites with RSS that you read, websites that have information close to your speciality or whatever. This all started as hand coded lists, but increasingly people are coding ways of making this happen automatically. Like Blogrolling.com.

Fourth, how does stuff like "Blogdex" work?
Blogdex, Daypop, and one or two others all do something similar. They read a large number of websites relatively frequently and then try and draw conclusions about what they see. Mostly the focus is watching the meta activity of the blog world. So Blogdex tries to see what stories lots of bloggers are talking about at any one time based on what URL the stories link to. As the amass a large amount of data in the procvess, there's lots of opportunity to mine this data and turn up interesting information in the archives. See also weblogs.com and blo.gs

Re the problems with links, have a look for trackback for Movable type. I've found that both Google and Alexa are not very good at tracking fast moving links between websites. Google is indexing Ecademy, and catching some of the links but I'm absolutely certain that we've got more links to us than they show.

Fifth, And, while I like this site as well, this really should be duplicated on my own site
One or two other people are grappling with the same problem. My approach is to grab the RSS from my blog here and insert it into my blog over there. I also access both blogs from  a desktop I wrote myself that uses the XMLRPC interface. And then I have a bookmarklet in Internet Explorer that adds a right click menu option to blog to Voidstar, Ecademy and Ecademy WiFi. (What's new and then 19 April) [from: JB Ecademy]

Wi-Fi+ Blogs+Conferences hits The Grauniad MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | New adventures in Wi-Fi [from: JB Ecademy]

B3ta does it again with the "Internet Simulator"

Keep an eye on Grokker from Groxis and Find Tools coming for connecting information. Dan Gillmor. But we need more sophisticated methods for gathering, massaging and making connections among all the pieces of information that enter our lives each day -- everything from e-mail to Web pages to phone numbers and more. So when I see useful tools, I pay attention. [thanks, Tomalak's Realm] 

Reiter's Wireless Data Web Log : : Smart City Telecom offers free WiFi in Walt Disney town Celebration, Fla. to DSL customers Interesting approach by an ADSL broadband vendor. Sign up to "Home'n'Roam and as well as the home Broadband access you also get free WiFi access at participating outlets. This particular company is heavily involved in WiFI and supplies systems for conferences so they already have the tech. But they're putting hotspots into public space around their ADSL coverage area. They've also got an enlightened attitude to allowing their ADSL subscribers to install WiFi themselves with cheap hardware from the same company.

This seems like a natural for BT. I wonder if their terms of reference allow them to cross subsidize Openworld with OpenZone? I also think this a natural for widening the coverage of OpenZone by having a franchise model where low performance access is available from customers who share their ADSL.