Jim Moore's Weblog writes about an idea called "Smart Posse". You've maybe heard about Smart Mobs; technologically facilitated mobs that come together quickly at short notice. You've maybe also heard of Meetup.com; a system to manage regular club meetings worldwide. Put the two together and you'd have a system for getting a handful of like minded people for some purpose at short notice. Another one in this area that never really took off was local2me; a mailing list system where you send and receive messages based on how close your zip codes/postcodes are.

Not sure if there's really something here, but I like the name [from: JB Ecademy]

The Register has a story about MyZones. These guys were at the Olympia Wifi show. They have a managed access point that lets you share your Broadband connection with neighbours. "A typical MyZones customer would have full always on 512K broadband service for two people sharing at £17.62 per month, three people for £11.74 per month, four people for £8.81 per month (all charges include VAT)." The equipment comes from Netgear and the package includes "a Wi-Fi broadband starter pack including an ADSL modem, Wi-Fi access point, a USB wireless adapter and the MyZones client software" There's also an upgrade pack for existing broadband customers but they need to "check with their existing broadband service provider if their broadband terms and conditions allow sharing" and they pay extra to use the MyZones software.

I still think there's something in here that doesn't quite ring true. [from: JB Wifi]

I hate PDFs. It seems Jakob Nielsen agrees as he's just released PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption

So please don't use PDFs if you could do the same thing with HTML.

By the way, did I tell you I hate PDF?

Next on my set of pet hates, "People use Flash for things that could perfectly well be done with HTML". [from: JB Ecademy]

I'm still looking for a WYSIWYG HTML editor to use in web forms that is a direct drop in replacement for TEXTAREA. I don't mind if it's only for one browser or one browser family, but it must be a direct replacement for a TEXTAREA and must not require any other changes to the form. It would also be handy if it was:-
- Open source
- Generates good, valid xhtml
- Could limit the html tags that are allowed
- Is client side only
- No Java, thank you very much
- Ideally it ought to use standard cross browser javascript and CSS but like I said it's ok if it's for one browser family only.
- Having said one browser, I'm only really interested in IE and Mozilla (Firebird). Opera and Konqueror would be a bonus but are not necessary.

This is an old request but it's coming up again. After 10 years of browser development, I can't believe I'm still asking this question. [from: JB Ecademy]

Pirate CDs top one billion worldwide and "In 2002, the sale of pirated CD copies rose 14 percent to 1.1 billion units, and has more than doubled in the past three years, turning a street-corner trade into an estimated $4.6bn (£2.82bn) business, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said in its annual piracy report."

So why are the RIAA threatening to sue their end customers?

Could this be the reason? [from: JB Ecademy]

The Register : BT set broadband demand trigger levels for another 500 exchanges (PDF list) today. Revised targets mean means 56 exchanges will go straight into BT's ADSL upgrade programme

Which is nice. [from: JB Ecademy]

You need to see this one. Sue All The World Music Video (from the Napster Bad! Cartoon Series on Camp Chaos)

There's some nice little touches in it, like Dr Dre whispering in Eminem's ear before each line Eminem raps.

In related news, "Man bites Pig". [from: JB Ecademy]

The Supernova 2003 conference is running right now and as usual all the great and good prime movers are there.

Supernova (along with O'Reilly's recent conferences) is turning into a showcase for just how connected and wired a conference can be. Needless to say there's plenty of WiFi and the attendees are all using it. And here's what they're doing:-
- An official organiser's weblog
- A group weblog driven by trackback
- A conference Wiki
- Confab: an ad hoc conversational space
- A PhotoWiki
- Chiki: A chat session auto-archived to a wiki
- A bunch of IRC channels
- Group document editing via Hydra
- A blogroll of Speaker weblogs
- Numerous RSS feeds of all this.

Some of this is pretty experimental, but I wonder if all the tech could be bundled into a distribution and then sold to conference organisers as a managed package? [from: JB Ecademy]

I've just read Irina's post about Britney with a reference to the Russian Club in her signature. This was posted at 9:28. At 9:50 Google had these ads showing.

Kremlin Gifts Catalogue
1000's of Russian gifts by talented Russian artists. Secure, low prices

M. Lysenko "Best works"
Arias, cantatas, choir music of the famous Ukrainian composer on a CD.

How do they do that? It looks as though they're indexing pages with ads on them either as they are shown or very soon afterwards. Is this introducing a 2 tier web in the index? Pages with Google Ads are grabbed much quicker than the rest of the web? [from: JB Ecademy]

More Like This WebLog: Necho Feed - Tuesday, 08 July 2003

Look! A necho feed in the wild. Excuse me if I'm distinctly underwhelmed. It looks almost exactly like an RSS 2.0 feed with all the element names changed. Is this what all the fuss is about? Surely, there's more to it than this?

DON'T MESS WITH RSS. DON'T MESS WITH CITLD.

[edited to add]Maybe there should be a challenge. "Show something you can do with necho that you can't do with RSS 2.0"

Things to make you go hmmm? The Speedpass-enabled Timex watch is a watch with an RFID tag in it. On the surface this looks great. By giving you an electronic personal ID in the real world you can use it to pay for stuff just by waving it past a sensor. The bad news is when you get mugged. "No, you don't understand. You are going to give me the watch" [from: JB Ecademy]

I've added a feature where you can add a link to a FOAF file that is off Ecademy. If you have one, you'll know what this means. You'll also want to turn on Ecademy FOAF so that your Ecademy network can be picked up.

If you don't currently have a FOAF file and want to create one, take a look at FOAF-A-Matic.

To see the results, try my FOAF viewer or Jonathan's

If you're concerned about security with all this I'm careful not to expose anyone's email address or details unless they specifically enable it in Ecademy. [from: JB Ecademy]

The Times has an interesting piece today on Compassionate commerce that looks at SMEs and entrpreneurs who are running businesses with a special focus on social causes. The Times section on SMEs is well worth a look too. [from: JB Ecademy]

The Register : Wireless rural BB service names the day from WRBB

WRBB says it will have coverage within 10km of the main centres. 10Km is quite a way to go with 802.11 under ETSI power limits. Interesting. [from: JB Wifi]

Two events in the Linux world with 802.11g

- Linksys release source for the GPL bits of their WRT54G This is less significant than it looks as the really useful bits like the Broadcom drivers are binary and closed source. But it's still interesting that a major AP is linux based and this may well ope up possibilities for some interesting hacking.

- The first linux drivers for the Atheros A/B/G chip set have been released. At last the Linux world can start playing with 802.11g hardware. [from: JB Wifi]

Lots to mull over in The Lure of IP Telephony: Can it Work for Me? (book excerpt) Thanks Glenn.

[from: JB Wifi]

Dave's just noted that the RSS 2.0 spec seems to have disappeared from google. With all the noise about link and echo and stuff I'd been going to that page repeatedly. As I can never remember the url (and for some reason didn't bookmark it) I'd been using a Google search for RSS repeatedly. I too noticed a couple of days ago that it had disappeared. It's really bizzare. A search for "RSS 2.0" points to the old url not the current url. If you search for http://backend.userland.com/rss it finds it, so the page is still in the index.

I too am also concerned about Google's use of DMOZ descriptions on Google searches. I don't like it that a 3rd party provides the text for the entry in a search rather than the web page author.

While I'm on Google, I had the same thought about the Blogger button on the Google toolbar. I would have liked to have seen support for other blogging systems. but then I used it and realized that it really doesn't do much. It's not using the blogger API, it's just opening a window into the blogger edit. This is just like Manila Express or the many bookmarklets and IE menu hacks. So I'm really not sure how Google could have easily made it work with other systems.

Perhaps what we really need is a 3rd party toolbar that does the Google specific things that Google manage like displaying Pagerank. Then add in the Alexa specific things out of the Alexa toolbar. But to be honest most of this passes me by since I started using Mozilla Firebird all the time.

Uncle Dave wrote this not so long ago.theLizardBrainOfRss. Mark Pilgrim used this as a reason for leaving item.link out of his RSS 2.0 feed in favour of guid, saying "The RSS 2.0 spec introduces [guid] and clearly defines it as a way to express a permalink. The clarification of June 25th clearly deprecates [link] as a way to express a permalink, in favor of [guid]."

And yet I look at the Lizard Brain description and I see DW saying that the BBC, news.com feeds are using link correctly, but Simon Willison isn't, when all three are putting a permalink into link. Then he says "link should be used only to link to the article being described by the post, it should only be used in the TLD context". Unfortunately the piece starts with "Now for the third -- should he use link or guid to represent the permalink to the post? I believe he should use guid because that's what it was designed for. Link was designed for something else. "

I'm sorry, but I just don't get it. I don't know what DW is trying to say and why it's still ambiguous. I don't understand why Mark Pilgrim is saying that this article is telling him to stop using link. I'm still looking at all this and thinking that if you have a permalink, you should put it in the link element. I do agree that adding guid is a good idea. And if the most convenient guid to use is the permalink then by all means put that in guid. As well as link.

But. But I'm still where I was. Almost every spec, almost every feed that has links and almost everything DW has said tells me that link should be filled, if you can, with a permalink.

If you don't have a permalink, then leave out link. If you absolutely must, then put the most important link embedded in the description into link. But don't put the permalink into guid and leave out link altogether.

Please don't mess with the CITLD core of RSS. It works. Why are we still arguing about this? And why is still ambiguous?

Now the only reason I'm posting this here is that Mark has turned off comments on that thread. I'd post it to syndication@yahoogroups.com but despite having >600 members, nobody ever replies any more. I'm feeling intense frustration about all this because it all seems so stupid.

So I'll just continue to do what everyone else does (put permalink into link) and try not to get too worked up about it.

BTW. I tried out RSS Reader for Firebird. It's quite neat though I don't particularly like the approach. The problem is that it only uses title and link. Predictably it fails miserably on Mark's feed. Mark would say it's broken because it doesn't properly support RSS 2.0. I would say his feed is broken because there are aggregators out there who only use CITLD, the old lizard brain.

Yet another way to waste time on the web BlogChatter - Realtime Weblog Aggregation Is a page or popup window that displays the latest updated weblogs in real time. [from: JB Ecademy]

MIT has started a project called Open Government Information Awareness. It's very roughly an IMDB for government in the USA. A huge (hopefully) repository for information about the government. Source code is going to be available.

NTK asked at the weekend for people to port it to the UK. Perhaps an unemployed Ecademy developer with time on their hands could pick this up? Between us all I'm sure we could find somewhere to host it.

[Edited to add] Here's the Boston Globe story on GIA. [from: JB Ecademy]